2024 Spring Release Webinar Transcript
All right, hey everyone, welcome to our spring release webinar.
Super happy to be here with all of you today.
My name is Chuck Gordon and I’m the CEO of Storable.
Thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to join us.
I’m excited to share some of the key innovations that we’ve recently released across the Storable platform.
As always, we’re excited to be focused on helping each of you run more efficient and profitable businesses.
Our seasonal release program officially kicked off this past February.
And while we’ll discuss it in more detail later, I wanted to highlight our team’s efforts in developing this program.
And I’m proud to say that your feedback has been extremely positive so far.
As such, we’re committed to continuing and amplifying our investments in these resources, starting with today’s inaugural webinar.
I’m looking forward to sharing some great information and also engaging directly with each of you today.
Let’s go ahead and go over a few housekeeping details before we get started.
Today’s session is going to be an hour long, and if you run into any technical issues, please use the chat feature to let us know so that we can try to help out.
The most common issue tends to be audio related, so if your audio is a little scratchy or comes in and out, we recommend switching to the phone call option in GoToWebinar.
We want today’s webinar to be interactive and we want to hear from you, so throughout today’s session you’ll be presented with several polls and we ask that you submit questions as we go.
A team of Storriors is standing by to ensure that your questions are recorded and we’ll address them at the end of our time together today.
1:53 Chuck Gordon
Okay, so here’s what we’re going to cover.
I’m going to kick things off with some high level anonymized data pulled from the more than 30,000 facilities using storEDGE, SiteLink, and Easy Storage Solutions.
That information will help us wrap our heads around what’s going on in the market today.
Then Chief Product Officer Jason Palmer will walk you through how we’ve designed Storable’s product innovation strategy to help our customers address those same market forces and associated challenges.
And then lastly, we’ll be joined by product leaders, Matt Buettner and Taylor Yarbrough to discuss a few of our newly released product increments.
They’re particularly impactful in helping you respond to the shifting market, and I cannot wait for you to hear more.
So let’s go ahead and jump right in.
At Storable, our customer success is the driving force behind everything that we do.
In order for us to create new technology that helps you run a better business, we first need to understand the key challenges that you’re experiencing.
And that starts with understanding the broader market forces that impact your profitability.
So let’s start by diving into a very high level overview of the current state of the U.S. markets.
There are a number of forces we’ve been tracking, starting with inflation.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve experienced multi-decade high levels of inflation, which started to come back down to Earth a bit at the end of last year.
But over the last few months, we’ve seen it start to rise again.
To help combat this, the Fed consistently increased interest rates until this past September.
Since then, they’ve kept them stable.
And while there were early indicators that they might make a few cuts later this year, the recent surge in inflation has led to a belief that those probably won’t happen until we reach the Fed’s 2% target inflation rate.
In terms of impact to operators like you, this has had two main effects.
The cost of capital has consistently gone up and access to it has become increasingly difficult.
This has made it more expensive for operators to continue growing through new construction and acquisitions.
Additionally, with mortgage rates also tethered rising interest rates, we’ve seen significantly less moving activity.
Across the U.S., just over 300,000 homes were sold in February of this year, down from a peak of 700,000 in June of 2021.
As you may have experienced, these forces put real stress on an operator’s profitability.
So now let’s look at how this has impacted our industry.
We’ve seen a fairly significant drop in tenant demand for self-storage recently.
This chart illustrates the trend of consumers searching for “storage near me”, that exact term, on Google over the last few years.
And as you can see, there’s been a fairly consistent drop year over year.
We would typically expect to see an increase in demand during the summer months that tapers off into the winter, but last year there really wasn’t a real busy season like we’ve known for so many years in the past.
A primary factor influencing this behavior is definitely rooted in housing trends.
As we all know, relocating is a huge reason why people need self-storage, and there’s just less relocating happening.
We’ll be monitoring this closely, and we’ll share more updates as soon as we have them.
As you might expect, a drop in tenant search demand typically leads to a drop in move-ins for operators.
Here, you are seeing the average number of move-ins that we deliver weekly to each of the facilities on the Sparefoot Marketplace.
This view is over the last four years.
While 2021 was a record year for our industry at 4.6 move-ins per week, we’ve seen a significant drop to 3.4 move-ins per week most recently.
Interesting.
Now, let’s take a look at occupancy.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, we saw record high occupancy rates approaching 92 percent across all facilities using storable FMS products.
That’s absolutely incredible.
But most recently, we’ve seen these rates drop down to pre-pandemic levels closer to 84 percent as of last month.
When compared to the last decade, these rates are still very high, but the decline is, of course, concerning and definitely impactful.
In response to this drop in occupancy that we’ve seen, we’ve noticed that operators are turning to Sparefoot to help fill those vacant units.
This chart, first time we were ever looking at this, this chart represents the percentage of all inventory on the Sparefoot that is visible at any given time, meaning live versus hidden, which makes it a great measurement of how much operators need to drive demand.
As you can see, we’ve seen a really sharp upward tick in the need to drive demand over the last seven months or so with many, many, many facilities activating their Sparefoot listings.
As you might imagine, occupancy pressures also impact average rental rates.
