181. KPIs for Coworking Spaces with a 2021 Lens

Resources Mentioned in this Podcast:

  1. Keeps my manager focused on and accountable for a few key aspects of the tour

  2. Gives us insights to review together that might help us to tweak our member acquisition approach.

Everything Coworking Featured Resources:

TRANSCRIPTION

181. KPIs for Coworking Spaces with a 2021 Lens

00:00:01 Welcome to the everything co-working 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. This is your host, Jamie Russo. This is episode number 181. Today we are going to replay an oldie, but goodie. It is from episode number 71.

00:00:44 So 110 episodes ago. Is that crazy? Or what if you have been a listener since episode number 71, send me an email. I want to know. So we're replaying this one because it's always a good time to think about KPIs, but we are especially in the mood to think about goals and measuring progress the week before we kick off a new year.

00:01:11 So that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to continue my intro with a lens on 2021 KPIs, by the way, are key performance indicators, things we track in our business because we know they matter and when they improve our business improves. So we're going to keep talking about that. Coming up next week is my interview with Kim Lee,

00:01:35 the founder and CEO of Ford in Birmingham, Alabama. I talk about Kim a lot because she is always moving and grooving. She expanded her coworking space at the beginning of March, which is amazing timing. She's been open for three years now. She just started a podcast. She's starting a mastermind program. She's got a lot going on and a lot to share.

00:02:00 And then the interview after that is with her community manager, Kelsey. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you. So don't miss next week's episode. So let's talk about key performance indicators or KPIs for short focusing on what drives your business will be critical in 2021, to set yourself up for office reentry. What we measure gets focus. What we focus on improves KPIs can help you get objective data on what's working.

00:02:34 And what's not. Sometimes we feel sort of intuitive about our business. We think something's working, we make assumptions, but we need to measure to really know the other good thing about KPIs and why I think they might be particularly helpful to you right now is they can also keep you focused and disciplined while you're working on projects that don't reap immediate financial rewards.

00:02:59 So I talked to folks who say, you know, they're feeling burned out. It's been such a hard year. They've been, maybe they've been doing this for a while anyway. And this year was really challenging. They thought they were going to start some new projects that got postponed. So it can be really hard to keep motivation. And it's possible that your processes and tracking and all of your good intentions have sort of fallen apart.

00:03:23 So it's a good time to revisit and reset on KPIs and business systems and all that good stuff, because assume we are looking at sort of a broad re-entry in may or June in the us fingers crossed that is not that far away. If you have things that you need to work on, SEO, for example, is a good one. That stuff takes a while to kick in.

00:03:50 You want to start working on that now. So if you've been sort of laxed through 2020, feeling like I have time nothing's happening here, it's time to kind of kick it into gear. And so I think talking about KPIs can help you get into that mindset and be disciplined and work with your team to make sure everybody's clear about what you're tracking. So a few other quick notes about this episode,

00:04:17 I referenced a KPI resource for coworking spaces. And if you're in my Facebook group, you've gotten this and maybe you looked at it and you're like, Whoa, we'll look at that another day. It is for good or bad kind of everything in the kitchen sink. I think it's a great reference tool, but it is really detailed. And so I want you to grab it if you don't have it yet,

00:04:40 you can get it in the show notes, but we'll put a link in the show notes so you can download it, but don't let it paralyze you. So pick a few like three to five KPIs that you want to focus on and then put the guide aside until you've made some progress on that first set of goals. And the guide I think is really nicely laid out.

00:05:02 It gives you KPIs what they are and how to get the data, to track them and sort of what to look at when you're tracking them. So if you feel a little bit stuck on KPIs and that's not part of what you've been doing in your business, definitely grab the guide. So the next thing I'll mention, just to kind of, you know,

00:05:22 update this episode is if you're feeling a little burned out and unmotivated going into 2021, and you just want me to make some suggestions on what to track, here's where I would start. These three are simple, but I think meaningful, super simple. So first let's start with revenue that you can control. We talked about this on the last episode, it's virtual office revenue,

00:05:47 and sometimes I bring things up repeatedly because they weren't repeating. I will tell you, I love it. When I talk to folks and they say, we set a goal around growing our virtual office business, and we're 25% of the way there we're halfway there. They know what they're looking for and they're taking the right actions to go after it. And it's working,

00:06:06 they're building their revenue. So virtual office is in demand right now. It is something you can control because people don't physically have to come to the office. So if you haven't listened to episode one 80, which is the last episode, go back to it, have a listen, set a goal with your team for building number of virtual office members or a revenue goal,

00:06:28 put it on a tracker and review that tracker every single week and determine the actions that you need to take in order to get that number to go up. You probably need to update your website. You need to get listed with more channel partners, et cetera, put those tasks on a to-do list, put it in a sauna, whatever it is that you use and make sure those things are getting done.

