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[Music] welcome to another episode of mortgage masterminds I'm Richard Greaser VP of marketing at sales Boomerang and mortgage coach and my guest is Michael McAllister founder at Empower Lo Michael thanks for joining me thanks for having me on in case you haven't heard about sales Brewing or mortgage coach um you definitely have been living under a rock for the past forever you know um sales Boomerang lets you know when someone needs a loan in your database the moment they need a loan and mortgage coach [Music] provides the advice that they need uh to make the buying decision easy for them because let's be honest it's not an easy decision in the home buying Journey a lot of times so that's what sales Boomerang and mortgage coach do why don't you hop on those websites if you want to learn more you can schedule a demo talk you can reach out to me richard.g at salesboomerang.com I'm always available to talk to folks but without further Ado Michael let's just jump into this um why don't you tell everybody a little bit about Empower Lo and what it is your background you know we talked a little bit your background was like an agency where you're doing a lot of pay-per-click ads for some very top producers and and small businesses and and you've transitioned a little bit in into a CRM which is interesting um and and you have a lot of functionality that you offer um so I'm just I'm going to shut up and let you tell a little bit about what it is you do yeah yeah so um actually even prior to being an agency right or starting an agency I was a loan officer so as a loan officer uh I built a system for generating leads using Google ads kind of reverse engineered what I saw blending tree Veterans United um Zillow right these these bigger companies kind of reverse engineered what I saw them doing uh Quicken Loan so I don't know how I forgot that one but reverse engineered what I saw them doing and built out uh basically a pay-per-click ad funnel with a landing page and generated leads uh with with you know long form details 10 12 data points um and was doing that for less than 15 bucks a lead so um basically spend a bunch of money money on ads and built my mortgage business that way I was super young not very good with working with real estate agent I'm a very like high D direct personality and that rubs you know rubs some people the wrong way at least in my market out here in Boise Idaho and so um I just the agent thing wasn't for me and so figuring that out was kind of the beginning of you know what it what has led us here now um at the point that I started the agency we we continue to have it uh Empower hello formerly Empower funnels but we work with currently 70 to 80 loan officers across the country and I don't know I don't even know how many different markets but basically uh like 60 70 of our markets are are full at capacity and we've got wait lists on you know 20 of our markets um so that's that's a really big you know still a really big uh part of my life and part of our business um but in addition to that because we did so much for our clients around marketing automation at the point that the lead was generated um we had a lot of campaigns and automations built out ready to go for a loan officer really regardless of what the lead Source was like yes we we use these automations for Google for our leads um but at the end of the day you know loan officers could be generating their own leads on Facebook they could be buying leads from Zillow Lending Tree whatever um and and all the automations and work that we do to help our clients after the point of generating the lead all really applies for them so um we basically packaged the CRM the marketing automation system that we use for all of our clients on the agency side for the last four or five years and now offer it as a standalone product where loan officers can go in and just sign up for that marketing Automation and take advantage of uh the the system that we have built out for them well so if I'm uh an Lo in the audience right now let's say I produce 20 20 million a year or something like that you know um fairly successful right what and someone's interested in working with you what does it take I mean like is this fairly hands-off is there a cost involved obviously there's probably a cost involved and uh and what can I expect yeah I mean first thing like leveraging the software platform leveraging that basic art marketing automation like really everybody but should be using something like this right and a lot of loan officers do a lot of loan officers have a CRM provided by their company uh that provide some of this functionality and have some content loaded into it um and a lot of loan officers are investing in their own platform outside of it if you're not that's step one right is make sure that you have some sort of marketing automation platform now if you don't have that and you and you would rather just skip straight to like generating leads and getting the full like full system you can do that and and we help loan officers do that uh it's it's obviously going to be a little bit more expensive you're investing in filling the top of your funnel rather than just investing in something that helps you optimize your funnel so um as far as like what it takes for an individual Lo to leverage like our lead generation platform uh that you're going to pay a setup fee or set up fees like 1500 bucks I believe uh for 14.97 uh and then 9.97 a month for management and then we're going to recommend a grand to 1500 a month in ads so about 2 to 25 two grand to 