To be successful in this business, as with any business I can think of, you need to be a great marketer of what you do, even more than you need to be great at the service or product that your business provides.
I am not saying don’t put a lot of effort into providing a great service to your clients, you definitely should, I’m just saying that as per the four components you need to master to have a successful business, if you don’t get past the Initial Marketing stage you will never get them into the Sales stage, and they will never have a chance to see how good the Operational side of your business is, and finally they will never have a chance to come back to you and refer their friends to you, encouraged by your Post Sales Marketing system.
The good news is that the better your Initial Marketing is, the easier your Sales are. The easier your Sales, the more clients you will have. The more clients you have, the better you can refine your Operational processes (helping your clients get a good home loan). In turn, the better your Operations are the more satisfied clients you will produce, making them more responsive to your Post Sales Marketing and the more worthwhile it becomes to invest in Post Sales Marketing with a larger, more loyal client base.
The marketing systems I use today, are much more sophisticated, and in turn have taken time, effort, expense and expertise to build. The benefit of this is that it is a much higher hurdle for other Brokers to copy. I can however apply them to other broking groups who don’t wish to try and create them from scratch.
The simple version of these systems involves giving prospective clients something of value, ideally, but not necessarily related to the service you provide. You do this to make a strong positive impression, make yourself relevant to their needs, and get permission to keep in touch with them. Then you need to assume that they aren’t interested in a new home loan right now – if they are, fine, but most won’t be. And that is okay, because we want time to build familiarity and trust with them. So you also need to have an automatic follow-up process that keeps in touch with them in a meaningful way that is of value to them, so they remain engaged with you and allow you to build trust with them for when they are interested in a home loan.
At this point, you are miles ahead of the Broker with his ‘Trust me, I’m a Broker with a lot of loans’ advertisement. I call that the standard type of advertising, or ‘business card’ advertising because their marketing is really just displaying what they do and how to contact them, like a business card.