In today’s competitive self-storage market, every missed call could be a lost customer. Join us as we delve into the power of phone etiquette and why answering promptly and professionally can boost rentals, build trust, and set your business apart. Get expert tips and strategies to ensure you never miss a lead again! Join Stacy Rossetti and learn to leverage her tips to conquer the self-storage space.
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Answer Your Phone: The Power Of Phone Etiquette To Business Success
Finding: Cold Calling
I want to talk about phones because we had a phone meeting with our phony staff. I figured that we talk about this so you can have an idea of phones and why phones are so important in the industry. There’s two different ways that you can do phones. Phones are on the finding side and also on the running side. On the finding side, I teach the best way for you to find a facility is to go directly to the owner.
The way that we do that is we build a list of all storage facilities in the area that you’re interested in then you follow those owners and see if they’ll be interested in getting an offer on them. This is cold calling. This one of the hardest aspects of buying a storage facility. It’s going directly to the owners. Now, you can go online and look for a storage facility but then you know that’s the easy way.
My dad when I was growing up, he always said, “Stacy, do can do things the easy or the hard way, which way do you want to do it?” The easy way obviously is going online, looking for facilities and putting offers. That is by far the easiest way, even when you’re doing it. It doesn’t seem like it’s an easy way because You don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe you don’t have to deal analysis. You’re afraid to talk to realtors.
It seems hard because it’s the unknown. The truth of the matter is if you knew what I know, you know that looking online for facilities to buy is the easy way. The hard way is to build a list and call owners directly. The hard way is where most people don’t do this. There’s less competition. More competition and less competition. You ask yourself, “Who do you want to compete with?” It’s like when you’re looking for a facility and you want to buy something. You’re like looking in either a primary secondary or tertiary market.
You got primary, secondary, and tertiary. There’s a little tiny primary market and there’s a little bit bigger secondary market and there’s like a big tertiary market. There’s a lot of tertiary markets out there. For some reason, everybody thinks that they’re supposed to be buying a primary. In a primary market is where all the competition is. I talked to somebody if he’s interested in buying in Nashville. I was like, “Do you want to buy a facility in Nashville? Do you not understand that if you buy a facility in Nashville, you will be competing with all of the hedge funds across the entire country. That will be your competition. Do you want to do that?”
The primary market is where all the competition is. Click To TweetWe own facilities in secondary markets and we have to compete with bigger players. I’m going to tell you, it’s not easy. Starting out, the best markets are going to be tertiary markets if you want to get your foot on the door. Tertiary market can be a little tiny market or a little tiny town or it could be a big town but it’s going to be the easiest to own and manage in a tertiary market.
Secondary markets get harder and primary markets get harder. The same thing with either going online and looking for facilities to buy or cold calling and trying to get owners to talk to you. Now, when you go online and look for a facility, and you go to Crexi or Loopnet. Those realtors that are listing those properties. They have already done all the work for you.
You don’t have to go out and try to get all the information of the owner because they’ve already put this package together for you. When you’re cold calling an owner, they don’t have their craft together. They are not ready to sell. They’re not going to hand over their P&L, balance sheet, and tax returns. You have to work with them and be open to not getting that information until you maybe mean it. You may not get it at all either. You have to be open to that.
It’s two different types of mentalities and I talk to both mentalities all the time. Some people want numbers. For some people they have to have the numbers. I have one student that is like he has to know what the ROI is over the next ten years. It’s like the types of deals that come from this are probably not going to fall into the types of bills that you’re looking for. You should be talking to a realtor and getting the information and running the numbers.
Whereas like cold calling, they don’t have this stuff. They barely have a P&L and a balance sheet most of the time. I rarely ever talk to an owner where they can hand over a P&L and a balance sheet like that tax returns. They don’t have this stuff. They don’t want to do that as well because a lot of them have a whole bunch of different businesses. Maybe they’re all just in one P&L, which is like us.
