Have you heard of Twitter? Chances are you haven’t, but everyday I see more and more loan officers and realtors pop into Twitterland. So, chances are your competitors have.

I may do a more complete post on what it is and how to use it effectively in your mortgage business and as a part of your mortgage marketing, but until then listen to my discussion with Owen Raun, of RMC Vanguard about Twitter.

And, of course get an account and follow me. This has become the fast beeline to a conversation with me. I love creating discussions and learning from my colleagues in this forum. Join me!

Is the Internet important to your local real estate or mortgage business? Apparently, the answer is a big–YES!

I know I already hear the comments:

“Bill, all my business is referral business.”

“Internet leads suck!”

“People on the Internet are only window shopping. They never buy anything.”

“Internet only works for the big National guys with lots of money.”

Well, I think Missy Caulk and her Team in Ann Arbor, MI might tell you are headed to the poor house with your stubbornness:

The Missy Caulk TEAM had 9 of those closings in April, making us with about 11% of the total closings. Of the nine closing we had in April, three of the clients were referred to us, and six were buyers from the internet.

My thoughts are, if you are a Realtor and not working the internet you are missing out. Since 77% of all buyers are going on line to look for houses, you must have a STRONG internet presence. When I say strong, I don’t mean a web site. Everyone has a web-site. Your web presence must include PPC ( pay per click) campaigns, and a good follow up system to nurture those initial leads and most important a home search site that is so good the buyers come back again and again.

Is it an important part of a down market mortgage or real estate strategy? At 11% market share Missy Caulk might tell you it is a real estate and mortgage survival strategy, and the 918 Realtors in the Ann Arbor, MI market might believe her:

If you include the entire MLS for the Ann Arbor Board of Realtors, this would include all the way from Brooklyn in Lenawee County to Brighton, down through Western Wayne County, there were 373 closings in 2007 in the month of April and only 82 for April 2008.

This means that out of the 1000 Realtors in Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors, only 82 got a paycheck of any kind in the month of April.

Notice the other key point she makes: “a good follow up system to nurture those initial leads.” You knew there had to be a least one opportunity to stump for the importance of lead nurturing and a good lead management system.

Congrats to the Missy Caulk TEAM. Keep working the Internet to gain market share and growth in this tough market.

I remember growing up and my Dad always talking about his secret to fishing success. He would say, “Billy, the biggest and the best fishing is in these little private ponds.” He was on to something…

Then, in 1999 Seth Godin wrote his seminal book “Permission Marketing” that touched off so many other innovative marketing mind altering quick-reads. But, the key concept that may apply more today than ever before gets lost in the subtitle: “Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers.” This is really the difference isn’t it?

This concept, my friends, is the secret to BIG success.

How Mortgage Brokers Get it Wrong

Often I see sales professionals hop from one hot commodity to the next. You sell mortgages when they are flying off the shelf, then cars, or insurance. You tell yourself, “it doesn’t matter I can sell anything.” Yet, what you really know inside is: I can’t sell anything, I don’t know how to create value, instead I am trying to follow the easy money. Unfortunately, the money probably isn’t really that easy, the pay certainly is not significant, and you find yourself on a treadmill that will definitely drive you mad.

Stop the madness, step off the treadmill, and change your perspective. Stop thinking about making $100,000 and start thinking about stocking a private fishing hole, a pond filled with customers.

How to Start Stocking the Pond

Now that you know you need a stocked pond, how do you start?

If you have been in the business for a while you probably have some fish to seed the pond. Dust off those old files in the corner and get them into your lead managements system (software makes it easier and more scalable, but even index cards can get you started).

If you are new to the business, or even trying to jump start things purchasing mortgage leads may be a good start. Even pond owners buy fingerlings to get their stock their ponds started. However, don’t attempt this until you have prepared your business to work pay per lead business.

Lead Nurturing

Once you have your “feeder fish” past clients and/or purchased mortgage leads you need to start your lead nurturing programs. If you are buying leads, certainly begin by immediately contacting and addressing immediate needs. If you a seeding your customer pond with past clients then make sure you reconnect in a valuable way. Send them a brief update on their mortgage or general state of the market.

Once you have started that initial connection begin to understand how they want to be feed. A key element to this is lead tracking, seeing how your customers react to different approaches and methods. Do they react better to an email newsletter, a blog, regular mortgage check-ups, Twitter? Then design the programs, may be multiple programs, to keep those loyal clients in your private pond.

Keep Stocking the Pond

Once you begin to grow that loyal customer base don’t forget to continue stocking the pond. You will always have natural attrition to your network of customer. That is why it is best to have constructed a system, a mortgage lead management process that can continually fuel your current sales, referrals, and new adds to your stock pond.

Examples of Working Pond Stocking

Lead Generation - LendingTree
Mortgage Industry - Quizzle
Network Marketing (MLM) - Quixtar
Individual - Jason Nation

How do you stock your favorite customer fishing hole?