In addition to a reduction in tenant demand, we’re seeing that your average tenant is now more price sensitive, given the impacts of inflation that we discussed earlier, this is very understandable.
This chart illustrates that new unit prices essentially increased quarter over quarter beginning in 2020, culminating in a high at July of 2022.
But over the past 22 months, we’ve seen a fairly consistent drop in rental rates, returning them close to pre-pandemic levels.
And on this next chart, we’re looking at move-in rate versus achieved rates.
So to better explain that, the green line is the average amount of rent that was charged at the date of move-in.
The purple line is how much that tenant is paying now on average.
So if someone moved in in January 2020, they paid roughly $152 on average to move in.
They are now paying $192 in rent if they are still a tenant.
So over time, their rent has increased by roughly 26% with rent increases.
Achieved rates peaked for customers who moved in during Q3 of 2022, starting at roughly $228 and now those same customers are paying roughly $244.
But as you can see here, we’ve recently started to stabilize at approximately $201.
I presented a version of this data at the Self Storage Association Conference in D.C.
earlier this year, essentially made the point that while the REITs might be exercising aggressive pricing tactics where rents are increased shortly after move-in, something you guys have likely noticed online, that is not a trend that we have observed across the Storable universe on average as you can see reflected in this chart.
Some of you though requested that we dive a little deeper on that and see if there were any different views that could potentially tell a different story.
were and are the REITs really the only operators using aggressive pricing tactics.
So we dove deeper and what we found is truly fascinating.
So let’s take a look at this next slide.
What you’re seeing here is the average amount of the first rate increase that operators apply to their tenants, segmented by which facility management software they use, SiteLink, storEDGE, or Easy Storage Solutions.
The X axis is the month a tenant moved in and the Y axis is how much on average the first rent increase was for tenants who originally moved in that month, whenever that rent increase might have happened.
So on the left side of the graph, you can see that tenants who moved in January of 2020 had their rents increased by about $10 to $18 the very first time their rent ever happened to be increased.
Compare that with the very last point on this graph, February of 2024, we saw increases of between $15 and $41 the very first time those tenants ever made their rent increased.
This is important because, generally speaking, larger operators are using both storEDGE and SiteLink, while smaller one or two facility portfolios typically gravitate towards Easy Storage Solutions.
And as you can see here, the larger operators on our storEDGE and SiteLink platforms, but especially SiteLink, have indeed experimented with a bit of this aggressive pricing strategy that we’ve seen from the REITs.
They capped out at a first increase of $66.30, but that has come back down a little bit for the most recent figure coming in at $41.51 for SiteLink.
So what’s the conclusion here?
What we found is that there are operators other than the REITs doing the same pricing strategy.
Now, are they being transparent about telling the customer upfront that this pricing is going to go up dramatically or not?
That’s the big question I know on everyone’s mind.
I don’t have that data yet, but perhaps something for a future session.
All right, I found this one really interesting.
I hope that you did too.
Before we move on to the next section, I want to do our first poll today.
It might take a second to pop up here, but in the spirit of sharing the most impactful information possible to help you make more informed decisions about your business Please tell me where I should focus next time. You’ve got some choices here. What information are you most hungry for?
We’ll give folks a second to do this All right, Matt.
Let me wrap that up. Okay, very interesting.
So rate increase strategy and impacts So what I hear is that’s the most popular one what I hear is the last chart we looked at must have just been absolutely fascinating.
You guys can’t get enough of that one.
And I agree, it’s interesting.
There’s a lot more threads to pull on and explore where that data came from.
Thank you guys very much.
If you submitted a question via chat, I’ll answer it at the end of our time together.
12:33 Jason Palmer
I’m now thrilled to pass the mic to our Chief Product Officer, Jason Palmer.
He’s gonna discuss some practical takeaways for operators in response to the forces I covered and the new features that we’ve been building at Storable to help you address them directly.
Thanks, everyone.
Jason, over to you.
Yeah, thanks, Chuck.
Good morning, everybody.
My name’s Jason Palmer.
I’m the Chief Product Officer here at Storable.
I work with all of our teams at Storable to collect all of your input and insights and incorporate that into developing the services that we deliver to you.
Before we review the enhancements we’ve made to the service across Storable, I wanted to start by walking you through how we identify the most highly impactful and enhancements that we work on.
Everything we do starts with and ends with you and your business.
Technology is only as good as the problems that it solves.
So our priority is to ensure that everything that we build helps you address your current and most critical challenges.
Our team spends a great deal of time aligning on those challenges before we decide what we’re going to build.
So I’d like to walk you through how we do that.
First, we start with customer engagement.
First and foremost, we want to talk to each and every one of you directly on what types of challenges you’re looking to address.
In these conversations, we want to deeply understand the key performance indicators that help you achieve your most important goals.
Secondly, is understanding the market forces.
We also see it as our responsibility to solve the challenges for our customers before they even realize that they have them.
Just as Chuck went through, we have over 30,000 facilities using our products and services.
And that gives us some unique insights, and many of which Chuck just shared with you a moment ago, that we can use to understand what’s going on in the industry and prioritize building solutions that help our operators overcome those challenges.
In a moment, we’re going to dive much deeper into how we do this.
