“A great question to ask is simply ‘What is the biggest issue your business is facing right now?'”
Mark Blundell
This means making the effort to understand their business — not having a ‘one-size-fits-all’ view of all accountants or real estate agents or whoever it is you are speaking to. Instead you must be prepared to adapt to what they need. Only then can you provide them with whatever is of value to them that clearly proves you understand their business needs and makes you someone they want to look after in return.
Those resources may be educational; they may be marketing items they can use to get more clients or it may be clients you refer to them.
Then you need to have a plan for staying in touch. You need to provide ongoing value to them to meet the needs you have identified, whilst also educating them on how your home loan services are going to help their business and their clients. If you keep it going, the basis for an effective relationship that actually delivers referrals has been created.
None of this is easy, it requires an investment of time to create the educational resources and systems to deliver this marketing process. But the end result is a considerable leveraging of your time and far more clients and referrers who want to use your services. Unfortunately, most Brokers take the easy path and keep trying for one-touch sales with both clients and referrers, meaning they miss out on many opportunities.
One of the biggest mistakes Brokers make is not having an educational system to drop clients into who aren’t ready to act right now. Sure, once in a while you will meet someone who just wants to get a loan right now and you are in the right place at the right time.
But more often, people haven’t even considered they want a loan yet, or worse, they have just gotten one from some other Broker. What we want to do is to get in front of them before they even know they need us, then give them as much time as they need to build trust with us by providing them valuable information and resources.
A good understanding and implementation of these principles is what I believe separates the top Brokers from the rest.
Something I will finish on is that in the past Mortgage Brokers have relied heavily on real estate agents to refer their home buyers to them. However, over the years I have seen that home buyers have been educated more and more to get their finances organised before they go house hunting. As such it is becoming more and more important for a Broker to be in control of their own marketing in the ways I’ve described in this post, by drawing people into their circle of influence and becoming seen as the expert before they are thinking of buying their next home, because when they are you are probably too late.
The advantage also, as I’ll detail in the later post on creating professional referral relationships, is that if you are preparing the finance of clients who are about to buy or sell, you can refer these clients onto a trusted real estate agent in return for them referring their clients back to you. By far, that is the strongest referral relationship you can create.
One of the key services provided by Mortgage Australia is the we have built and tested a complete Educational marketing system. Starting with our book, the 7 Easy Steps to Mortgage Freedom as one of our free giveaway items to prospective clients (along with a number of other free reports and guides) to bring them into our circle of influence and get permission to provide them regular educational updates.
Similarly, our automatic follow-up system segments them into 5 categories – First Home Buyer, Home Owner, Thinking of Selling their Home, Property Investor and General (if we can’t categorise them), then the person receives personalised emails from the Broker who gave them the book specific to their category. So First Home Buyers get information relevant to them, and Property Investors get information they care about.
We also co-brand the book with potential referral partners and have content in it specific to different industry types, making it their lead generation tool as well – but only if they refer their clients to us.