If you’ve read the first two parts of this series, you have already set realistic and meaningful production goals for 2010, and you’ve broken them down into the 6 Critical Results – the specific benchmarks on the way to a closed loan:
If you followed the instructions in Part 2, you’ve identified how many leads you need to generate each month, how many sales contacts you must make, how many applications you need to take, and how many submissions, approvals, and closings will be necessary to reach your income goals.
These steps are necessary, but not sufficient, to insure you have the kind of year you want to have.
What’s left is to set up a strategic plan you’re confident will allow you to hit your benchmarks – a plan you know you can execute. That’s the subject of this article.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume that you have developed a real Unique Selling Proposition in your marketplace – that you’ve done the work necessary to distinguish yourself from your competition in the eyes of your target markets.
What’s Your Strategic Plan for Lead Generation?
So you know who you are, you know who you want as clients, and you know why you’re the best possible choice they could make.
Let’s say that when you went through the goal-setting exercise in Part 2, you determined that your monthly goal for leads was 80.
Unless you’re brand-new in the business, you have probably also established some things you can do to generate leads. If doing those things gets you enough of the right kinds of leads to reach the production goal you set for new leads, all you have to do is make sure you schedule enough time every week to keep doing those things.
But what if you know you’re going to need 80 leads per month, but you’re only producing 40 now? You’ve got to find a way to generate another 40 leads a month. If you keep doing the same things you’ve been doing, you’re going to – at a minimum – come up 40 leads short every month.
So you might schedule some quiet time to do research or brainstorming to come up with some additional lead generation ideas you could implement. Maybe you decide you’re going to create a local Adwords campaign to drive traffic to your website so prospects will sign up to get a free report. And maybe you also decide to set up a campaign to Realtors in your market so you can create more referral relationships.
To implement these programs, you’ll need to schedule time to do the work of getting things set up, and you’ll need to schedule time to follow through, maintain, and monitor your results.
The key point here is that any of these kinds of things will require time to execute. If you need 80 leads a month, and last year you averaged 40, where will the time come from to make up the difference this year? It’s not like you spent half your time last year playing World of Warcraft, right?
Where is that time going to come from? However well (or poorly) you managed your time last year, you know you’ll need to allocate it differently this year if you’re going to create the time to generate those additional 40 leads per month.
There are so many different demands on the time and attention of a loan originator. There are phone calls and email messages, meetings, loan proposals to prepare, files to work up and turn in, details related to transactions that have to be managed. You’ve got to stay abreast of industry news, changes in loan programs and regulations. And of course you also need to find the time to market yourself, generate leads, and sell.
One of the more common methods suggested by seminar leaders and experts is “Time Blocking”. You basically take a form like the one depicted below, and block out time for the various categories of activities you do, with the hope of creating a balance where everything that’s important gets done:
What you end up with is your theoretical image of an ideal workweek. And while time blocking can be useful, the difficulty with it is that the theoretical seldom equals reality, and very few work weeks turn out to be “ideal” in every respect. In other words, “stuff happens.”
Another limitation of time blocking is that it deals with general categories of activities, like “calling Realtors.” And real results only get produced by taking specific actions – like “Call Maryanne Hooper at XYW Realty for presentation appointment.”
So if time blocking only represents part of the solution, what else do you need to do? What’s the next step?
The Ruthless Rules of Reality
Reality sometimes bites, but like it or not, it’s always Reality. One of its inescapable rules is this: Human beings were designed with creative minds that are capable of thinking of far more things we want to do than we will ever actually have time to do. Most of us dream of getting completely caught up, but if it ever happens, it will be because they are filling your veins with embalming fluid.
Given that we cannot ever get it all done, we must, if we’re to remain sane, pick and choose the things that mean the most to us, and do those things first.
In other words, we must prioritize.
Actually, to clarify that point, we all already do prioritize. It’s just that we’re not all doing it consciously. That’s how some of us end up spending amazing amounts of time fiddling with our email or doing whatever it is people do on sites like MySpace and Twitter.
