Stora Social Panel - Solving the Customer Equation

Okay, thank you for being so quick there. Appreciate it. So our first panel is called Solving the Customer Persuasion.

So just going back to what I.

Was saying earlier regards acquiring customers. We're just going to have a bit of a conversation about it now, a few questions lined up. We'll start though by going around to the. Just introduce yourself please.

Hi, so my name is Joshua ware, I'm the CEO of a software company called Caltuma. So we're a 3D sized guy that can get clipped into your self storage website. Before that though my background is the marketing manager of an Australian mobile self storage company called Taxibox and that's kind of what brought me to software and eventually led me to.

Hello, my name is Mark Benchman, part of Engage Management Services. I was set up back in 2009 purely as a management development company. Tend to fly a little bit under the radar but Donald Duncan's point of looking at what we've done over the last couple years that would have millions square foot development by next year. So we operate across seven different brands currently monitor and run about 14 different sites, everything from traditional 60,000 square foot facilities to the smallest sort of unnamed facilities that we're working with.

Gavin Sora and my name is Sarl, I'm senior product designer at Sora so I'm really interested in the sort of customer discovery process, you know, finding out how you guys actually run your businesses. Now you may see I've spoken to a few the guys in the room here and hope to speak to a lot more of the people here and try and understand much more about how self storage operates, how we can sort of bring the sort of platform and innovate on some new features that will help you progress your businesses and run more efficiently. So that's the self power. Thanks. Thanks.

Good wealth of experience in the room. So first question I'm going to try and keep this fair Mark I'm going to get you to answer this one first and obviously you guys can chip in whenever. So why do you think customers choose one operator over another when they're looking for storage?

Everything is particularly complicated. I think when you look at the data over the number of years location is primary. I think we always go off the basis that customer form travel pass a good facility to get to another one even if it's save a couple of pounds because what we offer is a need based product and it's our convenience so we people will always be choosing. It's a good facility but one that's the most convenient and easy for them to use. That's about as short as I can make.

Josh, you got any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think location is certainly key. I think if you were to not just have storage, if you were to browse on anything, chances are if you need that stuff, you've probably got your searching In Google First 4 or 5 results you might get after separate tabs. If you don't like what you see on the first one, close it down, get to the next one. Don't like it, close it down, get to the next one until you find what you're actually looking for. So it's kind of browsing in additional sense. So the better the seamless the website, the more information you get. That's what it's likely going to lead you to a conversion.

Without security on site security and the storage service, you have been secure.

Yeah, I mean for me I'd say that's probably a reasonable assumption that we want to see how secure is the facility and hopefully at the front end you're pushing that nasty forward. So definitely security would be up there.

Okay, second question, what are some of the things that you feel operators can do to maximize their conversion rates? We're talking about really from when they hit the website, they go on and see what's available to convert them into a customer Mapoid. What conversion techniques do other industries use that perhaps in the self storage industry we could make use of as well.

I'll jump in on this one because this is kind of my realm, as it were. So I still work with Australians taxi box. I basically just manage the website. It's a conversion rate optimization that we're trying to maximize with this. So I think the main point is that you want to have it as frictionless as possible and give as much information at the right time as you can your website. So it's not saying you need to pop information right straight off the bat, but you need to see where the friction points are on your site, see where people are dropping off and see what information you can give at those certain points. If you're getting more reservations coming through over the phone than you are on your website, I would say that that's a problem. I'd say your website should be doing the heavy lifting here. It's where the most people are going to be looking at your facility, at your company. So you should be putting that information up front as much as you can. So if there's common questions that you're being asked on phone meets, why not put that information on the front? If you're a 24 hour facility wherever they have to call you up to point that out, that should be at the front. If you're the most secure in your area, if you're the cheapest in your area, if you're not the cheapest what else have you got that you could be putting onto your website? This is going to reassure people and make them feel confident enough to actually give you the car detail else on.

The website add in there. So I mean traditionally we're, we're known to be pretty clunky. I if you go back so 10 years or even five years before pandemic sort of all struck us all how we move people in, how we reserve them, it's incredibly clunky.

I mean at times we sit stare.