If we’re going to go and sell our properties. We can’t hand you our tax return because we got 30 different businesses. We can’t do that and that’s what happens a lot when you’re talking to owners. When you’re cold calling an owner on the phone, you have to keep that in mind that’s how they are. If that’s how they are, how are you going to get them to know, like, and trust you? How are you going to get them to relate to you so that they feel comfortable with working with you? Some just random stranger that’s like holding them up.
You have keep that in mind on the cold calling. In that respect, that is why cold calling is so difficult. It’s like it’s an art and a science. Is it more of an older science? I don’t know, but it’s a difficult way to find properties to buy. If you can master it and you can get good at it, is a very lucrative way to find properties to buy. Way more lucrative this way than going online for properties. Also, again we watch all of our KPIs. It takes 200 phone calls to find one owner that wants an offer. It takes 40 offers to get one facility under contract.
Think about that, 200 calls to find one owner that wants an offer and 40 offers to get one facility under contract. We did 52,000 calls the previous year and we got twelve facilities under contract. That is cold calling but we got some amazing deals under contract. We worked with the owners. There was no realtor in the middle. We had one guy that was a super nice guy. He was like, “I throw in this land. I don’t need this land anymore. I’ll owner finance it. I like you. Let me just seller financed it.”
We’re working with one property where the owner is like, “Talk to my realtor.” That conversation and whole negotiation process is so convoluted. It’s so screwed up. It’s just like a waste of time. That’s why I like this process better and I push this process but to each of them. On the phone, you can either call owners or realtors. Whichever one you want to do, that’s what you’re going to have to do on the finance side. You do the easy way or the hard way.
Running: Answering The Phone
The running part, this is the management. We have sixteen facilities. We meet in every facility pretty much all. If you can imagine me and my husband’s life. We do like eight properties one week and eight properties for the next. We have at least an hour to two hour meeting every week on the properties. We’re going over like the marketing stuff, the boots on the ground, the phones, the pricing and the competition. How can we keep occupancy up? Is our price okay? What is the competition doing now? Is there any repairs that are needed? Is the walk through done? Are the phone people converting?
This stuff is what we’re doing every week on all of our facilities. It is quite an extensive work week for us to manage all sixteen facilities and we’re meeting twice a month on things like that just to give you an idea of what it looks like in our lives. There was like, “What do you do every single day?” It’s like in a day, we only had a couple of facilities.
It was amazing but now that we have a lot of facilities, it is a lot of work. All of these components that I just mentioned, if you have a small facility or a big facility or one facility or six facilities. If you’re not thinking about these on a weekly basis about your company and about your facilities, then it’s going to make or break. Gone are the days when self storage facilities or buildings that you own and they were like cash cows. You put a sign up and that was it.
That does not happen anymore. Now, it happens for us, for me, and for people that got in before 2020. For people that got in before 2020, oldies, their cash cows. For you folks, unfortunately, that’s gone. Now, it’s a business. You have about ten years left. This business is not going to be available. This opportunity is not going to be available because there can only be so much forge in the world. There’s not going to be the same amount of storage as there are houses or apartments. It doesn’t work like that.
There’s only so much opportunity. I believe that between five and ten years, the opportunities are going to be gone. If you want to get into storage, now is the time. Understanding all the concepts that I teach, in the course, my boot camps and everything else that I do. That’s what’s going to get you into this industry.
If you’re not a player, if you don’t have the grind or the push then those people aren’t fitting in anymore to this industry. There’s way too much competition out there. You’ve got to be on the up enough in order to be able to be in this industry. I’m letting you know that’s how it is. You’re competing with me and I’m competing with bigger players like bigger secondary players. Those bigger secondary players are competing with hedge funds. That’s how it is now. May the best person win.
Let’s get back to phones now. We had this meeting. The truth of the matter is, when you own a storage facility, the person that answers your phone is the person that is going to make or break the success of your business. I say this over and over again. The person that answers your phone is who is going to determine whether or not you’re going to make money in this business. The amount of effort that you put into making sure that the people that answer the phones are amazing people. Is going to determine how successful you are.
