Online origination: The art of being 'sticky'

By Adam Stein
Special to MPA

Editor's note: Over the next few weeks, we'll be running expert online origination advice from Adam Stein, CEO of LoanTek.

‘Stickiness’ can be defined as the art of keeping your customer engaged at each stage of the sales cycle. When accomplished, ‘stickiness’ increases sales conversion ratios and differentiates your offering from those of your competitors. The object herein is to keep the customer ‘stuck’ to you via your messaging. To do so your messaging needs to reflect the customer’s stage in the transaction cycle and contain messaging that induces them to move to the next stage of the cycle. As an example, proper messaging could induce a customer to move from ‘qualified‘ to ‘in processing’.

Failure to engage leads and referrals in this fashion, however, causes pipeline ‘fall out’ and a lender’s closing ratios will suffer as a result.
To ensure that your consumers are moving optimally through each stage of the sales cycle (Pre-Contact, Contact, Pre-Qualified, In Processing, and Closed) you will want to employ the use of a CRM. To differentiate yourself from your competitors you’ll want to use a CRM solution that offers validation as noted in the prior section and measures your consumers engagement(Online Mortgage Origination Part II: - Today’s Online Value Proposition).

Four considerations to effect a 'sticky' CRM

• Timeliness
• Relativity
• Validation
• Call to Action

Ask yourself this question: How often do I receive email, even from a known service provider, that goes directly to my deleted or spam folder? The object of this section is to ‘not to be like those senders’! By creating timely messaging that is relative to your clients request and stage in the transaction you can validate their concerns, answer questions and, by doing so, induce them to complete your call to action. Check back next time when we look at these four considerations more closely.

Adam Stein is the CEO of LoanTek.