Last year, I had the pleasure of leading an all day training class for the UK Self Storage Association in Brighton, England. The next week, I had the pleasure of presenting to the Self Storage Association of Spain in Valencia, Spain. Sometimes, being a public speaker brings you to some interesting and lovely places. I was reminded how important some of the fundamentals of selling really are to the self storage business. I like to talk about how our customers speak a different language than we do. We know all about storage and they usually do not. That causes us to make assumptions or to talk to people as if they already know what we know.
I had a funny experience my first night in Spain that proves the point. I was staying in a no smoking room on a no smoking floor. Someone in a nearby room was obviously smoking and it was drifting into my room. So I called downstairs to the desk to complain in my very basic Spanish to see if the hotel staff could do something about it. Somehow I was not quite understood, because within a few minutes a bellman showed up at my door to offer me an ash tray.
So be careful to understand what your customers are really thinking and what they are really asking. It is not always exactly what they say. When a new prospects call you on the phone and ask how much a storage unit costs, this is not really what they want to know. They want to know why they should store with you and not someone else.
