- Vision
Those who achieve any kind of big ongoing success in any industry always have a vision for their business. Now I don’t give you this success strategy with the intention of you closing your eyes and dreaming about the future. No. This is not just about goal setting either. This is about starting out and coming to work each and every day with a focus on achieving a vision for your business and life.
Top brokers always have a vision that is bigger than just them. They have a vision of a business, not just a job working from their spare bedroom in their spare time. The reason top brokers are where they are, is because they set out in this industry with a bigger vision than most. Most mortgage brokers see this industry as a way to quit their day job and work the flexible (often part-time) hours they want – they treat it like a hobby. Top brokers recognise the huge opportunity this industry can provide and they set out with serious “all or nothing” intentions.
If you want to become a top performing broker, you need to have a top performing vision. Have a vision of creating a serious business, hiring support staff and brokers, working from a real office, and working the fulltime hours it takes to get to the top.
Even if you don’t want to build a huge business with multiple staff, in order to succeed in this industry you still need to treat it seriously and not like a hobby or part-time job. So whatever your plans or goals for the industry are, create a vision, and the bigger and more challenging that vision is the more excited you’ll be and the harder you’ll work to achieve it.
- Persistence
Thomas Edison is said to have made over 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb.
James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes over 5-years attempting to create the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner.
Colonel Sanders was rejected 1,009 times before a restaurant finally accepted and sold his fried chicken. He was broke at the age of 65 before starting KFC, growing it to over 600 franchises.
I could give you hundreds of other examples of persistence paying off, but you get the idea. Unsuccessful people give up when something doesn’t work the first time, they give up at the first challenge or hurdle. Success and becoming a top broker is about persistence. Let me give you a few places you need to be more persistent:
- Leads
Most mortgage brokers give up way too early when working on new leads and referrals. Many get a new lead, call that lead once and then wait, assuming the lead will call them back. It doesn’t always work like that. Persistence pays off when it comes to working on prospects and leads; oftentimes it can take 3, 5, 10, 20 or more contacts before that prospect is ready to move to the next stage with you.
They say in sales most professionals give up after 3 contacts, but the average number of times needed to get a new client is 7 to 13 contacts. Something so simple as continuing to follow-up prospects can have a huge impact on your business.
- Referral Partners
Professional relationships can take many months or even years to forge, yet most mortgage brokers either try to rush things, or they try to build partnerships and when things get difficult or they don’t get immediate results, they give up.
In my business banking days working for a big bank, my sales manager at the time had spent two years getting to know a particular professional (I think it was an accountant), catching up regularly and continuing to put himself in front of this person asking for the opportunity to quote on the next major lending transaction for a particular set of high-end clients. Eventually, after two years of building this relationship, my manager got the opportunity to put together a proposal for a $15-million lending transaction. He won the business, and this solidified a relationship that resulted in over $100-million worth of lending over the next 12-months. His persistence paid off.
- Marketing
Getting a marketing and lead generation campaign to be successful requires persistence. It requires you to follow a formula, test it out, measure results, and tweak to improve until you get results and positive return on investment.
Most mortgage brokers either do zero marketing and lead generation, or they try something once and when it doesn’t work immediately they quit. Top brokers continue to invest and work on their marketing. They understand a successful marketing formula takes time to get right, it takes persistence.
If you want to succeed in the mortgage industry, you need to embrace persistence. If business was easy and everything worked the first time, everyone would be successful, everyone would be a top performing broker. In reality, it’s those who persist over the long-run who ultimately come out on top.