Have you considered the outsourcing option?
With fees increasingly being squeezed, a rising number of online estate agents and the ever present fight to win valuations ahead of all competitors, it’s a tough market out there. The list of skills you need to succeed just keeps growing – sales, negotiation, administration, customer service, marketing, etc and then added to that you need to be a legal advisor, accountant, contracts manager, property manager, people manager, counsellor…..the list is endless!
So how do you keep all the plates spinning? You have to dip in and out of so many roles just to maintain a successful business. We would all love to have big teams of quality people to cope with the workload, and delegate some responsibilities, to but in reality you need bottom line results. So you manage with the least amount of people to achieve the right results all the time focused on keeping your clients and customers satisfied. But have you considered the alternative?
Outsourcing may seem easy to dismiss as too expensive or too complicated but in reality when you look at your staffing costs, why would you do everything in house? Outsourcing is a concept that has allowed many large businesses to grow; from human resources, accountancy and office maintenance through to photography and signage. You outsource for good reasons, either cost and time or knowledge and experience. You can’t be the best at everything so sometimes your most favourable option is to partner with someone who is. It’s important to consider both cost and customer, and what will work for you and your teams, but in a lot of cases it makes sense.
It’s great to have a helping hand when you get busy and a popular way to maintain customer service is using outsourced telephone answering services. Traditional estate agents use them for overflow call answering and some online agents have used these companies to provide a 24/7 service for customers so they can speak to someone whatever time of day or night. In an increasingly competitive landscape, outsourced providers can help bring you a unique offering to elevate your service above the usual offerings whilst ensuring you don’t miss out on new business opportunities.
With the private rental market expected to continue rising, there are a number of outsourcing options to ensure agents are successful in that arena as well. Property management, maintenance, call handling, administration and accounting can often be found from a single supplier to keep things simple.
A relatively young addition to the outsourcing options for the estate agent industry is sales progression services. It’s a concept that strikes fear in to some agents, worried about the lack of visibility of precious sales at a key point, but consider the benefits before completely dismissing it. If you find the right fit for your business you could achieve a service not dissimilar to hiring a sales progressor in your office. They come ready trained, you get to regain some valuable time for you and your sales team to focus on earning activities rather than administration and, in many cases, you get a dedicated sales progressor so you can build that personal relationship. They can proactively manage your sales rather than react (when it can be too late to save the sale) and it can cost you much less than hiring someone in-house. There are some providers that will take on your cases as an overflow service as well, so you can ensure you are able to provide the same great service at peak times as well as in quieter months.
A new provider in this area, Savvy Sales Progressors, has developed an online calculator you can use to see whether it makes financial sense for you to outsource this key part of your sales service by inputting just a couple of fields. It’s worth a look and the results are shown instantly on the page with no obligation to sign up and no data is stored or shared. Try the calculator by clicking HERE
Outsourcing may be the helping hand you need or it may not be suitable for you, but in ever changing market conditions you owe it to yourself and your business to explore the options. You could end up reducing costs and benefiting from an enhanced level of service which allows you to win more customers. Outsourcing is like marriage, choose the right partner and you could form a successful long term relationship that benefits both parties and helps you develop and grow together.
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