Many brokers have expressed that, especially in our current state of affairs, it’s difficult to get responses from cold calls/emails and sales pipelines have all but dried up. This is Allie, Head of Product at BeyondHQ, and in this post, I’m going to show you how to use our Location Analytics web app to pique the interest of prospects and get your foot in the door.
Stage Setting
In the coming months, although no one knows for sure, it’s more likely than not that most companies will be looking to move/expand to lower-cost and less dense markets. This will allow them to cut operating costs on both the talent and real estate fronts, as well as ensure a safer work environment for their employees. A key component of these moves is answering the question of “where?” In which market should your prospect open their next office? Answering that question with our app, what would usually take months to determine now only takes minutes. By the way, for some great insight into the future of workplace, check out our COO, Jeff’s post.
Example Market Analysis
For the example analysis, I’ll use the well-known tech company, Dropbox, and run you through the 4-step report creation process.
- Project Creation is the first step, which entails filling in some background on the prospect:
From a quick Google search, you can find some background on Dropbox. One of our favorite sources for this info is Craft. Inputting this info shows the prospect you did your homework!
2. Client Needs involves gathering the hiring and real estate needs of your prospect. You can find hiring info on the website of most companies.
No surprise here that Dropbox is looking for mostly engineers, but also a couple of marketing folks.
Here I’ve inputted 20 Software Engineers, 20 Web Developers and 10 Marketing Analysts/Specialists into our application. No need for exact occupation title matches as skillsets are transferable and at this point, we’re just trying to get a relative sense of talent concentration and cost across markets. Note that the company profile you filled out in Project Creation shows beautifully on this screen. For real estate needs, I put 10,000 sqft to accommodate the 50 employees (20+20+10=50 employees). This is 200 sqft/employee which may seem like a bit high, but we believe that more space per employee for more personal space will become the norm in the coming months, again emphasizing that lower cost markets will be crucial for companies.
3. Market Shortlist creation gets you down to a list of top markets for your prospect. Given that you now have a sense of the company profile and the hiring needs of your prospect, you can use the filters on the left of the page to choose the specific criteria that you believe the prospect will prioritize for deciding on the new market. This will enable you to give your prospect a completely customized market shortlist. You can see the results of your filter selections in real-time, making this a fun and easy exercise :)
I’ve turned up the “Technology” and “HQ & Operations” to 1.1 on talent concentration filters (national average is 1) because the roles Dropbox is hiring for fall into these buckets. Then, I turned Wage Savings vs SF up to 35%, assuming they are looking for a lower cost location to hire talent compared to their current locations (SF is the most expensive market). Finally, I turned on the direct flight filters to SF and NYC because Dropbox has offices in these locations.
For comparison against current locations of Dropbox offices, it’s as simple as searching for and pinning these locations, and now you are left with 14 markets. On to Comparison!
4. Voila! The Comparison page now shows talent and real estate data, as well as market comparison analyses (Talent and Real Estate make up 80% of most companies’ operating costs!). Here are a few of our favorites, just two of the many interactive comparison charts/graphs that we offer:
The Talent Availability graph shows you the number of people who have your selected occupations across all 14 markets in your shortlist. All of our graphs are completely interactive, so make sure you play around with them :)
The Average Costs For Each Market table shows, well you guessed it, the average wages of the occupations you selected, as well as a range of real estate rents across each market, to reflect the different sub-markets within that location. Given the volatility and constant change of rent figures, these numbers are editable by you to reflect any specific data you might have for a particular sub-market… after all, you’re the expert on this! Any changes you make will update all graphs in realtime.
And don’t forget that at any point you can go back to the Client Needs or Market Shortlist pages to add/change or make any edits whatsoever and these changes will be automatically reflected in the Comparison page.
That’s it folks! We built a modern and powerful location analytics application so that you can blow your prospects away. Add value to your future client before you even contact them for the first time.
Premium Metrics
If you’re already engaged with a prospect or client who needs a deeper dive into Market comparisons, we provide metrics like tax incentives, business scores, cost of living, diversity index, and many more in our expert-led consultative application. Email allie@beyondhq.co for more info on this or if you have any questions/comments from this post! We release new features every 2 weeks, so if you have any requests, let me know and you just might see it in a couple weeks :)
