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Welcome to the secret shopping blog, our window into the world of secret shopping.

Marketers are aiming at ethinc groups all the time. Be careful how you do it for your business.

I got a direct mail piece at home the other day from a company in Gretna, Louisiana. The first page was written in Vietnamese. Unfortunately I don’t speak or read Vietnamese, even though I know enough about it to recognize it. I have heard it spoken and it sounds like a beautiful and interesting language to learn. After looking at the direct mail piece, I figured out it was a company that sells karaoke equipment. How did I get the piece?

Obviously the Phong Le Karaoke Company practices ethnic marketing. They bought a list of Vietnamese first and/or last names. Tran or sometimes Tron is not an uncommon Vietnamese name. My ethnic background is Norwegian and German. Tron is also not an uncommon Norwegian name. My dad, who is my Norwegian parent, thinks the reason Tran or Tron is often seen in Vietnam is because the Vikings traveled all over the place. His assumption is that a Viking named Tron ended up trading or plundering or both in Southeast Asia and his name carried on his legacy. I think it is because there are only so many sounds the human voice makes and Tron or Tran or Trun is a pretty simple one. So why shouldn’t it be found in many languages.

Depending on what part of the country you come from, you might be surprised to find out I am not Vietnamese. Many people who heard my name before meeting me were surprised that I was not. People who live in areas of heavier Nordic populations assume I am a Swede or a Norwegian. I often get catalogues of Swedish or Norwegian craft, clothing and culinary delights around Christmas time, when other companies are buying their Scandinavian first and or last name lists. So I am lead to believe that Norwegian-Americans buy sweaters and crafts and Vietnamese–Americans buy karaoke machines. At least this is what these companies are hoping. Lots of companies do this kind of ethnic marketing. My neighbor, who is Black, got a brochure from a large bank that is promoting its services in our town with a picture of a Black family on it. I got the same brochure with a picture of a white family on it. We had a little chuckle about it.

Is ethnic marketing effective and should you practice it in your self storage business? Well the answer is, “Do it well”. When I ran a bottled water company and we were trying to add new customers, our sales people loved to sign up a new customer who was any kind of newly arrived immigrant. One of our route drivers had been in the Army in Korea and could speak enough Korean to get a laugh out of a native Korean. He had a bottled water cooler in about every Korean household in town. One of our other salesmen set up a Cambodian couple and ended up signing up 8 other accounts for cousins and in-laws. Every sales person had a story of striking a vein like this. It is true that immigrants create their own networks and communities with their own group until they get settled in and comfortable. This can take one, two or more generations. Even after many generations these networks still exist in some looser fashion.

Here are a few ways to take advantage of ethnic marketing at your store. Find out which ethnic groups live nearby. Learn about them and the things they are comfortable with and uncomfortable with. If the dominant ethnic group in your neighborhood was Iraqi and Islamic, you wouldn’t roast a pig for customer appreciation day. Make whatever accommodations you need to make everyone feel at home. Don’t try doing fake tributes to people’s cultures. Fake tributes will blow up in your face. If you have people on staff who speak languages other than English, advertise this and let people know the hours that these staff people are available. Put up a sign in the office, so if someone comes into the office that really wants to speak Urdu, they can see that your Urdu speaking staff person is in from noon to 5 today.

Then take advantage of your language skills and put direct mail to work for you. Buy a mailing list of ethnic names matching your staff people’s language skills for you area and send out mailers. This will bring excellent results.

Set up a booth at ethnic food fares in your area. Give some discount to the local cultural or religious group that will help you spread the word that you are a friendly and reliable place for this particular ethnic group to store their belongings.

Learn to be patient with language and cultural differences. I met a gentleman a few weeks ago who has been living in the US for 23 years. He has two PHD degrees and is a University professor. However, his native accent is still rather thick. If you were not careful, you might assume he was uneducated, unintelligent or lacking funds if he showed up at your store one day in his yard-work clothes all sweaty and dusty from getting his three car garage cleaned out and organized. You might accidentally or on purpose treat him with disrespect. Wrong move! Assume anyone with a thick accent is a worthy potential customer with lots of friends and relatives.

