Does your message fit the medium?

It’s not what you say, but how you say it.

It’s true in relationships, and it’s true in business. Josh Friend, Founder and CEO of Insellerate, and Dave Vermillion, Founder and CEO of Mortgage Champions, explain in a webinar that how you communicate matters, and explain the best ways for communicating in a variety of mediums.

Borrowers want to communicate through many channels, including phone, email, SMS, and face-to-face interactions. You not only need to look at the ways in which you are equipped to transact with customers, but also look at your communication strategies for each channel and make sure they’re correct for that particular medium.

One of the biggest marketing mistakes that Friend and Vermillion see people make is trying to make a sale or pitch a product in an email.

“What you’re trying to do inside your automated product is bring awareness, stay in front of your customer, and give them value, whatever that may be,” Friend said.

Email lacks immediacy, so rather than trying to sell a product via email, Friend said that automated emails and drip campaigns are best used as a tool to build your brand and convey a message, keeping you top of mind for clients.

Face-to-face communication and telephone communication, although seen as somewhat old-fashioned, are really the best ways to engage in a deep and meaningful way with your clients. Listen to your loan officers on the phone and really think about whether or not they’re effective in doing this. In-person and phone communication are the best ways to build rapport, as well as the ideal places for presentations, explaining products to the client and answering questions. Reading body language and hearing a client’s tone is something that can only be done through these modes of communication, and can be just as valuable as words with it comes to building relationships.

Text message has become the most widely read and responded to way of communication. According to a Shift Communications survey, 82% of respondents read every text message that they receive, and various sources have cited that most texts are read within minutes. Friend said that the ideal use of text messaging is to communicate quickly so that you can speed up the transaction and get loans closed faster. A bonus? They’re also an efficient way to get in touch with clients with whom you’ve lost touch.

“Making sure you have multiple forms of communication and you’re good at all of them is absolutely critical,” Vermillion said. And, he adds, being good at them means knowing when to say what you want to say.

“If I find a single, universal mistake . . . It is notorious for salespeople in our business to overspeak, use way too many words, and give way too much information,” he said. Obviously you want to stay within the legal boundaries and provide necessary disclosures at the appropriate time, but you’ll never get there if you bombard the customer with too much information upfront.

Get the point quickly that your customer wants to hear, and be as concise as you can be. Thirty second voicemails, three sentence emails, single action text messages. Everybody’s busy, everybody’s got access to a lot of communication, and there’s a lot of solicitation that happens in the business.

“What consumers tend to lean toward, is those who are short, sweet, and to the point, and the key is, build that around your value proposition, your product strength, and your service strengths,” Vermillion said.

Be brief and powerful, and then once you initiate that customer either on a call or in a one-on-one environment, that is the time that you want to get stuck into the nitty gritty, getting to know the customer as much as you can, understanding their needs, and then 

“You can’t solve what you don’t understand, and you can’t understand if you don’t spend time,” Vermillion said.

Understand how to be diverse. Spend time where it counts, and tailor your communication strategy to ensure that it’s most powerful on the most appropriate platform.

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