A big part of my work with clients is lead generation and lead management, so I stay current on lead-source channels as they change and new ones launch. My team is setting up CRMs for operators right now and rebuilding how their teams answer a lead and move it through a pipeline, and the same problem comes up every time. Operators and community managers struggle to build a mental map of where leads come from, sort them into channels, and build a strategy for each channel.
In most coworking spaces, the person answering those leads is also building community, running hospitality, taking care of existing members, making coffee, giving tours (and more!), so an hour spent on one channel is an hour not spent on another.
Setting aside paid ads and social media, which are their own subject, a lead reaches you through one of three primary channels:
- Organic: Your own website and your Google Business Profile
- Commercial real estate brokers and tenant reps: Enterprise clients referred to you
- Marketplaces and lead gen platforms: Deskpass, LiquidSpace, Gable, Preferred Office Network, Peerspace, and dozens more
Which one produces the most for you depends on your market and your inventory. The third is the one that confuses people. Let’s walk through each.
Organic: your website and your Google Business Profile
The website is the part most operators are already working on: search engine optimization, content, and keywords.
The Google Business Profile does not tend to get the same support as the website, and it should. When someone searches for coworking in a city, your profile often appears before regular search results because you are a local business, and map results may show it. What a searcher sees there is your Google Business Profile, not your home page. Open Google Maps on a phone, type “coworking near me,” and those are the same listings.
Pull the metrics on your profile, put them next to your website analytics, and I would bet a lot of you find the profile bringing in many times the number of leads that your website generates.
Then look at the profile itself, because a lot of them have no products listed and whole sections never filled in. It has to stay accurate and complete, and it needs new content every week, so if nobody on your team owns that job, give it to somebody this week.
Commercial real estate brokers and tenant reps
This category may not apply to you at all. Brokers and tenant reps generally bring enterprise requirements to operators who can house them. These are coworking spaces with a significant inventory of private offices, with enough of them turning over that one is open when a broker calls; or a relationship with the landlord good enough to build space for a bigger requirement. If you run a smaller local space, you are likely not working with brokers.
Kane Willmott, CEO of IQ Offices, runs a broker program that works. Most of his leads come from brokers rather than from his paid ads, and he puts real resources behind that program. His spaces are downtown in major markets, and his product is a good fit for the enterprise client a broker is trying to place.
Some brokers take one requirement and push it to every coworking space on their platform in that market, which turns it into a race, and the operator who answers first often gets it. If your team does not have the systems or the people to answer that fast, it will not be you.
Other times, speed was never the issue, and the requirement simply fit somebody else’s inventory better. These platforms also send out a fair number of leads that never go anywhere.
Marketplaces and lead gen platforms
You will hear these called marketplaces, lead gen platforms, sometimes online brokers, which are a different thing from the tenant reps above. They are third-party platforms that match coworking inventory with demand, and most of them are digital marketers by trade.
A company with people in a hundred markets is not going to contract with a hundred operators, and it does not want its employees putting meeting rooms on a personal card and filing an expense report afterward, because it does not want the logistics or the paperwork. What it wants is one master service agreement and a platform where its people book meeting rooms, day passes, and offices. Regus, WeWork, and Industrious can sign that agreement directly, and most independent operators reach that demand by being listed on one of these platforms.
Accessing enterprise demand is the main reason to list, because the local remote worker who wants your meeting room often has no authority to book it. That person books through whatever platform the employer uses, and if you are not on it, you cannot have the booking.
Say LiquidSpace is serving a company like TriNet or Allstate. The person choosing the room logs into their LiquidSpace account, or into whatever other platform their employer has set up, and picks from what is available in the location they need.
Which platform matches which inventory
Dozens of lead-gen platforms and marketplaces exist, and new ones arrive constantly, because builders can see industry growth and the enterprise demand they could pull together in one place.
Enterprise does not have to mean the Fortune 500, either. Plenty of that demand is smaller companies that want control over what they spend on flexible office space.
| If your inventory is | The platforms that tend to match it |
| Day passes and hot desks | Deskpass |
| Meeting rooms and offices | LiquidSpace, Gable |
| Offices you would license to an enterprise employer | Upsuite, Desana, LiquidSpace, Gable, Preferred Office Network |
| Event space and meeting room rentals | Peerspace, and Giggster in some markets |
LiquidSpace, Gable, and Preferred Office Network all pull enterprise demand together in one place, though each of them would point out how it differs from the other two. Deskpass works on a per-use model that gives a member access to a network of spaces in a local area rather than one, and it has enterprise clients as well as individual users. LiquidSpace also serves individuals directly, where someone can book a meeting room for an hour or buy an office online.
If you have one office coming open a month, the platforms built around office placement are probably not worth your team’s attention. If you have meeting rooms in a range of sizes, and particularly rooms that seat twenty or more, you want to be on the platforms matching on-demand bookings.
There are a lot of people out there booking trainings and offsites, and a platform like LiquidSpace that matches you with that demand can get you found faster than listing the rooms on your own website.