Gone are the days where you could hire some random VA to answer your phone then hope that when they answer the phone, they’re doing a great job. Inside the software that you choose, your calls are recorded or you want to make sure that your calls are. Some software’s don’t record calls. You want to make sure that you choose a software where your phone calls are recorded. That way, you can listen back to the calls and see how the people are when they answer phones. Whether it’s you or a VA or a call center or your internal people that are doing it.
Whoever’s answering the phone, you want to be able to listen to those phone calls. It’s for training purposes so that you can go back over the phone call and say, “This is what you should be working. This is what you doing.” That’s number one. Number one for the phone calls is recording calls. Our phone support team, internally now we have five people to answer our phones. You do not have to do this at all but I’m going to tell you how we do it so you can mentally see how we set it up and what’s important and what’s not important.
This is all derived over like answering phones for the past years and knowing what is important in the phone section, the phone world of stores. We use CallPotential. You don’t have to use CallPotential. It is not a call center. It is a software that if you use a call center that’s answering the phone, most likely they are probably using CallPotential if they require you to have storEDGE because storEDGE and CallPotential work together. We use storEDGE. CallPotential is the software where you can manage your calls.
Customer Support
When somebody calls in, the phone call is going to be one of three things. It’s going to be either a lead, a sales call or a tenant or somebody that owes money, for some reason. We call that bad debt. You need to be ready when you answer the phone to be able to be the person that handles this. If somebody’s calling in and they’re already a tenant. You need to be the person that is the customer support person.
They’re calling because maybe they can’t figure out their gate code or their doors are not opening or some issue. Maybe they need to update their credit card and you can’t figure it out in the software. You have customer support. This is like, “I need help with this. This is not working.” I love this stuff. When customer support or customer concerns, they want to call because they’re pissed off about something. They have an issue about something. Either they’re locked out of the gate. They can’t get in or their doors are broken. There’s mice in their unit or they saw somebody living in another unit which just happened to me. I saw this in another unit.
I went over there and I checked on our facility. One of our boots on the ground people has a hernia. He had surgery, so he’s like out. I was like, “I’ll just drive over there and I’ll check on the facility.” There’s a guy living in the unit. Customers support and customer concerns is what the tenants are calling about, “I need help with this. I need help with this. This is something weird or some strange guy.”
Do you have to be this customer support person? A lead is a sales call. You already know that. The way that you answer this phone and talk to this person, this prospect is different than how you’re going to handle this. It’s completely different scripts, different tone, and different pace than what you’re going to be doing for them as well. This is where you’re adding a new tenant.
What’s important about the sales calls is conversions. Conversions equals sales. Sales equal money. Money equals profit. Whoever is answering this part needs to be very good at the goal and at converting. There is a science as art and a science to this. I’m going to tell you, call any storage facility out there that’s in the tertiary market and the owner basically says, “This is Jim. How can I help you?” They’ll even say the name of their storage facility .
The guy says, “Are you in the storage facility? I want to see if you have any like 10x10s available.”He say, “Ithink I have. It’s $50.” I’ll say, “Let me see if I can afford that. I’ll call you back.” That is is a typical conversation. That conversation is only going to kick you in the butt. You have to be very good on the sales calls with understanding the needs of the person that’s calling and making sure that you’re asking the right questions so that you can give them what they’re looking for.
You should be good on the sales calls. Understand the needs of the person calling and ensure you ask the right questions to give them what they're looking for. Click To TweetI’m going to say for the most part, most people do not know what size unit they need. They’re just looking at the price. I’m like, “How much can I afford?” You are the person or whoever’s answering your phone is the person that digs deeper and creates this relationship and this conversation and always always make sure you do not give them any prices or any information until you get their contact information first so that you can always follow up.