And lastly, adapting new technologies.
we’re always staying on top of the latest and greatest technologies that are hitting the market to integrate these capabilities into our storable services.
And that continues to help us push your businesses forward.
So I’m sure you’re wondering what have these engagements yielded for us recently.
Let’s spend a few minutes diving into the key themes we’ve heard, and most importantly, how we recommend our customers respond to them.
Earlier, Chuck shared several highly valuable data points that operators can use to inform their businesses’ decisions and strategies.
At the highest level, those data points boil down to inflation is starting to come down, but it’s still very high, interest rates are high, making it cost prohibitive to grow through construction or acquisitions, and tenant shopping behavior has negatively changed.
Tenant demand is down, occupancy is down, and rental rates are down.
From your perspective, simply put, these forces compound to drive your revenue down, operating costs up, resulting in significant hit to net operating income.
But we don’t see this as doom and gloom by any means.
And in fact, we’ve worked with hundreds of customers already to make substantial strides towards counteracting these pressures.
I’d like to walk you through the framework we’re using to not only help customers navigate these forces, but also how we’re prioritizing building new features to make them even easier.
There are four key areas that we’re focused on.
First, driving demand and incremental revenue.
For the first time in many years, we need to focus on optimizing our marketing investments, whether it’s attracting new prospects to our offerings, providing them with digital tools to convert or finding ways to elevate offerings above our competitors.
It’s important that, more important than ever to optimize those marketing efforts.
And for our existing tenants, you can also offer valuable goods and services that not only improve that experience, but also create incremental revenue streams for your business.
The second one is operational efficiency and cost reduction.
Another way to impact bottom line is to reduce costs.
Whether looking to reduce headcount, centralize operations, and achieve scale or focus existing managers on more critical tasks like making sales calls and becoming more operationally efficient is key.
Third is reliability and performance. Along those same lines, we recognize how important it is that our technology simplifies your life instead of complicating it.
So, we see it as one of our key objectives to ensure that your product is stable and reliable as possible so that you can focus on what really matters growing your business.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen more and more instances of cybersecurity and vulnerability significantly impacting storage operations.
The reality is every organization is at risk, impacted by bad actors.
While most operations don’t spend much time thinking about cybersecurity, unless they have a problem on their hands, our goal is to automatically reduce the chance you’ll ever run into any challenges in the first place.
So with those four key areas, driving demand, operational efficiency, reliability, and performance, and cybersecurity, we want to launch another quick poll.
So I’d like to throw up that poll.
And we’re curious, of those four categories that we just covered, which of those are most important to you?
Feel free if you’re concerned about more than one to identify each of those that are that you’re spending time thinking about today and I’ll give you a few seconds to answer.
Okay, Matt, we want to pop up the results of that poll. Yeah, give it just one second.
You got a little delay and I’m watching a bunch of votes come in. Yeah, so I’ll expose it in just a second.
Wow, it looks like we have a clear winner.
Driving Demand and Incremental Revenue, which really ties into kind of the first poll of understanding tenant behaviors and what’s gonna drive additional incremental revenue and demand.
So it’s good to understand we’re focused in the right areas.
So let’s kind of dive into that and kind of what we’ve delivered this last year.
And then later in the presentation, we’ll get into what we delivered in this last quarter and where we’re focused.
So as we look back on 2023 throughout the year, we released a number of exciting innovations across each of these different categories that we’re really proud of and we want to think you’ll be excited about them too.
Well most of today’s session will be focused on what we delivered in just this last quarter, I wanted to take a moment to demonstrate just those things that we recap, those things that we delivered over this past year.
So first of all focusing on driving demand and incrementall revenue, which was our top result there on the survey, we introduced tenant insurance, which is an incredibly important investment for operators.
Not only does it reduce your financial and reputational risk, but it also is one of the most reliable ways to generate revenue outside of rentals.
While traditional people-powered approaches to coverage are effective at reducing risk, operators typically find that to achieve their desired enrollment rates, it takes significantly more time and effort than what they had expected.
So we changed that paradigm by introducing AutoProtect.
We leveraged a technology-first approach to fully automate your coverage program, freeing up managers to focus on your business in other key areas.
And the best part is that we’re seeing on average a 65% or higher enrollment rate for those who have opted into this program.
The next one, operational efficiency.
So with storable products, there are a number of ways that you can either automate or streamline your daily workflow and processes.
That frees up your teams to focus on what really matters growing your business.
And while we’re continuing to invest in those types of efficiencies, there’s another category that typically goes unnoticed and that’s really training and development.
So as we look at training onboard and development for our storage users, we recently released the new feature that we’re calling the Resource Center.
By clicking on the question mark in the right-hand corner of storage, operators can now have access to a wealth of announcements, help articles, how-to guides that help you to understand better how to configure and optimize the solution.
So, whether you’re a new or a tenured user, you can quickly and easily learn how to accomplish tasks without the need to pick up the phone and call Storable.
Next, reliability and performance.
For our SiteLink users, we often heard that while the product provides all the functionality to run a successful business, it can be a bit sluggish in a few key areas, namely startup time and API and integration speeds.
So, we’ve been diligently working on a number of optimizations over the last couple of quarters, which have resulted in a 60% increase in launch speed and an 80% reduction in response time for API requests.
