How to Deliver Great Coworking Tours Every Time (In 5 Steps)

As coworking owners and operators, delivering exceptional tours is essential for attracting new clients.

The tour is often your only chance to highlight your space’s unique aspects. It’s also a powerful way to leave a lasting impression on prospects, convert more of them into customers, and ultimately — increase revenue.

However, many operators don’t maximize the power of the tour. They don’t research each prospect, don’t plan their tours, and simply don’t pay enough attention to the details that make a tour truly exceptional.

In this guide, you’ll learn 5 simple steps that will help you avoid these issues and consistently deliver great tours that turn prospects into members.

#1 Make Booking a Tour Easy

Great coworking tours start before you even know the prospect is interested in your space.

For customers, the experience begins on your site as they try to book a tour at their preferred time and date. The booking process should be as easy as possible — no lengthy forms, clunky spreadsheets, or going back and forth with your team via email.

We’ve seen many of our clients have great success by integrating a scheduling tool like Calendly in order to achieve this. For example, Common Desk uses this exact method to simplify tour scheduling. All their customers have to do is select their preferred location, date, and time.

Common Desk Coworking

Using this (or a similar) scheduling method will kick off the touring experience off on the right foot for your customers.

OfficeRnD has a tour booking solution similar to calendly called OfficeRnD Tours. This allows prospects to easily select a date and time when they want to come in.

OfficeRnD Tours Feature

You can see how this feature works in this announcement article.

#2 Do Your Homework on Each Prospect

Like all other sales pitches, the coworking tour is about your prospects’ needs. You may have favorite parts of your space that you want to show off, but if they don’t interest a potential customer, you’ll end up turning them away.

That’s why you need to research each prospect prior to the tour and understand what they’re looking for. There are a few ways to do this:

• Ask them a few questions prior to or after booking the tour. This is the most straightforward way to get the information you need. Just be careful not to go overboard with too many questions as that can induce unnecessary friction in their journey. Stick to the basics — how many people there are, what coworking products they’re interested in (private offices, meeting rooms, or shared spaces), and so on.
• Look at their website, social media profiles, and other publicly available info. This can give you a good idea of the company’s size, brand, and overall values. It’s not as reliable as getting answers directly from prospects but it’s a useful exercise to go through before each tour.
• Ask around town. If you’re dealing with an established company, they’ve probably worked at other coworking spaces (or traditional office buildings) in your area before. You can try reaching out to friends and colleagues in the industry to see if they have some useful insights.

#3 Use Email Automation to Answer Common Questions in Advance

After a potential customer signs up for a tour, you should have their email and consent to send them additional info.

This is a great opportunity to answer frequently asked questions (FAQ) and get some of the heavy lifting out of the way early. You can set up very simple drip campaigns with a tool like Mailchimp to answer questions about:

• Your space’s location and size
• The number and size of individual desks, private offices, and meeting rooms
• How to reach your space — public transportation, nearby parking spaces, and so on
• Your membership plans
• Amenities

#4 Create a Script and Map Out The Tour Route Beforehand

When it comes time to do the actual tour, you don’t want to start taking prospects on a random walk. It’s much better to have a planned script and route that can be tailored to each prospect, depending on their needs.

For example, if you’re trying to close a large company that’s mostly interested in having secluded office spaces and meeting rooms, it may be a good idea to start with these areas and spend around 2 ⁄ 3 of the tour on them. Then, you could finish the rest of the tour by showing the shared areas and amenities.

If you’re giving a tour to a group of freelancers, you may want to spend more time on the shared areas, dedicated desks, and event spaces.

Again, preparation is the key here. If you did your homework, as we suggested in step #2, you shouldn’t have an issue coming up with the best route for each potential customer.

#5 Adjust the Tour If Necessary and Clarify the Next Steps

While having a repeatable script is essential, it shouldn’t be written in stone, as clients’ needs and priorities can change at the last moment.

That’s why you should also ask plenty of questions during the tour to gauge if everything’s going according to the prospect’s expectations. After all, you don’t want to spend half of the tour in a private office with a prospective customer that’s now looking for a shared one.

Also, make sure to clearly lay out the next steps after the tour has concluded. For example, if you offer a free trial, invite the prospect to test your space for a day or two the following week.

Learn How to Start & Grow Your Coworking Space With Flex Academy

If you enjoyed this article on delivering great coworking tours, make sure to check out the rest of the resources in our Flex Academy.

Flex Academy is our collection of articles and other materials for starting, running, and growing coworking spaces. You can find resources on topics ranging from starting a coworking space to managing operations and growing revenue.

Here are a few additional resources you might be interested in:

• How to Improve Your Coworking Space Operational Efficiency With A Better Tech Stack
• How to Create a Strong Product Mix for Your Coworking Space
• How to Generate More Revenue For Your Coworking Space