Recently we have been talking with a number of iGuide Pro’s about growing their business.
How do I grow?
Do I hire an administrator, sales person, photographer?
How do I finance growth?
There is no question that the demand for iGuide is accelerating in North America and as Planitar continues to push for integrations and tools to make iGuide tools more accessible to the end user, our demand will continue to grow.
Brian Charlton in Calgary has experienced rapid growth in demand for iGuide and has been successful keeping up with this demand.
Do you have a plan for your business? A plan for growing it?
Do you want a plan?
Do you want help with planning?
As we all go through this growth, do we want to work together on plans to grow?
We want to help, so tell how best to help and work together to take advantage of this great opportunity that has been presented to us.
Thanks for bringing this forward Kevin. I’m sure this is all in the back of many our minds. Perhaps one suggestion would be to post case studies of some successful iGuide businesses to see what strategies they used to expand or handle the extra demand?
Thanks,
Paul.
Hi Paul,
There are a number of teams who have seen some incredible growth in their markets and successfully navigated adding people to their team.
I encourage and ask people to share their strategies for growth and success.
We have been growing like crazy. It’s all been via organic growth and the things I have been doing on FB.
We hired our first employee last year. Sadly, it didn’t end well with that person and I replaced him. Been bringing the new guy along a little slower but have been trying to find another person or two. It’s been difficult as nobody around here wants to work, they just want to make a bunch of money. But I digress…
I spent a good amount of money on a marketing evaluation. Based on that I am working to implement a few things. Once I get these all worked out–and I can hire at least one other person–I will be doing some traditional/social media marketing. Right now, I physically, can’t handle any more business.
Now, all of this is NOT iGuide business but that has been increasing as I’m able to talk about it more. Once I have enough people, I can go out and present to more people to get the word out. I also am working on some iGuide for Business work. May be partnering with someone on this. We will see.
I see a TON of growth in my area–Jacksonville, FL–for iGuide work (both RE and business). I plan to take advantage of it more than I already have.
One thing I’d like to see from Planitar is a regular Web Training for the users. I’ve had a few people use the iGuide but stopped using it because they don’t know what to do with everything. I don’t have the time to run around and train people and, honestly, I’m not good enough with that side myself. I think a regular (monthly? bi-weekly?) training session we can invite our customers to attend would both help them utilize the iGuide more effectively (and encourage them to order more) and make Planitar and us look good.
Anyway, things are moving along nicely at the moment. Just wish I could go out and grab more business. I’ve lost deals because I couldn’t get out soon enough.
Hi Rick,
We have created a number of user videos that are on our YouTube account, website and facebook page.
We encourage users to watch them and we encourage you to include them on your online media vehicles too.
These are intended to cut down on disruptive calls.
We also have our ‘New Client Information Kit’ that we send out to all new clients.
This is great, but where is this found for us to forward to new clients? I looked on the GoiGuide website but didn’t find it there. Are you sending this to all new clients we create on a new banner?
Phil, when we ran our own team we would send it out to everyone we got business cards from at shows and events.
Today, we still send out to contacts from trade shows but instead of our contact details, we direct to the order page.
We have the powerpoint design file that you can have to customize for yourself.
Send us an email request and we will share it with you.
Would people be interested in a regular webinar to discuss iGuide Business?
Michael and I discussed a 4 part series to walk people through the process we took to open the markets we opened.
We could see if Chris would be interested in hosting a regular tech talk webinar where people could tune in and ask questions about the system and efficiencies.
Michael or I could host a sales & marketing webinar to discuss opportunities and challenges we face in our markets?
I could host one or more on measurement and square footage as this is a distinct part of our business.
Let us know. If there is interest, we can make these happen.
I had no idea any of this is available, thanks. However, it doesn’t replace what I’m talking about. We can send this stuff out but, from experience, they won’t look at them or, if they do, they’ll forget what they saw and either ask us or, worse, just stop using the iGuide. If there were a regular training session where they could go to in order to learn what they can do, new updates (etc.) and ask questions, I think we’d see a much higher retention rate and higher number of orders.
I’m not saying it has to be every week, like maybe once a month would suffice I believe.
It’s just a much more warm and fuzzy feeling for us to tell our customers there’s regular training than it is for us to just send them an email with a bunch of info/videos/etc.
I’d be interested in this. My main problem is, right now, I have literally no time. Been trying to hire people to help out but it’s not been working out so well…
Also, with what you posted, there is nothing which shows our customers what they can/should do in order to use the iGuide to market a property once on the market. Nothing about how to create banners, etc. This is the critical info we need to get out to our customers. Heck, I don’t even really know all of these things.
Rick, I would like more explanation on the type of webinar you are thinking for clients?
Would it be for your clients or for you to learn so you can share with your clients.
Please explain what we can do.
Thanks, Kevin
For our clients so they know how to better leverage the iGuide for their listings. Everything from creating a login, creating/managing banners to understanding the statistics they get in emails each week.
These are things we can’t possibly teach as well as people on your side can do. As I said, I’m not even 100% on how to do all of this stuff myself.
Rick, what would be best to solve this - a webinar or some videos?
Perhaps a webinar would help highlight questions that could be answered through videos in the future.
Planitar already has a huge database of client email addresses (all those banners!). You could leverage these contacts and send out short iGuide tech tips or iGuide business tricks on a regular basis.
This would be helpful but a regular Webinar would look even better. Again, people get emails like this from so many places and, most of the time, the emails get ignored. They then come to us to ask questions. More importantly, many of them will just not use the iGuide because they don’t always see the value once they use them because they get the iGuide and they thing, “Now what?”
The regular webinars would remove this issue for many of them because they’d have the opportunity to attend these webinars to find out what comes next. Yes, there will still be people who don’t attend them but it will get more people using iGuides once they actually order one.
I’ve got 4 or 5 customers (at least) who have ordered them in the past but no longer order them because they don’t see the value after having them. Two of them are large builders–DR Horton being one of them.
