Tips & Tricks: Template Everything

What’s the super secret sauce to communicating effectively when you have to send out essentially the same information over and over?

Templates.

TEMPLATE EVERYTHING.

That was one of the keys to my success in running the closing department for a local homebuilder and eventually having two coordinators on my team.

There was an email/Word doc/form template for almost everything.

We didn’t waste a ton of time typing out scheduling emails and responses to routinely asked buyer questions.  We had a template folder in Outlook that held the standard email format or response verbiage for things that we got asked regularly.

So you were never starting from scratch.

Copy and paste the template, and then adjust the wording based on the situation at hand.

It also led to uniformity in our responses as a department.  You weren’t getting a slightly different answer from me than the other members on my team.  The policies were easy to communicate effectively because they were readily available to distribute.

And we were very open to adjusting the templates as needed.

Get feedback from a few homebuyers that didn’t understand something in your email about scheduling their home inspection?

Wording adjusted.

Distribute that email a few dozen times for the next round of scheduling and see if the feedback improves.

I think two of the best things you can do for yourself and your team is (1) to have systems in place for effective communication with your clients and (2) to be open to adjusting those systems when needed.

This also makes the training process for adding people to your team much easier.  New employees can create a reference folder with standard responses they can refer back to and there is no confusion about what you are requiring them to communicate to your clients.

Sometimes stupid simple is the easiest way to get things done.  Give people a road map to exactly what you want them to do and it’s much easier to get the performance you are expecting.