You can put them into an email campaign. You can put them into a text campaign and do all the marketing that you need to do because the key is in the follow-up right for sales. How many times did I have to email you to put it into the chat? How many times how many emails have you gotten before you join this webinar? Was it 1 or 10 or 20 or 100? It could be one or any of those. The keys in the follow-up, the script, and in understanding the necessity and the needs of the people that are calling in.
The key is in the follow-up. The key is in the script. The key is in understanding the necessity and the needs of the people that are actually calling in. Click To TweetGone are the days where people only care like, “I just want to know the price,” and just hang up. You have the bag debt. These are all the people that are behind on their payments. If they’re one day behind, they are considered late. Also, another thing is, this has to and also it’s the auctions. We put contracts. We got like 3,000 tenants. We have a lot of tenants. In the last couple of years, we added at least 1,500. Do you think we got every single one of the 1,500 people to sign the contract? Do you know how much work and effort it is to get people,get into their account, get them into the account, get their payment information, and get the contract signed?
We have one person internally. This is their job. Chasing tenants to get this done. That same person is the person that is good at getting people to pay their debt, to get to pay the payments. Now the way that CallPotential works and one of the main reasons that we signed up for CallPotential is that when somebody owes money to us, that phone call gets directed to the paid myself. I looked at the reports from February 1st to February 14th until the last two weeks, we had 70 people that paid by phone that called in.
I can do like a whole thing. I’m just bagged in. It will take a whole hour, but we have emails and SMS that go out saying, “Your past due.” We do that every day after day 1 to day 20 when they get hit into the lead status around 820. They get over locks but it’s a whole system internally that’s set up. Not only in CallPotential. You can do this also in storage and squeeze it through CallPotential. We had jobs in the last two weeks, 70 phone calls that my staff did not have to answer because they went directly into the pay-by-phone and they paid their bill by doing that.
I was like, “Thank you so much,” because this system is set up, email and text. It’s like bombarding up then pass to email and SMS then it says critical email. It says like in the subject line, “Lean.” Everything is this whole thing. I love it so much. You could see that bad debt. You have to think about the person that’s going to answer the phone. If they are going to call out because they call in and we also call out. We have one person that is good in debt collection.
We have a lot of people that are always past due. This script has a lot of empathy. It’s putting yourself into the situation of the person. Some people are like one over you, but the truth is, people are going through stuff. There’s a reason why they can’t afford to pay, so we need that one person to be that person for us. The voice of us on the phone empathizing with the person that’s having a situation.
One of the things we do, this is a very important tip for all of you. This is something that we talked about in our facility owner Mastermind. If you are an owner of a storage facility and you need to in a Mastermind of owners, this is something that we talked about. I thought this is a very important tip for all owners, was that you want to trade fees being waived for reviews. Fees need to be traded for reviews.
I will waive that fee if you give our facility a five-star review. You have to screenshot it and send it to us. Once you do that, I will take penalty and that fee off. It’s after they’ve heard the story, “I lost my job. I’m working overtime. I’m paying bills now.” We’ll offer something like that so you don’t ever want to give your feeds away. You don’t have to. You just give them a review that it was great.
Think About Your Phones
This is something that was talked about in the Mastermind. Hopefully, if you’re reading, you will join the Mastermind. You can get awesome tips like that. There were a lot of good stuff. The whole point of this session was for you to think about your phones and to think about how you’re going to be on the phone. Are you this type of person? This one the sales call is what are the needs of the person? Getting the needs from the person out of them.
The longer that you stay on a phone call, the better. We have tenants calling in for support. You have to be a very good listener, a compromiser, and have to have empathy. You have to be that type of person that answers the phone. Otherwise, you’re going to get screw yourself over. The same thing for the phones. You got to be able to Work with the people that owe money. They’re in the auction status or their past due and reminding them, “You’re past due. Would you like to pay with a card or how do you want to pay?” Once they get into the auction status and you hear like all the stories.
