Nothing happens until someone sells something

Welcome to our self-storage blog an insider view of the self-storage industry.

Employee evaluations are tough to do in self-storage if you are not at the store very often. You can mount a camera that streams to the door and can watch what is going on at the store at any time. Or you can use someone like Phone Smart to call the store posing as a tenant or prospective tenant from time to time.

We are probably tougher at scoring sales calls than most services, because we are a sales oriented company and we think that being sales oriented is the way to go. It is surprising to see how not sales oriented some storage operators are. I have a theory that storage used to be a construction game. It did not matter where you built, as long as you keep your costs down and had an appropriate unit mix, you could succeed. Then it became important to have a good location draw in renters and to be able to command top of the market rates. This is when self-storage became a real estate game. Before long, other people were placing their will built facilities on good pieces of land. Then the competition came in running a tight operation. This is when storage became and operations game. Software providers and management company’s focus on being able to understand the key indicators and control points to run an efficient business.

But now most operators are watching their numbers and running their reports and there is no longer much of a competitive edge comes in effective sales lead management. If you are creating more leads from your contacts and closing more than you used to, you will prosper. Secret Shopping is a great way to know if your staff is selling your callers or merely answering the phone.

You can tell if your people are just being friendly and knowledgeable or if they are using their friendliness and their knowledge to make callers stop shopping around. If your people can sell on the phones they can sell your walk-ins.

How do you run your business? Are you still in construction or real estate? Are you still struggling with operations? I would suggest you get into selling. It’s what your sharpest competitors are doing.