Discover why integrating your sales, marketing and operations is essential for good customer experience in the coworking industry.

The Importance of Integration

It is crucial for coworking operators to integrate their sales, marketing, and operations processes. Integration ensures that all aspects of the business work together, leading to increased efficiency and improved customer experience. When all systems are aligned, coworking operators can effectively attract new leads, convert them into paying customers, and provide a smooth and hassle-free onboarding experience for buyers and their teams. 

Let's think about what happens if systems aren't integrated. Marketing don't know which campaigns are converting sales, and don't know how to keep improving their campaigns. Sales don't get as many leads and don't hit their targets. Once a sale does happen the onboarding process might be manual, but it won't always be seamless. Unfortunately manual data imports do not always lead to timely comms because of the time it can take to run the data.

How to Align Sales, Marketing, and Operations Process

To align sales, marketing, and operations processes, coworking operators should start by creating user journey maps. It's good to look at what is happening currently but think about the bigger picture and what you want to happen in your ideal world at every stsage. 

It can be as simple as getting a big piece of paper or get in front of a whiteboard. Turn all distractions off and draw out the steps people take. Starting with marketing channels, right the way down the funnel to when they become a customer. Ask questions at each stage and try to only have answers which are yes or no. Keep working through until you have the whole picture.

Once you're happy, then sanity check with colleagues in every department. Make sure they agree with the process or the whole project will be doomed. Even better get them involved with the design process in the first place.

Along the way, make sure you identify every piece of software being used in the organisation too and think about how it is currently connected.

How to Design and Build the Integration

Once you have your user journey, you can start designing how to do the integration. Here are some steps to follow:

1. Identify key data points: Start by identifying the touchpoints where sales, marketing, and operations intersect. This could include lead generation, customer onboarding, workspace management, and more. Understanding these touchpoints will help determine how to integrate the processes effectively.

2. Assess your current tech stack: Once you know what needs to happen, you then look at how to make it happen.  Connect your workflows to your techstack and see if there is duplication or gaps.

3. Look at native integrations: see if you can leverage a native integration in place already. If there is one, you can need to assess it to make sure it can transfer the data you require. If it doesn't then you need to look at potentially switching software or building bespoke integrations using APIs.

3. Provide testing, training and support: Once you've built out the integration, create a test plan and take your team through the process. This is a vital part of the training to ensure your team is equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively use the integrated systems and processes. Also provide training sessions and ongoing support to address any challenges or questions that may arise.

4. Continuously evaluate and refine: Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the integrated processes and make adjustments as needed. Get feedback from teams and customers to identify areas for improvement and implement changes accordingly.

By following these steps coworking operators can design and build a robust integration of sales, marketing, and operations, setting a strong foundation for success.

What about OfficeRND?

One of the most well known operational tools used in the coworking industry is OfficeRnd. There is also Nexudus and Yardi - we also met Zapfloor at the UK GCUC conference which looks pretty interesting. We happen to work mainly with OfficeRND and are the only HubSpot Solution Partner to have this integration in the UK. 

OfficeRND has a native integration with HubSpot, however it will only sync lead information back into HubSpot if the contact already exists in HubSpot. Why does this matter?

1. You can't onboard new members added to OfficeRND 

At the top of the funnel clients use HubSpot to handle the sales process, which means you might have the CEO or Operations Director in HubSpot as the contacts associated to the deal. Once the deal closes you need to add employees for customers buying office space. But these employees won't yet exist in the HubSpot and you can't sync them on the native integration. So any new people using your space have to be manually uploaded into HubSpot. If the data isn't live, the worse thing might happen, your new customer being offered a promotion with lower rates than they paid!

2. You can't pass custom fields

You can't update HubSpot with custom fields like the product, start dates or location. Which means you can't offer bespoke onboarding based on these data points. Like providing location specific information around amenities.  Or different information around the product. An office with its own kitchen versus a lower value coworking space for example. 

3. Renewals and cancellations

Having renewal and cancellation data in HubSpot or your CRM means you trigger bespoke renewal processes based on the product, end dates and billing status. Notifying staff by trigger workflows to start a renewal conversation or trying to reverse cancellations quickly can really impact your bottom line.  It is crucial to efficiently update customers and transition them out of the renewal phase once their membership is renewed. This is a vital aspect of maintaining efficiency and a good customer experience in your sales process. 

If you need help connecting OfficeRND to HubSpot or another CRM platform, do reach out and we can chat through the process.