Pay attention to the ethnic groups in your market and make the most of their presence. You might be surprised who you find. As one might expect, Spanish is the largest new language group of new immigrants in Missouri where I live. But can you guess the second largest new language group? Email me your guess to tron@phone-smart.net and I will send you a prize if you are correct.

Good luck with your ethnic marketing. I hope you store lots of karaoke machines, sweaters and crafts for you business customers.

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For those of you who run self storage facilites, you might want to consider using PhoneSmart training to boost your shopping scores. Here is a blurb for you…

PhoneSmart is an off-site sales force that sells rental space for our clients when their leasing and rental agents can’t take a phone call…

We get a lot of practice selling self-storage. We think this could be of value to you.

PhoneSmart has developed a selling system that seeks to drive as many people as possible to the stores they called in a brief and professional manner.

Wouldn’t your organization benefit from our experience?
• “The actual training is more specific than I thought it would be; it is helpful to discuss concerns and assurances. The interaction with others in the industry is helpful as well to hear what others are doing.”
• “Praiseworthy: the “spousal” concern turnaround…”
• “Expectations were what I had anticipated. Some good interaction among the group.”
• “Expectations: met. Gave good ideas for structured methods for sales. Positives: understood methods, easy to follow.”
• “It was good in that it covered all the components of the call and put them together.”
• “Techniques helpful and good info.”
• “Liked “price stalls” ….overcoming those responses.”
• “Good ideas from trainer and other companies. Valuable information for all companies…”
• “I also learned better closing techniques and price stalls, price concerns and objection techniques that will help me close better and faster.”
• “I did expect that you had a sales process that was proven, but your calls really put your success into perspective.”
• “Tron’s expertise is valuable.”
• “I simply expected today’s seminar to be a creative pep talk. I was both surprised and pleased to learn new methods to address specific situations while selling to customers over the phone.”
• “The seminar was also conducted very professionally and I picked up a lot that I will implement at my facility.

Selling Self-Storage Seminar

Contact us for the next seminar Or schedule an on-site session For your company!
For details call Tron directly at 1-866-639-1715

• This is a great day (day makes sense, but should this be way?) to hone your selling skills.
• PhoneSmart Director, Tron Jordheim will lead a “Selling Self-Storage” seminar.
• Learn the PhoneSmart training system in a one day intensive session.
• Learn to drive more people to your store.
• Learn to dramatically increase your closing percentages.

Topics include
• Sales 101
• The Rule of Thirds
• The Basic Questions
• Building urgency
• Take your prospects off the market
• Get commitment
• Role Playing

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Welcome to the secret shopping blog, our diary of the secret shopping and mystery shopping world.

Sometimes you just need a different approach to training. Here is one way to help people remember important terms and concepts. Make a puzzle.

Here is a puzzle that PhoneSmart sales rep Ann put together to help people focus on what helps us sell self storage units in our overflow call center.

ann’s puzzle

10/26/2005

S E C U R I T Y T I L I C A F H P V E
E H S J L R B U K E T A G S S E C C A
I R T I E D I V J M H X A C M O I G Q
T Y N W Z A M R A L A R O O D R S L U
I M E S N E Q B P G E D K N P J R D H
N O M A C L N I K M W Y P T Z N E N R
E V E Q W T G E A E U C M A V T G U E
M I E D K O Y C O D X N B C S J A C S
A N R C P H O N E S M A R T Z O N F E
R G G E B E Z N L J H E I C Y E A T R
F S A Y D R S A C M L F P E I X M I V
E U E I S M I T W O E N F N C B E K A
M P V G Z C T Q C N D J E T V U T P T
I P I W E L E A E O K V A E Q K I N I
T L F P N Y T B M F N X T R G U S T O
A I S B M I O H R O D T U H O Z N L N
K E V D O G U F C I B L R J F W O B R
A S U N F N R W P E D U E O Q P D Y M
L O C K S J E G A R O T S F L E S U E

Access Gate
On-Sight Manager
Amenities
Pest control
Benefits
PhoneSmart
Contact Center
Price
Convenience
Reservation
Door Alarm
Security
Facility
Self-Storage
Features
Site tour
Five Agreements
Size
Hot-Lead
Specials
Location
Timeframe
Locks
Video Cameras
Moving supplies

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Welcome to the secret shopping blog, our window into the world of cusotmer service and sales.

