I hope you wrap up your phone conversations with prospective customers by inviting them to move forward and rent a storage unit from you. If you do, your prospect will sometimes say “No”. Although we all hope they say “yes” every time, even getting a “No” is a good thing.
Watch the video below and see why.
This is a video post and I’m including the transcript below for convenience. I know sometimes I want to hear or see one small part of a presentation, but I don’t want to spend the time trying to find the one segment of video I was looking for. All of my premium (paid) video content will have written transcripts or summaries to make review easier and to suit those who would rather read than watch. My premium video content will also have worksheets and other resources to help on-site self storage managers learn and apply the material as easily as possible.
One word of caution: There are run on sentences and other grammatical errors. This is a transcript of me talking, not an article about the same topic. We all tend to talk less formally than when we write (that’s why you can tell when someone is reading their speech or presentation). Let me know what you think.
— Begin Transcript —
Hey, I’m Kenny Pratt from https://sellingstorage.com and today I just have a real brief tip for you about why, when you ask a prospective customer to commit to renting a storage space and you get a “no” answer, why that really is very helpful.
It may sound counter intuitive, but hear me out.
Often times self storage managers make no invitation at all. They say something at the close of a phone call with a prospective customer like, “We’re open from 9am to 6pm, come by anytime.” Or, they say something like, “Give us a call when you are ready.” Which are no invitation at all.
Even if the customer then says, “Sure, I’ll give you a call.” or “Yeah, I’ll stop by when I’m ready,” something that is very positive sounding like that, you have no idea if they really intend to rent the space. They may just be being polite, and instead intend on calling the next person in the Google search results and seeing if they can’t get a better deal or find something that better meets their needs.
The point is you have no idea when you close a conversation like that and fail to make any kind of invitation.
So, what I’m recommending is that you do invite them to move forward with the sales process. An invitation may sound something like, “You know Ms. Janky, the next step is to fill out the paperwork. What would work better for you to come on down and take care of that, later today, or tomorrow?”
So there you go. A simple invitation like that would give the prospective customer the opportunity to say “sure” and set the appointment and come on down. You are going to get that sale. Or, they may say “no”.
The beauty of a “No” answer is that you really know now that they have some objection. The objection is not hidden. You are not waiting with your fingers crossed hoping that they are going to come into the store someday.
So, when they tell you “no”, you know they’ve got an objection and you can work on that. You can try to work and discover exactly what it is that they are not comfortable with regarding your store or the offer that you made or the price that you offer.
Just to summarize…
– Invite your prospects to do something to move the sales process forward. You’ll get, oftentimes, a “yes” and they will move forward and make the sale.
– Sometimes you’ll get a “no”, but at least then you will know there is an objection there that you can work on handling.
In some future video or some future blog post I’ll go into more detail on how to handle an objection and how to work through that to a sale. But for now you can do at least this much and open your eyes to where your customer’s are really at.
Well, I’m Kenny Pratt with SellingStorage.com, until next time.