It’s easy to get sidetracked with a new gimmick, idea or shinny object. I find that no matter what the market is like, if I stay focused on my fundamentals I will always have strong results.
The Fundamentals Of Originating
- Make Your Calls, Talk To People, Build Relationships
- Be Organized, Be Consistent
- Deliver On What You Promise, Close On Time, Do What You Say You Will Do
- Trust In The Process, Don’t Focus On The Product
Make Your Calls, Talk To People, Build Relationships
Based on your goals we’ve developed how many conversations you need to have each week. There is a direct correlation between the number of “new conversations” you have each week and how many loans you will do.
You need to track your calls and that doesn’t mean you need to pick put the phone 50 times. If you want do a happy hour with realtors and have 8 conversations at the same time. The bottom line is if you meet your conversation goals each week you will meet your loan goals for the month. Tracking your calls also stops you from getting off track and always gives you a chance to get back into the game. By tracking your calls you can walk into the office thinking you’ve had a great week on Wednesday and then realize you’ve only talked to 1 new person that week. Well guess what? 2 or 3 weeks from now you won’t have any new deals getting into escrow. By tracking it you can realize this and play catch up the last 2 or 3 days of any week which will ensure that you have a constant flow of business.
It’s really easy to use computers to send mass emails, market updates etc.. But emails never made someone like you and never built a relationship. Call your realtors, your clients talk to people don’t rely on technology and email to get business. Don’t get me wrong technology must be used but as a supplement to what is important and that is talking to people.
By talking to people, building relationships, getting to know someone and them getting to know you is what makes everything else you’re going to do effective. If you have a relationship and you send someone a mass email, they’ll open it. If you don’t they’ll just send it to the trash. If you have a relationship with someone and something doesn’t work out perfectly they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and not get mad. If you have a relationship with a client they won’t rate shop you and they’ll be more responsive when you need things.
All of this gives you easier referrals, easier transactions and allows you to be more profitable per loan. Your pricing and headache on a file is a direct reflection of the relationship you have with the client and that realtor!
“If what you did yesterday seems big it’s because you haven’t done anything today” — Lou Holtz
Be Organized, Be Consistent
Organizing your pipeline:
Every day you should start it out with a team meeting. Go through your current pipeline of deals in process. Everyone on your team should know what their job is for each file each day. Make a list send it out print it out and put it on everyone’s desk. If each person does their job each day you win. If they don’t you know who the weak link is.
Organizing your new sales:
Every morning you should have a list on your desk of clients who have made offers that may get into contract, refinances that you’ve pitched and should lock. Besides your current pipeline these are your next priority of people. Leave them on the list, call them everyday until they say we didn’t get the offer accepted or stop calling me we don’t want to refinance.
Organizing your pre-approvals:
you need to have at least 3 categories of new clients. People you’ve talked to or have been referred to you and you haven’t had much of a conversation. People you’ve talked to and based on what they’ve told you they are a good deal but you haven’t done anything else. People you have full applications on and some documents. Knowing the priority will allow you to stay in touch with the people that matter the most and you won’t lose a deal that you didn’t even know you lost.
Organizing your Realtors:
As much as I hate to say it realtors are prospects. We need to sell them all of the time whey they work with us. The funny thing is that the highest producing realtors are not always the best referral partners. You need to look at your agents, prioritize who sends you the most business and start with them. You also need to prioritize your new realtors. Start with the ones you have the best connection then move on. You need a binder which I’ll go over later.
What Does Being Consistent Mean:
“conformity in the application of something, typically that which is necessary for the sake of logic, accuracy, or fairness.”
I know we all want instant gratification and for the most part refinances are instant gratification. Purchase business is not that way. You need to have your game plan, know what you need to do and then do it every day every week and every month. How consistent you are in your calls, your marketing, your attention to detail will determine how successful you are each month. The hard part is that you won’t see how consistent you were or if it works until months down the line. If you have a great production month in June it’s because you had a very consistent April and May. You don’t work out to look good today, you work out to look good next summer.
“It’s the little details that are vital, the little things make the big things happen”— John Wooden
Deliver On What You Promise, Close On Time, Do What You Say You Will Do
THE BEST SOURCE OF BUSINESS ARE REFERRALS FROM YOUR PAST CLIENTS AND REALTORS THAT YOU ALREADY KNOW AND WORK WITH.
No one can sell you like you can but your past clients are a close second. That is why from a sales side of things your current pipeline is the most important thing you have. If you deliver on what you promise, close on time and do what you say you will do then you don’t just close a loan you create a marketing machine for the next 20 years. Every client you close becomes a little word of mouth marketer out there and it creates a pyramid of referral business for free.
The hardest part about getting a realtor to work with you is getting a realtor to work with you. Too many times I see a originator have a great meeting, get an agent to offer to send you clients and then the originator loses touch and never gets a deal. If a realtor says “yes I’ll work with you” then you need to stay on them until you get a deal. Not all realtors are busy so this can be months of emails and calls but if they say “yes” don’t let them off the hook until you’ve closed at least 1 and paid for your time. After that first closing if you deliver on what you promise, close on time, and do what you said you would do then the 2nd and 3rd referral will come over easily. Just don’t waste your time on a meeting, get a commitment and then get nothing out of it.
“The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.” — Vince Lombardi
Trust In The Process, Don’t Focus On The Product
You need to build a business plan around things that you believe in and things that I know work. If you don’t trust something you won’t give your full effort and anything that you do that you don’t give 100% to won’t work. Once you have your process in place you need to trust that you built the right business plan and get to work. This ties back into being consistent, meeting your calls, being organized etc… If you focus on the process for that loan, that 1 sales pitch, that day and that week the results will appear later on. A successful day is not when you closed 5 loans, it is when you did everything you wanted to do for that day and you checked off every box in your process.
Too many times originators focus on what they did last month, or how many they are going to close this month. The reality is that those months were either lucky and you can’t build a substantial business on luck, or they were because of how well the originator executed his process 2 and 3 months ago. I can’t say it better than the greats so I’ll leave it at this