When it comes to answering the phone, truth is stranger than fiction.

Complied by Tron Jordheim, PhoneSmart Director.

Our telephone sales reps at PhoneSmart try to have an answer for any concern a caller raises and tries to be able to professionally handle any situation that comes their way. PhoneSmart takes overflow calls from self storage facilities all around the country. We get some calls that make you shake your head. Here are some of the odd and curious calls we have actually taken.

We got a call from a desperate mother trying to save her teenage son with some good old fashion discipline. He was misbehaving and running with the wrong crowd. She described a scenario that is every parent’s nightmare. She was trying to use grounding to get him to slow down, but realized that grounding him to his room did not work so well because he always found something in his room to fiddle with… so her purpose for storage was to store away everything (TV, games etc) except his necessities (bed, dresser and clothes). Then he would have to earn back his luxuries one by one. I hope it worked for her.

Husbands and wives sometimes want storage so the other half cannot take belongings from the home. We get calls like this more often than you might think. There is a divorce brewing, an abuse issue, a spouse who is stealing from the home to support a bad habit or issues the callers don’t care to share with us. You know the callers are up to their elbows in trouble when they ask about confidentiality, refuse to give a home number or ask that the spouse not be informed. These are difficult calls to take, but you have to be polite and help the people without upset yourself.

One time we had a man-on-the-run call us. He explained that he was running from the law and thought he would be caught soon. His arrest warrant was apparently well distributed. He wanted to get all his belongings in storage before he got caught and locked up. Isn’t it odd that he would open up like that and tell his story to a perfect stranger on the phone, especially since was wanting to rent a storage unit us.

We have had calls from people who wanted to know if the storage place needed identification and if a contract was required, because they wanted to be invisible. One caller explained to us that he did not want to be traced to his storage unit and needed everything to be on the hush. These kinds of calls make you shiver.

One day we got a call from a lady crying and screaming on the phone claiming she was being held captive by some crazy man threatening her near a storage facility. She gave us clues about the location, but she was calling a nationwide toll free number for one of our client companies, so we had to guess which store she was near, based on her description. We contacted the store manager for the store she described. The storage Manager thought we were getting dingy and said that she gets crank calls on occasion, too. The lady who claimed to be captive sounded so terrified that we could not believe it was a crank call. PhoneSmart reps tried to contact the police in that area. The police didn’t think the location made sense based on the description and were not sounding motivated to investigate. BUT by the next day we found out that it was all true. The police had found the woman being held by a man in a parking lot across from the storage facility we had told them about. The police had responded to a call from someone locally who had seen the man and woman scuffling in the parking lot. The woman, it turned out, was ok. Very strange indeed.

Then there are the calls that are just plain odd. We talked to a guy who did not need a storage unit for four years. He was retiring in four years and was going to put a lot of his household stuff in storage while he hit the road in his RV. He just was curious what a unit cost. How is that for getting prepared?

One day we got a caller who asked, “How many golf balls will fit into a 5×10?” Okay, that would make a rep stop and think a second. We can talk about boxes and dressers and couches, but golf balls? The caller was starting a golf-ball cleaning and refurbishing business and needed someplace to store the balls after he pulled them out of lakes. We took the reservation, so I guess we answered the question right.

Just the other day we got a call from a lady who was potty training her son while talking to us on the phone. She put the phone down in the middle of the rep’s sentence and all we could hear was the lady praising her child for making potty. Ah, the special moments we get to share with our customers.

We also took a credit card reservation for a man riding his bicycle. Our rep thought he was on a cell phone, but assumed he was in his car. This is not unusual. She walked him through the sales process and took down his credit card number. When she tried to give him his confirmation number, he said, “I can’t write at the moment, I’m on my bicycle”. Who would have guessed that people call your stores on their cell phones while out riding their bikes?

We also participate in a global economy. Our call center may be in Missouri, but the world seems very small to us. We once took a call for a lady in Honduras who was moving to Hawaii. So we booked her a unit that would be waiting for her when she arrived in two weeks. We occasionally get calls from US service people from over seas who are calling to make a payment on their storage unit back home in the states. We booked a unit in Florida for a couple that was moving down to the sunny climate from Toronto Canada. It’s a small world.

