How to Support a Culture of Sales with Chat

Do you want to increase occupancy and rate in your executive suite? Then your team should implement support systems such as online chat to enable the sales process. Oh, but don’t forget to develop your culture of sales first.

FutureOffices has been thinking a lot about how executive suite providers can sell more office space and has written about selling the executive suite in a previous post. Many providers in the industry don’t support a culture of sales like they should or could. This entry is not, however, devoted to how companies can instill sales as a culture. It’s about how an executive suite sales culture can be supported with a very good online tool: chat.

In many industries, the key is getting the best sales people in front of the prospect. Often this takes several steps for the person to want to talk to a salesperson. Somewhere between 60-80% of serviced office prospects go online during their search for office space, so it is likely they will visit an operator’s website.

There are a number of things an operator can do, such as persistent contact forms (upper left or upper right on every page), persistent phone numbers, great office / location descriptions. Some (but not enough) office providers do all these things; and very few utilize one of the highest converting tools in the arsenal: online chat.

Many executives find every excuse in the book not to leverage this tool. From, “I can’t afford to staff it” to “I can’t control what the message is” (in my opinion this is the lamest, most ridiculous response) to “My customers will be disappointed if no one is there to answer their questions”. Yes, I’ve heard all these, and many more, both inside the industry and in other industries.

Sad thing is that nearly every company I’ve spoken with who has implemented online chat has been ecstatic about the results. Conversion rates climb and the systems are so advanced they have few complaints.

For smaller centers (and depending on website traffic), no additional staff needs to be hired. Usually the 2 or 3 center employees can “tag team” the system to answer questions, and when they are away, it is simply “turned off” by changing status within the system. This status is reflected on the website to ensure no disappointed would-be chatters.

A couple of the companies who are using chat as a way to increase website conversions are Avanta and Davinci Virtual. Ha! It’s no surprise that these two companies hooked up for a virtual office marketing agreement in the UK. You can read about this of this office space news website.

Please, if you’re an operator, go ahead and try out chat. Oh, but first, please develop a culture of executive suite sales first.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 9:11 am and is filed under Future Offices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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