At each other in the office. I go why are we making this so difficult, you know to fill out information forms to wait for somebody to call you back even though they don't want to speak to you. That's why we sent out the form on the website. So anything you can do to remove that friction is really, really important. And I think also that over the last couple years awareness of our products has really taken some steps forward. Whereas if you want it back say 8 years majority of people haven't used self storage before. So what we think they need to know is completely different than what they actually need to know. And I think that's one thing that was sort of a great work within self storage. Do you think it's all about selling them square foot or actually they just want to convenience solution for a private problem now is everything that they're doing with stress related no matter what it might be business. So we always think it's about trying to make the things streamlined as possible, as easy as possible for people.

Yeah and for me the phone call thing that the guys grow up here is really interesting. It's an interesting area that I'm trying to flack a wee bit of theater on at the minute. You know what do people ring up for? You know why are they on the phone to you And Joyce's product there ties in the key thing that people are looking for, how much space they actually need. That seems to be a key one. So for us at store it's really around how do we innovate at the front end here on the website and to drive that information up front so they don't have to use the phone as much. Maybe there's things missing there that's that still feel I have to call up and maybe there's People that still want that we better support, you know, just that we've got a connection to sort of make them feel like, you know, everything's in place and, you know, I'm going to get my stuff over and I can, I can utilize this because they're very new to the area.

That's actually a bit of a plug. That's one of the reasons about a year ago we set up another company called Inquiry plus, because you realize that now people who are actually taking stores, especially for the first time, they think nobody has any idea what square footage is. It's a real bizarre, historic carrier where we sell people square footage, but we're not selling business to business, we're selling to square retail product and we're selling to individuals that go into Tesco to the same degree. We're selling square footage, which is quite strange. But people who are using it for the first time, people inquire, they just want the cheapest price, so they just want 10 square foot and they should have the risk, a big truck in the yay square feet. So people don't necessarily understand what we can supply them and actually what they need. So instead of Inquiry plus, which is a pure self storage inquiry handling system whereby you speak to people via WhatsApp, via text, via phone, by email, whatever method they want. Because traditionally we still have this problem whereby somebody sends you an email and you pick up the phone and the first thing they're going to do is not answer your call because why? I mean, how many people put the number in? When you're filling a format that's correct, you just yell, I like an. So if you contact them and you may want to be spoken to, you have a much better chance of actually converting customers. So I think this, we're still a couple of years behind, I think collectively as an industry about how we deal with people. I think, you know, prices online, all.

These kind of things, things are coming.

But you've got to speak to your customer the way they want to.

Sorry, I can just jump in as well. So I've just come back from the US ISS conference and I think it's quite well known the US market is far more sophisticated in terms of the audience, in terms of them knowing what they want from the product. There's a lot said about the UK and European market is a bit more handholding, a bit more kind of information that needs to be delivered. I listened to Dean Booty's podcast recently. He's talking about this and how he prefers the customer to call up and Kind of go through the conversation. My counter argument to that would be you're going to get far more people on your website than you are calling you up. No one's going to call you up to say, I don't really like talking to people on the phone so I'm not going to look at you. They're just going to drop off your website. So there's information you need to give to the customer. Don't limit it to being on the phone. Give it on your website, give them that information there. You're going to get far more bookings over all that than if you just reserve it for those that. Actually.

I think that's one of the key things I'm noticing as well when I speak to operators is that there's a lot more work being done by people than it really needs to be. I think still, especially with the introduction of space calculators and everything like that, I think probably the large majority of people aren't using space calculators at the moment in terms of giving customers solutions to figure out what space they need. And you know, the consensus is generally.

People don't have a clue what, what 25 square foot needed install.

So, yeah, I think, you know, yeah.

Say, I mean, we're a very happy customer. Use a couple other brands.

Right.

It works very well. But I think it's a question of time. You know, if you look at sort of within C25, you're looking at people who are repeat users. They don't need to be explained. The Y self serves the best. They know they have 50 before they may want 50 again. So it's a question about as the awareness goes up, product the customer becomes more sophisticated and their interactions fall back away with time.

Yeah. One of the other questions is we can ask that so many people just don't even know about the concept of self storage. They've never even heard about it. So how do we as people in the industry, I guess educate the general public about the existence of self storage and the benefits it brings? I mean, I've never used self storage. I think it's a great industry. I was only introduced to it probably three and a half years ago. So, yeah, the question is what more can we do to educate people?

