Laziness — if you can do it for them, do it for them
When I refer to laziness I don’t mean your clients can’t be bothered to get off the couch (unlike my furry friend in the picture below). What I mean is that they have other priorities and prefer someone else to handle the annoying matters that are standing between them and their new home – like applying for a home loan.
According to the ‘Consumers on Brokers’ survey in the Mortgage Professional Australia Magazine (May 2015), the most popular reason for using a Mortgage Broker was ‘Help with the application’ (38% of respondents), whilst only 25% of people stated it was to get ‘the cheapest interest rate’. The most popular combination of responses as to why someone used a Broker was ‘Help with the application’ and ‘get the cheapest interest rate’.
What this tells me is that most people who decide to go to a Mortgage Broker are doing it because they believe it is an easier way of getting a good loan than doing it all themselves. Most people consider themselves very capable of getting their own home loan and of finding a cheap rate, but they are aware of the time and effort involved with researching and comparing lenders, completing application forms properly and chasing up the bank. It is simply easier to get someone to bring it all to them and handle all the paperwork.
Of course, some people think it is easier to walk into their own bank branch and get a loan, or have a bank’s mobile lender come to them. In this case, the client is trading off the benefits of a Broker, who has dozens of lenders to offer, against the perceived simplicity and trust they have with their local bank branch. Whether they are right or wrong doesn’t matter, but almost half of people seem to think so given the proportion of borrowers who choose the bank directly over a Broker.
As Brokers we need to understand that we must stress to our clients that our job is to make this whole process of getting their loan and buying their new home (or whatever they are borrowing for) as easy as possible for them. Then we need to deliver on that. Anything that you make your clients do that you could have done for them is what you are trying to avoid. Have a good hard look at your process and move as much as you can from the column of ‘what the client does’ into the column of ‘what you do.’
If your clients finish the loan process and feels like they had to do more than they were expecting, you’re in trouble. They need to come out of it thinking it was easier than they expected, which is only going to make it more likely they do future loans with you.
And once they have done their first loan with you, you can let them know that because you now have a lot of their information in your systems, it will be even easier next time because it will just be a case of updating their details, not collecting it all from scratch. This by the way, means making proper notes in your CRM so when you do speak to them next you are fully on top of their circumstances and can talk to them meaningfully without making them tell you about themselves all over again, something I’ll talk about more in the chapters on Post Sales Marketing.