Secret #1: They understand that their primary role is the marketing of their mortgage services, not necessarily the delivery of their services.
Most mortgage professionals have it absolutely backwards! They believe that they need to be the most technically adept with the best underwriting skills, product knowledge and customer service in order to be successful. While all of those skills are nice to have, they certainly aren't critical to your success. In fact, most successful mortgage professionals are quite mediocre in their technical knowledge and abilities. However, they are extremely good marketers. And if you're an excellent marketer, you have the power to attract clients at will and, therefore, you have funds to hire a team to help you with the customer service. On the flip side, without clients, you are out of business!
You see, a lot of mortgage professionals think that their business is like the movie Field of Dreams when Kevin Costner says, "If we build it, they will come." While that may be true in Hollywood, in the mortgage industry nothing could be further from the truth. If you hadn't noticed by now, if you build it, they will NOT come -- unless you have effective marketing! It doesn't matter how good you are at what you do, if you don't know how to attract clients you’ll be the best-kept secret around.
And another point to remember is that good marketing covers many sins. If you are a great marketer and you have the ability to bring in clients, even if you’re a mediocre underwriter you can still have a very successful business.
Take Microsoft for instance. When they first came out with their software it was somewhat buggy and it wasn’t a great product. Some of you Mac users would say things haven't changed much! But here's the point: because of Microsoft's marketing, they were able to overcome those initial technical glitches and still become the dominant market leader today. Now I am not suggesting it’s OK to be mediocre, I'm simply pointing out that marketing your services is far more important than how good you are at the technical stuff. In fact, you’ll have a lot more clients to practice on to get good at the technical stuff, if you are a great marketer!
You know I always like to remind my clients that they need to work ON their business not just IN their business. When you work on your business, you work at things like getting new clients, and developing and establishing processes, procedures and systems that allow your marketing and operations to run on autopilot. When you work in your business, you get mired down into the details of the day-to-day minutia and you never engage in the high-leverage activities that actually grow your business.
So the very 1st Secret of Superstar Mortgage Brokers and Loan Officers is that they understand that their primary business objective is the marketing of their mortgage services, not necessarily the delivery of their services.
In next month’s 2nd secret, I’ll teach you one of the critical keys in attracting potential clients to come to you (rather than you begging them for their business). Stay tuned...