So I think on that one, not only communities calculate and that will help save it a lot of time. We recommend it. I also like to thank the SSA and Randy for doing my marketing for me. There's a stat in last week's report showing that only 9% of customers actually knew how much space they needed. So thank you for that one. You can see that in the marketing pretty soon, I'm sure. But I think in terms of what we can do to educate more broadly and not just about people coming to the website. My recommendation in a similar. But I've never used storage myself. Try and utilize those that could be a customer that you already have. So with Taxi Box we do a lot of research and a lot of data gathering on the people do come to our website and do book and then move out. And we've got a big database of past customers that we can ask them about their experience. We can ask them how long did you intend to store for versus how much did you actually store for. We also have the third column which is we know how you actually sold for. We can see where the difference is. So that can help us in terms of what we then need to do with the marketing. Do we need to be showing the short term option for customers? But really we're trying to push towards the long term. The other audience that will research a lot are the people that do come to the website, give us the lead details and then drop off for whatever reason and don't convert. They're not just dead emails to us. They're not just people who moved into a marketing campaign span. There's value in that. There's value in learning why they can put did they copy a competitor, if so, why? We can find out if they were just high kicking, if they're thinking they're needing it, why they might be needing it. That has really helped us shape our paid campaign. Email marketing, our blog content is all honed around those people that come to the site and then interact with it in some regard. Whether they're booked or not. There's still data, there's still information that we can gather and then we can push that into the market center.

Yeah, definitely. So I mean what Joyce has touched on there is a key component of the software market. The product based software has developed over the years which is sort of customer discovery. And I think as your facilities get more automated, you know, there's a big fear of, you know, what do we use our staff for? How is that going to wrap up? You know, what about our seals? And I mean I think that, you know, those type of things can be repurposed in other ways. You know, you can be send people out to find out more about your customers. You know, this, this type of process also works, you know, for physical businesses too. You know, so how do you go about Purchasing a storage, you know, getting that, being more involved in the community and running the advance through things that, that maybe happen that can help educate them about the utilization of self storage, et cetera, you know. So there's, there's definitely opportunities there, you know, for advanced learning in the state.

Yeah, I'm going to jump in there because I was, took my two young boys to rugby the other day and there's big banners all around the rugby pitch with storage sites, advertising there and I think it is, I think it's using those opportunities as well. There are other storage companies that sponsor local football teams so it's on the shirts and everything. So I think it is a community business type of storage. So yeah, thinking outside the box a bit more and doing things that perhaps others aren't doing in terms of advertising. I'm just going to talk about pricing on websites now. Browser's a big thing Sora, booking and payments online and it follows the whole transparency on websites and everything like that as well. So Mark, I'm going to start with you on this one. What's your general opinion about having prices online? Because it's a very mixed view.

Yeah, no, I think it's coming and you know it's a real one. I mean we obviously when we deal with some of our teams in stores who are competing with guys who literally can be 50ft away. I think Christian Store bought about 25 people in the second car park so there's none there. And I think it's about if you don't know what separates you from your competitor right then you probably have more to worry about than just being completely open back to pricing. I think you need to understand your own business first and what sets you apart, what makes you different, why you're better than your competitor. If it's service, access, cleanliness, it can be anything really because we're a deep based product then you should have no problem staying value prices. And yeah we're going to get to that stage. Totally agree with you about. So we've been talking about push pull pricing for decades and if you see the amount of Wishlist for like Radical and Sitelink and everything else about can we get control of the yield management side of the business that's so, so important. So yeah it's coming and it's going to be because at the end of the day we're getting towards a little.

Bit of commoditization of what self storage is.

So you're going to be going through these processes like customers going to want it so that's where we're going. I mean, you know, you can say you don't want it, but if the customer's asking for it, that's so you kind of have to go embrace it. Progressive for the Internet. Maybe back in the day 111A in the yellow Pages, well, you know, everybody has to do that in the elevator.

On the first page.

But then online you can if you want.

Now if you look at the US.

Market, see a lot more mature than.

The UK market, the vast majority of operators that all show their prices and I've no doubt it will follow and you can already see that change happening there.

One thing I can add as well from experience with Taxibox. So one of the first things I did when I first joined was looked at the user flow we had for our Google Ads journey versus the Be Organics and the other platforms that we have. So every time we had a Google click, it would go to a certain page on our website because we wanted their details. If we spent anywhere between $2 to $15 to get that click onto the website, we wanted something from that. So we wanted their contact details straight away before they drop away and then at least we can chase them and hound them. So we had this form and that was before they could see any information really about the website or get to.

Any of the pricing stages.