Peerspace is a significant marketplace for event and meeting bookings, and it is strongest for the events somebody wants held anywhere other than a hotel meeting room with bad lighting, bad furniture and a catering requirement attached. In most markets you can find every type of meeting space on it.
Its search engine optimization is strong, and because it is a marketplace with a lot of traffic, Google treats it as an authority, so on an event space search in your market it will often rank above you. Check that Peerspace is active in your market and list with it.
Giggster is the other name that comes up for event bookings, and how much either of them produces depends a lot on the market.
How a new listing gets its first bookings
An Allstate employee logging in through their employer’s account is picking from a limited set of spaces their company has access to, so you can be getting enterprise bookings that way and never see them on the public site.
Somebody who comes in through the public site is seeing something closer to Airbnb, where the highly rated and most booked spaces come up first. Both Peerspace and LiquidSpace rank you on bookings and reviews. A new listing has neither, so it does not rank, and if it does not rank nobody books it.
Chicken and egg.
You may have been on a platform for years and never seen a lead. I have heard an operator say they had been on LiquidSpace for eight years and never got one, and that is possible. It is either a problem with your market or a problem with your listing.
I visited a space recently that had a good answer to the ranking problem. They have a very specific niche, they decided LiquidSpace was an important lead source for their market, and rather than wait, they are routing all of their own meeting room bookings through LiquidSpace right now, so their booking count goes up and they have a reason to ask each of those customers for a review.
We have a partner with a terrific event space and a long history of good bookings who still cannot get onto the first page of Peerspace results, and we may do the same for her. Get in touch with the customer service people at these platforms. They want their partners to do well, and if you are an engaged partner they will sit down with you and go through what would improve your ranking.
Peerspace is the exception, at least for me, because I have not been able to get anyone there on the phone, which does not change the advice, since the leads are real.
Where Flexspace.ai fits, and why it is not a marketplace
Operators and community managers mix up Flexspace.ai with a marketplace, and with their own website. It is not a lead gen platform, and it is not a marketplace. It is an AI-powered e-commerce and booking engine that you link to from your own site, and its job is to convert more of the visitors you are already getting. Think of it the way you think of Shopify, a platform purpose-built to convert people who are already on your site.
It runs dynamic pricing, promotions, retargeting, abandoned cart recovery, and upsell flows, aimed at the products people do not think twice about buying online: meeting rooms, training rooms, day offices, mail services. Offices will probably get listed on it eventually, but for now it is built for on-demand inventory.
The typical independent operator is not running dynamic pricing or abandoned cart recovery on their own website, and many multi-site operators are not either. A lot of the coworking space management platforms do not have this technology yet. OfficeRnD has released its Growth Hub, which has many of the same features and is also built to convert the traffic already on your website. Flexspace.ai is worth considering, as long as you are clear on what it is: not a source of leads, but a tool for converting the ones you already have.
Track the lead source, then decide which listings to drop
The 80/20 principle applies here, and you can only use it if you know where your leads came from. If you are on a CRM, you are probably used to this. If you are on a spreadsheet, put in a column for lead source and fill it in every time, so you can count what each source produced and how many of those became members.
Without that column, a community manager still develops a sense of where leads come from, but that sense is built on the leads they happen to remember, which isn’t the same as counting them. You might feel sure a particular platform never sends you anything, or that its leads never convert, and you might be right, or you might just be short on data.
You are going to have to take some platforms off the list, because there are dozens of them, so make that decision from the count. What you are looking for is the two or three that perform in your market, and those are different for everyone.
Platforms also perform differently market by market, Peerspace included, though Peerspace is far more national than it used to be. Somebody in a Facebook group getting a pile of leads from Preferred Office Network is telling you what works for them, and you need your own numbers.
So run the report every quarter: where the leads came from, and which of those sources converted. When a platform turns up quarter after quarter with no leads, or with leads that never become members, that is your answer on whether to keep updating the listing.
Syncaroo, for updating every listing from one place
Syncaroo lets you update your inventory in one place and push it out to any lead gen partner integrated with it. The alternative is someone going in once a week to update each listing by hand, and the risk is that it doesn’t happen, so the inventory a buyer sees on those platforms is no longer the inventory you have.
There is a monthly fee, so weigh it against those hours. It is worth looking at once your own numbers show that marketplaces are a real part of your funnel and you are on more than three of them.
Where to start
Start by putting your Google Business Profile metrics next to your website analytics to see which one is actually sending you more. If the profile wins, and it often does, it needs somebody on the team posting to it every week.
For the marketplaces, the ones named here are the first stop: Deskpass, LiquidSpace, Gable, Peerspace, and Preferred Office Network, plus Upsuite and Desana if offices are what you have. They have been around the longest, they have the most clients, and they are spending money on ads or running sales teams to bring users onto their platforms — users who need a space like yours.
You do not want to be on every platform that exists, and you do not need to join each new one that appears, so match them against the inventory you actually have and put the lead source column in this week. A quarter from now, it will tell you which of these listings your team should keep updating, and which ones to let go.