2500 a month so not necessarily for your brand new Lo right out of the gates but also you don't necessarily have to be a top producer uh to take advantage of it either so who's creating the ads I mean like so who's making that content are you telling them what should be in the content are you creating the content for them or you I mean I guess you see this across a lot of clients and what performs and what doesn't so how do you do that yeah so we so it's like ready out of the box basically like we create we have already created all of the ads we have all of the keywords that you should be bidding on we have the pixel data that we feed back to Google as far as who is most likely to convert into a lead uh and so the loan like loan officer doesn't have to do anything I mean they they get access to the Google ads account in fact they get ownership of the Google ads account um and they pay for their ads directly so we're not marking that up at all but as far as like their involvement and getting that set up there really isn't any I mean once they once they pay their invoice there's we have an onboarding form that they fill out um and that onboarding form kicks off on our end the Fulfillment of it and and then the next time that we talk to them is their go live call um and we're basically showing them what we built for them and uh introducing them to the marketing automation software and like some tactics for working the leads and so what does a dashboard look like uh for like a an NLO what are they looking at when you're looking at like a monthly snapshot of using Empower Lo yeah so um you know some statistics that that you're going to want to track um you know working with us on the PPC side obviously uh cost per click um cost per conversion and conversion rate are three are really the three biggest ones uh your cost per click with your conversion rate creates your cost per conversion so if you have a two dollar cost per click your conversion rate is 20 uh then your cost per lead is 10 bucks a lead essentially right um and so those are those are some of the biggest metrics that you want to track as far as the Google ad side um in any other application and it or including this one the most important stuff that you want to be tracking is the stuff that happens after the lead is generated so uh what percentage of the people that you're talking to are you sending an application link to if you're sending them an application link or how what percentage of them are you having a an intake call with them if that's part of your process uh what percentage of of the apps that you're taking are qualified what percentage of your pre-approvals are going out shopping right away like these are the metrics that are really going to give you input on what you can be doing differently at the end of the day like leads are leads are leads to some extent now I say to some extent because the industry took this to an extreme with Facebook ads and and some of the shitty leads that that a loan officers would generate for themselves on Facebook some loan officers took this to the extreme real estate and took the extreme not All Leads are created equal however if you're generating leads on Google if you're buying leads from Lending Tree if you're buying leads from Zillow if you're buying leads from uh uh you know rate Marketplace bank rate whatever if you're buying leads nine times out of ten those leads are going to be very very similar to one to one another um and so given that that's the case uh really all all of this stuff you can kind of apply it you know you you can apply it across the board so you're let's say your management and your software can only really lead a horse to water what do you see the difference between the folks using your platform and your services the ones that are really successful and the ones that aren't what is what are those qualities that make that differentiates a successful level versus a non-successful level because you've you're basically doing everything they need up until that conversation right yeah yeah um and it's funny because like we like you would think that that makes it a slam dunk every single time uh and it doesn't it doesn't like we we've gone as far as setting appointments for loan officers and putting the appointments on their calendar um and then we backed off of that approach because we found like getting to the point of having an appointment or having a conversation is not the hard part for a loan officer so there's two pieces to this I'm gonna answer like answer your question directly as far as uh you know what makes the difference between somebody who's successful and not there's two pieces number one coachability hands down because at the end of the day if you come in with all the bad habits in the world it doesn't matter like we know what we're doing we're not afraid to tell you like how to do it and as long as you follow our lead we we haven't had a client that came on board left their ego at the door and said hey I'll do everything that you guys say like that you guys say and not be successful we've never had that so number one is coachability okay number two though is the desire like the the inherent desire to actually help people right like you have to actually have a desire to go beyond exchanging money for leads that close loans like you like this lead generation doesn't replace being a shitty person or a shitty loan officer basically is is what I'm getting at is like um if you're not if you're not the type of person that's gonna dig deep enough to find opportunity when you have a conversation with somebody if you're