One of the underlying principles of my book, Mortgage Broking: Lead Generation and Sales Mastery is creating a marketing advantage, and its important to understand that just a small marketing advantage can have a major effect on lead generation.

Improving your marketing by 10% might improve your loan volumes by 100% or more, and below I explain why.

The reality is, your clients don’t really know how to genuinely choose one broker over another. We are all telling them we are the best and will give them a great outcome.

If I am trying to choose between the half dozen mechanics in my area to service my car, I can not know who will do a better job without doing some serious investigating. Even if I do put in the necessary amount of time and effort, can I ever really be sure of my decision? All I can really go off is my external view of their business.

No matter who I choose, its a risk. No matter how good their operation looks, I might end up with a dodgy mechanic who does a poor job, perhaps he fixes things that don’t need fixing and overcharges me. I’m not a professional mechanic, I’m not qualified to properly compare them, I’m just trying to find someone I can trust knows what he is doing and is honest.

Just like me, what you clients are looking for is a tangible reason to choose you over someone else. Something the other business can’t promote about themselves.

In a typical situation a client might have two local mortgage brokers to choose from, and they both seem quite similar from the client’s perspective. As far as they can tell you both look professional and reputable, have plenty of lenders and promise a great service, but there is nothing clearly separating you in their eyes.

Its really a toss-up as to who they will choose.

This is the classic marketing problem and it absolutely plagues all Mortgage Brokers. 

But, all else being equal, if one broker can obviously demonstrate a clear difference to the other broker from the client’s perspective – one broker goes from getting 50% of the clients to getting almost all of the clients.

That is why in all forms of sales, and definitely in Mortgage Broking the 80/20 rule applies so strongly, with 80% of loans being written by 20% of brokers.

Creating that point of difference is beyond the scope of a single article, but it is something I discuss at length in Mortgage Broking: Lead Generation and Sales Mastery.