You have to be able to sit there and listen to the stories and come up with the solution for them. This is a business so you can only do so much but what you don’t want is a one-star review. A one-star review screws you over. It takes 10 or 5 stars reviews to get rid of your one star. Everybody sees all the five stars, but they always pay attention to the one star. That’s what everybody wants to know, what’s the bad thing? You don’t want to get those.
The person that handles your phone is the person that’s going to be responsible for the one star review. They’re the ones that’s talking to the people. You want to make sure they are always training. The point of this discussion is you need to just be aware that when you buy a facility, this is one of the most important aspects of owning a facility.
That was it for this episode. Eric is saying, “Do you have any call centers that you recommend?” In the industry, I can’t remember all the names. I know some students use XPS and ESS. There’s a couple of them out there. They’re getting more popular. I would ask around and post it on Facebook because I can’t remember. There are a lot of them that are coming on.
If you have a third party management company, they’ll have their own call center, but then one of the questions that you need to ask when you’re looking for call centers is these questions, like if you pick a call center that has like 30 people answering the phone. They all answer whatever, then there’s not any one person that’s good at stuff. Do they have their own separate people that answer the phone for sales? Do they have their own customer support? Do they have their bad debt collections?
How do they separate everything out or is it all thrown in? Most call centers I say they’re just like everybody answers whatever. Make sure that you get the specifics on that when you ask about call centers. Internally, us over the past years know that this is the way that you want to set stuff. This is your mindset. This is how your phone system is working. It doesn’t have to be through CallPotential. Know that this is the three ways that you’re going to be talking on the phone if it’s you or somebody else. The training is super important.
I always say, the people that are on your team are only as good as you train them. If the people that work for you suck, it’s because you suck at training them. You’re the boss. Put some more time and effort to it. One of my students has a virtual assistant answering the phones and he had done no training. He didn’t meet him on weekly basis. He had no training at all. He wasn’t growing and I was like, “You’re not putting any effort into making this person part of your team.”
We meet with our phone team every week. We had a two-hour meeting and this is what we talked. Do you have any specific classes on wholesaling? I am about to release a wholesaling, just so you know probably in March. We’re getting close to getting it all added. That will be available. I teach wholesaling in the coaching program.
There’s a lot of wholesalers in the coaching program and also in the boot camp. The boot camp that we just had, I did like a whole session on wholesaling and also in the course. There is a couple of wholesaling sections but the truth of the matter is, if you want a wholesale self-storage, everything that you need to know up until owning a facility is what you have to know. It’s all the finding and the deal analysis. It’s everything that you should be knowing about also.
What is the difference between the online training and in-person training in price? The in-person training the StorageNerds is $15,000 with the coaching program. That’s a lot of money. It’s an investment. The course is like $1,000. It’s like DIY, “I’m going to do it on my own,” versus, “I want Stacy to be my coach and hold my hand and be there for me.” That’s the difference.
You can get on the waitlist by going to StorageNerds.com. I get that some people can’t afford it. I get it but that’s the price. I just opened up my boot camp in January. I do boot camps in January, May and September. I opened up the January one to the public. There was a handful of people that came but that was it. You can’t pass up on something. I’m telling you, that window of opportunity is going to be gone within the next 5 to 10 years.
If you do not take action now, you can miss out because it is becoming commercialized. Secondary and primary market storage is going to be commercialized. They’ll only be availability in maybe tertiary markets. There’s a lot of smaller players like me where I have sixteen facilities in tertiary markets. You’ll notice when you start looking for storage that in an area, there’s one person that will own six facilities.
It’s becoming that way. You’re going to be missing out if you don’t get in now. That’s it. Do you have a group investment team for people who need to pull income to invest? That is for the flow. We’re talking about the flaw. I’ve syndicated deals. I’ve also co-sponsored deals and I have my own fund where I crowdfunded many people together. There’s different types of funds.It’s a 506(b) or a 506(c) or you can syndicate something with one deal by itself. You learn about fonts. I appreciate you folks hanging out to the end. Take care.
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