00:06:48 Just as an example for talking about building your virtual office revenue. But if you have a tracker it'll force you to think about what do I need to do to move this number? And that's what you'll focus on every week. By the way, quick note, if you didn't listen to episode one 80, yet, if you have not set up your virtual office or your digital mail offering yet until January 15th of 2021,

00:07:11 I am giving you free access to my mini course, how to set up a virtual mail program. It's usually $97 or it's included in my community manager university program. But until January 15th as a new year's gift, you can access it for free go to everything. coworking.com forward slash virtual office. Okay? So I'm making suggestions for KPIs for you to focus on in 2021.

00:07:40 If you are looking for someone to tell you what to focus on, the first one is revenue that you can control. And I suggested virtual office revenue. It may be something else for you. The second one KPI that I would track, because I think we're going into a time where we don't know our potential member, as well as we used to.

00:08:02 So I would look at website, visitor conversions into tours. So we know what number, how many people hit my website every month. And how many of them book a tour. This is a number that you may need to sort of reset on. If you haven't been tracking it, or if you have been tracking it, it may be hard to look at it relative to what it used to be.

00:08:25 I think you want to get a baseline and check to make sure that that number is improving. So you want the percentage of people that are converting into tours to be going up. I think this is a useful number to watch because it may be an indicator of whether or not you have the messaging and the membership options that potential members are looking for. Now,

00:08:49 this might be a tricky one right now. So that's why I'm saying start tracking it and get a baseline so that you kind of know what you're looking at. You may have folks, this conversion rate may be lower right now because people are looking at doing so they're coming to your website. They feel like they want to leave the house, but they're not ready yet.

00:09:10 Or they have their own office space. They want to downsize. They're looking around, but they're not making a decision yet. So you may have a lot of visitors right now with a low conversion rate, but we want to see that conversion rate go up over time. And as soon as you start to feel that your market is recovering and that people are looking for office space,

00:09:30 you want to see that number going up. And if it's not going up, it could be an indicator that you don't have the messaging or the offers that are resonating with the members, your potential members that are looking for space. So as people start wanting to get back into the office, there'll be new segments of customers for flexible office space. You might need to test your messaging and your offers until you align with what the market is looking for.

00:09:57 And your two are conversion rate from your website. Visitors is probably your best indicator of whether or not you are communicating clearly to your potential members and making offers that they're looking for. So do they, you know, do they want flexibility? Do they want to share a private office? Do they want a dedicated desk? These are typical products that we've offered,

00:10:20 but you want to really, really talk to your tutors. When you come in, you want all the insights you can get out of folks that are looking for space to make sure that what you used to offer is still what the market is looking for and determine if you need to make some adjustments. So office flexibility is one of those things. You may choose not to do it,

00:10:39 but we hear a lot of folks that don't want to commit to a full-time office right now. What does that look like? Another segment out there is that work from home crowd or that downsized crowd that wants to allow their team to share some space. But they, you know, they're not sure how to pay for it. You're not sure how to charge for it.

00:11:00 You might have to do some testing and we're going to do an episode on this 100%. This came up in the Facebook group and somebody tagged me and said, you know, Hey, can you do, can you talk about this? Because folks are trying to attract those corporate users who are work from home, where the corporation's going to pay, what does that look like?

00:11:18 How do they want to pay? How do you set that up? This may take some practice in your market. So you may need to be watching your website. And there are tools that you can use on your website. Hotjar is one of them that will help you really see where are users clicking? What are they looking at? How much time are they spending on something?

00:11:37 Google analytics is a great tool. And if you or your team don't use Google analytics. If you have some downtime over the holidays, it's a good time to do some training on that. And there's all sorts of free stuff. Look at YouTube. You know, you don't have to pay for, for training, but it's a good time to start to get to know Google analytics and how to use it,

00:11:58 to evaluate your website health and, and how it's working for you. But there are other tools. Hotjar is one of them probably, if you Google for Hotjar, others will come up that you may want to use to test messaging and offers. And if you're not used to updating your website, very often consider getting into the mindset of testing. You can't change every week.

00:12:19 Otherwise you won't have enough data to know if something is actually working or not. But you know, throughout 2021, it may be that you're making some changes every couple of months to try to test. As you learn more about the language that your potential members are using, what they're looking for, so that you speak very quickly and simply to them on your website and can capture them and get them in for a tour.

00:12:43 Because typically coworking spaces convert very well. Once they get someone into this space. So we want people into the space. Okay? So my third suggestion for a KPI. So website, visitor conversion into tours start tracking that every month, you know, go into Google analytics. What were my website, visitors that month, and then two hours. This is going to be tricky.

