Cost or return

Thanks for stopping by at the self storage blog, where we keep an eye on trends in self storage.

I had a client talk to me today about the size of July’s PhoneSmart invoice.

Occasionally in the summer busy months a store that sends us a ton of phone calls looks at a decent sized invoice. Most stores send us about 50-70 phone calls in the busy season per month, which means they don’t spend a whole lot, but they rent a lot of units. This makes us a super investment. Where a store sends us two or three times the volume, the invoice starts looking large. Although the number of rentals we create also increases by two or three fold and one of two things happens. Either the client thinks about sending us roses because we rent so many units, or the client calls to see how to lower the PhoneSmart invoices.

The problem is that someone has to answer the phone calls to the store, unless you don’t want new renters. Now if you are at 98% physical occupancy and 99% economic occupancy, you might not care about the phone. Or if you get 90% of your new customers from walk-ins and drive-ups who do not call on the phone first before they come in to rent, you might also not care about the phone. For the rest of you, someone has to answer the phone. So you have to do the math to see who you want to pay to answer the calls.

Here are a few things to consider as you are doing the math. The question becomes a matter of shifting dollars you are paying us to payroll. You might also consider that on average we are creating more leads and reservations per phone calls than store staff. This may not be true in your case. But this does often make it more tempting to let us handle more calls, as we tend to net more rentals per calls.

Do you pay additional staff dollars and payroll costs to decrease your PhoneSmart invoice?

Do the PhoneSmart dollars amount to a lower cost of acquisition of new business when all things are considered?

Don’t forget to enter our contest to win a registration for the Self Storage association conference in September. It will include a dinner with our PhoneSmart crew. All you need to do is send me an email with the names of three people who have submitted a blog to this self storage blog site. I will draw at random form all the entrants.

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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