You could make about 65 more cold calls. Or hold 13 more open homes. Or you could take a power-nap every day of the week.
Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day – you can blame the Egyptians for that one. So, if you can’t make more time, what can you do? You can save it.
Enter CRM. A Customer Relationship Management system can automate tasks, manage relationships and make your agency more efficient – saving you time (and money). Every wasted click is a wasted moment, and it all adds up.
Here are our top 4 ways to save hours every week.
1. Cut down on meetings
For argument’s sake, let’s say your agency’s daily meeting runs for about 30 minutes – a modest estimate. Every day, you stick to the same agenda. Each agent gives an update of all existing transactions, and the office manager talks through any further news or changes that the team needs to be aware of.
That 30 minute meeting, run from Monday to Friday, eats into two and a half hours of each person’s working week. And that’s not even counting admin time spent scheduling and the meeting, getting the tech to work or exchanging pleasantries when the meeting finally kicks off.
In fact, the average person spends 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings – and that was pre-covid. Now, the first 10 minutes of any meeting is filled with “Is my microphone working?” and “Can you see my screen?” – you know, the fluff. And all that fluff adds up.
Instead, configure your CRM’s dashboard to surface expiring listings, important contract dates and activity and reminder streams so everyone in your office can see what’s going on. You’ll enter your daily meeting with context, and only need about 10 minutes to talk through any urgent matters that have cropped up.
Time saved: 20 minutes every day of the week, plus all of the fluff.
2. Better KPI reporting
Once a week, you (or your performance manager) probably sit down with each agent to analyse their performance in a one-on-one meeting. But before that happens, someone needs to go into your system and get all the information out of it. Every single week. For every single agent at your agency. Doesn’t sound like the best use of time, does it?
Work out what’s most important to your agency, then configure a report for it so your CRM does the heavy lifting. At a minimum, you’ll be wanting a list of:
- appraisals (conducted, won and lost)
- listings (new, current and expiring)
- the activity taken in relation to their listings
This will save your agents or admin from having to manually set search parameters and pull all of this information out of the system once a week. Instead, you’ll get all of the above in one easy-to-read, automatically generated visual report.
Besides, your agents shouldn’t have to wait for their weekly performance meetings to check in on their appraisal to listing ratio, commission forecast and other activity. They should be able to track their own performance, identify trends and take action to improve.
Time saved: at least 20 minutes per agent.
3. Automated listing alerts
This one is for Rex users specifically, but your CRM might have similar functionality.
Hopefully, your agents are already in the practice of sending alerts every time you win new listings. But how much time would you estimate that takes? Even if you have a templated listing alert, you’d still need to populate the fields, test the link and merge the letter with your contact list. That’s got to take at least 10 minutes.
Every time you create a new contact record for a buyer, create a match profile. Add in the buyer’s price range, property types and interests. You can even store custom data such as the school their kids go to, or local sporting team. Rex will automatically alert those contacts that you’ve just listed a property they may be interested in. And, because those alerts are sent as campaigns, buyers have all the details they need to work out whether they want to know more.
This effectively saves your agents one phone call per matched buyer – that initial five minute chat where you tell them you’ve just listed a new property, and provide all the basic information. Let’s say every agent lists one new property a week, and there are about 20 people in your database whose requirements perfectly match each new listing. Rex saves each agent from making 20 cold calls to introduce the property. Instead, potential buyers will receive the listing alert and respond if it’s of interest to them.
Time saved: 10 minutes sending the listing alert and 1 hour 40 minutes on the phone.
4. Letterbox drops
At a brisk walk, the average person can cover 5 kilometres in an hour. How big is your core farm area? Say your agency primarily focuses on a 4 kilometre radius – to walk every street within that area would take dozens of hours. Is that really the best use of your agents’ time?
Then there’s the writing, designing, printing, folding of the letterbox drops (if an agent isn’t doing it, then they’re at least spending time approving this stuff). You do the maths… That’s a lot of time wasted on letterbox drops that only a fraction of homeowners ever read before throwing in the recycling bin.
Still, if you want to be seen as the go-to agency in a geographic farm, you have to be seen – and cold calling only gets you heard (if you’re lucky).
Enter digital advertising. Digital ads can put your latest listing, Just Solds, agency bios – whatever you want – in front of 79% of your core farm area when they’re active and engaged online. Designing, creating and placing ads on Facebook, Instagram and the Google Network can take hours (and a lot of hair pulling). But, with a tool like Spoke, setting up a digital campaign takes less than 5 minutes – leaving your agents more time to focus on enquiries.
Time saved: 2 hours and 55 minutes.
That all stacks up to a staggering 6 hours and 35 minutes per agent, every week.
It’s about working smarter, not harder. Tech tools can take over a lot of the heavy lifting, leaving your agents more time to spend generating rapport and finding their next listing.
