86. Part 3/3: The Coworking Sales Funnel Dissected
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
Creative Coworking Partnerships: How to negotiate and structure management agreements from the landlord and operator perspective
TRANSCRIPTION
86. Part 3/3: The Coworking Sales Funnel Dissected
00:00:01 Welcome to the everything coworking podcast, where you learn what you need to know about how the world wants to work. And now your host coworking space owner and trend expert. Jamie Russo. Welcome to the everything. Coworking podcast, episode number 86. This is Jamie Russo. I own a coworking space in Palo Alto, California. I am the executive director of the global workspace association and the host of the everything co-working podcast.
00:00:33 This episode is brought to you by my program. The coworking startup school. This program is for you. If you're investing in your coworking space and want to avoid making costly mistakes and having undue stress by getting yourself expert in peer support in a highly facilitated environment, I want to make sure you create the right space for you and your target market, right from the beginning.
00:00:53 I want to make sure you get the business model, right? So that you're set up for financial sustainability that matches your goals. I'll review your proforma, help you with your product mix design frameworks, sourcing furniture, working with vendors, getting your marketing systems down, hiring the right team, getting you set up with the right tech and more. If this sounds like something you need,
00:01:13 check it out@wwwdotcoworkingstartupschool.com. I am reformatting the program a bit and the next cohort will launch shortly. So make sure you get your name on the list. This is the third episode of a three-part series on the co-working sales funnel. So if you missed the last two, I would go back and absolutely listen to those first, or you'll probably be a little bit confused.
00:01:34 They really go in order. So go back to episode number 84 in the first week in episode 84, we covered how to assess whether or not you have the revenue potential that you thought you had in your prelaunch, proforma, and what to do. If that is not holding true. Then we talk in detail about the components of the coworking sales funnel and the top of that sales funnel.
00:01:55 Getting people to your website, to book a tour last week in episode number 85, we covered the important layer of the sales funnel, where you convert website, visitors into tours and how to avoid leakage in this critical layer of your sales funnel. We used Anna from Atlanta to illustrate potential leakage areas. This week, we're going to go through making sure you convert the scheduled tour to an actual tour,
00:02:20 the DNA of a great tour experience and the tour follow-up so enjoy. So you fixed all the whole leakage points on your website and they book a tour. So you have live chat, you've got a phone number. You have super clear membership options that are easy to find. You have pictures of people in this space. A member profiles can answer all their questions.
00:02:43 They know how to find you. They're super excited. They book a tour. So the leakage point here is they may not show up. So also know this. When you're tracking data for your sales funnel, how many tours do you get booked that actually show up? And you know, what percentage show up is it? Half is at 75%. If you're losing a lot of people,
00:03:01 why is that? And what can you do to make sure that they show up for the tour? Because presumably these people are active searches, right? To schedule a tour is a pretty big deal. So assume that they're a warm lead. Not that they're just random. You want the percentage of people who book a tour and then show up to be very high.
00:03:18 So what can you do to ensure that folks are showing up for tours here? A couple of ideas. When you set up your tour, booking plugin on your website, look for the option for the user to add the appointment to their calendar. Once they booked. So usually these plugins will have that little thing you can add that lets people add the appointment to their Google calendar or to their outlook calendar,
00:03:38 whatever it is that they're using. So give them that option. You might also test sending them an invite from your business calendar. So if you use outlook or Google calendar for your business calendar, send them an invite for the tour and look for them to accept, collect their phone number. When they book a tour and send them a text message reminder,
00:03:58 you could call them and remind them, you send them an email confirmation upon booking, make sure they have any special directions they need for parking and accessing the space and then send them a reminder email the day before the tour, you do not want to overwhelm them and feel like you're irritating or desperate, but you want to make sure that they have the appointment in their calendar and that they know how to get to the space.
