Are you ready to transform your mortgage game to become a sales superstar?

As a consumer direct loan officer, it’s time to get a bit savvier to automate your sales processes like a pro so you can spend more time closing instead of doing busy work.

In this article, we’ll break down the sales process into easy-to-follow stages to leverage new mortgage technology tools to make your job easier. 

1. Define your sales process

This will be the step-by-step approach you’ll use to acquire and retain customers who are interested in obtaining a loan.

The sales process will involve a series of activities, such as prospecting, qualifying leads, educating your customers, and finally, closing the sale.

The typical sales process for loan officers includes:

• Prospecting for new customers and leads
• Lead generation 
• Mortgage marketing campaigns
• Gathering referrals and networking
• Qualifying leads
• Educating leads
• Applying and performing underwriting
• Closing the sale by finalizing documents and securing funds for the borrower

So how do you define your sales process? Let’s look at some tips. 

Identify your target market

To effectively sell mortgage loans, loan officers should identify their target market, whether it’s first-time homebuyers, investors, or people looking to refinance their current mortgage.

Understanding the customer’s pain points and financial situations will help tailor the sales approach and improve conversion rates.

Outline each stage of the process

The normal sales process for mortgages involves stages such as lead generation, pre-qualification, application, underwriting, and closing.

By defining each stage, you’ll identify the key activities and resources required, and the expectations for each stage. This will help you track progress so you can maximize success.

Establish clear goals and objectives

Be specific about the goals you set, whether it’s to generate 20 new leads each week, or to close 50% of proposals presented.

Develop a communication plan

Determine the best communication channels, whether it’s phone calls, emails, SMS, emails, video chats, or in-person meetings. You’ll likely use a combination of both.

Implement your follow-up strategy

Have a plan in place for following up with potential clients after initial meetings and calls, including other important milestones such as pre-qualification or underwriting.

Effective follow-up strategies will help you stay top-of-mind with potential borrowers and ultimately close more loans.

2. Understand your market and adopt a consultative selling approach

Adopting a consultative selling approach helps build trust and establish a relationship by offering personalized guidance in a non-pushy way that will retain leads longer.

To implement a more consultative selling approach, loan officers should take the following steps:

• Ask questions about their financial situations so you can offer guidance
• Listen actively to gain a deeper understanding of their needs to build trust
• Provide value by offering personalized guidance and advice tailored to their specific needs.
• Build relationships with clients rather than solely focusing on the sale. For example, follow up after meetings, or email them helpful blog posts or literature to maintain regular communication

When you adopt the consultative selling approach, you’ll improve your sales results and build strong, long-lasting relationships with clients that will lead to more family and friend referrals.

3. Choose the right mortgage CRM

Your customer relationship management (CRM) tool is your autopilot that guides you through your sales day. Most loan officers depend on their CRM for maximum efficiency to make sure they contact the right people day after day according to their place in the sales funnel.

Some factors to consider when choosing the right mortgage CRM:

• Integrational with other platforms, such as loan origination systems, email marketing platforms, and lead generation tools
• Customization to meet your unique needs, such as custom fields, workflows, and reports
• Lead management capabilities to prioritize leads, track follow-ups, and automate lead nurturing
• Marketing automation such as drip campaigns, landing page creation, and lead-scoring tools
• Reporting and analytics to show sales pipeline reports, conversion rates, and ROI analysis 

Below are our favorite mortgage CRMs:

• Salesforce
• Velocify
• SimpleNexus
• Jungo
• Surefire CRM

In addition to mortgage CRMs, some loan officers are maximizing their success with new AI tools such as ProPair, which uses machine learning to automatically distribute leads to their team based on lead qualities. This can save time and improve the efficiency of the sales process.

4. Automate lead generation

Loan officers will use a variety of methods to generate leads online, such as running social media, blogging, and revamping their mortgage website to attract new leads.

Many of these tasks are time-intensive, however, when they’re set up, they can begin running on their own to become 24/7 referral sources for new leads.

Let’s look at a few strategies to automate lead generation.

Optimize SEO for your mortgage website

Loan officers can use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner tool or Ahrefs to provide keyword research, tracking, and optimization to identify the specific language your borrowers are searching for online.

Using this information, you can begin blogging about specific scenarios and loan products that will be discovered in a Google search.

Create lead magnets such as free eBooks to get email addresses

Sometimes when people land on your website, they’re not ready to fill out the contact form out of fear they’ll be instantly spammed. To work around this, you can create a lead magnet which is a subtler way of getting your borrower’s email address.

A lead magnet could be a free eBook, download, cheatsheet, or piece of exclusive content your website readers will have to submit their email address to download.

For example, you may create an irresistible lead magnet such as “How to Get a Mortgage In Half The Time” that will collect more email addresses for cold emailing.

Outsource to lead generation agencies

This is the simplest and most effective option, and while it requires paying somebody else to perform this work for you, it’ll be worth it in the long run because your conversion rates will increase dramatically.

5. Automate lead nurturing

Loan officers can automate the lead nurturing process using CRM systems and email marketing platforms together. Set up drip campaigns to automatically send relevant content and messages to leads based on their recent behaviors.

For example, you should have a drip campaign set up in place to automatically respond to every new lead as soon as they submit their contact info. 

You can set the timing and frequency of these automated emails to be triggered by your lead’s behavior. 

For example, if your lead opens their initial email, then another automated message will be sent a couple of days later. If the lead doesn’t engage with their first email, then the follow-up email will be sent a week later, so you don’t annoy them with too many emails.

Loan officers typically send emails on a regular schedule, such as once a week or twice a month without overwhelming the borrower with too many emails.

6. Automate the loan application process

Back when everything was done on paper, the loan application process was more tedious and consuming than it already is now.

However, by automating this process, you can reduce manual effort and improve efficiency, giving your borrowers a better experience, and giving you more time to make phone calls.

To automate the loan application process:

• Use digital loan application tools, such as Blend or Roostify to integrate with your loan origination system. 
• Automate document collection using Finicity and Plaid to connect accounts and automatically provide required documentation
• Provide e-signature tools with as DocuSign and Adobe Sign to sign documents electronically
• Automate underwriting using Ellie Mae’s Encompass or Finastra’s Fusion Mortgagebot
• Provide automated status updates that give your borrowers tools to track their progress by using Floify or Maxwell

Kaleidico — a lead generation agency for mortgage loan officers

Ready to supercharge your mortgage marketing and sales strategy? Kaleidico is a full-service mortgage marketing agency and lead generation firm for mortgage lenders.

With our proven marketing plan and team of marketing professionals, we’ll help you take your sales game to the next level to generate new mortgage leads and close more loans than ever before.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki