The best way to sell yourself to someone in both business and in life is to take a genuine interest in them. When you sit down to have a cup of coffee with someone, you ask questions to get to know them. Hopefully, you find some common ground, and it is from there that the relationship begins to grow. The same thing happens in the first phone call with an enquirer. The moment that you find a point of commonality with the enquirer, you have begun to pull them closer to you, and that is the beginning of a productive relationship.
Many brokers do get around to being interested in the person they are dealing with, but they wait until they have already begun a business transaction to become interested in the client as a person. Their presentation is upside down.
Ultimately, if you want to book an appointment with someone, you need an invitation into their home. Our work is unique in that we have to get a glimpse of a person’s innermost life to do business with them. We have to go into their homes at seven o’clock when they are making dinner, getting kids ready for school the next day, and probably cleaning the house because they have a stranger sitting on their sofa. Before we are allowed into such a personal environment, we probably want to leave the client with the impression that we were genuinely interested in their situation on the phone. If we make the front end of the phone call mainly about gathering financial information from the client, we essentially tell the client that I am interested in you as a business transaction more than as a person. If we show genuine interest in the client and put across the message that it will not be too difficult to get the loan across given the particulars of their situation, they are highly likely to want to establish a relationship with us.
It does not take much time to bring the client closer to you. Two or three minutes of casual conversation is enough to impress upon a client that you are truly interested in their situation. If we do this at the beginning of a call, rather than the end, we pull a client toward us before asking them to put their confidence into us. Flipping the order of our presentation in this way allows us to establish a common vantage point with the client from which to oversee the rest of the process together.
About Mark Blundell
Mark Blundell is a specialist coach mentor and strategist to mortgage brokers. He has coached and mentored Mortgage Brokers for the past 20 years helping many to become some of the highest producers in their aggregation group. Mark shows brokers the best ways of pitching their services to potential clients and referrers. He develops email templates and telephone scripts that produce outstanding results for brokers. The brokers who use his unique strategy of client engagement consistently have the highest conversion rate in the industry. His ideas and strategies are practical and simple to implement. He believes in working within the confines of a brokers’ comfort zone and tailors processes that blend well within the persona of the broker he is working with.
The above is a chapter from Mark Blundell’s own book, ‘Mortgage Broking 101’. If you would like to get a full copy of his book, contact Mark directly at mark@ markblundell.com.au or call him on 0415 723 723.