So, definitely seeing a lot faster and speedier experience on SiteLink.
And lastly, cybersecurity and privacy.
While some companies may tout cybersecurity compliance through claims of SOC or PCI audits, this is merely scratching the surface of what’s truly needed.
Storable invests significantly more in cybersecurity than what’s required for these audits to provide an industry-leading service that protects your business more effectively than any other vendor in the industry.
In the last year, there’s been more than 20 million events triggered by our security monitoring system.
The remarkable aspect is that, thanks to our robust security team and infrastructure, we managed to detect and fork all cybersecurity threats without requiring any intervention or awareness on your end.
Momentarily we’ll be introducing a couple of product leaders across Storable who will be using this same framework to demonstrate how we’ve been working throughout the first quarter to help address some of the challenges that Chuck and I just referred to earlier.
Before that though, I wanted to walk you through another significant investment that we’re making to ensure that getting the latest information on all of these innovations.
So we want to introduce to you the seasonal release overview.
We recognize that each of you are incredibly busy running your business and it’s our goal to make it as easy as possible for you not only to be aware of the latest enhancements, but also learn how to use them.
So, to that end, we’re committed to each of the enhancements we’ve made to our services over the previous quarter, what we’re calling seasonal releases.
These releases include two key resources that you can look forward to.
The first is going to be an innovation report, where our innovation report is a deep dive into each of the new enhancements released across the services at Storable.
We’ll walk through how each of these enhancements helps you to address the shifting market forces as we discussed throughout the day today, and includes links to our help center, which will walk you through how to enable, configure, and best utilize each one.
And the second thing to look forward to each quarter is this webinar.
And during these sessions, not only will we be sharing what’s new with Storable and our services, but we also look forward to engaging directly with you with some of these surveys to help us prioritize the things that we’re excited about working on.
And with that, I’m excited to announce that the Innovation Report will be available for each of you immediately following today’s session.
We’ll be following up with all of you via email with links to download it, as well as messaging directly within your FMS.
So keep an eye out for that later today.
25:10 Management Software
Next up, I’d like to introduce Matt Buettner, our VP of Product for FMS, who will walk us through some of the great innovations we’ve made in Q1 across storEDGDE, SiteLink, and Easy.
Matt?
Thanks, Jason.
So I trust that you’ll all agree that your facility management software sits at the center of your operations.
Whether it’s moving in a customer, processing a payment, or tracking and prioritizing critical tasks, facility management software is essential to run an operationally efficient business.
Storable has more than 30,000 facilities running on our FMS platforms, so I can promise you that we are dedicated to ensuring these products are constantly innovating and delivering a reliable experience.
My name is Matt Buettner.
I am VP of Product Management for Storable’s Facility Management Software portfolio.
My team’s job is to stay on top of what is going on in the storage industry, to talk to customers like you to understand your pain points, and then work with our engineering team to add new capabilities to our solutions that help you run your business as efficiently as possible.
I’m here today to highlight Storable’s recent FMS innovations.
We’re going to start today by grounding the conversation with FMS vision, and then I’m going to walk through recent updates for each FMS, and as you will see, there is something in here for everyone.
So, Storable’s FMS products were built to give you, the operators, the most intuitive all-in-one solution possible to improve performance, optimize your daily workflows, and drive revenue.
We know these solutions are the foundation on which you build your business operations, and our teams keep that in mind every single day as we strive to achieve this vision.
Over the last couple of years, we have invested heavily to improve performance and deliver features that optimize workflows for each of our FMS customers.
We do recognize though that our customers’ needs are unique and may even evolve as you change and grow, which is why not all FMS platforms are created equal.
We’ve intentionally designed these distinct products to serve the varying needs of all types of operators and we prioritize our investments and the delivery of new features based on the primary needs of those operators on each platform.
SiteLink is optimized for larger multi-facility portfolios with highly complex technology configurations that are often made up of multiple vendors.
With the SiteLink Marketplace, operators can get access to the largest number of third-party integrations available in the market, full stop.
Easy Storage Solutions is optimized for smaller operators who aren’t necessarily looking for a highly tailored technology solution to run their business, but don’t think that Easy is underpowered, as it offers a ton of functionality out of the box in an all-in-one solution, and it always will live up to its name as the easiest FMS to get up and running to help you optimize your storage business.
And last, but definitely not least, storEDGE is designed to be the most flexible, easy-to-use FMS in the market.
storEDGE can meet the needs of operators ranging from single store to several hundred store portfolios.
And with all of the core functionality included right out of the box, you have everything you need to get up and running with storEDGE.
So if we rewind just a little bit to what we heard from Jason, I’d like to reinforce Storable’s four innovation pillars, as these have definitely influenced our FMS roadmaps and the new features that I’m talking about today.
So to reiterate, we are focused on solutions to help in driving demand and incremental revenue, achieving operational efficiency, assuring reliability and performance, and supporting your cybersecurity and privacy needs.
With this fresh in our mind, let’s dive into just a few of the advancements we’ve made recently across each of our FMS platforms.
28:54 SiteLink
The primary focus for SiteLink has been to deliver on the operational efficiency and reliability and performance pillars.
