Marketing Makes the Promise. Operations Keeps It.

The standard picture of a storage company has a line down the middle. Marketing brings the renter to the website. Operations takes it from there.

Gabriel Luna does not think that line exists.

"Operations and marketing truly go hand in hand, and there's never really a handoff," he said. "I feel marketing sets the expectations, and operations really delivers."

Gabriel runs marketing for Derrel's Mini Storage, which has been family-owned since 1963 and now has 69 stores stretching from Bakersfield to Sacramento. Derrel's has run on Tenant Inc. since March 2021. He has spent nine years marketing self storage and about eighteen in marketing overall. What he has built at Derrel's is a marketing department that behaves less like a team that just runs ads and more like the company's answer desk.

Marketing is where the questions go

Ask Gabriel what his job is and he does not start with ads. He starts with data.

"I really want to know and need to know whatever operations wants to know," he said. "I've always felt that marketing was kind of the central hub of information."

The questions come from every level of the company, from a manager at the counter to the executive team. Each one is about how a department runs and which numbers tell you whether it is working. Marketing sits in the middle because marketing already lives in the data: where renters come from, what they respond to, what they rent.

That only works if the numbers marketing sees are the same numbers operations sees. Two teams working from two versions of the truth will always need a handoff, because someone has to translate.

A question that used to take Gabriel about a week to answer now takes him about half an hour. We told that part of the story in What 'You Own Your Data' Should Actually Mean. The focus here is what happens when marketing and operations work from the same numbers.

Pricing and promotions are a marketing lever too

At Derrel's Mini Storage, Gabriel's team can change pricing and promotions directly, see how renters respond, and adjust again.

"It's the ability to test information," he said. "It's the access behind the scenes to change promotions and pricing. It really is a moving machine."

That is what a moving machine means here. The team bringing renters in controls the offer those renters see, so nobody waits on another department to update a price or a promotion.

Marketing is not the only team working this way. The auctions team works in Hummingbird too, and Gabriel points to delinquency coming down. The bigger change, in his words, is transparency.

"It has brought transparency," he said. "It has brought more data, not only in the marketing world, but in the operations world and how we're performing at the site level."

Transparency is what removes the handoff. When every team can see how each store is performing, nobody has to carry the news from one department to the next.

The vendor has to show up like part of the team

Running marketing and operations as one system puts pressure on the software underneath it. Questions come up about how a number is calculated, and the answer has to be right, because both teams are making decisions on it.

When Gabriel ran into questions like that, the response surprised him.

"I think I had about four or five of your engineers jump on and made themselves available to answer questions," he said. "I thought that was, in my career, kind of unheard of. I'm used to quarterly check-ins, and maybe monthly check-ins if I'm lucky."

A couple of support tickets turned into a working session. When every team runs on the same numbers, nobody can wait a quarter to find out how one of those numbers is calculated.

"We're constantly pushed deeper into the system," he said, "and had really good conversations about how to make the software work the way we need it to."

What Derrel's runs on

Hummingbird is Derrel's property management system, so rates, occupancy, delinquency, and the auction workflow all sit in one place. Mariposa is the website. Because Tenant Inc. builds both, a promotion is set once in Hummingbird and stays matched on the website, at checkout, and in the lease. There is no second system to update, which is why Gabriel's team can change an offer and have renters see it without waiting on anyone.

That covers the first two conditions below. The third is the people. When Gabriel needed a number explained, the engineers who built the system got on the call.

What it takes to remove the handoff

Gabriel's setup comes down to three conditions. Any operator can check them against their own business.

One set of numbers. Marketing and operations look at the same data, down to the store, so nobody has to translate between two reports.

Marketing can move the offer. The team bringing renters in can change pricing and promotions directly, instead of filing a request and waiting.

A software partner that answers. When a number needs explaining, the people who built the system get on a call, not on a quarterly schedule.

If any of the three is missing, there is a handoff somewhere in your business, whether or not anyone calls it that.

Take the leap

Asked what he would tell an operator still weighing a move to Tenant Inc., Gabriel did not hedge.

"Take the leap," he said. "Talking from a data guy, I feel data is king, and I have never seen data put together like this, especially with the new tools that are coming. Let me shout out Alita, let me shout out the Nectar platform, because these are, I feel, tools of the future that are coming, that are here now."

Both tools draw on the same data as everything else in this story. Alita is Tenant Inc.'s AI agent for renter conversations, and Nectar is the open API that connects that data to other tools.

Marketing makes the promise. Operations keeps it. At Derrel's, both teams are looking at the same numbers when they do. The real question is whether yours are.