Office Space Advice
Q & A: Becky Simi Discusses Virtual Office Marketing
Published August 26th, 2010 by Jennifer LeClaire
Virtual offices are hot, hot and double hot. Yet many serviced office operators remain focused on renting full-time office space—partly because they don’t understand the benefits of putting an emphasis on virtual offices.
Becky Simi, managing partner and director of Sales at Pacific Business Centers, is tackling that challenge at her company. She’s taken a leadership role in developing and implementing best sales practices, while directly overseeing four centers in the San Francisco Peninsula.
With more than 10 years experience in customer service and sales in the Office Business Centers industry, Simi has plenty of wisdom relating to marketing virtual offices. aBetterOffice.com caught up with Simi to get her take on virtual office marketing and more.
What are the most effective ways to market virtual offices?
We have found that education is a big part of it. Often, people look for a standard office and are not aware about the virtual office product.
What’s the best way to market a virtual office to someone who has already contacted us? We try to systematically bring it up to every prospect that makes contact with us, whether they are looking for a virtual office or not. Most of the time, it’s an education process. Many people do not know what a virtual office is and therefore what the benefits may be. We highlight the cost benefit which often ends up being their number one priority.
Investing $300 a month on a virtual office space is more attractive than spending $1,000 plus for a full-time space. There are also image-related benefits that prospects find intriguing. Having access to a receptionist/administrative personnel and use of a boardroom is what the savvy worker is looking for anyway.
How can you tell which of your efforts are working and which ones aren’t?
Some of our centers go out of their way to systematically push virtual offices over full-time office space. The results over the years have been dramatic. For example, our Cupertino and Oakland locations have about 200 virtual offices each. It has been a long-term effort. Other centers that did not have the same bias, perhaps because of lack of adequate conference rooms or less trained managers, have a considerably lower volume. So, one of the clear critical success factors is training.
A good CRM system is important in that respect. In fact, what is really interesting is to see that the highly-trained managers experienced a higher conversion rate for prospects into a virtual office plan.
How do you differentiate yourself from other virtual office providers in your messaging?
Technology. Our ShoreTel VoIP telephony platform, with ability to check voicemail as e-mail attachments, Find Me/Follow Me and a host of other features, has really helped us a great deal versus our competition. We realize that with the OBC industry increasingly embracing the same ShoreTel platform, that differentiation factor will go away. We have been working hard on the next differentiator, which I think will create another milestone for our industry. But is too early for me to reveal.
What are the biggest challenges of marketing virtual offices?
The misperception of center managers that selling a full-time office is better than a virtual office. Yes, there is a short-term revenue benefit, but there is a limited capacity of full-time office space versus quasi-unlimited capacity for virtual offices. That full-time space will still be there to sell so why not promote your unlimited resource?
How do you overcome those challenges?
Training!
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Elizabeth Sanchez August 27th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Nice Q&A. It seems like so much of everything comes down to education and training. I thought the insight about how serviced office space managers tend to focus on renting physical office space rather than virtual office space was valuable. Business centers are leaving too much money on the table.