If you’re a loan originator, broker or branch manager who wants to take your career to the next level, ask yourself:
What Could Coach Bob Do for Me?
Set Production Goals – And Actually Reach Them with Confidence and Consistency
We’ve all set goals, haven’t we? But do we always reach them? Bob has identified 7 Critical Stages of managing a loan origination business, and developed a simple, effective system for monitoring those stages. He tells his clients that, no matter what the market conditions are in your area, no matter where rates are, you can still reach your closing goals every month, because closings always result from a series of specific actions over which you have complete control. In other words, if you do enough of the things that result in closings, you will always have enough closings.
Here’s the way Ron Erdmann – a successful producer and branch manager with National City Mortgage in Toledo Ohio – put it:
“Bob helped us develop a game plan we could follow – if you don’t have that, you can easily get lost in the details of this business. It was all there, and all we had to do was implement all the parts and everything would work fine. Obviously, we tweaked it along the way – Bob has been my coach since 1994 – but that plan got us to where we needed to be.”
It’s a Pipeline – Not a Faucet!
Have you ever wondered why we call it a pipeline? Wouldn’t it be great if it were a faucet? Then, any time you wanted 10 more closings you’d just turn on the faucet until your “glass” was full.
But your system of leads, “prequals”, loan applications and loans in process is called a pipeline because, in order for closings to flow smoothly out at the end, you must be constantly pushing new leads through the front, and you must also make sure you don’t have any big holes in the middle of the pipe.
Bob says, “The single largest cause of unrealized potential in the mortgage business is the failure to fully recognize the difference between a pipeline and a faucet. We call it a pipeline, but we act like we think it’s a faucet.
“If you knew it as a pipeline and treated it like one, you would be carefully measuring your flow through each of the 7 critical stages of your system, and you would be responding immediately to a drop in flow in any of them. But most originators aren’t measuring those 7 stages, so by the time they realize that the month’s closings aren’t going to be what they’d hoped for, it’s too late to do anything about it. What’s worse, even at this point, most originators don’t really know whether their problem is not enough flow at the front of the pipeline, or whether there’s a hole somewhere in the pipe itself. Any of these problems can be fixed, but not if you don’t even know what to fix.”
Spend Your Time Accomplishing Your Priorities – Instead of Spending Your Time Trying to Figure Out What They Are
Let’s say it’s Monday morning at 9:00 am, and you’re at your desk. If you knew with certainty what was the most important thing you could possibly be doing in the next 15 minutes to ensure the consistent success of your business, you’d probably do it, wouldn’t you? What would it be like to always know, at any given moment in time, what the highest and best use of your time would be?
Anyone who has been a loan originator understands the often hectic, even frantic pace of our business. There are hundreds of ideas available for generating leads and closing more business. You are getting calls from customers, Realtors, and others concerning loans in process. Each loan is loaded with details, any one of which, if handled wrong, could cause last-minute problems, extra phone calls, or even cause you to lose the transaction. You are subjected to a constant flow of changing information with which you must keep pace, from interest rates to new loan programs and underwriting guidelines.
If you were to make a list of all the specific things you could be doing today to bring in new business and proactively manage your pipeline, the list would be so long it could easily take a month or longer to get it all done – and in the meantime, new ideas and demands on your time are arriving daily.
The point, according to Bob, is that we must recognize that there really are more things to do than we have time to do. Therefore we must make choices; we choose which thing we will do now, and we choose not to do all the other possible things – at least for now. Those choices, made a dozen times a day or more, determine our level of success or failure. Making the right choices consistently requires that you have a strategic plan in place.
Danielle Rowland was a top loan officer in Waterfield Financial's Fort Wayne Indiana home office when she was offered a position as branch manager in Grand Rapids, where the previous manager had quit suddenly and taken all the LOs to a competitor. Danielle moved to Grand Rapids, and without knowing a soul there, began building both her personal production and a branch, essentially from scratch. Here’s what she had to say about why Bob is her coach:
“Bob Williamson helped me develop and implement systems that keep me more focused. I had heard about most of the new ideas for generating business, but all these ideas were just running around in my brain – nothing was getting refined or implemented consistently. Bob helped me create a system that was specific to my circumstances. This has enabled me to handle the jobs of both producer AND manager.”
Earn More Money in Less Time
Some originators want to increase the amount of business they do, but either don’t know how to proceed, or can’t seem to find the time to get it done. Others are satisfied with their income, but find that the time demands of their work sometimes interfere with their other life priorities.
