“if people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.” – Zig Ziglar
When taking your clients through the four systems of your business – Initial Marketing, Sales, Operations and Post Sales Marketing — what you are doing is proposing, building, proving and maintaining trust. That is the goal of each step.
Before we dig into how to best complete each step with a prospective client we should first become clear on what we are trying to achieve.
Each step is designed to move people to trust you as their best option for this home loan and for their next home loan.
Overall, I see Mortgage Broking as just a ‘trust exercise’ comprising four main stages with these goals:
- Initial Marketing — Getting an understanding of you and what you do out to your target market in a way that makes them consider trusting you so they contact you over all the other possible choices they have.
- Sales — Getting people to agree to trust you to help them with their loans and laying the groundwork to become their Trusted Advisor, not just their Mortgage Broker.
- Operations — Showing your client they were right to trust you and continuing to work towards Trusted Advisor status.
- Post Sales Marketing — Reminding your client that they and their friends should also trust you at relevant times in the future.
In getting people to trust you, what you are doing is giving people a promise and then delivering on that promise. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, your brand is a promise to your customer.
So another way of looking at the four components of your Mortgage Broking business are:
- Initial Marketing — ‘I promise if you call me I will work in your best interests and be a great Mortgage Broker for you.’
- Sales — ‘Do you accept my promise?’
- Operations — ‘See, I’m keeping my promise.’
- Post Sales Marketing — ‘Don’t forget, I kept my promise and I promise to do the same next time for you or anyone you recommend to me.’
If, in the eyes of your clients, you fail to keep your promise at any stage you will lose some or all of the trust that you have built up. You might manage to salvage this particular loan, but it will be harder to win their business again. You will fall into the ‘same as everyone else who promises and doesn’t deliver’ category. Unless of course they are so jaded they have an even lower level of trust in every other lender or Broker they could use and take a ‘better the devil you know’ approach – but it’s not a winning strategy to be mediocre and hope everyone else is aiming low.
As I’ve said before, what you are trying to sell is yourself. What you are trying to get your client to buy is trust in you.