The vast majority of loan officers / branch managers make a huge mistake: They send emails or texts without the willingness to make a phone call or follow up.
Most LOs try to figure out a way to send out emails giving updates to agents and the borrowers on the progress of the loan, instead of simply calling with the updates, which gives a golden opportunity for asking for even more referrals using the simple “just ask” script at this point (this has been one of our biggest sources of even more closed loans).
Don’t get me wrong, in my branch, we also do have the automated “milestone” updates that go out to the borrowers and agents via email and text for when milestones like the appraisal come in and / or when we are clear to close…
… so those automated updates are great, but in addition to those, we actually pick up the phone and update by the phone ALSO. That’s where we get most of our purchase referrals is with those simple update calls with our “Just Ask” script at the end to get even more referrals on those calls. It’s kind of one of my secret sauces.
Keep in mind, the purpose of the “update calls” isn’t really to update them, even though they all love that part, it’s really to ask for yet even more referrals… and it’s very, very effective in doing just that. Oh, did I mention that this one set of calls is responsible for most of our repeat referrals… you know, the kind of leads that actually close at a very, very high level.
Oh sure, we get some referrals from the email and text communications, but it’s when we picked up the phone that things really started to take off for us and other LOs that are doing it the same way we are.
We find the same results with all of our marketing – phone calls out trump everything else combined.
It really just makes common sense. In our single days, if we are looking to date somebody, I think we can all agree that a phone call would out trump an email.
In fact, there is a famous study that in person meetings were #1, phone calls #2, text messages a distant #3, snail mail #4, and email was in last place when it comes to influencing people.
So why do most loan officers communicate their marketing messages with the least effective way to do it??
I’m convinced that they simply didn’t know the facts about 1. How ineffective emails are, 2. How effective phone calls are, 3. They aren’t sure what to say.
So again, I’m not telling you not to email, I’m simply letting you know that if you are avoiding making the phone calls, that’s likely going to cause you a lot of pain and lost opportunity to close yet even more purchase deals going forward, and I can totally help you get over that.
If you need help with what to say on these update calls to get more inbound referrals, or what to say when calling your past database to get more inbound referrals, I’ll be happy to share with you the same ones that we share to our members on a free “Freedom Club Demo” call.
There’s no charge for this and the charge for not doing it is likely HUGE!!
See ya on the inside ☺