Divide your income last month by the number of hours you worked, and you’ll know how much your time was worth that month. Let’s say you worked about 160 hours. Now ask yourself: were you completely focused on your highest priority for every minute of those 160 hours? Were you at your best, “in the zone,” as they say, for every one of those 9,600 minutes?
Of course not. Even Superman has his kryptonite moments. But athletes and successful businesspeople have discovered that even incremental improvements in their performance can result in dramatic improvements in their bottom line.
Bold Strategies That Can Make You #1 in Your Market
Many loan originators are already generating enough leads. Lead generation isn’t rocket science, and there are a number of proven ways to find the people who will be in need of your service.
Bob’s 30-year career in sales and marketing has taught him that more often, the missing ingredient is a superior offer and product.
He’s not talking about the loan product. He’s talking about your contribution to the loan customer. Once you have identified your prospects, what can you offer them that would be so important to them that it far outweighs anything they could get from your competitors?
Dave Kime is a producing branch manager with Flagstar Bank in Tucson, Arizona. He says:
“Bob opened my eyes to a better understanding of sales and marketing as it pertains to the mortgage business.
Anybody can do more business in a refi boom, but he helped me improve my production in the middle of a down market.”
Randy Warren, a loan officer with SouthBank in Huntsville, Alabama adds:
“He identifies what it is that the customer needs, and then he develops that and teaches you how to deliver it.”
And Danielle Rowland, quoted earlier, says:
“I am impressed with his ability to see things the way the consumer sees them, as opposed to the way we sometimes think the consumer ought to see them, and to not only help me develop the kinds of services customers want, but also how to explain them to people so they want what we’re offering.”
Homebuyers: Let’s Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse
When homebuyers evaluate mortgage lenders in a competitive marketplace, they are usually looking at less than $1,000 difference in closing costs for loans with the same rate and term. Bob can show you how to help your clients save $3,000 or more -- on the price they pay for the home they buy.
The Buyers are going to have X number of dollars for down payment and closing costs. They’re going to finance the rest. So any difference between the lowest price the Seller would have accepted and the listing price is going to be rolled into a loan amount and amortized over the term of the loan. If you can provide your clients with information that enables them to buy a home listed at $200,000 for, say $190,000, you have helped them save the $10,000 difference plus the interest they would have paid on that difference. If they stay in the home for 10 years, they will have spent more than $6,000 in interest for that $10,000 (at 7%, 30-yr. amortization). In this rather modest example, you would have helped the Buyers save over $16,000, not even counting their savings on discount points, title fees, and other closing costs. If the Buyers understand you have been instrumental in helping them accomplish $16,000 in savings before they make their first mortgage payment, do you really think they’re going to abandon you over a couple of hundred dollars worth of closing costs? More to the point, if you’re providing this service before they’ve even made a final decision on a loan program, you’re not leaving much of an opening for another lender to even get to talk to them. What can your competitor do to top you? Take them around in his car to look at houses?
If you work with homebuyers (or want to), learning how to do a Strategy Session (where your objective is to help the Buyer with a strategy for buying the right home at the right price) will clearly separate you from the pack in your market. Bob says that before he developed the Strategy Session, his clients’ success rate at getting consumer-direct homebuyer leads to meet with them was between 10-15%. Now, with a much more meaningful and clearly superior offer, that success rate is often above 25%, which means people are able to generate twice as much business with the same number of calls.
Building Realtor Relationships that Give You More Business – Instead of More Heartburn
What’s the fundamental problem with most Lender/Realtor relationships? According to Bob, it’s that loan officers position themselves as vendors to Realtors, instead of as partners. Vendors are expendable. By asking Realtors to refer you business without ever reciprocating with referrals of your own, you are volunteering for the subservient position – and taking it personally when Realtors treat you accordingly!
Bob points out that, from the standpoint of consumer perception, lenders have advantages Realtors don’t have. Homebuyers in the early stages of deciding to buy a home generally feel much more comfortable talking with a lender (whom they perceive to be more objective and neutral than a Realtor). If you as a lender can establish trust and build a relationship, you can refer -- to your Realtor partners – buyers who are ready to buy in absolutely every sense of the phrase. For your Realtor partners, it means you’re sending them clients they don’t have to “sell” on the idea of buying, and it means a much shorter, more fruitful path to a closing and a commission. This is not the type of relationship a Realtor will walk away from over a rough closing, or just because your competitor seems to be quoting a lower rate on a loan program.
