“if you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.” – Bob Hooey
Your Post Sales Marketing is the final part of your systematic approach to earning customers for life. It began with your powerful educational initial marketing that positioned you as an expert Mortgage Broker, which was followed by a sales process and delivery of your service that laid the foundation for your status as your client’s Trusted Advisor.
As the Mortgage Broking industry matures it is becoming more and more expensive to acquire new customers. It is only going to become more prevalent that large real estate chains, accounting, building and financial planning firms will create their own in-house Mortgage Broking divisions to work off their existing client bases. Attracting new customers typically costs several times as much as keeping an existing one and the probability of selling to an existing client is much higher than selling to a brand new prospect.
There are only three possible reasons you can lose a client:
- They die, move away or otherwise or are no longer potential borrowers for us.
- They are unhappy with the loan we gave them.
- They are unhappy with the way that they are treated.
General statistics across all industries suggest that of the clients any business loses this year, around 5% to 10% of them will be in the first category. Nothing much you can do about them. It does however mean we need to make sure we take the effort to bring young clients into our business so this percentage doesn’t grow too large over time.
Between 15% and 30% of people will fall into the second category. This may not be completely within your control and you gave them the best loan you could that they qualified for, but in any case, your client feels you didn’t do the best job you could have and they don’t come back to you next time around.
All the remaining drop-off in a Broker’s client base, roughly 60% to 80% of your lost clients, occurs because of a poor attitude or indifference on the part of the service provider. The majority of customers leave businesses because of neglect, feeling unappreciated, unimportant, or taken for granted.
According to Dan Kennedy, “Sixty-eight percent switch because of what they perceive and describe as indifference from the merchant or someone in the merchant’s organization.”
Any client that doesn’t do their next loan with you is a client you have lost, and the majority of clients you lose are because the client feels you don’t care
about them or have forgotten about them. As a bare minimum, having a basic Post Sales Marketing System means reminding your clients that you do care about them and want to help them in the future. Without at least that, and hopefully a lot more, you will be building your business the hard way and be forever chasing the next new client.