The process of recruiting passive candidates with a transferable book of business built upon trusted relationships remains a mystery to production leadership in the mortgage industry. Questions often come up including: “Where do I find them?;” “How do we attract them?;” and most importantly, “How do we close and retain them?” These questions can be broken into individual categories with best practices and techniques, but what can you do as an organization to unify and become more effective at your strategic growth efforts overall? Here are a few ways you can begin to tackle this internally with your branch, area, region, or enterprise:
1. Train your team: Define your value proposition and Unique Selling Proposition (USP) with a single sentence. Having the language regarding your Six Core Components (Business Model, Leadership, Culture, Operations, Technology and Geography) and value proposition be uniform is crucial for your introduction. After that, you have the flexibility to freestyle.
2. Have an opener: Who are you, why are you calling, and what do you hope to accomplish? (Hint … look to develop a relationship, not hire someone over the phone).
3. Create goals: Create and use a metric to measure the activity you need to accomplish your goal.
4. Prepare for objections: We have learned that most managers dislike developing new relationships because of the rejection that can come with it. Define common objections and discuss how to overcome them.
5. Create an appropriate target list: This is not your 1,500 LinkedIn contacts. This lead list needs to be defined and targeted.
6. Scheduled review calls: Share successes, challenges and where you are finding traction with certain types of people or with specific companies.
7. Be organized: Have systems in place to compile data, as well as track and manage relationships and activity—if it cannot be measured, it cannot be managed.
8. Make it a team sport: Involve others in the process. This creates trust by helping validate the things you are presenting relative to your company value proposition and/or USPs being communicated in a similar way by all involved.
This type of initiative is always best executed as a team. Creating an environment where you can provide coaching on the “soft skills” along with who and how to target those you are hunting will help you learn where your strengths are and where you have room for improvement. We have been involved in helping companies organize and execute these strategies for 16 years. There is a science and art to recruiting and retaining producers. If you have any questions or want to learn more, feel free to contact us.
Steve Rennie is chief sales officer with Model Match Inc., a technology platform and business plan used internally by sales leaders and executives at banks and mortgage companies. Model Match allows companies to organize production recruiting initiatives with structure, process and accountability. Steve may be reached by phone at (949) 356-5792 or e-mail [email protected].
This article originally appeared in the October 2016 print edition of National Mortgage Professional Magazine.