As an example, we recently improved the data refresh process to help users log into SiteLink much faster, which reduces frustration and increases efficiency.
And we know that many of you are centralizing your operations, So, we focused in particular on making the system faster for those users who may not be working with the same facility all day, every day.
We also spent a lot of time analyzing data on the performance of our APIs, which are the integration points for other solutions in the storable portfolio, as well as the vast number of third-party applications you’re using or even the applications you’ve built yourself.
And in just the last two weeks, we released enhancements, which improve the response time of our APIs up to 80% depending on the type of integration.
This improves the efficiency of the entire SiteLink ecosystem and will help to streamline your operations significantly.
Additionally, with improved monitoring and investment in infrastructure, the SiteLink ecosystem is seeing the best reliability and stability it’s had in years.
30:00 Easy Storage Solutions
For Easy Storage Solutions, we first wanted to highlight the new resource center, which has replaced the previous help menu and provides a space for announcements, easy access to the Help Center as well as operational tools like software setup checklists and solutions guides.
This enables you or your employees to access any help article, walkthrough guide or feature release announcement directly from within the software you’re using every single day.
This will serve as a huge pain reliever for current customers who feel that they have to call into support anytime they have a question about the functionality or who don’t have the time to search an external site for the answer.
This new Help Center will also provide an additional boost to new operators who are on board with us with a revamped setup checklist and straightforward walkthroughs that will enable them to be up and running in just a few minutes.
We’ve also been hard at work expanding our reporting offerings.
The new chargeback report provides the ability to see the status of all of your chargebacks in one place.
Previously, if you wanted to track this activity, the only option was to call into our support staff.
But you told us that takes valuable time and it pulls you away from running the business or finding new tenants.
Now, with instant access to your chargeback activity, Easy Storage Solutions saves time and helps you more easily defend against chargebacks, driving improved performance directly to the bottom line.
We also heard that new consumer protection laws having to do with communications are confusing, and you need a centralized place to track which of your tenants had consented to receiving text messages.
The new Consent Status Report provides a single place to see a full list of tenants, their phone numbers, units rented, and whether they’ve provided consent to receive text messages.
This saves time while giving you a tool to help you maintain regulatory compliance in this area.
So with these new resource center and reporting updates, our latest releases on Easy Storage Solutions firmly address our operational efficiency innovation pillar.
31:56 storEDGE
And last, as occupancy and rental rates are dropping, operators need a way to further monetize their units.
Tiered pricing, recently released in storEDGE, gives you more control over your pricing in order to maximize revenue by providing a way to identify available units in tiers, such as good, better, and best, and command higher prices for your premium units.
This exciting new release on storEDGE covers two of our four product innovation pillars, including driving demand and incremental revenue and achieving operational efficiency.
And here are three highlights to explain how.
First, with tiered pricing, you can remain competitive with those tenants who are shopping for value, but still upsell on the merits of your best units to capture all potential revenue.
And now that almost all of your prospective tenants are shopping online for their storage needs, it is critical that your pricing is accurately presented across all digital demand channels.
This capability is integrated across Storable websites and the Sparefoot Marketplace out of the box so you can fully optimize demand tactics through your online presence.
And with the effort that you’re spending to drive demand and streamline your operations, capabilities like this are critical to reduce the effort it takes to also maximize revenue.
On this final slide, we just have a quick view here of some of the functionality for this feature, including how units are added to a given tier, the pricing configuration tools for a given unit group, and a quick display of how tiering can be presented on your website.
For those of you interested in enabling this functionality, I encourage you to review the extensive documentation available within storEDGE.
So as you can see, our FMS teams have been hard at work innovating on each of these platforms.
And remember that these highlights were just a sampling of all the great new features that have been delivered recently.
Please visit the Resource Center in your respective product or the appropriate Help Center on storable.com for a list of all the new functionality we’ve delivered in each FMS.
And now before we move on, we do have a quick poll we’d like to launch to better understand where you are focusing your efforts to optimize your operations within your facility management software.
All right, I see those votes starting to roll in.
We’ll give it a few more seconds here.
All right, those are starting to slow.
We’ll launch the results.
And consistent with, I think, the results of the previous polls, everybody is focused on driving that incremental revenue and looking at ways to drive pricing strategy.
I do think our price tiering and storEDGE should hit the mark, and we look forward to continuing to innovate in these areas.
So thank you so much for your responses.
It is this type of customer feedback that our product management teams live for, and we appreciate your feedback so we can ensure our software enhancements are focused on the areas in which you are focused, so we can bring you maximum value with our technology.
35:20 CallPotential
Now I’d like to hand it over to Taylor to discuss our innovations on CallPotential.
Right. Thank you, Matt. And hi, everyone. I’m Taylor Yarbrough.
I lead the strategic vision and product development for CallPotential.
So I want to first start by zooming out, and thinking about the acquisition of call potential through the lens of our current focus areas that both Chuck and Jason walked us through.
So a driving force of the acquisition of CallPotential was the alignment of the products to Storable’s mission to enable operators to grow and run their businesses.
The CallPotential products are positioned to significantly help operators maximize their revenue and drive operational efficiencies in a period of significant economic uncertainty.
