The Biggest Mistake I See Loan Officers Make (And How to Fix It)

Today's Business & Life Tip, I have often said for years and years that, “The Loan Officer with most friends wins.” This is a conclusion that I came to in my early career.  It was by accident, as most things are wasn’t really designed. I just kind of figured it out through observing and watching the results of certain things.

One of the things that I used to do from the very beginning, about a year and a half into my career. I started managing a very effective database and gathering a lot of information on my clients to get to know what their hobbies are, their interests, what their hot buttons were so I could market to those hot button and send them interesting periodicals and articles, and things of that nature that might really be important to them. Then I realized one day through some marketing ventures, where I got engaged in with my past client database about how they wanted to know about me.

What had happened was...

I used to write a newsletter, once a quarter, a four-page newsletter that I send out to my entire past client database. It had the lead article as, “Braheem on Bonds, The Rate Report, I would have a cooking recipe in there, at a sports trivia quiz.” I would ask one of my referral partners to write an article for the newsletter on accounting or insurance, and then at this one section called, “Did You Know.” It used to be like, “Did you know that we do 203k loans, Did you know that we do construction financing, Did you know that conforming loan limit has been raised.”

On one of these days, I was sitting there, writing with the newsletter and I was kind of stumped on the “Did You Know.” One of my teammates, Alicia John walked by and she said, “What’s wrong?”. She could see that puzzled look at my face. I said, “I can’t think of the “Did You Know” for this newsletter,” and she said, “How about, Did you know that Tim and Anne are going to have a boy?” My wife, Anna at the time was my partner in my business. So, all of my past clients and referral partners knew her as well. And, we just found out from the ultrasound that we are getting ready to have our first child and it was going to be a boy. I said, “That’s cool, I like that, let’s try that, that is kind of fun.” The results of it were that 37 people called me to congratulate me. 37 past clients and referral partners.

It was at that point, the light bulb went on...

“Whoa! they need to know who I am too.” I have been spending all this time trying to get to know them. But, they were looking for common denominators to connect with me — that shifted my entire scope of marketing. From that point forward, my personal brochure that was extremely important and powerful in the growth of my business embodied who I was as a person, my hobbies, interest, etc. I started to infuse more and more personal stuff into the newsletter and then lastly is when I finally built a website and that became something important to do. I really made my website representation of my interest, my values, who I am, my family, my hobbies, etc. I know this to be true at this point. If you are not doing that, you need to start doing that.

Everybody that you encounter wants to know who you are and you need to be tactful, professional, non-arrogant way, put that out there. So they can learn a little bit about you. This is why Facebook and other forms of Social Media are so successful because people can really get to know you. Start using family photos on your facebook page. Start making sure that you are really giving people something to kind of sink their teeth in you because the more that they like you, the more success you will be, the more referrals you will get, and everybody wins in that equation.

I hope that you found this business and life tip to be helpful to you, to your success and we’ll be talking real soon.