Managers Tips for Selling Pt2 – selling upper floor units

I have been asked by a few people over the last month how do I approach the selling and charging of upper-floor units. So this month I thought that I would give you my take on filling up a building across all of its floors.

I’m a salesperson, so I believe you can sell anything to anyone as long as you give them a good enough reason to buy it. You know your property better than I do. Why should people rent your upper-floor units? Surely, you can come up with a few good reasons for your customers to store upstairs, can’t you?

Like so many other things in life, you are only limited by what you allow yourself to be limited by. In this case, you might be convinced that there is something wrong with upper-floor units, looking at them like seconds at the pottery shop or day-old bread at the bakery. I’ve been in the self-storage business a long time and have seen a lot of things happen at stores. In particular I had this one staff member that was new to self-storage. He was running a building which had several floors and a rolling staircase. It was a hectic time in the business and when training him, I forgot to tell him how he should handle anyone wanting a unit on the rolling staircase. When I went back to check on him, I found he had rented more upstairs units in a short period of time than anyone ever had at this store before … and without an additional discount. Why? Because they didn’t know any better! Even afterwards I couldn’t get the Store Manager to change his opinion of the odd sized units and as a result he always found it near impossible to sell those units whilst the new guy could almost sell them at will.

If you think there is some deficiency in your upper-floor units, then your customers will think so too. In truth, there is nothing wrong with upstairs units. It takes the same time and effort to go up in the lift as it does to go down the hall. Of course, it is easier to use a drive-up unit, but there are also negative aspects to using these. For instance a customer is outside in the elements when they use a drive-up unit. Heat, cold, and precipitation can make using a drive-up unit a miserable experience. And if you are concerned about personal safety, wouldn’t you rather be in the building than out on the yard? If it ever rains where you store your goods, you may have rain that blows under your door and onto your stuff. With all of these negatives, perhaps you should charge less for your drive-up units. Okay, maybe not. I’m simply illustrating the point that, if you try, you can talk yourself into any bias.

Here is the truth. You do not know what your customers want unless you ask them. You can give them the option of an upstairs unit or a lower level unit, or you can simply take them to whichever 100sqft unit you want to show them. Either way, most customers really don’t care where their unit is in the building as long as it suits their needs. Someone who accesses a unit every day might prefer a unit that is easy to get to, but it may be your upstairs unit near the elevator that the customers considers easier to get to than your downstairs unit way down the hallway.

The main difference between upstairs and ground floor units is going to be the price. I am a big advocator for having ground floor units at a premium rate over units on the upper-floors. This in fact should make it easier to sell the upper units however does create the same bias against the ground floor units as staff can be afraid to ask for the extra rental. What I suggest is taking the ”but“ out of your language. In other words, don’t say, ”We have a 100sqft unit available, but it is on the third floor.“ That makes it sound like something is wrong with the unit. To the customer, anything that comes after the word ”but“ is bad. Instead, say something like, ”Yes, we have 100sqft units, follow me.“ Then take them to the upper-floor unit and finalise the deal!

But what if you have a store in which the upper units are especially difficult to access? You may even have stairs to negotiate or if on the top floor the units towards the edge of the roof may have impeded height due to the roof pitch. If you truly have a problem with your upstairs access, I recommend a selling tool I heard about called ”Selling your Worst Feature“. This may not make a lot of sense at first glance, but think about it for a second. If there is a feature of a unit that is not attractive and could turn off a customer, you don’t want it to become apparent late in the sale and ruin a conversion that was going well. Just mentioning the feature isn’t enough. You must bring up the objection and overcome it at the same time. If the customer doesn’t object, then it is no longer an issue.

For example you could take the approach, ”One of the nice things about our store is that you can save money on your rental by storing upstairs. Now we don’t have an elevator, but a lot of people are glad to go up a few stairs to save the money. Or, if you prefer, we have some convenient first-floor units. Which would you like to look at first?“ The ”worst“ product just became the one that is potentially the best value to the customer, especially if access is going to be infrequent.

If you are not uncomfortable about selling upstairs units to your customers, then they won’t have any problems renting them. If you give your customers the impression that one unit is pretty much like any other, they will accept your recommendations and choose whichever unit you show them. Make a decision to lose your bias against upstairs units or better still find a few good reasons why people would want to rent your upstairs units and then practice with each customer until you can sell upper-floor units as well as ground floor ones.

Finally in the states an interesting statistic is that upper-floor customers stay on average 20 percent longer than those renting drive-up units. The little bit of extra effort it takes to move out from an upper-floor unit as opposed to a downstairs or drive-up unit apparently does make a difference in people’s decisions to move out. Just think, you are letting a lot of money get away every time you allow yourself to talk a customer out of renting upstairs.

For more ideas on how to sell space and convert enquiries, please contact us