“The astute business owner understands that the purpose of a sale is to generate a customer. The lousy business owner thinks that the purpose of a customer is to generate a sale. One lasts much longer and has much more fun than the other.” – Dan Kennedy
Mortgage Brokers that are only focused on the next commission are missing out on a lot of money.
Most businesses try and get customers to make sales. Instead you should be trying to make sales to get customers. Doing the first gets you short term income. Doing the second provides long term income and growth in the value of your business. Most Brokers think only about the next loan they will get paid for. The ones that become truly successful for the long term think about their past clients.
Now that we have gone to all the effort of getting a client and doing a great job for them, we want to make sure we have our post-sales marketing systems working for us to achieve their potential lifetime value for us. The first loan you do for a client is just the beginning and is just a small percentage of their lifetime value to us, and our lifetime value to them. It is your post-sales marketing system that will unlock this value for you both.
To be clear, there are four practical things we want to achieve through our post-sales marketing.
1) Minimise Clawbacks
We all hate getting clawbacks. Some of them are of course unavoidable and occur due to unforeseen circumstances. By ensuring the lines of communication are open between you and your client you can at least minimise them or give yourself a chance to handle them. Your post-sales marketing should educate your client that if they are doing anything significant with their home or their loan they should be speaking to you first.
No one likes that clawback feeling.
There may be ways for you to manage the situation that avoids the clawback or instead results in a new loan that at least minimises its financial impact on you. If a client decides they need to increase their loan and goes to another Broker, you are going to get a clawback, whereas you might have been able to keep them with the same lender or switch them yourselves if that was appropriate. Perhaps the client decides to sell quickly and buy again elsewhere, but has forgotten about you and so he goes with a Broker recommended by his new real estate agent.
Your post sales marketing in the months after the loan is done should be confirming and reconfirming that whilst the loan has settled, you are there to help with any problems they may have with the goal simply to protect the sale you have made. A clear measure of your relationship with your clients and how well you have educated them to come to you about anything affecting their loan is that it should be a rare event that a clawback happens that you didn’t see coming.
A common complaint clients have about their Broker is that they didn’t hear from them after settlement, so if you genuinely want to differentiate yourself on your service, this is an easy way to do so. If your clients feel that since you have been paid they never hear from you, it will diminish the relationship you’ve been trying to build and move them back to a transactional view of you. Rather, take the time to check up on them after the deal has been done and people will appreciate that you are ensuring everything is okay at a time when they weren’t expecting anything more from you.