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You’re familiar with the expression “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, which suggests the theme of turning a negative into a positive. Well, while you don’t need to have a negative in your mortgage marketing efforts before you can gain a positive, so to speak, you can certainly turn lemonade into mortgage leads. Following is a simple, inexpensive idea for generating leads that any loan officer can do.
I keep hearing out there that online marketing for mortgage professionals is a waste of time because you’ll never be able to rank high enough in the search engines to get significant traffic. Of course, being the internet type that I am, I have never bought into this logic. But I couldn’t prove that it was possible for a regular, non-tech-saavy loan officer to crack the search engine rankings and achieve significant “organic” (unpaid) search engine traffic until now.
Salespeople are sometimes surprised by the actions of their clients and prospects. They feel fooled or misled and become disillusioned and disappointed when prospects don’t behave the way they expect them to. There are three key phrases to listen for when attempting to predict someone’s behavior; “I want to”, “I have to” and “I should”. Let’s look at each of these a little closer.
The most powerful headline I ever read and acted upon was a negative headline. It changed my life.Yet most books on direct mail copywriting will tell you to cast your headlines, overlines and Johnson Boxes always in the positive. But sometimes being negative is positively good for business. Or, to say it another way, negative headlines in your direct mail advertising are not always bad.
The headline that changed my life appeared in a small display ad in the Daily Mirror, a British daily newspaper. Here’s what it said:
Providers of professional services come in many roles and titles, but the truth is, professional service customers exercise a brutal taxonomy — to them, any given provider fits one of two categories: expert or salesman. Now, we’ve all met so-called “experts” who were little more than very clever salesmen, and we’ve all worked with salesmen who’ve surprised us with genuinely helpful expertise. But again, it’s our customers’ perspective that counts, and in their minds, the distinction is simple: Salesmen are people who chase after us, hungry for work; experts are people we actively seek out, money in hand.
Ah, if only the people around us were more professional. Our lives would be easier, our businesses would grow more effortlessly, we’d find our jobs more fulfilling… the list of dramatic benefits can go on and on. But what does it mean to be more professional? More importantly, what can we do to make sure that we, and our associates, are becoming ever more professional?
Do you think sales is a numbers game? Many very smart loan officers think that the way to increase their loan pipelines and to increase their loan closings is to simply increase the amount of mail they send to prospects… they couldn’t be further from the truth.
Sure you know the date and all, but do you really know what today is? I am writing this article on Sunday, April 16, 2006. When I stop to think about it, I realize that this is the one and only Sunday April 16, 2006 I will ever have.
You could be the most brilliant marketer in the world, but if you can’t close you’ll be starving and homeless in no time. Use these four steps to turn leads into closed loans.
Real estate agents get pitched by loan officers almost non-stop, especially when interest rates are on the rise. What makes one LO stand out over the rest? What makes an agent decide to send business to one LO instead of another?
Having a crystal ball to see into the decision-making process of real estate agents would be wonderful, but since Harry Potter lives in England (and doesn’t much like Divination anyway), perhaps the best thing to do is turn the tables on your approach with agents.