00:13:06 You're not always going to have the right data. Well, did the tour come from the website? Did they come from the Google? My business listing? Did they show up? And if they showed up, well, did they go to the website and then show up off the street? I get it, do your best, right? If you just throw up your hands and say,

00:13:23 it's impossible, I can't track it at all. You'll never have information that helps you. So most folks are going to have come to the website at some point. And then if you must, if you do not, you must allow people to book a tour directly from your website, Calendly, acuity, whatever tool you want to use, please make that happen now.

00:13:44 And if you don't have a website, developer, find someone on Upwork, this is an easy thing to make happen. And it is incredibly important. Do not make people call you or email you to set up a tour, make it as easy as possible. It'll also help you with these metrics, right? It'll help you have fewer sources of folks booking tours so that you can measure.

00:14:06 So do your best on the measuring, but put that in your KPI document and start measuring the third suggestion for a KPI. And this is super simple. And I talk about it all the time, but if you're feeling sort of stuck and unmotivated and you need something simple, this one will drive. Results have activity on your Google, my business listing every single week.

00:14:29 And this was an easy one because it's just a check box. Did I get someone to write a review? Did I update a photo? Did I post an offer? Super simple three options, but it matters, right? So I think a lot of folks are feeling fairly good about staying focused on that, Google my business listing. But if you're in the camp of,

00:14:50 sometimes you forget, sometimes you're not super consistent on it, make it a KPI, put it on your tracker and give it to someone else to do. And if you don't have a community manager and you're kind of overwhelmed by some of these, get a VA to help you. I posted recently on Upwork and I have a very inexpensive, so Kristen who's,

00:15:08 my old community manager is on my team. She is virtual, but she does higher level activities. She helps me with tracking and whatnot, but I also found someone on Upwork who is inexpensive and overseas and very helpful. So they can, you know, you can find someone to do these really basic things if you're not getting to them and you, you know,

00:15:29 or don't have someone on your team find some support. And I know we don't want to pay for a lot of extra things right now, but you can find them very inexpensive help for basic things like tracking metrics. You know, somebody to look at the Google analytics, although it's a good, good for you to get in there. And if you happen to have a market person on your team,

00:15:49 then hopefully you're reviewing things. These things are ready, and this is kind of old news, but get these processes in place. Okay. So that was just kind of an intro to the episode, which we recorded a while ago. I just wanted to do a quick update for you for 2021. Also, if you are working on opening a coworking space in 2021,

00:16:12 I want to make sure I extend an invitation to join my free masterclass three behind the scenes secrets to opening a coworking space. If you are working on starting a space, I want to share three decisions that I see successful operators make when they're creating their coworking business. I help dozens and dozens of folks start spaces. I work with businesses in my flight group program,

00:16:35 my community manager program. I see the success drivers and I've kind of distilled them into three drivers that I want you to consider. If you're opening your space, it's a totally free masterclass. It's about an hour, which includes Q and a time. If you'd like to join me, please register at everything co-working dot com forward slash masterclass. And the links that we mentioned today are in the show notes@everythingcoworking.com,

00:17:00 just click the podcast link when you get there as the easiest way to find it. It's also under episodes, Ford slash one 81, but the link to the masterclass, the virtual mail training, if you need that and the KPI doc, all in the show notes, and there I will sign off and let you dive into the KPI episode. And if you are listening to this the last week of December happy new year,

00:17:24 Sianora 2020, and here's a big toast and cheers to a much more positive 2021 for our industry. I will continue to be here for you and be your cheerleader and try to try to keep your chin up. So reach out if there's anything I can help with. And I will see you in 2021, let's jump into topic. And Today's topic actually came out of our flight group,

00:17:52 Slack channel. So we have a Slack channel for everybody that's in the flight group and people will jump in. So we do our flight group calls once a month and people will jump in with topics here and there outside of the calls. And I have to give co-authorship to this topic to Michael Evarts from shared space in Atlanta, he kicked off the initial version of the list.