If you are a mortgage broker you have certainly received the frequent call from pay per lead mortgage lead providers. They tout high quality, superior ROI, and dramatic growth; which all may be true, but only if fits your business. This type of marketing requires a specific understanding of the marketing used to generate the lead and the unique sales processes that can ultimately convert them consistently. Let’s take a closer look at the factors that may make pay per lead a good or bad fit for you.

Understanding Pay Per Lead Marketing

Pay Per Lead is the ultimate result of a myriad of marketing techniques that produce a customer inquiry or lead, which can be sold to a sales team.

First, let’s look at the marketing that produces a lead. Typically, two primary techniques are used to produce a mortgage lead: email marketing and paid search. Both techniques are highly specialized disciplines within marketing that notoriously require scale (large email lists or significant advertising budget) and efficiency (the simplest adjustments are the difference between boom and bust). In each case, the general principle is to engage the customer with information or advertising creative (marketing speak for a combination of image(s) and value/benefit message(s)) and convince them in a matter of seconds to provide an introductory amount of personal contact data and information about their potential mortgage need.

Second, let’s look at the lead that is produced by the marketing. Now that the customer has provided this information and a lead is produced, what has the lead provider produced? Most simply they have approximately 20 introductory data elements and an indication from the customer they would like to talk to someone about mortgages. However, considering the brevity of these marketing messages and the customer’s low time, risk, and commitment level the percentage of inquires with a high intent to buy is most likely low.

Finally, let’s look at what happens to the lead once it is produced. Although, the percentage of buyers that have a high and immediate intent to buy is low the marketing expense to target and produce any reasonable quantity of  potential borrowers and homeowners with this level of intent is very expensive. Ranging anywhere from $100-$300 per lead produced. Obviously, since the market will not bare that sort of price per lead the monetization of that marketing spend must be distributed. This, of course, is the most basic reason that pay per leads are sold to multiple mortgage companies.

With a better understanding of pay per lead marketing programs and the leads that they produce lets see if this type of marketing program fits you mortgage business.

Multi-State Licensing

Just like the marketing programs and lead providers that produce the leads you are considering buying, your mortgage business needs some level of scale to be successful with Internet leads. This scale begins with the breadth of geography in which you can provide mortgage loans. If you are a single state, or even a single town local lender buying Internet leads is not for you. This is not to say a single individual or small 2-10 loan officer branch is not a fit for lead buying. In fact, in most cases this is a perfect fit. However, make sure that either through your own licensing effort or with the help of a Net Branch affiliation you can write loans in at least 5-10  States.  Fortunately, this is a reasonably low barrier to overcome with approximately 30 States with manageable licensing requirements.

Broad Range of Loan Programs

Prospective homeowners and refinancing borrowers will naturally have a range of financial situations and needs. Consequently, to service the customer inquiries in good faith you need to support several loan options. Attempting to fit every customer into a 30 year fixed mortgage is a recipe for frustration for you and the customer. Really this requirement is not unique to pay per lead programs, but it is important to consider. These inquiries will most likely be sophisticated and knowledgeable borrower and often have more complex past financing or current needs. Therefore, the richer your portfolio of loan programs the higher rate of success you are likely to have.

The good news is that again this is a fairly low barrier to buying leads. Most correspondent and wholesale programs offer a full spectrum of loan programs and capable processing assistance to support your mortgage operation.

Disciplined Sales Process

The level of discipline in your sales process is likely the key determinate of whether pay per lead is for your mortgage business. All of the other factors for success are easily achievable and require little adjustment from the way you do business today. In contrast, your sales process most likely will need to change significantly.

Internet leads come in sporadically and unpredictably throughout the day and the evening. The customer expects immediate and frequent responsiveness. An Internet customer may not be seeking to create a “relationship.” Each of these attributes of an Internet lead will effect how you need to alter your sales process to be effective.

You need a system. Most likely this means lead management software or service designed for mortgage leads, but can be constructed less efficiently from email and spreadsheet tracking. This sales system needs to immediately alert you to new leads, compel you to quickly follow-up, allow you to track contact and customer needs, and enable you to efficiently move the customer to a loan closing with minimal personal interaction.

Pay Per Lead Can Be Highly Successful, But Only If It Fits

Pay per lead marketing programs can be hugely successful in your mortgage business, but only if you are prepared and it fits your business design. If you are veteran loan officer flush with referrals and relationships that have locked you in as the mortgage expert in your community, then Internet leads are probably not a fit. However, if you are an aggressive loan officer, with a young business, and trying to build that solid foundation of referrals for the future buying Internet lead is probably the best path to success.

I have long been an evangelist of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which at its core has the premise that markets are conversations, but it was until a few months ago for it to really hit me that success in sales is really tied to the same premise–good conversations.

So often, we in sales, are tied into a manufacturing mind set fostered by language like pipeline, production, and conversion. Don’t underestimate the power of focusing on these concepts. However, today I want you to step back from the metrics, efficiency, maximizing units, and analyzing funnel ratios. Let’s think about the bigger picture.

People would much rather buy things from people they know, even better people they are friends with. Those kinds of relationships start with conversations, and are matured into friendships with conversations.

