How Mortgage Professionals Can Automate Their Work

Alex Machuca discusses Lead Automation

When you work with mortgages, you work in a people business. And this is a problem. Bringing in new leads means constantly talking to people — including many people who might not be good leads in the first place. If you want to automate your life, how can you do it in a way that makes you more efficient without missing out on mortgage opportunities?

How to Ensure You Focus Only On Realistic Leads

One of the key ways mortgage professionals can spend their time on productive leads? Start whittling down the leads you do engage. If you want to be more productive, you can immediately put it to use in the way you manage leads:

Use disqualifiers based on credit.

You can use surveys and polls to eliminate people with poor credit that you wouldn’t have considered for mortgage products in the first place. Rather than you taking the time to whittle down your leads, make sure that the disqualified leads take themselves out of the running before you speak to them on the phone.

Key in on your target demographic.

If you target, for example, people with stable jobs or high-trending jobs, then there’s a good chance that you can promote mortgages with them that they’ll be able to pay off over time. Mortgages are, after all, highly income dependent. By focusing on the root causes of good, solid income, you can spend more of your time on those leads who are most qualified to work with you.

Incorporate your pre-application into your follow-up.

Data drives automation. The more you find out about someone, the easier it will be to automate your follow-ups. If you can find a way to incorporate your pre-application into your follow-up process, you’ll not only be able to focus on the most important leads, but you’ll have a way of prioritizing

Automate the Pre-Qualifying of Your Leads

The fastest way to ensure that you spend less time with leads — but still generate leads — is to automate the process of pre-qualifying each lead as it comes in.

The first step is to look at your advertising. If you use an advertising platform with a high degree of customization, like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads, you can create campaigns that automatically target people of certain income.

Consider who you’re looking for. Do you want someone shopping for their first home, or are you looking more for someone with a stable income?

The next step is to look for opportunities to outsource your marketing efforts to someone else. For example, can you hire someone to handle A/B testing on your campaigns? Someone to write your direct mail marketing copy? A virtual assistant for mortgage professionals who can take on the tasks you don’t like to do?

Also consider how you can outsource promoting the value of your work. Can you work with a PR professional who can help get the word out? If so, you might find that much of the work they do for you only requires a little input from you before it begins.

Everything you do can be automated, to one degree or another. It all depends on the upfront work you’re willing to put in to make it happen.

Find the Tiny Wins that Add Up to a Lot of Change

Automation isn’t a process that happens overnight. You shouldn’t feel discouraged if you can’t find a way to automate every aspect of your life in mortgages.

Take on the mindset that there should be “no stone unturned” in your quest for automation. If it can be improved, improve it. Consider the following “little wins” as candidates for improvement:

Eliminate cold calling.

Cold calling was an effective, if inefficient, way to build new business in years past. But bringing in leads in the 21st century doesn’t require direct, voice-to-voice connections anymore. Consider eliminating cold calling in favour of only following up with people who willingly give you their phone number on your website.

Add a scheduling tool to your website.

A tool like Calendly will outsource the “email tag” that goes on when you try to schedule time with a potential lead. Simply installing this on your site alone may save you hours (or even days) each year, depending on how often you play “email tag.”

Create dedicated landing pages.

Create a dedicated landing page for different segments. The narrower your landing page’s focus is, the more it will speak to each customer. It will do more of the pre-qualifying and the selling — but only if it speaks directly to the customer’s needs.

With the right strategies in mind, you can automate a great deal of your incoming mortgage leads — and create the systems you need to filter in the right ones for you.

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