Now, here’s the tricky part: you cannot intelligently prioritize all there is to do, all you could do, unless and until you have all of it collected in one place so you can see it all. How can you find the most important task out of a hundred tasks if only 20 of them are actually on your to-do list, and the rest are scattered in your head, your voicemail, your email, your home office, and the trunk of your car?
Draining the Swamp
There’s an old management expression that goes like this: “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp.”Our goal here is to drain the swamp and keep it drained, because when your swamp is drained, the alligators have to find somebody else to bother. We want to create a system simple enough that you can use it right away, and effective enough that you’d never want to stop using it.
Step 1 is to have a single place where you collect everything that requires action. For some people, an in-basket will suffice; others may need a dumpster (kidding). If it requires action, or you think it might, or you don’t know what else to do with it, it goes in the in-basket. When I talk about collecting everything in one place, I mean everything, not just paper. So you don’t just put the stuff on the top of your desk and credenza in this in-basket, you go through your email and make a list of every email that requires action on your part. (Trash or file the rest.) Put the list in your inbox. Do the same thing with voicemail – write any calls that need to be returned on a list and put the list in your basket. Finally, you need to spend at least a good half hour of uninterrupted quiet time emptying your head. Anything you can think of that you need to do, want to do, or might want to do, write it down and put it in your basket.
Step 2 is to deal with the contents of your in-basket. There are 5 possible actions to take with the items now in your in-basket:
1. Throw it away. If it isn’t important enough to act on or save, throw it away.
2. File it. If it’s some kind of reference material and you need to save it so you can find it later, file it.
3. Do it. If it will take 5 minutes or less to do, go ahead and do it right now.
4. Possible Later Action File. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, calls this a “Someday-Maybe File”, The idea is to have a file folder where you put ideas that you may want to take action on later, and put all these kinds of items in this folder. For this concept to work, you have to periodically (at least once a month) review everything in this file and decide whether to move it up in priority to the things you will now schedule for action (see step 5 in this process), leave it in the Possible Action folder, or throw it away.
5. Schedule It. If it doesn’t fit any of the 4 previous categories, the item is something requiring action that will take more than 5 minutes to complete, and is of high enough priority to put it somewhere on your schedule now. This category is so important that I’m going to expand on it further:
Dealing with “Schedule It” Items
By process of elimination, you’ve dealt with everything else, and what remains – your “Schedule It” or “Action” items – are your highest priorities.
If you look at these items, you’ll notice they all fall into one of two categories: they are either Tasks or Projects. A Task is a discrete, clearly defined action that you can complete in one step, while a Project requires two or more steps to complete. And here’s the problem that ruins the productivity of so many loan officers: trying to treat projects as if they were tasks.
An example of a Task would be: Call Maryanne Hooper at XYZ Realty to schedule a presentation appointment. It’s a simple task, it doesn’t require you to have done anything else first (i.e., no prerequisites), and if you see this task on your calendar/daily schedule you’d know exactly what you need to do to complete it.
Here’s an example of a Project: Prepare a Sales Presentation for Realtors that will result in them giving me referrals. Clearly, you can see that this is a Project -- it will require multiple steps to complete. And it is highly unlikely that a loan officer with all the responsibilities you have, would be able to create the conditions necessary to complete a Project like this in one sitting. You have too many other things to do, and you’re subject to way too many interruptions in the course of a normal work day. If you place this project into your schedule as if it were another Task, when the time comes to do it, you will immediately be overwhelmed by it. You won’t know where to start. You’ll be tempted to procrastinate. Right about then, your phone will ring, or somebody will stick their head in the door with a question, or you’ll be possessed by an irresistible urge to check your email. And you’ll be toast.
So if the item you’re looking at is really a Project, take a sheet of paper, define the project on the top line, and write down some specific things (Tasks) you would do to get started on this project. You don’t necessarily have to map the whole thing out right away; just get some ideas down on paper. Take the piece of paper and any accompanying materials that go with that project, and put it in a “Projects” folder that you’ll keep somewhere very accessible. Then take the first Task (or the first few) and put them with the rest of your tasks to be prioritized and scheduled. Make sure you tag them with your project’s name so you’ll remember the larger purpose behind why you’re doing those tasks.
