How to Hire a Personal Assistant at a Commercial Real Estate Agency
In commercial real estate sales and leasing, it’s increasingly common to hear that agents don’t have free time every day. There are usually a lot of things going on in the office and in the real estate market. With that being said, you still need to get to some critical things that will enable you to build your business. The solution is to get more people around you and get outside help.
When you look at the daily tasks that need to be done, there are still two or three that are very important. They are usually:
- Search for new business opportunities through daily prospecting
- Serving your existing customers with effective marketing campaigns
- Matching buyers and renters to your listings
So these three things drive the entire commercial real estate cycle. Some of these things can be adjusted to involve other people to help you. Having a good personal assistant who understands your business processes will be of great value in your career. First of all, you need to get to the point where you can afford this high-quality person. You will need the right person and that will cost you personally or the company.
Before we delve into the strategy behind the process here, I’d like to say that you should never completely delegate the prospecting process to other people, and do it for the wrong reasons. I have seen many salespeople take the opportunity to give others the task of making cold calls and knocking on doors. The best salespeople always make leads every day in some way and find the process critical to their influence in the marketplace.
Always remember that you are in a professional sales industry; That requires an exceptional salesperson who is prepared to do the hard stuff every day. You have to ‘sell’ in many ways and forms.
So you can add people to help you with each of these three processes. However, they shouldn’t completely take over and remove you from the top 3 activities. You still need to have a discipline of customer connection and negotiation as part of your business model. You are the person making the deals and that is a fact to remember.
Taking these three points that I just mentioned, you can adjust your working day as follows:
- Have someone research the right people to cold call. This investigative process takes a long time. When the correct numbers and contact details are passed to you, you can still make the calls. Your personal assistant can then enter the call results into the database. However, you must maintain a close connection to your database and review your progress every night or at the end of the business day.
- Your personal assistant can send correspondence and emails to your clients in your absence. However, this does not take away personal contact and phone calls with all of your clients at least once or twice a week. You’re the person they hired to solve a property problem.
- You can have your personal assistant go through the database to match the buyer and tenant inquiry to the listings you currently have. This allows you to make personal calls to qualified individuals in a timely manner. When the match is done, you make the call.
Always stay in touch with your market and don’t let shortcuts get you out of the process. The best salespeople are always at the forefront of their business activity and marketing processes.