00:18:13 He kind of jumped into Slack and said, Hey, this is what I'm looking at tracking. What does everybody else track? You know, what do you think we should add? I think Michael is an operations poster child. You should see his Asana board. It's a work of art. So he jumped in and I started dropping KPI's into a Google doc,

00:18:33 which you can access at everything. coworking.com forward slash 71, the show notes page. And then I'll also put the link in the Facebook group, which you can join by going to www dot everything, coworking club.com. So metrics are super important to running a successful business. And I'm talking financial metrics, member engagement metrics who shows up to happy hours, not just,

00:18:58 you know, sort of the core financial numbers, but all the things that are happening in your business. There's a famous quote, attributed to Yogi Berra. If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else. So you want to have goals for your business and you want to have plans in place that you think will get you to those goals,

00:19:15 but you can only measure success around those goals. If you're tracking your progress and then tweaking the drivers that impact the outcomes of those goals, which is kind of a mouthful, but hopefully, you know what I mean? So if you have not started a space yet, I want you to just kind of listen to this episode and just kind of absorb and think through,

00:19:36 okay, this makes sense. You know, sort of putting together a picture in your mind of the things you want to have in place to kind of track these things. And also to help you think about running your space and all the things you need to have in place to drive towards these metrics. And these goals. If you have a space open and you have a space management system and a CRM,

00:19:56 you should be able to track a lot of these KPIs in per data that you get from those systems. You may not have the exact right dashboard that sort of presents itself. Some may, you may have some of that in there already, or you may have to pull that data out and sort of create your own dashboard. So you might just want to go back to basics and create an Excel file,

00:20:18 you know, with all the KPIs that you like in there and just kind of track it and gives you a nice visual. So we do that for our tours. We have a tour dashboard that tracks a range of information from the tours for every tour that we do, that we use to draw, you know, data and insights so that we can understand,

00:20:37 okay, where is the demand? What are people asking for when they come in? Why do we tend to close tours? Why do we not close tours? It, the format is really basic, but really works for us. And it's easy to scan and look for trends. And we review it every single week. I review it with my community manager,

00:20:54 even if I can't get in there to do an in-person meeting, to go through it, we'd hop on zoom and we do a screen-share and we look through it and she kind of voices over what she's seeing and the notes that are in there. So I'll link to the template for the tour tracker in the show notes as well. And I can just list off kind of a few of the things that we track for tours.

00:21:13 And this is not necessarily comprehensive. So obviously name, do they work for a company? Do they work for themselves employment type? I just want to note, this is important to track. You may have it in your CRM and you could set your CRM up to track these components of the tour, which may work, but base management systems don't capture people until they're an actual member.

00:21:35 So I want data on the people that are not that don't convert to members, because I want to know who they are and you know, where are they going and what decisions are they making if we know that information. So we always ask them, how did they hear about us? I asked my tour, you asked my community manager to think of,

00:21:52 you know, what's one thing you have in common with this person that you could bring up during the tour. So they're looking for, you know, where does the person live? They're looking them up on LinkedIn. What do you know, sort of, what can they learn about this person so that they can sort of establish rapport? And we drop that into the tourist spreadsheet and well,

00:22:11 and that's just a little bit of an accountability thing for my manager to make sure she's always thinking about, okay, how do I build rapport? And what's that kind of one thing, what neighborhood does the person live in? Which is important for where we are, you know, we're in Palo Alto, but Palo Alto is not very big as a town.

00:22:27 And so we pull from a lot of surrounding areas. We want to understand how far are people driving and you know, whose consideration set are we in? Where do they work now, either for a company or location, what are they looking for in a coworking space? And so these are all the things that we talk through on a tour. So these are the conversations we're having with our tours,

00:22:47 which could be another separate topic, but so what are they looking for in a coworking space? What other spaces are they looking at? I love to ask that question. And generally people will tell you, especially if you're sort of, you know, in the groove of a conversation with them and you sort of casually ask them, so where else are you looking?

00:23:03 You know, don't make it a super big deal, but we love to get that insight if we can, what's their next step. Are they doing other tours? When are they trying to make a decision? Are they making the decision or is someone else which is important to understand sort of in your followup and then follow up date? Just so if there's,

00:23:22 and again, you can put that in your CRM and assign the task, but the person may say, Oh, you know, I, you know, I'm looking at a few more spaces. I'm going to decide at the end of the week, then we'd wait a couple of days to follow up and sort of ping them. Or it may be they're looking for an office and we don't have an office.

00:23:37 So we'd put them in our office waiting list. And we try to update them every once in a while. Maybe they schedule a trial day. And so we want to get them set up with a trial day and, you know, make sure we're following our sort of trial day sequence. So that all happens in our tour tracker. And I'll just include the link to the template for the tour tracker in the show notes as well.

00:23:56 Okay. So let's, we get sort of specific on the tour tracker there, but the first bucket of KPIs. And so KPI is key performance indicator just caught fairly common acronym, but just in case you hadn't heard it before KPI key performance indicator would just sort of means like, what are the key things that impact your business that you should be tracking?

00:24:17 So on this file that I'm linking to in the show notes, I have a column for the KPIs and then a column next to it for, well, how can you impact these KPIs and then sort of notes, you know, that sort of relate to that KPI. So I'll try to go through some of these without taking forever here. So member acquisition is the first bucket.