If you follow this system, the only things you will be putting into your Daily Schedule/Calendar will be Tasks (Calls, To-Do’s, and Meetings), which is a good thing, because Tasks are things you can actually do. All of your Projects will be in your Project Folder.
Getting Your Tasks Prioritized & Scheduled in Your Calendar
At this point, you have an inbox with nothing but Tasks in it. Your Tasks may be on individual pieces of paper(attached to related paperwork or a file), or you may have a bunch of them on a to-do list, or a combination of both.
What remains is for you to get them into something that will allow you to see all of them at once so you can prioritize and schedule them.
My personal preference is ACT!, because it was designed by and for salespeople, in its later versions it’s also a fully functional and highly customizable CRM program, it’s a database that holds all your contacts and allows you to customize fields any way you want, it automatically maintains a history of any activity related to a contact, it has a Task List View that lets you see everything you need to do on one list (which you can filter any way you want), and finally it has a Calendar View that gives you a visual representation of your workday. When you schedule Tasks for a particular day and assign them estimated durations, the Calendar View lets you easily see how much of that day is already fully scheduled and how much time is available to schedule additional tasks.
But that’s just my preference. There are other ways to skin this cat. You can accomplish most of the same things with Microsoft Outlook. Or you could design a spreadsheet for your task lists and use a simple Calendar program to move tasks from the master spreadsheet to your calendar. Some CRM programs have calendars, and if you can figure out a way to schedule Tasks that aren’t drip campaigns, you could make that work. Hey, if you’re really old school, you could even use a paper system like the DayTimer. Use whatever you’re comfortable with.
Whatever method you’re using, go ahead and enter all your Tasks from your inbox into your system. As you do this, also give each Task a Priority (like High, Medium, or Low), and estimate the time it will take to complete the task. (Note: if a Task is going to take more than 1 hour, you should seriously consider whether it’s really a Task, and not a Project.)
Now you can sort your Task List by Priority, so that all the High Priority Tasks are at the top of the list. Ignore the Medium and Low priority items for the moment and just focus on the High Priorities. This should be a much more manageable list. Find the Task on the list that has the highest payoff, and/or the highest urgency, and schedule it in your Calendar for a specific day and time. Then go back to your Task List, pick the next most important item, and schedule that.
I plan my schedule a week at a time, and I do my planning on Saturday mornings for the upcoming week. This is my time to reflect on where I stand relative to my goals. It’s a time to open my Projects folder and add new Tasks from my key Projects to the upcoming week’s Task List. It’s also a time to brainstorm new ideas that popped into my head during the previous week (I write them down when they come to me and put them in my in-basket). I always run out of time slots before I run out of tasks. When that happens, everything left over gets deferred until the following Saturday (by which time I will, of course, have accumulated additional tasks that will need to be added to the list).
But I know that the tasks I have scheduled for the upcoming week are the most important, highest payoff things I can be doing. I know that, because I have looked at everything I could be doing, and picked the things that mattered most to me. This gives me tremendous peace of mind, because everything is in my system and accounted for, and nothing has been forgotten. I sleep like a baby at night.
When I start my workday – any workday – I go into the office and open my calendar. My schedule is completely filled out. I don’t have to think about anything, and I don’t have to make any decisions about what to do next. I am in full-on Action Mode, completely focused on the task I am working on right now. When I complete it, I don’t waste any time trying to figure out what I should do next. I just move on to the next task on my schedule. Like everyone else, I do get interrupted by unanticipated problems and opportunities. When these things happen, all I have to do is decide which is more important: the thing I had already scheduled, or this new thing? I make my choice and move on. In this way, I will routinely complete 75-150 tasks in a typical workweek. Each one of them moves me closer to one of my high-priority goals in one or more of the areas of my life that matter most to me: income, professional development, family, civic/community work, health & fitness, spirituality, etc.
Some people think this means I’m an unusually disciplined person. The truth is, I am by nature one of the least-disciplined people I know. But about 30 years ago, I just got tired of being disappointed in the results I produced. I use this system because it makes me happy. I would no more stop using it than I would walk out of the house without my pants on!