Selling on Your Own? How Live Chat Can Do Some of the Work for You

When you’re a “solopreneur,” you have to do everything: the sales, the books, the customer service, even the coffee runs! Maybe you plan to continue going it solo, or maybe you’d like to expand to have a staff someday. Either way, juggling every aspect of your business can be a pain, but considering the high price of hiring help, what can be done?

Live chat is an affordable, reliable option for real estate businesses. A live chat service on your website can be your salesperson, customer service representative, and intern all at once, freeing you up to focus on what you enjoy doing best in your business.

Live Chat as Salesperson

Like many entrepreneurs, you may have started your businesses because of, well, the entrepreneurial aspects: the big ideas, the planning, the autonomy. Perhaps the idea of sales never entered your head. But being a solopreneur absolutely requires you to be a salesperson, regardless of how you feel about it.

“If you don’t feel comfortable doing sales, it’s hard to really get your business off the ground,” says Gregg Schwartz, vice president of sales and marketing at Strategic Sales & Marketing.

“Making sales is the most important thing your company does, and it’s crucial for entrepreneurs and founders to take an active role in the sales process.”

So what can be done for entrepreneurs who don’t enjoy sales? Enter live chat, salesperson extraordinaire. HelpSquad’s live chat features real people talking to your customers in real time. Trained on your products and your style, these live chat representatives can do a lot of the heavy sales lifting for you. They’ll answer questions and sell customers on your brand. All you have to do is close the sales and earn profits!

Live Chat as Customer Service Representative

As a solopreneur, there’s nothing like connecting with your customers personally to learn how they engage with your products or services. But when you’re in the middle of another important task, you find yourself in a quandary. Do you interrupt your flow to help this customer feel important, or do you deny the customer the attention he or she deserves to keep at what you’re working on?

“[Business owners] make the mistake that you have to drop everything to answer the phone for a client, even if you’re working on something totally different,” says Chris Jordan, owner of Atlanta Insurance Live. “You have to be in charge of your own schedule.”

As the dedicated solopreneur you are, you want to drop everything for your clients, but you also have to be disciplined and take care of your own wellbeing. Luckily, live chat representatives can “drop everything” at any time and give undivided attention to your clients. This convenience for your clients is also convenient for you, allowing you to maintain focus and be as effective as possible.

Live Chat as Coffee-Running Intern (Not Literally)

Even though you’re running your real estate business on your own, that doesn’t mean you can’t get help from good friends and family occasionally. But how can you know which duties to delegate?

“Two types: those that are low-value relative to time spent (such as sorting through email to find the important ones, scheduling meetings with prospects, or scanning and organizing documents), and those that you just aren’t good at (such as bookkeeping, designing a logo or managing SEO),” says SCORE, a nonprofit organization that helps small businesses. They go on to say that you’ll need to decide how much your time is worth. For example, if you can bill your time at $100 an hour, it’s worth it to pay someone $20 an hour to do the bookkeeping. That frees you up to do more work.

Add live chat to your list of friends and family you can delegate to. Let’s say you have a new client who is confused about an aspect of your business. Live chat agents may spend 40 minutes with this client answering what turns out to be a very basic question. You spend those same 40 minutes working on a billable task. When you compare the profit from that billable time to how much you paid for the live chat service, it’s an easy comparison: live chat is definitely worth it!

Live chat is an affordable, reliable option that you’ll quickly realize you can’t live without! It can be your salesperson, customer service representative, and intern, allowing you to maximize your time and focus on what you do best. Contact HelpSquad today to off-load these duties to our agents and free up more of your time.