Want to be more efficient?
Efficiency means you’re achieving MAXIMUM productivity with MINIMUM wasted effort, energy, and expense.
Vehicles that get the most miles per gallon are fuel efficient.
Bags that hold the most stuff while taking up as little space as possible are space efficient.
Tools and technology that can get the job done better than without it are work efficient.
As a mortgage loan officer, if you want to be more efficient, produce more, and make more money than your peers, then there are things you are going to want to outsource.
If you’re working with a company that has an unsupportive team environment (which is probably not the best company to work with), in order to be most efficient, you’ll want to explore leveraging resources available to you.
That means delegating tasks to those that can do the task better and faster than you can, so you can focus on other areas of your business like closing more deals and building relationships with sources in your market.
Want to be more effective?
To be more effective means you’re successful in producing a desired or intended end result.
Hammers are effective at banging nails into wood.
Knives are effective at cutting stuff.
A nagging spouse…. Not so effective (see how this works?).
If you want to be more effective, use the right tools that you have available to you to get the job done. This means making use of those whose job it is to do that one thing for you. Could you do it yourself? Sure, but why would you when they are literally being paid to do that one thing?
When you’re efficient and effective, you’re doing things the smart way. You’ll see better results in less time and you’ll grow your business so much faster.
If you want to grow your business, get your loans processed as quickly as possible, and close as many loans as fast as possible, YOU MUST…
OUTSOURCE!
With that being said, I want you to understand, there are definitely tasks you DON’T want to outsource because they’re things that only you do best.
Like a well-oiled assembly line or the perfect machine, there are components that do one specific thing and only that thing. However, they each work together interconnectedly to reach the desired end output.
Figuring out what you should and shouldn’t outsource will help you do so much more than you could by yourself.
Here are my suggestions on what you should outsource and what you should not:
Do Outsource: Doc Collection
Hopefully, you work with a company that has someone on staff who does nothing but make sure all the documents that are needed to be submitted, are submitted to get your loan funded.
If that person is available to you, use them.
Why?
They will be more effective and efficient at this task; they’re less likely to miss something because they have less stuff to focus on than you do.
Get that task off your plate if possible.
Don’t Outsource: The Intake Of The Loan Application
Now, to be clear, I don’t mean don’t have the prospect fill out the 1003 online, what I mean is don’t delegate THIS part of the process to anyone or anything.
Don’t have someone else take your prospect through this critical process.
Why?
Part of your job as a mortgage officer is building rapport, trust, confidence, and deference to you as a service professional with each lead. The diagnostic aspect of this process is the perfect place to make this all happen.
This is where you get to discover important details about your prospect, uncover issues, and advise on ways to move forward.
It’s this one critical point in the process where the expert positioning and authority perception magic shines.
Do not risk missing this opportunity!
Do Outsource: Initial Lead Contact
As a general rule of thumb, initial internet leads convert at about 3% on average when you’re dealing with a decent lead source that has qualified targeted leads.
What that means is that if you generate 100 leads a month, about 10 of them will even be worthy of a conversation, and 3 will close in 90-120 days.
Like panning for gold, the time it takes to sort and sift to find the value could be better spent hiring someone to do this part for you. It’s very time consuming and doesn’t really require specialized knowledge to perform the task. We also suggest leveraging technology to help you with this as well.
Don’t Outsource: Converting Leads To Applications
When someone is worth talking to is when you should step in and do what you’re trained to do best–close the deal.
This way you spend less time switching modes, which means you get to stay in the zone, stay focused, and less scattered, which, ultimately, will allow you to have better results, overall.
Do Outsource: Email Management
As a loan officer, the role you play in your organization means you get bombarded with nonstop internal communications. Even trivial things you would consider nonsense get cc’d to your inbox.
Perhaps 10% of all those messages actually require you to take any meaningful action or response–right?
Don’t waste your brainspace on this! If at all possible, outsource this task.
Don’t Outsource: Agent Communications
Don’t forget, we generate our own leads to empower ourselves, to unlock immense value potential, and to be indispensable to our organization.
That doesn’t mean we do this so we don’t have to work with agents.
We generate leads so that our relationships with agents are strengthened and made more valuable on a 2-way open line of communication basis.
The goal is facilitating communication not adding more bureaucracy to it.
Do Outsource: Social Media Content Creation
Curating and creating content is something you can and should have someone else help you with because, generally, the likelihood is there are people that can convey your message quicker and clearer than you can, especially if you are not good at written content.
While you most certainly can be the one to inform what they write as in prompting them and giving them ideas on what to write about because, after all, this is your brand, your voice, your identity you want people to associate with you, so what has produced matters.
What is produced matters, but as long as the message is cohesive and the readers hear your voice in their head as they read…
Let the writers write for you.
Don’t Outsource: Social Media Prospecting
When prospects start interacting with your posts, when they start reaching out or inquiring about something they read and you see that, I’d recommend you be the one to exchange with them in the personal message box.
Why?
Closing is what you do, right?
Each interaction is a potential opportunity to close.
You need to take it; don’t leave it to the help.
With that, thanks for reading and I’ll see you at the top.
Michael
P.S. If you are ready to give this outsourcing thing a try and have your own online lead source gaining you 100+ leads, we are helping LOs across the country by turning their best leads into scheduled phone appointments.
P.P.S. Want me to help you set up your own simple, predictable, profitable lead generation system that includes an industry leading CRM that handles the initial lead contact?
Click this link and book your live demo. We can begin getting you set up today