I turned that off in the first couple of weeks. We lost about 600 leads in the first few months. They didn't get fired, which is great because bookings went up overall because what we were doing by putting that leap on there before we were showing pricing, we were alienating those people that didn't want to sacrifice their details when we weren't giving them anything in return. So they were just dropping off and going to someone that did have pricing online. And then also those leads that we were getting through were awful because they hadn't seen the pricing. So they were just tire kickers that were just doing it for the sake of doing it. It was slowing down our sales process. All the follow ups we were doing were leading to nothing.

It was a very low conversion rate.

So we actually found that turning it off, while it was a heavy hit, it was something that we needed to do and we got the benchmark for it pretty quickly. So I understand if you've already got a pipeline in place which takes those big details and does hide your pricing, you know, restrict your pricing or however you do to get pricing on your website, if you do display was a gamble for us and it paid off. That's to say it might not have a view but it is something you can test very easily and you can.

Turn it on for a period.

We can have pricing for 50% of your audience and not show for 50%. Check it out. Don't just assume because you've got this setup running now that it's the way that's going to lead you to the most bookings.

Because it wasn't gross, just I'm probably going to get shot by Tom because.

It'S been a hard week.

I forgot about two years ago we turned one of our stores to do online pricing. It was Hills over in Colchester and I should remember this. It's not good.

Yeah.

So we went down that route because we had the flexibility to give it a try. The owner said let's give it a go. We wanted to set them apart from Storage Mart, et cetera that were in the town now. So all the prices went online. First thing that happened obviously is you drop all your inquiries supposedly. You drop all your inquiries supposedly. But really all that happens is you pre qualify your leads. That's all that happens. The quality of your conversions is really good. You're not wasting loads of time in the staff thereby following the follow ups that A they want to do because they can never get a hold of them, B, that you're wasting loads of time paying to do so and your, your, your quality goes up. So their conversion rate wasn't really a conversion anymore because it's a qualified leave you can say went up a lot and the quality of the customer went up on. So yeah, should add that. Here we go.

Well for us from a software perspective, I mean we're much more about efficiency and transparency. We like the fact that you can just come and see the price and book and for me I think hiking your price is a symptom of something else that's wrong. There's another problem land below this here. In other words, you know, you're not messaging yourself, you're not pushing your value based statements out or your unique selling points as Mark touched on earlier. You know, so there's all these elements that seem to bubble beneath this decision. The hanging, soothing, capture the lead, which you know, I think you can do both. You know, you can push them through this funnel and also support them on the way through the funnel. You know, to offer an earphone number up front, you know, let them contact you through multiple ways, whether it's WhatsApp or some of these other services that you can place onto the site or using things like Interconnected. So They've got a channel to ask the questions that you need to ask at that particular time whenever they need them answered. You know, that type of support and also the transparency I think will definitely improve the capture of customers in the long run.

You know, I think to respond to that, I think it's also as a reflection of our industry starting to mature. So if you think back, going back to go back 10 years, for example, looking at sites and looking at locations, you mentioned sort of volumes of populations. You know, there was a time when nobody wanted to go into a town that had less than 100,000 people. And that's because I think that it was a sort of, you were still quite a young sector by any stretch. So any kind of lead you're protecting and looking at your competitor, you know, because the last thing you wanted to do is possibly down to them. Because I think eventually we're probably going to get to the point where you look a bit like the hotel sector where you get into a hotel, it's full, but they're going to be on the phone and send you down to.

The hotel down the road.

Because we're kind of all in this together a little bit. I kept my teeth working behind the reception desk years ago in a self service facility where most important thing was to preserve the customer. We're going to tell them about insurance, we're going to tell them about ad block. So I get them off the line, getting them in, whatever you do, you won't get a message to your competitor. That's such a sort of juvenile industry type thing. In industries we've got so much more than that where you're looking at smaller facilities and smaller towns because you're more confident about the offer. So we're definitely going to go down that route where as I said, I think it's about understanding being confident about yourself.

I think, I guess part of the issue is that if you're new to storage, I think an element of paranoia seeps in as well. Who I've spoken to in terms of you worry that your lack of experience is possibly affecting your sales. And then if you have been transparent and show pricing or another road isn't, then you start panicking and thinking oh, return prices on again. So yeah, I think it's a mixture of that possibly too.