We saw this acquisition as a real opportunity to expand the Storable suite of offerings and bring the best solutions under one roof to deliver more end-to-end value to operators.
So the CallPotential vision really strongly aligns with our goal at Storable to be a one-stop shop for operators.
And before CallPotential, we already had a number of solutions and valuable tools under the Storable umbrella to manage the tenant lifecycle.
So, from prospecting awareness and move-ins, all the way to managing your existing tenants, Storable offers a number of package solutions.
All of that helps operators more effectively manage their tenant lifecycle end-to-end.
But looking at this lifecycle, including the call potential products, you can see the additional points of value that you can have during these key points of the tenant lifecycle.
Lead Manager Pro helps you track, convert, and move in new tenants supported by automation, ensuring you’re never missing following up on a lead.
Contact Center helps to centralize the management of your leads and existing tenants and making sure your calls are prioritized and get to the right person at the right time.
Finally, Collections Manager Pro automates the most tedious task as you’re tracking, managing, and collecting on that delinquent revenue.
So, at a high level, you can see the alignment of the CallPotential solutions with the problems we’re trying to solve at Storable.
And CallPotential really enhances the value of the Storable suite of products to provide even more automation and simplifying your workflows to improve your operational efficiency and remove barriers to increasing your revenue.
To further highlight this, I want to walk through the three products in a bit more detail so that you can understand how they can help you address challenges within your own tenant lifecycle.
38:00 Collection Manager Pro
So I’m going to start first with collections.
This is an area where operators are spending some of the most time and they’re making these calls, which are not fun.
And more importantly, it’s taking time from more important and higher priority tasks like converting leads and managing your existing tenants.
With Collections Manager Pro, you can achieve industry leading collections rates with a fully automated process, which will help you collect up to four times more delinquent revenue.
The collections workflow is pre-configured out of the box with our best practices, including over 100 touch points with increasing urgency leading up to auction.
This is going to keep you top of mind for your tenants.
We also take an omni-channel approach.
So that’s phone, email, and text, all of which offer convenient payment options, which, as you can see here on the slide, is critical because tenants like to pay in different ways and giving them an automated pay-by-phone option and two-tap digital payments within those texts and emails help meet tenants where they are when they are ready to pay.
Our texts and email include an easy pay link, which drops the tenant right into a payment experience, which you can see here on the screen.
And Collections Manager Pro also helps derive Auto-Pay enrollment.
This is critical as tenants enrolled in Auto-Pay are known to stay up to six months longer and are less sensitive to price increases.
39:30 Lead Manager Pro
Switching gears into lead management, lead conversion is a critical task.
So we know everybody already has a process in place, but I find these processes are often manual and have time slots.
It includes exactly how many leads you have incoming and how those leads are being followed up with.
We did a study placing over a thousand inquiries into different locations, and we found that only 7% of those leads were followed up with, and only 2% were followed up with more than once.
Following up with every lead is even more critical now than ever, with the macro backdrop of declining occupancy rates, competitive street rates, and increasing costs to acquire leads.
Our Lead Manager Pro product offers you visibility and accountability by centralizing your leads, automating your follow-ups, and helping you better track and convert those leads.
We do this with automated workflows, scripts, and integrated phones to simplify your manager’s job and ensure your employees are giving your leads a consistent experience.
On the slide, you can see here some examples of incoming and outgoing automation communications.
So first, we’ve got the call pop, which is showing your managers who’s calling, their status as a lead, and where they’re calling into.
And then on the right, you can see an example of our outgoing automated messages, which include directions and a quote prompting this person to call back to book their unit.
These are just two quick examples of the automated features within this product.
All of this results in a better tenant experience and ultimately incremental revenue of up to 32%.
41:15 Contact Center
Finally, I want to highlight our Contact Center.
So growing and scaling operators are looking for ways to take more control over their operations and really manage their tenant and prospect experience without increasing their cost.
Contact Center is a robust operational tool that enables operators to pool their resources and centralize their operations to control, prioritize, and route calls across their entire portfolio.
The enhanced reporting and dashboarding that you can see here on the slide also helps you understand where your employees time is being spent and how your calls are being handled.
Our smart route technology helps automatically identify incoming phone calls, establish the intent of those callers, and then route them to the right place.
This powerful automated feature then gives you the ability to customize how those calls are routed.
This helps you drive a better tenant experience by prioritizing your lead calls, routing your existing tenants to the right person at the right time, and driving your delinquent customers to payment options first, which will help reduce your call volume by up to 30 percent.
All these features combined help you maximize your staff’s time and drive overall operational efficiency.
To wrap up, as Chuck and Jason kicked us off with, the market forces are really continuing to shift, and we’ve aligned our product strategy across four pillars to help you-all combat that uncertainty, and the CallPotential Suite really aligns well to those pillars.
The entire suite is aligned to driving demand and incremental revenue as Leads and Contact Center help you better optimize your conversion rate and tenant experience and Collections Manager helps you get paid faster and more reliably.
Operational efficiency is also core to theCallPotential product suite.
With our bias to automation, we help you maximize your staffing and enable remote operations.
All of this is underpinned by a strategic focus on reliability and performance as we continue to leverage the integration with storable to invest in making call potential a truly enterprise grade solution.