looking for uh the people that are you know that get on the phone and say all right I'm ready to submit an application I'm ready to apply on this house right now um and you don't show any desire to get to know them as an individual you're gonna you're gonna struggle with it for sure and we've we've seen that before for like time and time again so it's interesting I was I was never a loan officer but I can tell you though I have bought and sold several homes before and so I will say that the loan officers that I've worked with it worked with before and I've had good experiences and bad experiences the ones that I find the most interesting and someone who I will maintain a relationship with are the ones that have it's not just about my need right now like that conversation is usually like and they'll even be they'll even say that that hey this is just one piece of many transactions you're probably going to do in a Lifetime right and you also have family members maybe your parents people need help with their retirement and might need a reverse mortgage or you know there's so many like conversations outside of just this one individual transaction which by the way might not even be in the borrower's interest people are pretty ignorant when it comes to their mortgage needs so you know you you really have to be a doctor about it I mean be a professional you're in this business because you're you're better than they are they you've been doing it you know however many years you've seen this many amount of mortgage loans that you've done for folks and you know that's that's the approach to from my perspective is that you really got to dig deep about what are their goals where are they at in their life right now where are they going and when is the next time you're going to have to help them help them as well right and then and then if you do a really good job at that there's all of their friends and all of their family right um because I think every conversation has to lead with a retirement these days this country has a huge problem with retirement so I mean every Millennial you talk to should be making sure that they're planning for their retirement at the very minimum right regardless of whether they're buying a house or not or whether their parents have enough money to fund their their retirement right so every conversation in my opinion can lead to like four or five other mortgage related conversations with other people if you do it right in the business so amen that's how I answer my own my own question um yeah so so talk to me you're um when did you start Empower ello uh 2018. and you're just you're growing you're growing really well I I assume yeah yeah so uh this year or last year to this year was uh our small like smallest percentage of growth so far um but we should still finish with about 25 growth between 2021 and 2022. um but we're trying to gear up and and uh get ready for another big push well so what's the the one thing I didn't ask is what's the investment uh in terms of time like or and you also said that you got to be ready to be coachable so you know let's say you're an older person you've been doing what you do for a really long time um you know what is that change in your daily habits look like uh you know what I mean like what do I have to what do I got what do I got to do to be successful with empower yeah I mean the the good news is like I don't really uh it's not really so much a Time Time investment it like I said it's more just like a a difference in approach and it's there's multiple steps in the process that that uh show that that signify that and I'll get to that in a second um time investment wise if a loan officer is spending you know 1200 bucks 1500 bucks on ads generating 100 to 150 leads a month they should be able to do they should be able to do this with our marketing automation our system for no more than two hours a day um an hour of that is like hour of that is like concentrated uh CRM interaction time right and then the other hour is going to be spread throughout the day just conversations uh appointments you know Etc um so that's you know three hours a day tops right if you're slow slow moving with the technology um which is a pretty like which is a pretty decent size commitment for for 2 two you know two or three loans which is why uh you know if you're are slow with that technology um probably you you should be looking at an end game with this if you're going into it as far as um not necessarily doing it yourself uh and and you know passing it off to somebody in your branch or somebody on your team or or something like that um but like I said two hours you know two hours a day as far as like the the commitment to change um like I said they're they're based a lot of the stuff is basic sales habits that really you should be having in your business in general as far as checking your CRM every day as far as using your CRM as a means of like scheduling your days down the road when you put tests and you and you schedule tasks for yourself you know living by those tasks when that day comes you know a lot of the stuff is is stuff that you probably should be doing for your business otherwise and then some of it is just like the difference between talking to a somebody that was referred to you by a real estate agent that where you're running on borrowed trust versus talking to somebody that met you online and inherently has a low level of trust for you trust with you and like being able to bridge that Gap quickly has more to do with uh you know Paradigm shifts and word tracks than it does with like an extensive amount of time