00:24:38 So some of the things that you want to be tracking for member acquisition, just to kind of know, you know, am I growing my pipeline? Are we getting enough tours in the door? Things like that, what is my sales funnel is my sales funnel sort of supporting this. So here's some of the things we have in the list. Number of subscribers to your email marketing list,

00:24:58 number of direction requests through your Google, my business listing. Talk about the Google, my business listing kind of a lot, but make sure that you just have nailed that and it's really done well. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, Google it and make sure that you optimize yours. Because once you start looking at the analytics, you'll realize there are probably a lot of people who look at that and never go to your website.

00:25:22 So your website analytics are super important, but you could be getting people who are requesting directions and showing up for an unscheduled tour, which we all love, or they're looking for directions to come to an event. So that's, you know, it's hard to know exactly why they're looking for directions or maybe they want to see how far is it from my house,

00:25:40 but it's an indicator and there's traffic there that may not be captured in your website. So it's hard to know whether there's an overlap with your website, but do you want to be looking at that, just to see how that changes over time? And it's just another good metric. You can also tell your Google, my business listing. We'll tell you number of phone calls that have been made from the listing to your space.

00:26:00 You know how when you see a business listing, you can click on that little blue hyperlink and call rate from your phone. So your Google, my business listing, we'll track that related to that. If you can track this, you want to know how many calls did came in that were not answered. And if you are not running the space yourself,

00:26:17 especially, this is a question you want to be asking your community manager. And I talk about this price probably overkill, but I can't believe it happened. So I have to mention it all the time is global workspace association did a phone survey about a year and a half ago, and we called 300 spaces. And half of them did not answer their phone.

00:26:37 And we called again, and I can't remember the exact stat, but it was like, twenty-five percent of them, again, didn't answer their phone. So it's like really hard. Get in touch with some spaces and maybe they're full and not taking new members, but I don't know many people in that boat. So you want to be asking this question of your manager because they may just not be thinking about it.

00:26:54 They may think, Oh, you know, I have to go make coffee. You have to do these things. The phone's not gonna ring. And I would say, you want to make this number zero. So pay for a phone answering service, which you can get through DaVinci virtual office solutions or cloud VO. We use that for interspace zero calls go unanswered in our space.

00:27:14 Sometimes they go to voicemail, which, you know, again is not super ideal, but someone has talked to them in person and asked them, how can we help? We'll send you through. Someone will get back to you right away. So they feel like someone has responded to them. So you want that to be zero. So just get that in place and then make sure you're not missing any calls.

00:27:34 Number of website visitors, which you can get through Google analytics. And again, part of the reason for talking about this is make sure you're looking at the stuff ongoing. Cause I think some of us sorta want to put her ear muffs on and just sort of hope there's this great sales book called hope is not a strategy. It's kind of old school,

00:27:50 but if you have trouble sort of holding yourself accountable to these types of things, read it because it's just so clear. Like, look, you have to track things. You have to have systems in place. You can't just hope that people are going to show up and hope that you're doing the right things. You have to know. So review your data,

00:28:07 review your metrics on a periodic basis that works for you, but it shouldn't be any more than monthly. You need to be looking at these numbers and being consistent and holding yourself accountable to these number of tours booked and kind of related to the phone answering service. And this is in the how to impact these KPIs column is, do not make this. So have live chat on your website.

00:28:32 We struggle with this because when you have one community manager, you have a smaller space. You can't have somebody on the live chat all the time. So it's a little tricky to manage, but I still think it's better than not having it up at all. So not everybody wants to email. I mean, a surprising number of people call. I never used the phone.

00:28:50 If I don't have to. I mean, I have phone calls with people all the time, but you know, I love to do things online. So I love when I can book things online. I love when I can get all the information I need just by looking at a business listing and not having to call someone, it just takes longer. Right?

00:29:05 But some people like to call and some people like to live chat and some people hate to send emails and wait for a response. So you want to make it as easy as possible for them to get in to your space because we all know that is the key factor to getting people converted into members is getting them in for a tour. So have live chat on your site and shared space.

00:29:26 Atlanta is actually a great example. Back to my poster child, Michael efforts, they have live chat on their site. You go to their site, little picture pops up. I think it might be of Michael. I don't think he answers all the live jets, but it says, you know, how can I help you? And I don't know what else it says,

00:29:40 cause I always of click it off, but it's immediate. And so if you want to ask a question or book or two, or you can do it, make sure you have a book, a tour button on your homepage, like super, super clear, like this should be the big thing, right? You want people to book a tour. You want to let them find the other things that they need to find in order to if they want to evaluate your space.