So before I hand it back to Chuck, I do want to run one last quick poll. So that being said, as we launch the poll, I really would love to understand how you all are currently managing your leads today.
So I’ll give everyone a couple of seconds to let those answers trickle in.
All right.
Looks like we have answers ramping up here.
Okay.
And there are our results, so it seems like we do have a significant amount of people doing so manually or with the help of their FMS.
If you are using another tool, I’d love to hear from you in the chat in terms of what that tool is.
But yeah, thanks everyone and back to you Chuck to close us out.
Thank you, Taylor.
Thank you to Matt and Jason as well.
44:58 Q&A
Great stuff today.
Now it’s time for everyone to join me back here on camera and we’re going to do our Q&A section.
So we have about 10 minutes and we’re going to try to knock through as many of these as we can.
So Matt, let us know which questions came in and which ones we can answer first.
Yeah, absolutely. So just to flag for those that are in attendance as well, we’ve got a whole bunch of questions that came in today.
A lot of you guys ask questions that are very specific to kind of your configuration or how to get the most out of your products.
Just know we are going to follow up with you guys after the fact on those kinds of questions.
You won’t hear them on the panel today, but we are absolutely committed to responding, so keep an eye on your email and we’ll get back to you guys.
But there are a number of kind of thematic things that continue to emerge.
And so Chuck, I want to, to your point earlier, you were correct.
We had a number of people that responded to that aggressive rate increase slide and had some follow-up questions on that.
And so one of the buckets that popped up was this, just to kind of curious, if you’ve heard anything anecdotal from folks that are using this strategy, whether it’s existing customers or folks at the trade show or whatever, in terms of how that’s going for them and what are kind of some of their lessons learned as part of that?
Sure, I mean, I think the reality is that you can look at the REITs, they’re doing a huge amount of volume by having a low price displayed and then increasing rent by 30 or 50% in the first few months.
And they don’t seem to be getting a lot of pushback from it, honestly.
There’s been some, but relative to the difference that that can make to each property’s performance, doesn’t seem like it’s that much of a problem.
Now, will that change over time?
Will their reputation be tarnished?
Will they start to get bad online reviews?
That’s the part that we really haven’t had enough time to see how it plays out yet.
In terms of larger operators within the Storable ecosystem who are leveraging that same concept, I’ve heard mostly positive things, although what I will say is most private operators are taking a more transparent approach, kind of making it at least somewhat clear that this is an introductory rate of some kind, which personally, I agree, you should do that.
That’s just the right thing to do eventually, not being transparent with your customers is gonna come back and bite you.
So yeah, I mean, I think there’s something to this.
It’s just a, how aggressive do you wanna be about it?
But I think the strategy in general is, it’s not a new one, it’s one that many companies and many industries have been using for a long, long time but clearly it has a place in self-storage.
Awesome, thank you so much.
Jason, I’m gonna turn it over to you.
So a question came in, we got a lot of folks that submitted some stuff too, we’re gonna send over the product team, but how are you including customer feedback in the product development process?
How do you think about making sure that what we’re building actually helps them address their most critical problems?
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a couple of areas of investment.
We’re continuing to dial up the, and increase the number of sessions that we’re having like we’re having today to one, communicate out to you what are the things that we’re focused on, how we’re prioritizing the things that we’re delivering.
We also had a great, some great sessions at the most recent trade shows where we brought in customers and discussed what our priorities were for this year, got feedback from them on industry trends and kind of how they were addressing some of those challenges.
So incorporating all of that customer feedback from those sessions, from sessions like these, as well as our customer-facing teams, support and sales, and getting feedback from them on customer meetings that you’re having with them to understand what are the challenges you’re dealing with, what are the ways that we can help drive better results for your business, and then looking at that across the portfolio of customers and the services that we offer to ensure that we’re focused on delivering value around those business objectives.
And so that really is a critical focus as we kind of turn the ship to ensure that we’re making the biggest impact to your business that we can.
Awesome, I’m sure people are excited to hear that.
Thank you, Jason.
Matt, as also predicted throughout your presentation, tiered pricing and just dynamic pricing strategies in general continues to be something that we hear a lot of interest in.
So one of the questions that I think is just very straightforward, but I think is worth acknowledging is first, Tiered Pricing, is that a free feature?
Is that something folks have to pay for?
How does that work on storEDGE?
Yeah, Tiered Pricing is core functionality in storEDGE.
There is no additional charge for that.
One quick caveat, the feature is available today for customers who are not also using channel rates, but we are targeting the end of this month to make it usable in conjunction with channel rates.
But no, to answer the question, there is no charge for that functionality.
And Matt, there was another question that came in related to price tiering whether or not this was limited to being used on Storable Websites.
And the answer is that the price tiering that you do establish in storage can be displayed on non-Storable websites via the storEDGE API integration.
And there are already several third-party website providers that are exploring that capability.
So some more information.
That’s great.
You are ahead of my follow-up questions.
I was gonna ask you both of those things.
So we’re on the same page.
I love it.
Very good.
And then Taylor, on Collection Manager Pro in particular with some interest, I think that came up, I mean, to the point of just additional revenue, I think that’s why that’s particularly compelling right now.
But the questions that came in were just kind of better understanding, how does this actually directly interface with the customers?