investment makes sense so I I can say that um from you know mortgage coaching sales Boomerang when it sales Boomer when sales Boomerang sends a piece of borrower intelligence to a loan officer CRM you know let's say it's somebody who has a lot of credit card debt but a lot of Home fifty percent over 50 home equity right the interaction between that first of all speed delete right the time the time's got to be quick they got to get marketing animation out there quick and we usually recommend like an email text phone call like those kind of three you know I don't know what your secret sauce is but um you'd be surprised the number of clients we have that have I I mean I wouldn't even say some of them honestly have very little marketing Automation in place and the marketing automation they have in place is pretty bad so I would be so much more confident knowing that uh the people we work with we're using someone like you to manage that marketing automation piece um because it really it really is up to the person we can give best practices all day long but it really is up to the person who's getting the information to do the right thing with it right and I'm more and we've proven this right with data that uh Mark people with really good marketing automation definitely convert higher as a result right I mean it's just very simple data we've seen it um yeah and so I'll I'll give the plug out there right now that anybody who's working with you off of our intelligence is definitely going to be more successful than putting just kind of like the bare bones together you know what I mean themselves and not real especially because you've got the experience across many different loan officers doing this yeah yeah 100 and I appreciate that and the the one thing that I'd say with the marketing automation piece is you know because a lot of people hear marketing Automation and they think that that means taking the human touch out of it um we there's this this concept that I've been talking about a lot lately called a forcing function and I can't remember I think it's from impossible to inevitable is the book that I read read it in but a forcing function um is basically like a decision that you make that forces your hand at a decision later on essentially so the idea of using marketing Automation and this in the context of sales Boomerang and we're so excited uh so excited to partner up with with sales boomerang in some capacity more details to come uh around that but we're so excited to partner up with sales we were in some capacity to be able to push those automations for our clients and and their close deals um push the automations automatically and then generate what I would call like a forcing function and text message which is a text message that goes out that goes straight for letting them know hey I've got this critical piece of information for you about your loan when would you have five to ten minutes to chat now if I send that text message out automatically and they respond and they tell me when they have five to ten minutes to chat I am like infinitely closer to having that significant conversation with that borrower than if I just got that notification in my inbox and then in my head I have to get over the mental hump of reaching out to them coordinating a time doing like they're going to respond back with oh I have time this afternoon or I won't have time until tomorrow or whatever like you're right there you're right there and if it was me getting that message like I'd be kicking myself in the ass later if I didn't actually like like fat like act on that you know that'd be pretty uh it'd be pretty embarrassing you know and so we kind of use that like uh self-inflicted peer pressure those forcing functions um and and we're excited to do that with with the alerts from sales Boomerang well I am too we are too um let me ask you a question um are you I know this is your secret sauce are you allowed to share or are you willing to share some of your secret sauce in terms of like you said leads aren't all created equal and so I just wonder amongst your zillows bank breaks lending trees um all of those Facebook you know if you had to rank them in terms of like these are the convert the highest or is the highest quality down to like oh I don't know if this one's really worth your uh spend like where would you put stuff in buckets yeah yeah I appreciate this question this is a good question um what about like what I look at when I'm evaluating the quality of a lead is uh intent basically and how accurately can I measure the intent of the the lead and what they originally wanted to accomplish so number one top of the list has been for a while and probably always will be until they you know completely shut out loan officers is going to be Zillow reason why is because the intent is insane on Zillow leads Zillow gives away the like gives away everything on their website for free ungated you don't have to provide your contact information like all of that stuff is is available to everybody as far as the the listing search and their calculators and stuff like that all that stuff is available to everybody which means when somebody does finally inquire this is somebody that's been sitting on their site for a year two years maybe right so that they're at the peak of their intent the peak that they'll ever be those are like those are like gold I wish that I could recreate those for my clients I can um so that that's what I would say Zillow um below that Lending Tree exclusive um I think semi like if you're running semi-exclusives unless you're a call center yourself like you're