“I Want It All. And I Want It Delivered.”
Dan Kennedy
When you have taken the time to really understand your client’s situation, what you need to be doing to provide a great sales experience is to focus your service on your client’s laziness and impatience.
If you can successfully do that, you will have gone a very long way to having a happy client, which is a necessary basis for cultivating a lifetime client. As a Mortgage Broker, that means always trying to make things easier for your clients in a way that gets them what they want faster.
I believe that laziness and impatience are the hallmarks of the modern consumer. When I want something, I want getting it to be made easy for me and I want it to happen quickly. People expect transactions to be easy.
One of the biggest hurdles we have when getting our clients to do loans with us, particularly refinances, are that people see it as a hassle. Filling out forms, digging through paperwork, changing our direct debits, it’s all a pain. All
Brokers know that almost every homeowner could save money through our services far beyond the effort they put into it, but still they sit on their hands and keep paying more than they have to.
Whatever we can do to make things easier for our clients is going to be of benefit to us and them.
Amazon is a company that is a great example of the value of making it easy for people to buy. Their whole business is about bringing shopping for pretty much anything you want into a single place with a single interface. They store your credit card details so you just need to click a few buttons to buy. In fact, they even have a ‘Buy now with One Click’ button because they know that the more someone has to do, even something as simple as clicking a few times on their mouse or tapping a few times on their tablet’s screen, the more likely they are to drop out of the purchase.
Similarly, Amazon pioneered the concept of e-books with their Amazon Kindle device. Now buying a book doesn’t require visiting a bookstore or ordering it and waiting days for it to arrive. I can browse books and get what I want on my device in minutes. One click and I get it immediately. Amazon has monetised my laziness and impatience for their benefit.
Apple is much the same. They have made it so the users of their devices are now trapped in their ‘ecosystem’. They have my credit card details stored so all I need to do to buy a new game or application is to press a couple of buttons. In the past I had to type in a password but now I just press the fingerprint ID on my phone to confirm my identity. If I want to switch to an Android or Microsoft device, I’ll need to search for and repurchase all the applications I had Apple versions of. Apple has their iTunes software installed on my computer and if I switch devices I will lose the movies and TV shows that I bought through them.
All too much of a hassle, so I’ll stick with Apple. No wonder they are the most valuable company in history.
Uber is another. They have simply looked at what is difficult in the taxi industry and removed or streamlined it. When using Uber, I no longer need to take the time to pay the driver when I get out, its done automatically. I can see how far away the driver is from picking me up so I’m not having to impatiently watch out the front window for them. The end result is that a company that doesn’t own any cars or employ any drivers is the largest taxi company in the world.
Making it fast, simple and easy to transact will invariably increase the level of new and repeat purchases any business will do. Objectively analyse your service by looking at what you make your clients do that they don’t have to, then do it for them.