What do you stand for? Specialise in reality

“You can’t be everything to everyone but you can be something to someone.” – Drew Davis

One area where Brokers often try and differentiate themselves is to present themselves as a specialist in a certain area of lending. This is something that I agree with. Not to say that other Brokers can’t and won’t do it, but you can create a true advantage over an ‘I do everything’ Mortgage Broker in this way.

And no, I don’t mean putting this on the back on your business card:

This tells people you specialise in home loans and clients of every kind, which is not really specialising at all compared to every other Mortgage Broker.

As I see it, if you want to specialise then you have two choices.

1. Specialize in reality

“The key to branding, especially for smaller firms, is to focus on a limited number of issue areas and develop superb expertise in those areas.” – Philip Kotler

Someone who really specialises just does the loans in their category and refers anything outside of it to other Brokers, ideally to Brokers who themselves just specialise in the sort of loan you are referring out. Creating a network with other specialist Brokers is a great marketing strategy in itself and produces better client outcomes.

The benefit of this is that you can clearly define your target client and really focus your marketing. Your sales will also improve as you will also become better at knowing the concerns and issues of that sort of client and will thereby be better at attracting and working with them. You will also become better at the lending issues these clients face and the best products to manage this.

You don’t have to appeal to the mass market to be successful. The more you can become the go-to person in a niche market, the more valuable you are and the less meaningful competition you will have.

Clients will always prefer to work with someone who has handled a similar situation to theirs in the past, and the more times the better. When people read your client testimonials they are looking for an example that matches their situation, they want to see themselves. They want to be able to trust that you understand their situation and have the solutions to their problems.

The difficulty Brokers have with really specialising is that they hate turning away business that doesn’t fit their target market, which is particularly difficult in the early stages of any business.

Which leads to the next option …