The ISS team is in Washington, D.C., this week hosting the Inside Self-Storage World Expo. We are joined by hundreds of industry professionals who are here to learn the things they need to know to build or sustain their storage business in such difficult times.

The day kicked off with an opening session focused on self-storage marketing. Hosted by Derek Naylor of Storage Marketing Solutions and Mel Holsinger of Professional Self Storage Management, the presentation shared campaigns submitted by self-storage managers and operators to the recent ISS "Best in Self-Storage Marketing" contest. Among them were the "Naked Storage" video submitted by our second-place winner, Andrew Emory, and an eight-piece print-ad campaign submitted by our third-place winners, Stephanie and Joe Tharpe, managers of Lock Box Self Storage in St. Juliet, Tenn. Attendees of this session got practical, hands-on guidelines for improving their own marketing campaigns.

After the morning's initial session, folks moved into concurrent seminars, choosing from one of three eduation tracks. I personally have been sitting in on the "Day-to-Day Operation and Facility Management" track, enjoying seminars by Hal Moore, Jeffrey Greenberger, Mel Holsinger and—as I type—Brad North.

It's standing-room only at the moment as Brad talks about customers' motivations for storing, why they choose a facility, and the new retail paradigm in effect in self-storage today. The managers and owners in the room are learning the critical steps to selling and how they directly increase rentals. They’ll get techniques for reversing customer objections, outdoing the competition, and turning a facility’s unique advantages into profit.

Did you know one of the top reasons a facility manager fails to convert a prospect to a rental is because he fails to get the potential customer's name and phone number? You'd think this is sales 101 stuff, but it's not so obvious to everyone. Are guilty of this sometimes yourself?

From here, we'll move on to the Self-Storage Q&A and Roundtable Discussions, where attendees can ask questions of the experts and interact with their peers. The Q&A is one of my favorite expo events—always very lively and unpredictable! You can never really anticipate the challenges that will be shared by operators in that session. I'm always surprised at least once.

So we'll see what more we learn today. More updates from the show floor tomorrow.

By the way. Jeff Greenberger says, "Hey."