00:30:00 But a lot of people may sort of be doing a geographic search and not spending a ton of time researching on your website. And they just want to come in. So make this really, really easy related to that. Another thing I tend to harp on, make sure your address is on the homepage and it should be in the footer across your site.

00:30:17 People do not want to guess at where your location is. And again, they may find that through your Google, my business listing. But if they're going to your website, you want this to be really easy. Okay? So you want to track number of tours completed. And again, that may be in your, you know, your CRM, how you track.

00:30:32 This is not important, just that you're figuring out where in your sort of operational processes, does this get tracked, but make sure this could be, if you don't have a CRM yet, don't make an excuse for that because this can all be done on paper, have a sign in at the front desk with a clipboard old school, have people sign in when they come in name,

00:30:51 email address, and that can help with sort of the tour dashboard that you're doing too. So just know how many people are coming in for a tour. One thing that we find, and this is again, sometimes it's helpful when your manager leaves and you haven't replaced them and you sort of play the role for a couple of weeks is I had a couple of tours one week not show up.

00:31:10 And I was like, who are these rude people? I would never not show up for a tour. So I called them and they were super nice. And they either like just forgot or whatever, but the forgetting, I was like, well, we can help control that. Right? So we need to be sending a calendar invite to our tours.

00:31:28 If your booking system doesn't already do that. So your tour system might send one to them or let them, you know, add it to their Google calendar. That they're Eichler whatever, when they booked that tour. But if it doesn't then have your manager manually send one so that you can reduce no shows. And that was something I realized we need to add to our system because we have,

00:31:49 our book of tour is done through, it's not Calendly, but it's similar to that. I'd have to look, but it, I don't think it puts an invite on their calendar. Otherwise I don't think we would've gotten those no shows. So I need to look into that on, on our side. But again, it's good to be tracking these things cause then you sort of can figure out where are the holes?

00:32:06 Why are people no showing? And how can we help fix that? But if you aren't tracking the number of tour, no shows and tours completed, then you know, you don't know that percent of tours converted. I think this is probably an obvious one for most people, but make sure, you know, when you get someone in the door for an official tour,

00:32:23 you know, how many of those people are converting things you can do to impact this? No, some people go overboard with this. Like my experience with WeWork is if you tour, we work, then they will send you an email until you tell them to stop sending emails and you, them, I went to another space that may not be your Mo you may want to have a simple follow up tour sequence.

00:32:47 It's fairly, you know, sort of gentle, but making sure to re you know, we send pricing because a lot of people come in and they're like writing stuff in their phones and you know, or writing stuff on the back of a notebook. And it seems like they haven't looked at pricing on websites. Sometimes they just have like no idea. And so again,

00:33:02 I think sometimes people are not doing a lot of research. They're sort of doing a geographic search and then they're going to get the details when they come in. So either have a handout with that stuff in it. But I think it's a nice reason to get to into their inbox. So we send those details as a followup. And then we have a couple of emails that we sort of send gently when we don't hear back from people just to kind of stay on their radar screen through their search.

00:33:25 And, you know, we highlight members. We'll put, typically we'll put them on our email list as well. What else to track? If you're paying incentives to staff for tours converted, then you want to track that. What does that look like? How much are you paying? This will play into customer acquisition costs because if it costs you, you know,

00:33:44 a bonus for your staff to get a customer, then you want to factor that into that calculation budget spent on digital marketing conversion channel. So conversion by channel can be tricky. I mean, if you, so when you're talking about digital marketing, so you got to track budget spent on marketing in general, and then digital marketing, other marketing, social media,

00:34:10 and you want to track, you want to try to track conversions by those channels, which is not super easy to do, but there are things you can do. If you are promoting a phone number on your digital marketing, you can get a number that is trackable. So it's unique to that source so that, you know, okay, somebody saw a Google ad and they're,

00:34:30 that's where they're calling from. Cause that number is unique. You can set up landing pages in your website that are unique to your promotional sources. So if you're running ads on Facebook, you can direct all those people to a specific landing page. And you can tell how much traffic you're getting from your Facebook ads. And then you can set up again,

00:34:49 this might be a little tricky to track through the entire process. You can track a conversion to booking a tour. So, and then it may just be hard to tell, like when someone joins, where did they come from and how did that convert? But if you're trying to track these things, at least you're going to get a sense of, you know,

00:35:09 how much traffic is coming into your funnel. And then if all the other pieces of your funnel are kind of really buttoned up, then you should get a sense for is digital marketing in general, working for me. And am I getting new members from these sources? And you know, do we want to continue this spend revenue from brokers? So if you work with a broker to fill in,

00:35:30 this is more likely if you have a lot of offices to fill. So we work has a really substantial broker program. Then you want to be tracking that too, that you understand how much are you spending to get folks into your offices and how much are you paying in commission fees, social media, this one I keep talking about too, because I think we need to be careful these days with how much Facebook is throttling business,

00:35:54 page exposure. So you are probably posting and getting a small percentage of reach of your overall fan base. So you want to be careful about how much time your team is spending on social media. If you are using social media, you want to be really strategic with it and make sure you are producing content that drives people to your website, because this is how you're going to get people into your funnel.