running against rocket mortgage every single time and you're gonna get smoked every single time um and if not in you know not in any sort of like loan product or anything or loaned all like product knowledge um but just in salesmanship and and and uh technology tenacity Etc I mean those guys are like trained to do what they do and that they're really good at it um so exclusives I would say Lending Tree exclusives um I don't like bank rate because it's basically like Bank rates are rate table leads essentially um which means you're just you know you're dealing with bunch of uh rate shopping you know rate Shoppers and I was never really a fan of that um so then you know really it's like if it's not Zillow Zillow or Lending Tree um then then you have to evaluate the traffic Source from there and how accurately can you assess where the traffic is from so whether it's rate Marketplace or um you know mortgage Research Center or an agency like you need to be able to know where the leads are being generated because if they're being generated from Google all of those are going to be on this level and anything else is going to be lower than that whether it's email whether it's display and banner ads uh consumer direct mailer responders like all of those are Interruption pattern Interruption marketing and not capturing people where like where they're searching and so um like I said once you get past Zillow and LendingTree you really gotta dig a little bit deeper and say how are you generating these leads and the less they share with you I mean our clients see everything from start to finish all like before they even start with us if they don't if you you can't see everything as far as how that lead is being generated uh that should that should throw up some red flags well so you mentioned uh so far Google was like creme de La Creme then Zillow LendingTree uh exclusive and that's kind of your three but um I'm not talking about like social media organic kind of you know work that a lot of people are gaming those algorithms and they're really good at doing that but what about spending on uh ads on Facebook on Instagram on Tick Tock did you see any success there like as part of a broader marketing strategy yes if your goal is direct response lead generation no like direct like direct response lead generation you inherently have a very very low level of trust with your audience which means that intent piece ends up determining whether or not it's like you have a good lead you know a lead that's worth uh worth having now the flip side of this is like if you're if you are retargeting on Facebook leads that you've already talked to or at some point or leads that landed on your landing page previously um or you know targeting agents on Facebook with a little video about you like you can use Facebook Instagram Tick Tock you can use all that stuff very successfully in your business but if you're just talking about generating leads and and taking strangers name email address and phone number like you're wasting your time if you're doing that anywhere except for Google except for a very very very limited circumstances interesting that's very interesting and are when you have your marketing automation are they different for all of these are they all the same like what I'm trying to say is do you do a different workflow for all of your Market automation depending on where someone's coming from or is it kind of standard well so we only do like we only do Google for our clients and so the cam like the campaigns that we've built assume a level of intent that is there with Google um whereas like if you were generating leads from Facebook like you might have to change some of the language because uh you like some of the language of our marketing automation insinuates that they were searching for like what we do so outside of that though 90 I mean 90 of it can be the same I think that a lot of loan officers overthink this stuff when really the the best thing to do is to make sure that you have communications going out and and make sure that they sound somewhat like a real person um you know and not necessarily overthinking the content of that so I got a uh this is a weirdo question for you but um this is what I do so there's a couple of realtors in I live in DC in the Washington DC area and there's a couple like big realtors that will do some pretty extravagant Investments to do Legion and what they'll do is everybody they sold a home to they'll invite into these big party buses and take them out to Wineries and you'll get like I'm not kidding you know like a hundred people on these party buses where the wine is Flowing everybody's having a good time and they let their clients bring whoever they want and so you know and and of course they've got their agents walking up and down the buses you know getting to know people and you know they do very well with this model now I don't think that works for everybody I think it works for some people and some people can pull it off and some people can't maybe especially if there's like a niche Community you're focusing on but um I guess my question is coming at is there there's a lot of that kind of stuff work in Legion what I'm trying to say is I saw an ad um just just today and I got the same it's funny I saw the ad and then the same SDR who works for the vendor that's a sales representative for anybody who doesn't know send me an email immediately because they got good Tech they knew I saw that ad and he immediately follows up with an email offering me airpods if I'll just listen to their pitch for 30 minutes and so I started thinking