Naturally, it follows that the more conversations we have the richer a lot of things will be in our lives, not the least of which is our sales pipeline.

Give it a try. Forget your numbers, call quotas, and conversion rates.

Do this daily, for one week:

1. Call 4 random people out of your address book
2. Email 4 random people out of your address book
   
3. Sign-up for Twitter
4. Follow 10 people you wish you knew (suggestions: @davewiner, @chrisbrogan, @scobleizer, @morganb, @pchaney )
   
5. Twit a response, idea, or question at least 4 times/day
6. Comment on 4 blogs

Tell me what happens…

I will officially confess my affinity for productivity porn. I have read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and enjoy the pearls at 43Folders and LifeHacker. I have even been known to fill a few moleskins in my day. Luckily, I appear to be in good company with Marc Andreessen, whose modified GTD is closer to my own processes.

But!

Far too often we get bogged down in the preparation to be productive. Or, sometimes even worse, the tracking of that productivity.

This has long been a frustration of mine. The business world is littered with consultants, pundits, critics, analyst, and my personal favorite–silver bullet business books. Each can be incrementally valuable, but most times they are simply a distraction to simply getting started.

My recurring itch for this topic was flared today by back-to-back posts at LeadCritic on reports and metrics. You can see where I am going with this if you have ever crossed my banter on this topic in the past, on LeadCritic:

As you will see in the whitepaper, I am a big advocate of instituting metrics in a framework designed for action. My approach starts with a few high-level defined objectives. They should be broad in scope, but specifically targeted at the top line (bottomline, expense, metrics ALWAYS get you looking at your feet and those kids ALWAYS lose).

and my own Better Closer, back in 2006:

Although metrics and analytics are critical to the continual improvement of any business process, it does not ensure what you have learned will get implemented. This can be a critical disconnect in high velocity business process.

Sales is hard. It is a constant roller coaster of successes and failures. Customer contact and engagement is the biggest enemy and fear of even the best sales person.

The last thing a good sales force needs is to be bogged in opportunities to delay that next engagement. Reports and metrics often become that convenient distraction. Slicing and dicing reports to look for that perfect set of leads to try is wasted production. Lead management, by definition, should be maximizing your opportunities–automatically. Reports and metrics should be incidental to performance and indicative of production. More simply, reports and metrics don’t convert they only indicate if you did.

The single best thing you can do for your sales process is reposition the function of reporting.

Metrics and reports do not define or create a process. They should not be the front-end of lead management. They should be the passive observation of trends and behaviors. Indicators and triggers for adjustment.

This is captured perfectly by this story; from a guy that truly gets how you make analytics matter, Jamie McDonald:

At lunch one day with the CEO of the business, I saw him pull a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. It was his one page dashboard. His four key metrics:

• number of visits to the park in the previous day (volume measure for his business)
• avg. wait time at the rides
• avg. spend per park visitor
• hotel occupancy rate and average daily rate

In my mind, more complex than this often begs the question, “do you know what business you are in?”

Growing your business or your revenue is rarely about focusing on efficiency (reports and metrics), but rather your ability to repeatedly execute getting started.

Social Media, Community, and Conversational Marketing is all the talk in tech circles. It is not just a geek topic. It should be effecting your mortgage business. Stop sending out handwritten fake personal notes and mindless email blasts to your clients.

Get personal, get real, and get social.

Chris Brogan, a social media mogul (wouldn’t you say Chris?–I know you are reading this), has given you the social blueprint:

• Find your style/voice and your goal
• Build your storefront (blog)
• Fund it with the right ad partners
• Add value (ideas)
• Make your About and Contact say “Call Me!”
• Promote it
• Build a community

A sense of motion, enthusiasm, and interaction is powerful in getting your current prospects and past clients to engage with you to solve their problems. Homeowners and borrowers are as nervous as you are about the market. They want to talk to someone that they think is sharp and real.

Here are some great models:

• Owen Raun 
• Tony Gallegos
• Todd Carpenter
• Dan Green
• Rhonda Porter

I have been thinking about a resource like this for months. Being in the business of providing lead management software to hundreds of sales forces, I am constantly ask for resources on how to get the best out of lead management and build top performing sales teams. So, here it is the top 100 answers and resources in no particular order (feel free to add to this list with your comments):

1. First, get the lead management lead providers like to brag about
2. Keep it simple. Start with a simple sales process. Then execute, measure, adjust, re-execute
3. Learn about Internet lead generation and how to leverage them to grow your business
4. Don’t call them leads. You will start treating them like leads, and leads don’t buy anything
5. Make sure your lead management process help foreshadow and set expectations for your customer
6. Don’t forget to tell past clients what is going on in the market
7. Read books by these guys: Jeffrey Gitomer, Seth Godin, Robert Cialdini, Zig Ziglar
8. Lead management is not easy, but it can be broken into critical key performance indicators
9. Leads will not convert instantly or magically. Lead nurturing is critical to an effective customer experience and sales success
10. Don’t get caught in a rut of commitment to consistency. Your current “system” may be your weakness Read the rest