00:04:20 And that there's no frustration with that aspect. The next portion of the sales funnel is you've done all you can to make sure they show up for the doer. Now you're going to nail the tour and get the conversion to membership. So getting a prospective member on site for a tour is critical and ensuring that you have a clear tour day process documented and that your staff is trained to manage it and execute.
00:04:46 It is also critical. Do not assume that your staff knows how to give good tours. If they have not been trained, they probably don't. And if they've been trained by someone else, you might have a specific way that you want to do it, that you think drives conversion, and you want to test this right? You want to constantly be analyzing what's happening when people come through and what seems to resonate with people.
00:05:08 This is not going to be super easy to do in a highly analytical way. It's going to be a little bit qualitative. So you're going to have to debrief after your tours. I have a tour document where my community manager puts lots of notes for each tour and we try to understand why do they not convert? Do we not have the product that they need?
00:05:25 Are we not close enough to their house? Are they looking at other spaces? Are they not the decision maker? You know, what are sort of, we document all those aspects so that we can understand where the issue is and what we can control and what we can't control. So I made a note of seven tour de considerations. Number one is the member set up to get into your space with no frustration.
00:05:48 This is important. So in mice space in Chicago, and I think I talk about this way back in my, how to, you know, choose a coworking space. Location episode is we had a very confusing entrance to our very beautiful coworking space, skyline view, 18 foot ceilings, brick and timber space, full kitchen. I mean, it's a beautiful space,
00:06:11 but really hard to find the door. That's a big problem. So we would do all sorts of things to try to make it easy for them to find the door. We'd send them emails with little tips. We'd had a screenshot that we'd take with arrows. We had signage on site. We had to work really hard at this. So you want to have someone go through this process and give you feedback about all the pain points.
00:06:35 Do they know where to park? You know, if that's relevant, maybe they're not driving in there walking or taking public transportation. Do they know how to access the door? Is your entrance clearly marked with directional signage and use as much as possible. You staying within the limits of your building rules. Number two, how is the member greeted when they enter the space,
00:06:54 will your community manager or sales manager be able to ensure that he or she is at the front desk when your tour arrives first impressions really matter, right? If they might be making coffee or dealing with some sort of other issue, how can you make sure that they know that they need to be at the desk and ready to greet the tour? This can be hard.
00:07:12 I totally get it. Tourists come early, tourists come late, but you don't want the tour to walk in and have no one near the front desk and no one to greet them and to make them immediately feel comfortable and that they found the right place. So do what you can to prevent, you know, an unsure arrival for the tour has your tour guide research,
00:07:33 the prospective member so that he or she can immediately ask relevant questions and create common ground. This can be done by using a simple LinkedIn search. You can often find enough information on LinkedIn to make some connections. What are their previous jobs? Do you have any mutual connections? You know, did they go to the same college or do you know someone who went there and you just have something interesting to say about the town where their college was?
00:07:56 Where's the person lived, et cetera, consider having your staff add any relevant LinkedIn notes to the perspective members and treat in your CRM. Maybe somebody does the research and then they get sick and they're not there on the day of the tour. It'd be great to have this in a centralized location so that anybody could glance at those notes before giving the tour and make that immediate connection.
00:08:16 I think this is really important and makes the person feel like you're giving them personal attention and creating common ground, and that you're showing them that you know how to develop community in a small way, but small ways matter when you're introducing someone to your space, does your tour guide, and this may be a community manager or a sales manager. So I'm sort of giving this role a generic name,
00:08:37 number four. Does your tour guide have a prescribed path through the space as well as a discussion flow with key talking points to go through the space with a perspective member. So in my experience, again, this is critical in no organization, should the sales staff or your tour guide go untrained. Most people are not a hundred percent natural at selling. They're just not.
00:08:58 You might think that you have this amazing outgoing community manager, but he or she needs your guidance and your process. So, and also I've should have addressed this early on. You may not like sort of talking about selling your space, but I just use it because, you know, you can think of it as attracting members to your space, whatever it is that you like.
