How do you know an experience centre is working?

An experience centre is a strange kind of shop. It is built to sell, and it almost never does.

A customer walks in, spends forty minutes among full-size installations of your tiles, falls for a 1200×1200 slab in a warm grey, and leaves with a brochure and the address of a dealer in their area. The sale — if it happens — happens somewhere else, weeks later, through somebody else’s invoice.

Which makes it very hard to answer the question every finance team eventually asks: what is this centre actually worth? The honest answer is that footfall cannot tell you. What the handover produced can.

Why does footfall mislead?

Most centres report it anyway. Two hundred and forty visitors in March, two hundred and sixty in April. The number goes into a presentation, the line goes up, and everyone nods.

Footfall is the easiest thing to count and the least useful. It tells you people came. It says nothing about who they were, what they wanted, or whether any of them bought anything.

And the way it is usually counted makes it worse. A register at the entrance, filled in when somebody remembers. A door counter that cannot tell a customer from the cleaner, or one family of four from four separate enquiries. A figure totted up at the end of the month by whoever is least busy.

A centre with 400 visitors and ten orders is doing worse than one with 150 visitors and forty. Footfall alone cannot tell you which one you have.

What does a working centre actually produce?

If the centre’s job is to inspire and hand over, there are only four things worth knowing.

1. Who came, recorded by the person who met them

Not a count at the door — a record made by whoever attended, while the customer was still in the room. Their name, their number, what they came for, and whether they were a homeowner, an architect, a contractor or a dealer.

That last distinction matters more than it looks. A centre drawing fifty architects a month is doing something very different from one drawing fifty homeowners, and a single footfall number hides it completely.

2. What they asked for

This is the part most centres throw away, and it is the most valuable thing they produce.

Every conversation on the floor is market research you are not paying for. Which sizes are people asking about? Which finishes? Which of your products do they walk straight past, and which do they photograph?

Collected across every centre, every week, that is demand data arriving from the floor rather than from a forecast. It tells you what the market wants before your sales figures do — often months before, because a sale is the end of a decision that started with a visit.

3. Who was in the room with them

A customer rarely chooses tiles alone. The architect who brought them, the contractor who will lay the floor, the dealer who will fulfil the order — these are the people who decide which brand gets specified on the next project, and the one after that.

A centre that knows which architects keep bringing clients in knows who to invite to the next launch. One that does not is guessing.

4. Whether the handover worked

This is the one that answers the finance question.

When a customer is referred to a dealer, does the dealer call them? Do they visit? Does it convert? At what value?

Most centres hand over and never hear again. The dealer gets the customer’s number on a slip of paper, and whatever happens next happens out of sight. So the centre’s contribution to the eventual sale is invisible — which is exactly why its value is so hard to prove.

Track the referral from handover to outcome, and the centre’s value stops being an argument and becomes a number: these visits became these orders, through these dealers, worth this much.

Why is this so hard with paper?

None of it is complicated to want. It is hard to collect, because the information exists for about ten minutes — while the customer is in the room — and then it is gone.

A register at the door catches a name, if you are lucky. The conversation about sizes and finishes lives in a salesperson’s head. The architect’s name is mentioned and not written down. The referral slip goes into the customer’s pocket.

By the end of the month, what reaches head office is a footfall number, because that is the only part anyone managed to write down.

The fix is to capture it at the moment it exists, by the person who is already there, in less time than the conversation took.

What should you be able to answer?

A centre that can answer those is not just working — it can prove it.

Common questions

Is footfall worth counting at all?

Yes, as a denominator. Referrals converted per hundred visitors is a meaningful figure; visitors on their own are not. Keep counting it, and stop reporting it as the result.

Will dealers tell us whether a referral converted?

They will if it costs them almost nothing and is not a login to another portal. A link and a code, with the customer’s details already filled in, gets answered. A request to report back by email does not.

Won’t recording every visit slow the staff down?

Only if recording is a separate job. When it happens as part of something the staff are already doing — producing the quotation, sending the brochure — it costs nothing extra, which is the only version that survives a busy Saturday.

How long before the numbers mean anything?

Visitor records are useful immediately. Referral conversion needs long enough for handed-over customers to buy, which in tile is weeks rather than days. Demand patterns need a season before they are worth acting on.

We built Sales360 for tile showrooms and experience centres, out of three years spent on showroom floors. It records each visit on a phone while the customer is still in the room, and tracks referrals through to whether the dealer converted them. If you run experience centres, book a twenty-minute walkthrough on your own catalogue.

More on this: ten showrooms, ten different answers and how to know whether your showroom marketing is working.