I’ll never forget losing a client to the Commonwealth Bank and now I can make sure it never happens again.
In my early months of broking I had a client who wanted to do a $530,000 refinance. In Perth, back in 2000, that was a big home loan, certainly the biggest I had done. A $2,968 commission to me was huge.
They were an existing CBA customer for their banking and were happy when I went through the options to refinance their current home loan to the CBA (CBA broker loans were under their Colonial brand back then).
Unfortunately, my client happened to mention at the CBA branch that they were refinancing their home loan to them and the branch scrambled to get them to do their loan with them directly.
They argued that ‘it wasn’t a real CBA loan’ and that it must cost more or be ‘different’.
MY CBA BDM confirmed to me that my Colonial branded loan was exactly the same as the CBA’s branch loan. In the end though, my client believed that it must be cheaper or easier to go direct to the bank and went through them.
For a young broker working on their own, it was very painful and disappointing.
Looking back, my problem was that I had no genuine reason as to why the client should choose me over doing their loan with the branch. We’ve all been there – many people assume a broker loan must somehow cost more because the broker is getting paid and the banks play up to that idea.
The problem is, if you have no obvious point of difference compared to the bank or another broker, you are relying on luck and your winning personality.
But I don’t need to worry about that anymore and neither do the brokers who use ‘The 7 Easy Steps to Mortgage Freedom’ properly.
When a broker uses my book they lay out the foundation for the real benefit they are going to provide.
Yes, it starts with getting them the right loan today, just like with any broker.
But then its our responsibility to ‘take over their loans’ so they don’t have to worry about them. We will review them every year and make sure the bank has passed on all the rate cuts they should have and that their loan is still competitive. We will find out if they are eligible for any special or better deals as their LVR drops. We will set up their loan properly as described in the book.
Long story short, we will help them implement these ‘7 Steps’ so they can become mortgage free, faster and easier. And we build our service around it.
Their bank isn’t going to do that for them, the other broker might plan to do that, but even if they try, our books is going to show we are the real deal, not them.
You will hugely reduce the number of deals you lose to competitors by having a tangible and obvious point of difference.