- Original Poster
- #1
Hi,
I run a mountaineering business along with my business partner. It's essentially the two of us who do all the admin and guiding, although we do make use of freelance guides during our busy periods.
Winter tends to be the busiest time of year, and at the moment, we're getting plenty of enquiries, mainly through submitted contact forms on our website, but also the occasional direct email and sometimes phone enquiry.
As we're both out on the hill most days, we tend to answer most enquiries in the evening, which whilst essential, means that we're working pretty hard until fairly late in order to secure bookings etc.
Currently, we're managing most of this just by our email client (we both use Thunderbird), but I was wonder whether there was an easier way to keep on top of all of our enquiries, as quite often we might get an enquiry, reply to it, but then not hear anything back. Rather than notice that we've not had a reply, it often gets lost in the barrage of more recent enquiries, and so we probably loose a few potential bookings as a result.
Our email set-up is fairly simple... We have one email address (info@) to which all emails go to. Within that, we have a folder each, and just drag and drop emails into our individual folders and then deal with them, so that there's little chance of both of us replying to the same email at the same time. We star emails that need replying too, but inevitably, we've both got heaps of starred emails, many of which aren't such a priority or have been replaced by a more recent email from the prospective client. This all feels pretty clunky and potentially inefficient.
As a side note, we raise invoices through Xero, but there's nothing to link emails/clients to invoices, other than us doing it manually.
Is there a better way to manage all of these enquiries, because at the moment, both of us are feeling the strain of keeping on top of our emails. I appreciate that hiring someone to assist is something we need to consider in the long run, but for now it's not really an option, both due to finances and lack of time to train someone in what is quite a specialised line of work.
I run a mountaineering business along with my business partner. It's essentially the two of us who do all the admin and guiding, although we do make use of freelance guides during our busy periods.
Winter tends to be the busiest time of year, and at the moment, we're getting plenty of enquiries, mainly through submitted contact forms on our website, but also the occasional direct email and sometimes phone enquiry.
As we're both out on the hill most days, we tend to answer most enquiries in the evening, which whilst essential, means that we're working pretty hard until fairly late in order to secure bookings etc.
Currently, we're managing most of this just by our email client (we both use Thunderbird), but I was wonder whether there was an easier way to keep on top of all of our enquiries, as quite often we might get an enquiry, reply to it, but then not hear anything back. Rather than notice that we've not had a reply, it often gets lost in the barrage of more recent enquiries, and so we probably loose a few potential bookings as a result.
Our email set-up is fairly simple... We have one email address (info@) to which all emails go to. Within that, we have a folder each, and just drag and drop emails into our individual folders and then deal with them, so that there's little chance of both of us replying to the same email at the same time. We star emails that need replying too, but inevitably, we've both got heaps of starred emails, many of which aren't such a priority or have been replaced by a more recent email from the prospective client. This all feels pretty clunky and potentially inefficient.
As a side note, we raise invoices through Xero, but there's nothing to link emails/clients to invoices, other than us doing it manually.
Is there a better way to manage all of these enquiries, because at the moment, both of us are feeling the strain of keeping on top of our emails. I appreciate that hiring someone to assist is something we need to consider in the long run, but for now it's not really an option, both due to finances and lack of time to train someone in what is quite a specialised line of work.
