Managing Labor Expenses
When it comes to any business, labor is a high portion of your expenses. It’s not something you will ever get rid of, and you don’t want to! But there are ways to reduce the expense. Like every part of your business, there are ways to work smarter, not harder, and this is also true with how you manage your labor. One way to do this is through real estate automation, which can streamline various tasks and processes, reducing the need for manual labor and increasing efficiency.
Obviously, we’re an offshore company and we specialise in supplying real estate VAs that help companies to reduce cost. However, we still believe that if you can automate it, you should! There is zero value in having a human waste time doing something that can be done by a computer.
Automation as a Solution
In every business, using online tools and web apps is becoming very normal. The problem is there are so many! None of them does everything so you wind up updating one thing here and then one thing there and trying to get the different bits all talking to each other. This double or triple-up can be extremely time consuming and labour intesive. What if there was another way?
Introducing my best (electronic) friend – ZAPIER!
If you’ve never heard of Zapier, then prepare to be amazed. Zapier is an amazing automation tool that can connect any of your tasks or tools into a seamless workflow. A few years ago, you needed to invest in expensive business processing software, but now all you need is the tools you already have and Zapier.
Let’s look at an example of how Zapier can work for you in a few different scenarios.
Scenario 1: Enter a property enquiry into a spreadsheet and a CRM and then add it to a marketing campaign.
Real Estate Automation Streamlining Enquiry and Marketing
Every enquiry that comes into your office is a process that can take around 10 minutes per contact. If you want to do this manually, you definitely should hand it over to your VA and not your internal staff. But really, there is no need. You can automate the whole thing.
If you’ve never used automation before, this might blow your mind a little. Let’s go through it step by step.
An email comes into your inbox from realestate.com.au with an enquiry about a property.
The email is read by a bit of fancy tech called Email Parser. Email parser extracts the data you choose and creates a row in a spreadsheet so you can keep track of incoming enquiries.
It will now also create a contact in your company CRM and tag the user a buyer.
All that is done without any of your staff being involved (except in setting it up in the first place).
And that’s not all. Once the enquiry is in your CRM and tagged as a buyer, your marketing software can then schedule a sales sequences of events specific to this new contact.
Finally, you can add this new contact to your mailing list, so that they receive the newsletters you send from MailChimp or FreshMail or whatever system you use.
Let’s count the tasks that have been carried out here:
- Add enquiry to spreadsheet
- Add contact to CRM
- Tag contact
- Add contact to marketing campaign
- Add contact to newsletter mailing list.
That’s a lot of work and it has all been taken care of by Zapier. No copying and pasting, no cluttering up someone’s to-do list, just everything dealt with and entered where it needs to be.
If you want to know more about Zapier and other automation tools and options, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love this stuff, so I am more than happy to share my knowledge with you about how to best utilise it.