to myself like this pretty significant like powerful way to get someone onto a 30 minute demo I don't know what their cost per acquisition is you know what I mean but obviously yeah it's worth it it's worth it for them to just get me on a demo for 30 minutes right they'll get enough of us to convert in their mind but I just wondered does is there any of that that you're seeing anybody doing in the mortgage space is anybody offering ridiculous gimmicks like that that are kind of like you know and doesn't work yeah um I'm not like the on the real estate side or on like the example of the real estate agent I mean I've seen a lot of I've seen a lot of stuff like that um and lenders you know I I see more lenders like supporting an agent in that than doing it themselves um a lot of lenders their clients like they can't they they wouldn't be able to run an event like that without getting the agent's buy-in first because the clients are not their clients the clients are the agents clients really right um and so that's where a lot of our clients you know see a lot of our clients see benefit from marketing consumer direct is that eliminates like that eliminates that Dynamic like at the point that I've found the lead like I'm the quarterback of the transaction the lead looks at it that way I look at it that way the agent looks at it that way um and so that so I could see our clients maybe getting deep you know getting more into consumer direct party type things like that um and and you know especially a client that we have out in Arizona closing 19 to 20 of these like Google pay-per-click leads a month um I could definitely see that working out for him um the most like creative I mean we have like we have a local a brokerage right now that like has uh like four people on their team right driving around and like wrapped like Teslas um and I don't like I don't quite understand that all the way that's pretty gimmicky I don't know how well that's working um and then lastly the some something that like I wouldn't have necessarily been on board with four three four years ago that I've seen a little bit more of lately specifically do you know do you know Jeff zimfer yeah yeah just great yeah yeah so Jeff uh Jeff runs uh mortgage uh what is it called mortgage marketing yeah so he has that podcast with a mortgage uh mortgage or I'm sorry agent Academy or something like that it's mortgage marketing.pro um and it's and basically it's like his like agent training academy and this concept of running trainings for real estate agent on pretty basic like social media marketing digital marketing like uh marketing automation type stuff I think that honestly like that to me I that was my play When I was a loan officer I just didn't have the content out of the box to do like when I was generating leads for my business and I wasn't closing Lee as many deals as fast as I wanted to even doing that the next thing that I did was I started putting on classes for real estate agents how they could generate leads or how they could manage their social media or whatever so this was like was my Approach up until the point that I said I'm gonna do this on the agency side so I really really believe in what he's doing with that uh especially at the point that he's like got it in like a pre-packaged like ready out of the box uh you can run your events virtually um I I think that that I think that that is very underrated right now um is is running those events as a means of getting in front of as many agents as possible yeah we talked about cash cash does it a lot um cashed it off yeah he he he's really good at that actually he does it regularly and uh he said the barrier is not too high to get into it so definitely a good strategy yeah well Michael this was awesome um Everybody if you want to find out more uh you can reach out to Michael on uh LinkedIn how in any any other way you want people to contact you yeah just head over to empowerlow.com um you can claim if a 14-day free trial if you let us know uh that you heard about us on the mortgage masterminds podcast we'll extend that trial for you out to 30 days um so you just got to shoot us a chat and say hey I started my trial I heard about you from mortgage masterminds we'll extend your your trial up to 30 days so feel free to head over there you can book a demo for our mortgage lead generation service called core you can click a link at the top of the page and book a demo for that um or yeah hit me up on LinkedIn hit me up on Facebook I'm I'm around so you heard what Michael said go register for 30 days spend your entire Year's marketing Budget on buying leads just for those 30 days and then you're out I'm just kidding there we go there we go hit it hard test those terms of service [Laughter] Michael thanks so much man I enjoyed this yeah me as well I really appreciate you having me on thanks for listening if you like the podcast please give us a five star rating subscribe and tell all your friends about the show we at sales Boomerang started this podcast to elevate the mortgage lending industry by sharing the kind of exclusive Insider Knowledge from the successes and failures of the best of the best the foundation of every successful lender is borrower retention sales Boomerang is the number one fully automated borrow retention system in the industry one in two of the biggest lending companies in the United States use sales Boomerang to make sure they reach out to their borrowers when they need a loan and more importantly before their competitors do if you want to learn more about sales Boomerang check us out at salesboomerang.com thank you