00:36:22 Certainly, you know, a sense of wanting to build a brand and wanting people to identify with that and feel like they're a part of something and certainly for members to sort of affiliate. And when they see you in their feed, you know, they have that warm, fuzzy, like I belong there. I feel that way, like CrossFit for me is an example of that.

00:36:42 I love seeing my CrossFit box, post photos of members and it's the CrossFit open. So they've been making these awesome videos of our Friday night events, where we all do the open workouts together. And that's the feeling that, you know, I think we want our coworking space members to have is I belong there. Those are my people. It's a real stickiness factor.

00:37:03 So there are reasons besides member acquisition to be doing social media. But I think in the scheme of your time spend, you want to be careful how much you're spending on the free version of that. Okay. You want to be tracking leads from other lead gen partners, such as you know, for virtual mail, for example, sphere mail, cloud VO,

00:37:24 DaVinci, virtual office, anytime mailbox box, et cetera, so that you can kind of get a sense of leads that you're generating yourself and what your partners are bringing to the table. Leads entered directly into the system by a sales person. So if you have a sales person on staff, that's directly responsible for lead gen, then you want to, you know,

00:37:45 sort of have a system in place to track that and understand how they're impacting the marketing funnel leads put into the system by local networking. I kind of put this one in, because I think a lot of people put a lot of focus on local networking, which I think can work. But the scale is going to be smaller when you go to a networking event,

00:38:07 I think you are probably lucky if you come home, having had a couple of conversations with people who are really interested in what you're doing and think at some point, you know, they might be a member it's a couple at a time versus, you know, your, our Google, my business listing gets 20,000 hits a month. You know, you can not network your way into 20,000 people a month.

00:38:32 So 20,000 people are looking at that. Google my business listing, you know, you, in terms of prioritizing, you want to be spending time on that before you're spending time at networking events, if there's work to do on that. So I think it's important to help you evaluate what am I spending my time on? And is this really driving my sales funnel?

00:38:54 There may be other reasons you're doing it leadership within the community sort of brand building. But again, when you have to make decisions about time and time is also money, and whether it's you or your community manager, there is a value on every hour you spend. I think the tracker can help you realize, okay, these things are moving the needle and these things are not and know where to focus your time.

00:39:17 Things like marketing. So kind of back to our we're still in the member acquisition bucket here, email marketing, open rate. Like again, you know, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly how much business are you getting from your email newsletter and this, I mean, not the one you send to members, but that you send to people who are interested in knowing more about your space.

00:39:37 And these may be people that have toured people that have been to the space for an event. Anybody always be building your email list. 20% is kind of a good industry baseline for open rate. If it's much lower than that, then you may be producing content that people are not super interested in. And this is something you have to test. You may want to produce content that's super local.

00:39:59 And Kat Johnson is super awesome in our industry for helping people think about what content to produce. This is a little bit of a side note, but Kat johnson.co, and you can go to her coworking specific information, but she has like a bajillion ideas about content. You can create the relevant for a coworking space. So look at those ideas for newsletter content,

00:40:22 social media, content, blog, posts, content, that kind of thing. But if you have a really open rate, that's lower than 20%, you might want to be looking at what you're producing. Is it relevant to your audience? Because your email list is where you can tell people, you know, you can have a waiting list for your offices,

00:40:38 but if you have an office open a dedicated desk open, you're running a coworking special, you want to provide valuable content that helps them open it. But it's like your way to get to people that you know, are interested with open seats or specials that you're running or events or things like that, member retention. So I think a lot of people,

00:40:56 it takes a while before they think about tracking these things or somebody like the global workspace association sends a survey and you think I don't have any of this data. Why are you're, you're asking these things, which are good, but I don't track this. So start tracking it that we, when we send you that survey, it's easy to get to.

00:41:12 You want to know member retention by, you know, over time and across product type. So an example would be on average, how long do my dedicated desk members stay? How long do my coworking spot or hot desk or whatever you're calling that membership type. How long do they stay? And if you have breakdowns across coworking, full-time 10 day, five day w you know,

00:41:38 day passers, some sort of other light membership, you want to be tracking the tenure of them offices. So you want to know kind of what your lifetime value is across each product type and then lifetime value of a member. How many months on average did the member stay? And also by product type, that's an important topic to me. And I'm working with my GWA hat on,

00:42:01 we're working with some folks to do a workshop on that topic. So that is to come in 2018 and I'm looking forward to that. Cause I think that'll be really useful revenues. So you want to track obviously overall revenue per member per month and per year revenue by product type per month and per year. Then this is super important because you want to be getting a sense of what membership types are best suited to your market.

