Back from the Phillly SSA conference

I had a great week last week at the self storage association meeting. We got to see a lot of current clients and made some great contacts for future clients.

I hope you will enjoy looking at my self-storage blog in the weeks to come. It will give me a chance to share with you impressions and reactions as they happen. I am fortunate to have a lot of friends, acquaintances and clients who are storage insiders. Between their feedback and what we see every day from the phone calls we answer, we have developed an interesting window on the business.

The host hotel was well set up for an association meeting last week. Almost everyone stayed at the host hotel and when I walked slowly enough through the halls, I bumped into all kinds of people I wanted to see. I read in the SSA Monday News that there were 1400 in attendance. I think I talked to almost all of them.

We had a good turn out at my Selling Self-Storage Seminar on Wednesday. It was the first one of these I have done in conjucntion with a national event where all attendees were PhoneSmart customers. That allowed us to talk about many ways that PhoneSmart call center reps and store staff can work together to rent to more people.
We had some very good sales people at the seminar, so we could talk about more advanced sales techniques. We did our seminar in a Hotel that was created in Philadelphia’s first skyscraper, the PFSF building, which went up in 1932.

The trade show was great, too. DJ Johnson, one of our great call center reps, helped work the booth. We talked to a lot of current clients. It is very rewarding to hear the success stories people share about the call center and our secret shoppng service. We created quite a few promising prospects for new business, too. It will be fun to watch them go throuigh the process of implementing our solutions and reporting back to us with their success stories at a future trade show. We are lucky to be in a service business that is so helpful and so profitable to our clients.

I found the conference sessions interesting. The SSA is trying to become a leader and authority in self storage marketing, operations and advocacy in a more sophisticated way than in the past. I find it to be encouraging, although some people will be uncomfortable until they see how things develop. The studies in consumer habits and operational and financial characteristics seemed well crafted and of great value. The more our clients and prospects learn about their business, the more they can see the value we create for them.

I had a fun breakfast while in Philly. My childhood friend from grade school lives in Philadelphia. I hadn’t seen him since graduating high school. It turned out he works in a building about three blocks form the host hotel. It was fun to get caught up with him.

It was great to get home from my trip, too. It takes your family a little while to adjust after you get home from being gone for a week. I am glad I am not on the road every week.

I was also very pleased that it took me just a couple of hours to get caught up after getting in the office this morning. The people who help me run PhoneSmart do a great job taking care of business, so I can go out and see clients and create new clients.

The call volume is looking good today as we expected it might. We have had several good spurts so far.

Here is a reminder for you for next year. We had forgotten how many people tune in to the March Madness Basketball games. We were looking at call volume for Saturday the 19th and were at first puzzled at how slow it was in comparison to trends. But it was a big basketball day and many people were watching their favorite teams play hoops. Wait until next Monday. You will like how busy it will get.

Tune in next time for more words from the world of storage blogs. Bye for now, Tron.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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