Addressing email enquiries is necessary, but it can eat away at your time and keep you from doing the work that’s most important. You must respond to buyer enquiries in a timely manner because you never know who is going to become an active buyer. This is especially challenging if you manage all of your business hands-on. This Coaching Tip will explain how to maintain your schedule while handling those consumer questions.
If you must reply to emails personally, then train yourself to type faster. Speed will get you through those replies quickly so you can move on to your real work. There are training sites online that will measure how fast you type and offer drills to help you increase your speed. Keep in mind, this is the least preferable method, but your situation may require that you do it.
Most enquiries are basic repetitive questions. You can use this redundancy to streamline your process. Note the questions you find yourself answering over and over, and make templates of your responses to them. Then you can simply choose the proper response template, change the recipient name and property details, hit Send and you’re done. You can also have forms, videos, brochures and property files ready to attach.
As your business expands, bring on an assistant to perform these tasks for you. Frankly, as an agent you should not be doing email at all. Enquiries must be answered, though, so hire someone to handle all that so you can focus on your most important work. You do need to know how many buyer enquiries you are receiving each day and get their contact information so you can call them. Your assistant can prepare a daily report for you with this information.
Set up an email address that you share with your assistant so you can check progress on incoming emails, and can deal with critical messages if your assistant is away. The point is not to let email interrupt the primary tasks you need to accomplish.
The more active your business is, the more enquiries you will receive. Even with an assistant you need to automate. There are database systems that automatically add contacts into the database and generate follow-ups. Batch your email processing and schedule a time for that to happen.
Stay in control of the time you spend directly with email and don’t let that time expand into the rest of your schedule. Remember, it’s the time you spend with your clients face to face that matters most.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.