It happens to us about every day that we have an odd situation or a funny circumstance that we can use to lighten up the atmosphere. Occasionally we get a bizarre or scary call that makes us glad we are not at the location the person called. We know each of you could write a book about some of the odd and strange calls you have taken. Just like you, we take them with a smile.

bye for now, Tron

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Welcome to the secret shopping blog, PhoneSmart’s diary of the mystery shopping and secret shopping world.

“A” can stand for Attitude. One of our goals in Secret Shopping Land is to help our clients understand their purpose in answering rental inquiries. What attitude should they have when they’re talking to potential renters? We believe that their goal should be to first determine what the caller is looking for in a storage facility or apartment home. The manager should come with an attitude of understanding so they know how best to help the caller. We encourage them to learn about the caller and their situation so that they might uncover other potential needs that can be met by storing with them. On our evaluations, we can’t stress enough how important it is to ask questions.
We have heard calls where the managers don’t ask a single question other than “How may I help you?” Then they proceed to tell the caller what they think they need to know without even attempting to find out. In our secret shopping experience, we have also heard calls where the manager asks several questions. However, none of them really get him any closer to helping the caller or getting any commitment from them to rent at his facility. We try to get across the importance of the right questions to ask so they are not wasting their time or the caller’s time.
Unfortunately, many people in need of storage don’t know exactly what questions to ask. We have heard calls where if the caller didn’t know what to ask for in size, they were denied service because the manager didn’t know how to help them.
The attitude is important because if the managers understand that sometimes their potential customers rely on them to be the experts in storage, they’ll step up to that responsibility. This shows those callers that they have reached someone who’s knowledgeable and cares for their needs. It builds trust and can really establish a good rapport with the caller.

“A” can also stand for Assume. You know what they say about people who assume… But sometimes it seems that some of our managers just can’t help themselves. As already mentioned, we have evaluated calls that were based purely on assumptions. This can be a big mistake to make. Not only can it upset the caller if the assumption is wrong, it can close huge doors of opportunity.
My brother was looking for an apartment and he had a list of places that he was interested in and that were in his price range. He called one place and asked for a one bedroom apartment. The leasing agent quickly told him that they only had 2 bedroom apartments available. My brother being new to apartment hunting thought that was that and ended the conversation not really knowing what else to do. Having done some research, I discovered that the property did have 1 bedroom apartments for rent, just not the day my brother called. This leasing agent missed out on a rental and sent my brother’s money somewhere else because he didn’t bother to ask when the apartment was needed. This simple question would have changed the entire course of the call.

-Laura

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Welcome to the scret shopping blog, our diary of the mystery shopping and secret shopping world.

Let’s pretend that you walk into a shopping center looking to buy a fuzzle. There are three vendors that sell fuzzles. You walk up to the first and he says, “We have the mini fuzzle for $40, the medium fuzzle for $60, and the super fuzzle for $80.” You thank him and walk to the next vendor. He tells you that they are sold out of every fuzzle except the super fuzzle, which costs $90. So you leave and go to the last vendor. Here you walk into the store and are greeted by an associate. He asks you a few questions and then says, “Well, each of our fuzzles are hand crafted. They have a lifetime guarantee by the manufacturer. One of the great things about your fuzzle is that it will dance and sing, clean your house, and walk your dog. And with our super fuzzle special offer, they are only $85”

Even though the third vendor’s fuzzle may be slightly more expensive, you are excited to own such a valuable fuzzle and buy it.

The reason that customers are willing to pay extra can often be that they feel they are getting addional value. If you have two car mechanics next to each other and the cheaper mechanic just tapes your bumper back on, you may be persuaded to pay a little extra to permanently attach your bumper.

My point here is that if you tell your customers a little bit about your store or product you can build a sense of value in that product. The customer will feel a peace of mind purchasing your service and be confident that you will back up what you sell.

“Selling” your service before you give the price can also help absorb any sticker shock a customer may feel.

In the secret shopping world, we see a lot of people who are too quick to give the price. They shoot themselves in the foot by not highlighting some of the wonderful things about their business. So don’t sell yourself short by forgetting to tell your customers what great features your store or product has.

Ta Ta for now…

Sarah

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