Hi Oren. We've had a lot of internal discussion about tours recently. Our main issue isn't conversions per se, but a) the time it takes to do tours on spec/the fact that it takes resource away from the front desk, and b) members (especially the ones in the dedicated glass fronted rooms) feel a bit like they are fish in an aquarium . Also we do get a lot of random people who have no real interest in joining (because we're right in the centre). We don't do any hard sell, but we do mention our 2 trial days, with no commitment at all, and many people take us up on this. We then stick to our no commitment promise (we do follow up, but not to ask them to join or even ask if they are thinking about it)
So overall we're cool to do tours, but we're aware that they can be a bit inefficient, and we want people to want to join afterwards, not to pressure them. This is what we've thrown into our discussion, and it looks like our solution is to do tours once a week at 2.45pm, in groups.
This means the following will happen;
- we think we'll eliminate the non serious/curious and random people who wander in
- our members only have to have one group of people a week walking around on a tour
- we can plan resource accordingly to cover the front desk so we don't have a situation where reception is empty during a tour
- we can introduce people to each other as we walk around, so during the tour these potential members are making new connections.
- the reason we're doing it at 2.45 is that we have our very popular 'Cake Wednesday' member get together at 3, so a) the place is really busy at that time of the week which looks good, and b) we can end the tour offering cake and chat to our potential new members, and get them introduced to existing members.
We're going to run this new policy in next few weeks
Cheers
Tom