00:42:28 You want to make sure you're breaking your revenue out on your P and L to make this easier to track. So if you have a bookkeeper and you're either sending them, they either are getting a feed through QuickBooks from your space management system, or you're sending them a report at the end of the month, that kind of breaks out credit card fees, revenue.

00:42:48 We break out our revenue by each product type so that we can look at that every month and you know, across years, even to understand how that moves and how that's impacting our business. So you may have to ask your bookkeeper to break out that detail cause they just like to dump revenue into a big bucket unless you ask. So you want them to break it out by membership types,

00:43:10 offices, coworking day passes, virtual mail event revenue. You want to know like, what are those things doing for your business? Where is the opportunity? If those numbers don't look like you thought they would look, or what surprises are there, or if you're going to do another space, you know, what would you tweak in order to optimize your revenue mix?

00:43:32 Or if you're going to change something in your current space, you know, do you need more coworking space or Jean more office space, or do you need more meeting room space? Like if you're not tracking by product type, you will have no idea sort of how to tweak at that level. Another thing is, is really a more traditional real estate KPI,

00:43:52 but I think it's interesting to at least know it and consider it. We just had a discussion about this in the Facebook group. I can't remember his name, but there's a guy from Des Moines that brought this up people coming in and asking about price per square foot. And this is not really related, but I'm saying you might want to track a revenue and profit per square foot.

00:44:12 Especially if you have multiple locations, it can help you just compare. And again, I know it's sort of a more traditional real estate metric, but you know, companies like we work and mindspace and folks that are going after kind of density to make their model really hum. They will be looking at these metrics and looking at them across locations. So you may,

00:44:33 from a values standpoint, not want to be thinking about how much money you're making per square foot, especially because we want to think about the overall experience that we're designing. And you do not want to look at a lounge space and think, no one's sitting there, you know, for eight hours a day, it's not full. You know, we're not making enough revenue on it,

00:44:52 but in our industry, the revenue, prescription's a little bit tricky because part of what we're selling is this perception of a variety of types of spaces that people have access to break rooms and lounge spaces and podcast rooms and all these things that may not be used at a hundred percent of the time during the day. So be careful not to take this sort of the wrong way in your business,

00:45:12 remember what we're trying to do. And I think everybody listening probably is in that mindset, but do you want to track this metric? Because I just think when you're looking at it over time and it can help you. So the global workspace association asks for this metric when we do our survey and our survey will run again next year. Not this year,

00:45:31 we ask that and just a good benchmark, right? You want to know where do you fit sort of across what other people are doing in the space and then costs you want to track costs coffee. One of my favorite things to drag amenities like, you know, are you offering cold brews, sparkling water, sort of, what do those costs look like?

00:45:51 And are they sort of getting out of hand or are they sort of aligned with what you've budgeted for member event costs? You know, those again, it's it's, this is partly for you to know. And also these really facilitate discussions with your community managers. If you have a community manager that tends to go overboard, you want to make sure you've got a budgeted amount for them to spend and that that's getting tracked digital marketing,

00:46:12 spend trap staff time on digital marketing. If it's social media, that's free again. You want to make sure you don't have a community manager. That's spending 20 hours a week on social media. That's not going to get it. Move the needle for you. Digital marketing, spend any other marketing, spend digital metrics, mobile versus phone on your website,

00:46:32 traffic sources on your website. There are a lot of things we could get to in terms of Google analytics, but I would say for sure, you should be looking at your Google analytics and your overall website traffic, and this could get into a longer sort of sales funnel conversation. But I think I've kind of given you a lot to think about on this one.

00:46:49 So we're going to end that here, we may do another one on sort of what to look at when you're pulling up your Google analytics every month. But so I'm going to wrap up here. I'm going to put this, the link to this document in the show notes and I'll put it in the Facebook group. I know it's a lot when you can't see it to just be listening to it.

00:47:06 So it might help to sort of eyeball it. It's not actually as long as it probably sounds for me kind of talking and talking, but hopefully this was helpful. Thank you again to Michael Evarts for throwing this out there and starting the conversation on this. And I hope you all have a great week and I look forward to connecting next week. Thanks for joining us on this episode of everything.

00:47:29 Be sure to click the subscribe button so you can stay up to date on the latest trends and how tos 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.

Jamie RussoComment