What's Holding You Back?

"Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone." - Robert Allen

"To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can." - Og Mandino

"Do not listen to those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious." - Og Mandino

Why Don’t You Sell More?

Virtually every sales manager or business owner has asked themselves, "Why can't my salespeople spend more time selling?" Every loan officer asks themselves constantly, "What can I do to create more loans?" Regardless of how many times the questions are they seem to evade worthwhile answers. Many ponder this issue very seriously as many believe the lack of consistent prospecting by their sales organization is most damaging issue facing their company. Failure to produce consistent, desirable sales results takes its toll not only on profits but on  employee morale as well.

It's time for us to study why selling or the lack thereof is such a problem and create some tools that will help us overcome our shortcomings in creating more sales. While all of us ask why can't we sell more, few of us truly understand why this is a problem for us or how to solve it.

Two elements have contributed tremendously to a lack of confidence in selling mortgages. They are:

1. Fear of the unexpected or fearing the worse

2. Anxiety of not having systems in place to minimize transactional friction

Fear - Caused by not getting a deal

Imagine having a crystal ball that would show you the result of your sales calls before you made them. Don't you think that you would have the utmost confidence to make those sales calls in which you excelled and cancel the appointments that were not successful. Well, you can choose to believe it or not such a crystal ball is available to you!

However, before we go there let's look at two major stumbling blocks in selling. Most of you want to have instant results. Your prospecting experience has produced different results than you had hoped for. Most of us take this disappointment and internalize it as some kind of personal failure. This thinking process is not based in reality and only occurs because a sales person has confused external validation by a potential referral partner or borrower with personal worth.

Solution: You must psychologically reframe your expectation of prospecting and instead of being the "rejectee" you must start to think of yourself as the "rejector". Understand that the sales process contains many steps and that an inconsistency between the way you do business and what another party desires has no implications as to your personal worth.

Many other loan officers feel that they lack the knowledge or skills to effectively sell and therefore they hold themselves back awaiting the proper time to launch their massive promotional efforts confident of their knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, these same loan officers do little to perfect the resources that they feel are necessary to sell. True, most mortgage companies don’t offer proper training or coaching on the importance of prospecting, how to develop a prospecting plan, improving personal effectiveness, creative visioning or developing a template of ideal clients. These are things that you must do yourself!

Solution: Develop a personal culture and philosophy of continuous, never ending improvement and invest the time and money to make that a reality. Acknowledge that the industry is broad and that it is impossible to know everything. Don't be like the borrower who is in search of the Holy Grail, the lowest possible rate. Things are constantly in flux, it is impossible for you to gain a total understanding of the mortgage industry.

So, what is this this crystal ball that will help you gain the confidence of actively seeking out more loan business than ever before. You will have it in a minute but first you need to understand that I believe firmly in the scientific method. For those for you that have forgotten, the scientific method says the research begins by making a hypothesis and then designs experimental study to test the hypothesis. These tests must be repeatable in order to predict dependably any future results. Here are the steps to the process:

If you conduct an experiment time and time again, the results will be the same assuming you performed it the same way every time (that is to say that you exercised control over all variables). Our crystal ball says that if you replicate the successful marketing efforts made by other loan officers you will get similar results. In other words, if you recreate what has worked in the past exactly the way it was done before you will also have success. 

As loan officers you should know that there is a wealth of information available to show you how certain marketing efforts will perform. We all realize that taking rate sheets to real estate agents is not an effective way to market but not every method creates the same results. I absolutely guarantee you success if you create an entirely different mind set and design a sales methodology that stresses the more complex value of the relationship beyond the more simplistic value of a single transaction.

Stop right now asking for business and referrals when you done nothing that justifies that request. After all, most referral sources have some financial elements at risk in giving you business and all of them jeopardize their reputation with what you do with a borrower's loan file. Starting this week implement a strategy that concentrates on providing value to your referral partners and concentrates more on helping them succeed instead of simply wanting something for yourself.

If your sales efforts are all about getting a loan and you don't get one then every sales call that doesn't result in a lead is considered by you to be a failure. Once you change your thinking and consider sales calls as your effort to help build a relationship by helping someone else succeed, every sales call that ends with a "Thank you" is a success!

Fear - Caused by getting a deal

There is no crystal ball when it comes to systems to process incoming loans. It is as simple as the systems you have available good enough to get the job done or your systems are more likely to fail. To the degree that you are uncertain as to how good your systems are you adding to your anxiety and discouraging you internally from going out to cultivate more business.

Well known is that ebb and flow tide that accompanies the sales behavior of so many loan officers. One month selling, one month processing and then it takes one month to recover! If you find yourself in the position that each time you bring in a loan it creates problems for you, you are probably not too likely to want to go market for more loans. These additional loans complicate your life to the point where your frustrations exceed the economic benefit of getting new business.

Most sales people do not have strong natural organizational and process skills. You probably tend to “cock and fire” instead of taking time to develop plans, organize, schedule and execute. You probably don't want to play a major role in seeing a loan go from origination to closing. In fact, these tasks might be those that you enjoy the least but find yourself buried in because your processing system isn't getting the job done right.

If this sound familiar, you must contemplate ways to improve getting a loan from origination to closing to free your resources from the shackles of processing so you can have the confidence and resources to sell more. In most cases, this means having qualified parties you can trust to get the processing done. If your company lacks the talent to get your loans processed, you must find it and cultivate it yourself. This might mean going to your manager and finding out what can be done to hire the right personnel or it might mean going somewhere else to work.

Other Factors

You are not holding yourself accountable. Most mortgage companies have not developed an effective process that holds you accountable to do the marketing necessary to succeed. They don’t know how or are too busy or disinterested to provide the proper coaching and supervision needed by their sales people. You must accept a personal directive to study, learn and implement ideas that can help you analyze your effort and measure your success.

Part of making yourself accountable is setting clearly defined, personally compelling goals. All the other things pale in comparison to this one. The person who has a passionate goal will not be side tracked by rejection, will not need to be held accountable and will succeed in spite of a lack of organizational skills or knowledge.

A sales person who is passionate, focused and committed will go out and beat on enough doors until they make it happen. More than anything else when you see call reluctance on a sales person’s part it’s because they’re not passionate about going to the next level or achieving the next goal. They have somehow gotten comfortable with the results that their current behavior is producing for them. And as long as they’re satisfied with the results of their current prospecting activities and can live off of the income that’s generated from those activities they won’t increase their prospecting behaviors.

Thanks for Attending!