"A" is For Automation – 3 Key Areas of Your Business That You Must Put on Autopilot
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As our world of ever-expanding technology creates further demands on our time (even though it’s supposed to free up more time for us-that’s a laugh!), it becomes more and more clear to me how important automation is to a real estate agent.
What is automation? It’s having a system in place so that you don’t even have to think about a certain part of your business. You have everything set up ahead of time, all ready to go.
Automation saves agents not only time and money, but headache and heart attacks. By automating certain systems in your business, you take away the pressure and stress that so many agents deal with-stress that can be avoided with the right systems in place.
After all, a stressed agent is not an effective agent. (I hear you laughing.) But seriously, there is good stress and there is bad stress.
Good stress is the motivation and energy you feel when you’re putting a transaction together. That’s a happy kind of stress.
But then there’s the kind of stress where you have to send out three buyer’s packages, follow-up with five phone calls requesting information about your services, and get a marketing activity report out to a client who’s almost ready to make an offer-and all this before 4pm when you have to pick up your kids to bring them to baseball practice.
That’s bad stress. Automation in your business helps get rid of bad stress. With processes set up and already in place, you can get those tasks done lickety-split.
There are 3 major areas of your business that should be automated:
1. Follow-up.
This is a no-brainer. In today’s day and age, there is no excuse for not having an automated follow-up program. And yet I can’t tell you how many agents there are to whom I have to say, “Stop putting stamps on your own envelopes. Have a printing company do that for you!”
I know many of us (myself included) like to control everything that’s going on in our businesses. But the truth is, once I learned to delegate 90% of my business to others, I was ten times more productive.
You can be too.
You can have somebody print your mailers. You can have somebody put them in envelopes and send them out. Heck, you can even import the content of your marketing materials (like some of the systems we provide at The Lones Group).
2. Tools.
What do I mean by “tools”?
Buyer packages
Seller packages
Marketing activity reports
Client surveys
Client thank you letters
You never have to worry about writing another one of these once you create a template for each of them. All you have to do is open it, change the name, “File-Save As” and “Send”. Or “File-Save As” and “Print”. And away you go!
3. Lead Generation.
Yes, you CAN automate your lead generation. For example, let’s say you want to work with expired listings. Do you have an expired listing package all ready to go? How about a system for gathering these names on a regular basis? And another one for executing the delivery? Believe it or not, lead generation can be one of the most profitable areas of automation.
Think about everything you do on a daily basis and ask yourself, “Is this something I could farm out to somebody else? Who can help me with this?”
Putting these three areas of your business on autopilot is the one task that will save you more stress than you can imagine. Start implementing them today.