00:09:16 And you can frame it as a process, as something other than sales for yourself, if you prefer. But I think you want to think about all the sort of, you know, typical sales processes in order to optimize these conversions, to make sure that your space sells memberships and is financially sustainable. So in addition to having a tour flow and key talking points for each of those areas throughout your space,
00:09:39 number five, what special sauce tactics do you integrate into your tour process? Does the perspective member get introduced to a current member is the perspective member invited to attend a member event. We've had a really great luck recently inviting prospective members to a member lunch, especially if they already know someone in the space to have them come in for a lunch. It just like seals the deal because we get great turnout for our member lunches.
00:10:03 They get to interact with others. They get sort of a feel for the space. They can stay and work for the day that tends to work really well. So is there something like that that you can do the sort of unique to your space and your team that might work really well? Number six, what is the process for your staff to get to know the perspective member throughout the tour?
00:10:20 So they've done that upfront research and they know a little bit about what the person does or where they're from or where they went to college. But you know, it's this whole thing like being on a date with someone you think the date went really well. If you get to talk about yourself a lot. So that means you have to ask the person questions so that they're talking about themselves a lot and feel good and special and cared for.
00:10:40 So have a list of questions for your staff to use, to get to know the perspective member, or you could start the tour with a sit down in a meeting room before the tour starts, not a long one, but just a brief one to find out what are they looking for? What's important to them. What do they do for work? Will they have team members?
00:10:57 All those things could be done in a short meeting and show off a meeting room, which is also fun, make sure they have coffee and water and that kind of thing. And then number seven, how does the tour end? Is there an offer for a trial day, a list of questions to understand where they're at in their selection process, asking them if they're ready to make a membership selection,
00:11:14 if they're not ready to make an immediate decision, make sure you ask them questions. Like where else are you touring? You might feel sort of self-conscious to ask this, but I always ask this because they will tell you. And then, you know, and that's such good information to have ask them. When do they plan to make a decision, ask them if they are the decision maker or with someone else on their team,
00:11:34 be making the decision, you know, ask what questions can you answer that haven't been answered yet on the tour. And then as your tour guide, or you wrap up the tour, make sure you let the prospective member know that you'll send them a follow-up email, including pricing and membership details mentioned this also at the beginning of the tourists, they don't get all stressed out and feel like at the right this stuff down because you'll send it to them in an email.
00:11:56 I also like this because it sets an expectation that you will send them a follow-up email. So you're not sort of out of bounds by doing that, but you're doing it in a way that it's helpful to them. So then the tour follow-up is kind of the next piece in the funnel. If your prospective member has left the space without signing up on site,
00:12:13 the next best outcome is that they've agreed to sign up as soon as they get home. So your process may be that. And that's our process. We don't actually have people sign up onsite and we've talked about testing that differently, but we, if they're commit, we say, okay, great. We're going to send you a link to sign up through our membership system.
00:12:29 And once you do that, we'll start the onboarding process. So if this is the case, make sure that you are your tour guide takes that action immediately. I get it. Like you can get distracted, you need to make coffee. You need to get things ready for the next day. You need to run a member event. There's an event,
00:12:44 this space that night, like you can get busy, but let me tell you my favorite quote from a sales guy I used to work with is time kills deals. And I've seen this play out again and again, in any sort of sales situation, right? This is why like urgency tactics tend to work well because you want people to commit, right.
00:13:02 Then people get, when they leave, you get distracted, they start thinking about their budget. They might change their mind about their budget, or they might just get busy with work projects and be like, look, I don't have time to make this transition right now and push off the decision. So if they already said, they're ready, like you want to keep them in that moment of decisiveness and readiness to sign up.
00:13:23 And so send out that signup link immediately and get your member signed up and start the onboarding process immediately. So they feel like they're in and they can't back out to you don't want a member who doesn't want to be a member for sure. And you will get a sense of that from your tour. You'll know whether somebody like just really isn't ready or isn't a fit.