I think we understand the value prop, but what does it look like from a tenant experience when you have Collection Manager Pro enabled?
Absolutely.
So that omni-channel experience, once you do have a tenant that’s delinquent, will kind of start a cadence of following up with them.
We will give you a pre-configured set out of the box, which you can tweak to best fit your business.
Text and emails will include that payment link, and our automated phone system includes Marcy who is our very friendly pseudo AI who will chat on behalf of your facility, friendly reminding folks they are delinquent and they should pay and she
will ramp up that level of urgency as you’re getting up to auction.
So that’s what it will be like on the tenant side and then they’re prompted to either call you back and direct it into that pay by phone channel or use those links that we saw in the presentation.
Awesome thank you so much.
Chuck I got a an easy but a fun one for you that came in from the crowd which is just this idea of you know out of all of the data as you were putting together this presentation and everything you saw and kind of like thinking ahead of what you want to go see next. What is it that you found kind of the most personally compelling or interesting?
And then kind of the bonus question is, what is it in particular you want to see next out of the data?
Great question.
Well, you could probably tell which slide I thought was most exciting by just how excited I got.
And that would be the last slide, which is kind of a new view that we were able to put together that really showed there is a difference between operators using our different software platforms in terms of how they are executing their own pricing strategy, which I find really interesting.
So I think that there’s a lot more to dig into there and why and what types of customers and, you know, even within SiteLink, is that the biggest SiteLink customers or are the small SiteLink customers doing that too?
And, you know, why would SiteLink, small SiteLink customers be acting differently than Easy customers? That’s an interesting question.
So those are some of the things that I’m excited to look into next.
Perfect. And then I’ve got one more that was a grouping.
Jason, I’m going to throw this one over to your way.
We saw this play out in the polls a number of times today that folks are planning on addressing demand above all else, filling empty units for the first time in a few different years.
So as you, there’s a few questions about Sparefoot, about Websites, but I’m going to ask you more broadly.
As you look across the Storable platform, what are some of the key tools that we have that you would suggest customers utilize to be to drive demand? Key products? Key tools?
Well, certainly first and foremost as we look at running the business, we want to ensure that we’re maximizing the leads that are coming into the system.
And one of the things that we’re focused on is we look at optimizing Sparefoot to drive high quality leads that are coming through the Sparefoot channel, that as those are coming in, and part of the reasoning behind call potential coming together with our FMS solutions and tightly integrating with with Spearfoot is so that we can maximize the revenue that’s coming from all those different demand channels and clearly track leads all the way through the system to ensure that as soon as that customer hits, the Websites identifies a need that we’re capturing that working that lead as effectively and as fast as we can.
So I think that’s a critical component that we’re focused on is how we’re optimizing that workflow and that experience between the suite of applications that we have.
And so moving forward, we’re gonna continue to look at how we drive high quality traffic and how we ensure that we’re working with you to get those customers converted at a high rate as quickly as possible.
Awesome, thank you, Jason.
Perfect. I will address one more.
We got a ton of questions on this one, so just to address it for everyone to hear.
A lot of people either had to step away to help a customer during today’s session or had some audio issues or want to share this with somebody else they work with.
Just know we will absolutely be emailing the recording of today’s session out to you guys within the next 48 hours. We’ll also post it on storable.com.
So if you do want to share this or review this, you’re more than welcome to.
And then you can always send us an email at [email protected] f you have any questions.
And we’re glad to chase down the answers and get you guys connected with the pros.
But that wraps up our Q&A.
So Chuck, I will let you close us out here.
Awesome.
Thank you, Matt.
Before we go here today, I did want to take just a moment to distill the key highlights that we hope that you will take away.
And that is, first, we are fanatical about the success of your business.
Everything that we do here is customer-centric, and it’s targeted at helping you run a more profitable and efficient business.
Hopefully you could see that today.
Second, your input is critical to our ability to do just that.
Whether you’re innovating, or whether we are innovating on new products and services, we’re always aiming to ensure that what we’re doing enhances your operations, and we need your feedback to validate that, or to steer us in the right direction.
And so to that end, the conversation is not over.
We’ll be reaching out to you and your teams in a number of ways throughout the year, but if you have thoughts on how we can improve, please do not hesitate to practically reach out.
We are always welcoming your feedback and the opportunity to better serve you.
So let’s talk next steps real quickly here.
Later today, you’ll have access to our most recent innovation report, which takes a deep dive into each of the new enhancements released across all the products in the storable platform. You heard about some of those today.
What’s really practical advice to address the shifting market forces we discussed today.
For your convenience, we included links to our Help Center, which will walk you through how to enable, configure, and best utilize each one.
As I mentioned at the top of today’s call, this webinar is only the beginning of our seasonal release efforts.
In August, we’ll be hosting our second session, which details everything we’ll be releasing throughout Q2 this year.
So be on the lookout for an email with more details on that later this summer.
And that concludes today’s session.
I can’t thank each of you enough for your continued participation and partnership with us here at Storable Bricks.
We’re thrilled to be able to support you and your business and it’s a responsibility that we do not take lightly.
We hope you have a great day and we hope you will join us again in August for our summer release webinar.
Thank you.