I mean if you want to be the, the lowest price in the game, you know, then do the research and put the lowest price up, you know, and be transparent about it. You know, there's probably no war uncle.

Naturally data just on sort of larger competitive thing that all our customers are competing with, you know, the big suppliers in the UK and really, you know, there's so many things. They're doing the marketing for you, right? They're spending all these millions to promote self storage for you. All you've got to be is the sort of local. This is a local business we touched on before. You know, these are local businesses, that's why they work. So if you're the local provider that people can trust and, you know, you know, let me be able to safely access storage more, however it is, let them pump all the millions into, you know, promoting self storage and making awareness for everyone. But we shouldn't be scared of the larger operators because they tend to do the same thing for all different people.

That said, I think sometimes potentially a mistake people made when they start copying the bigger operators, doing the same things, potentially making the same mistakes again. So it's trying to be innovative. That's what this is all about, really. I'm just going to finish panel by asking what do you think operators doing at the moment as maybe being a bit complacent potentially? How can they avoid becoming complacent in the way they're operating?

I think to kind of touch on that one, especially with the American side of things. When talking to operators out there, I imagine that for a large proportion of you out there, it's probably doing quite well capacity wise. Especially over the last 12, 24 months, capacity is probably pretty good and there's maybe a bit of lethargy in terms of the owner, like there's sort of things about innovation so forth. Early in 1995, 100% capacity was the point in proceeding and carrying on. My kind of counterpoint to that would be to be looking at your channel. Just because you're 100% male doesn't mean it's six months time a competitor could have knocked around the corner and take off your audience that you're going to need to be operationally very slick as much automation, making sure it's a really positive journey so that people don't want to drop ship. So, yes, you might be doing very well at the moment and having it running on a really good wave, but my main kind of focus point would be to make sure that that isn't kind of a statement. Until this time that we were doing finance, we didn't look at other options, look at other technologies, look at operational processes, things that we could be doing to improve.

Yeah, definitely second that. I mean, there's a lot of people coming to the sector. Many can, you know, back that up. There's a huge amount of interest. Institutional money is now coming to the sector has for the last couple years. So there's a lot of facilities opening, there's a lot of facilities opening next year. So it's really going back to being confident why you are different and why your business is the one that customers should come to. I think one thing that we're finding is some of our clients, those are the ones who actually pay for these facilities and get them off the ground, is that they kind of think the last couple years in our sector is the norm. So anybody that we've moving for in the last couple years have just had an absolute gangbuster two years with the pandemic. But that's not normal. You know, we have to look to how 20, 17, 18 and 19 was and that's sort of more traditional seasonality. So I think we're starting to see a little bit of complacency about people buying sites, bidding on sites before full feasibilities are done. Because they just think, yeah, this could be like that going forward. Well, it's not, you know, we're very lucky to be in a good sector that's done very well and historically is very resilient. But you don't know what's coming out of the, you know, around the corner. So always thinking for is super, super important.

Now from a, from a software perspective, what do you think the next 10 years looks like, I suppose in self storage?

Well, I'd like to touch on that last question first if I could because one of the things that I'm new to the self storage per se, you know, so I'm learning a lot as a goal here. And one of the interesting things for me is the, is the maximizing your revenue, you know, this sort of price increase that happens whenever you've got occupancy, you know, and what drives that, you know, and I don't know if operators are being complacent about it. I don't have enough knowledge to know what they are or not. But certainly for us at Stora, there's a real interesting area here about using data to sort of drive this process and help self storage operators, you know, make those decisions in a more timely fashion and in a better fashion to, to maximize the gains that you can get from occupancy and that type of thing. So I can see that data layer being a real important thing to implement. So collecting data and certainly with products like Stora, we can collect and anonymize data to help all of our operators push that information back to them again to help them, you know, money to enroll in their business is better.

You know, based on a different operator perspective. We, we consult a lot with a lot of operators and it's really, it's sort of astounding still to this day that people don't run their business from a yield perspective. So there's two parts that we always think to facilities at least up and it's the yield management afterwards. And so many people are so worried about pushing up prices and you know, putting price rises through because your costs are going up, etc. So the whole yield management size so so important for anybody who's getting worked towards maturity because it's the only way you can drive revenue business because unless you can keep building extra space. But it's a really key factor. And I think that's one good point about the complacency. This is still, I don't think, managed enough and probably accurately enough for some people that we see.

Thank you very much. And on that note, thank you very much to the panelists.