00:13:43 And certainly don't stock them, you know, unless it's your style stock. But I think, you know, sort of use some intuitive feel for where the person is at. But if you think they're ready to sign up and they're, you know, you want to like, keep that rolling. So if they are not ready to sign up, but you feel like they're a warm lead,
00:14:02 put them into a tour follow-up process that you should try to automate with your CRM system. So a tour follow-up process might look like this. You send them an email, same business day, if possible, that's personalized detailing pricing and membership options with a personalized note relating to a connection you made on the tour. If you really want to make an impression and give the prospective member a flavor over your team.
00:14:26 And I give kudos to Cain Welmont of IQ office weeds for this idea, send them a video follow-up sharing, using a service like loom or BombBomb. And I will link to these in the post as well. They are great ways. If you can get your staff to get over the discomfort of video, to leave a really unique and personalized message as a follow-up,
00:14:48 but then you can automate the rest of the followup in your or email service provider that is automated. So that might look like this two days after the tour, you might send a, any questions for us type of email, send a short email, thanking them again for visiting the space and ask them if they have any lingering questions about their visit that you can answer.
00:15:08 You might send an email a week after the tour. If they still haven't committed, checking in to see if we can help you make your decision kind of email again, keep it short. We're not trying to be in their way. We're just trying to keep us top of mind with them and nudge them along. If they're ready to join, but got distracted with other business or life needs.
00:15:27 Then there's the two weeks after the tour email, invite them to a member event or trial. They email if they still haven't committed, but you think they're a warm prospect still consider inviting them to an upcoming member event. In order to automate this email, this is a little bit tricky. You might need to send a personalized email at this point, or have it be an event that you host on a regular basis.
00:15:51 So it's, you know, we always have, you know, a member happy hour every first Friday at four o'clock. And it's something that, you know, never changes. You can put it in your automation as an alternative. You could also offer them a free trial day if they haven't done that yet. And automate the email with the offer and instructions on how to redeem that free trial day.
00:16:10 This is kind of the end of the automation piece, where you need to sort of decide what to do with this person. If they've showed up for a trial day or they've joined or whatever, but if they still haven't dropped them into your email marketing list so that they receive your monthly newsletters, it can't hurt. If they haven't told you that they never want to be a member of your space,
00:16:27 then they still may be a prospective member. So put them on your marketing list so that they can stay connected to what's happening in the space. And if they haven't made a decision, yet you might still be totally on their list or B maybe they've joined another space, but they don't know if they're going to be a hundred percent happy there yet. So subscribe them to your newsletter list and keep them updated on what's happening in your space and who's joining and,
00:16:50 and that kind of thing. And you never know, they may turn up again. And the process above is totally a framework. The intensity and duration of the follow-up is up to you. So for example, we work, it seems that their process is to send followup emails until you tell them that you are not going to join. So they're following the,
00:17:08 I will keep communicating until you turn me down approach. This may not be a fit for you, or it may be. So you decide, and it's just a framework, but I think it's helpful to think through what's possible. And to know that you can automate it with your CRM. And I will leave with mentioning that I have in the post listed out a number of the resources that I've mentioned so far in this episode,
00:17:32 and also include a link to the 2018 co-working tech and tools guide, which also has a number of these resources listed and some more detail on them as well. So I may, you know, do some additional episodes that kind of dig even further into some of these funnels, but I think we're pretty far in at this point. And so I'm going to give you a break.
00:17:54 If you have any feedback or any questions on this episode, I would love to hear it. It would be super helpful to understand, you know, what else do you want to know? What else can I help you understand to kind of get this down? Cause I think it's really, really important and critical to the success of our business. So let me know,
00:18:09 send me an email at jamie@everythingcoworking.com. And I will talk to you next week. Thanks for joining us on this episode of everything. Coworking, be sure to click the subscribe button so you can stay up to date on the latest trends and how to until next time.
For the full show notes of this episode, click here.
Want to join our coworking conversation in the Everything Coworking Facebook Group? Find us here!
Looking for a specific episode? Go to the episode index here.