With Bob’s coaching, you can learn how to develop more solid, productive, mutually beneficial Realtor relationships. He can help you get appointments with the Realtors of your choice, and make convincing presentations that result in the Realtor’s assistance in your lead generation efforts. And you’ll learn how to build the relationship from the initial presentation with a well-organized series of 15-minute weekly phone meetings where you and the Realtor focus very specifically on moving forward with the clients you have in common, review the results of last week’s marketing efforts, and agree on ways to continuously improve those results.
Build an Annuity
An annuity is “a sum of money paid … at regular intervals.” And whether the purchase market is part of your business or not, your existing customer base is the richest potential source of new income. But most originators haven’t fully tapped this resource.
To begin with, how often do you recommend your barber/hairdresser, grocer, doctor, or lawyer to a friend? Wouldn’t you agree you only go out of your way to recommend someone when you believe they’re exceptional and you know your friend will be pleased with their service?
That’s the way most people are. During his years as a consultant to the healthcare profession, Bob invariably found that doctors who had a great “bedside manner” always had busier practices than doctors with equal or greater technical proficiency who lacked exceptional communication skills. Why? Because at the heart of their effort to communicate and empathize with their patients was a genuine concern for their well-being. And patients who felt they mattered to their doctors were more comfortable and experienced better clinical results. And they told their friends about this (often unexpectedly) positive experience.
Even a mediocre loan officer occasionally provides better-than-average service to a customer. But an exceptional loan officer designs a system that insures that every customer has a great experience, while constantly reinforcing the idea that you want a long-term relationship with them, that you welcome their repeat business, and that you pledge to provide the same extraordinary level of commitment and service when they refer their friends to you. As your coach, Bob will help you develop a Customer Care System that replicates your best possible effort with every single client.
This is the difference between getting a few referrals, and getting the full benefit of the annuity that is symbolized by your customer base. But there’s also another important reason to design and implement a Customer Care System in your business. Bob puts it this way:
“There is an epidemic of poor time management in the loan origination business, caused in large part by having to re-invent the wheel every time we take a loan application. If you sat down and made a comprehensive list of everything you would want to do on every loan to insure a smooth, on-time closing and a customer who wants to send you more business -- if you were looking at the whole process from your customer’s point of view, and using your experience to build in steps that make the process simpler and more convenient, you would have the foundation of a Customer Care System.
“Then, if you proactively applied Murphy’s Law and built in steps that would prevent or anticipate potential problems with either the approval or the closing, you’re a step closer. Next, think about the Realtors and other involved parties (e.g., appraisers, title companies, attorneys) and build in steps where you are regularly communicating to keep everybody informed (which will dramatically reduce incoming calls). You’d want to build in steps to proactively follow up with anyone on whom you are depending to move the transaction forward (including customers, Realtors, appraisers, processors, underwriters, and title companies). You’d also want to think about opportunities to get your marketing messages across to customers, Realtors, and other referral sources.
“Finally, if you integrated all those steps and incorporated them into your day planner/schedule/contact management software, you would have a Customer Care System that not only insures smooth closings and happy customers, but also saves you time and allows you to focus on running your business instead of having it run you.”
A Professional Nag
Have you ever known anybody to pay someone to nag him? This is what one of the industry’s top producers and best-known speakers, Greg Frost, had to say about Bob in 1991, after a few years of working with him:
“He came up with some good, creative ideas. Then he helped us organize a plan for getting them done. Then he just kept nagging us until we did it. Without his staying on us like he did, I don’t think we would have gotten nearly as much done.”
While there is humor in Greg’s remark, he also highlights one of the key roles of a coach: to bring out the best in you, to help you become the person you are capable of being.
In a different industry than ours, Vince Lombardi became a coaching legend. Here is the way Jerry Kramer (one of the Hall of Fame players Lombardi helped develop) described his coach:
“I don’t think anybody knows what he can do until he tries. He makes sure you try.”
Ron Erdmann (quoted earlier) was a successful producing branch manager with 20 years experience as a Realtor and mortgage banker when he hired Bob to coach him in 1994. Fourteen years later, Ron still meets with Bob every week:
“Whenever I’ve been faced with an obstacle or a difficult management decision, Bob has been very helpful in clarifying my thinking. He asks the kind of probing questions that put me back on target ...”
Bob has coached originators at every level of career development – from rookies in their first year in the business to top originators closing in excess of $50 million per year.
The question to ask yourself is this: From wherever you are in your career today, what is the next step, the next level of development for you? And how could a coach help you get there sooner?
To schedule a personal coaching session with Bob Williamson, click here.
For more information about Coach Bob's strategic approach to the mortgage industry, click here.