Empower Your Mortgage Business with Pipeline Management CRM for Mortgage

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good evening everyone and thanks for joining us today we are here with a representative from all three of our crm partners so we're glad you guys could all make it we are here talking about crms and how to really leverage them especially right now that everyone's pipeline is so full so we're going to be talking about making processes more efficient and how you can really leverage it the best so we are here with josh cohen of shape josh friend of incellerate and randy toby of liondesk so thank you guys for joining us thanks for having us so starting out i think it's important to recognize the fact that crms aren't one solution fits all it's really about finding what works for your business so brokers a lot of the time will talk to each other and get feedback on certain products and that's great but you also have to remember you have to identify what's best for your business so starting out josh cohen i'll kick it over to you first how do you think is the best way for a broker to go about identifying the need in their business and finding a crm that's best for them yeah it's a great question um you know finding the right crm can be a daunting process because there are so many options out there i think identifying your biggest challenge is the first step to finding the right system that's going to work for you i hear on a daily basis i speak with brokers and members of aim every single day and uh it seems to be that the biggest challenge generally speaking is follow-up right we have so many people in our pipelines leads are coming in rates are low right now and it's hard for them to keep up so following up with previous clients farming repeat business out of existing relationships can be really important um you know something that shape focuses on specifically is ease of use so that's been a huge advantage for us right we know that the uh audience that we're speaking to brokers loan officers processors not only are they super busy but they're sales professionals they're not engineers or coders so everything that we have built and continue to build is with the specific mission of making it easy to use so that you're not spending uh wasted time figuring out how to configure your crm for your needs the other piece that a lot of people are looking for are integrations with their other softwares that they're using in their tech stacks so i think it's important to make the crm easily connectable with other platforms that you're using to run your workflow yeah absolutely randy i'll take it over to you yeah uh josh answered a lot of that right uh we are talking about you know the same thing with cars right bmw mercedes a different thing for everybody getting what their wants are uh one thing that i would definitely say is play to your your strengths as well right if you would at least say doing video or something like that like look for a program that you can utilize to really amplify what you're good at right if one's really focused around sending emails and you don't like to send emails but you like texting right go that direction so um i believe that everybody has superpowers right and they do think better than others so double and triple down on your strengths and you know like like josh said you know those weaknesses obviously find some things to complement those but double and triple down on what you're good at and then do the follow-up with that tool yeah i love that that's a good point josh yeah i mean both great uh answers you know what i think i'd add aren't that is i think if you're a lender or broker you know what i'd ask yourself the question are you a heavy tech user a light tech user right what are you what are you really trying to get at are you really a process driven individual um you know are you once in a system that you actually work in interact with are you trying to build something new a new way to do loans a digital process or if you're not and to ran into the randy's point if you know hey video is what you really like or this one thing is how you do your business and um and maybe you're not trying to uh reinvent how you do business and you're not trying to you know go after the digital market as much or something then you know find the crm that's maybe that's less complicated that's easier that's you know you may not have as much functionality but it's what you're going to use or if you're someone who's wanting to actually build um build off of technology and um and you want to look for a system that has more capabilities right okay you can integrate with that you can make changes to that can really kind of you know grow with you yeah absolutely and josh cohen to your point i know we talk to brokers a lot too and follow-up is it's tough it's tough to manage your pipeline and be able to follow up with your past business so what would you say is a good ratio of time to really focus on the current business that you have and following up with your past business how do you manage that yeah it's a great question i you know they're equally important nobody wants to leave money on the table and so leveraging those previous relationships is really important but of course something we talk about a lot internally here is speed to lead so every time a lead comes in you want to be connecting with that person as soon as possible before they start shopping for another broker and sometimes that requires some relationship building and getting on the phone and speaking directly to that potential client so we allow automation for following up and nurturing everybody else in your pipeline in addition to your new leads so you know we have filters in place where you can pull up lists right away of people that you want to target so that you can either reach out to them via phone text or email but you also have the ability to do mass strip campaigns through whatever communication methods you want so i think it's important to find a crm that is doing a lot of that tedious admin work for you and reaching out to people on your behalf with the content that you want them to receive without really spending any time and taking any time out of your day right in my opinion the biggest advantage that a crm can provide to uh any of our users is putting time back into your day so that you can focus on what you do best which is generating more leads and closing more loans and growing your business yeah absolutely automation is king yeah so josh friend i'd love to hear your input yeah i think um i guess the question was really how do you do follow-up or how you devote time to follow-up or how do you manage that so i guess to highlight the point of follow-up and even i'm just gonna say initial contact uh we have done a study for four different years now each year we we go to about a thousand lenders online so we use the mba's list of the largest lenders we go online and we apply for a mortgage we ask them for a mortgage through whatever method they have whether it's a point of sale solution a contact me now form what we have found in those four different years of studies uh the best year it was only 56 percent of people didn't respond on average almost 60 percent of lenders don't respond to one not even speed to lead it's not they don't even respond one time and other people that did respond the average person only responded one point three times less than two percent of people use text messaging so i mean the reality is no one in the industry is doing this very well we're gonna phrase that there are some people doing this extremely well and there's the rest of the industry who's doing this very poorly it's probably a better better way to say um so you know automation first is first first step is automation you have to have automation in place to put in there so whether you're you know communicating through email through text through ring's voicemail through a facebook post to instagram targeting you want a system that does that's when we built our platform for engagement um we kind of hit the saw the struggles that lenders had which was one is um you know they don't have the technology to do to do the follow-up or the time but they also don't and didn't have the time to create the content or the time to create the strategy of it so i think that's also important when you're looking at a system is what can best practices can you leverage right so we're leveraging we've had three million borrower applications the last three years and 70 million prospects last three years across our platform so we're looking at all the contact points between an email and a text and a ring's voicemail and a facebook post and a piece of direct mail an instagram post what's the ideal way to get these people to continually come back to you so if you can automate that put some intelligence behind it that's the biggest part of the battle the second thing is um make it a habit that you spend 30 to 45 minutes every day just prospecting old customers you just time block it say you're gonna do it um and it's in i mean the amount of money you can make by doing that and you know use a system like what we do is prioritize alerts so you will give you a work list every day it's going to give you people you should follow up with based off of how long it's been you know so have a way you know we have an automated way to tell you here's the people you follow up with but if you just spend and just time block 30 to 45 minutes every day to follow up with past customers referral partners etc if you're not already doing that you're gonna make more money there's no question about it your income will go up so it's just time block put yourself to do it and then you have a system that automates it all right it's obviously you're gonna get a compounding effect and huge lift as well yeah i think that's a really good point because so many brokers right now their pipelines are so full so they say i don't have the time to even get these systems in place but if you think about all the time that it's going to be saving you when you do get these systems in place and get the strategy down and it's just all automated you're going to save so much time and be able to work on the high level things that you should be working on it's like riding in a horse and buggy and people are driving past you in cars and you say oh i don't have time to go buy a car right now i'm still in new york city right yeah that's right time to pull over and upgrade randy how about you listen i mean this is a business where the more hands you shake the more you make right so i'm gonna say that i would weigh a little bit more heavy on the outreach um up from where josh said you know he said 50 50. i'm gonna say 60 you know more like 60 in my personal opinion from our experience um i i think if you want unlimited earning potential right one thing that you can really focus on is more engagement and more outbound communication if you can generate your own leads and you can create conversations i.e engagement you're going to win right people and processes can be put in place to do the processing and managing of the loans this business historically is a feast and famine type of business right real estate and financial service so um i think if you can continue to stuff that pipeline full right where it's bursting build processes and again i'm talking with josh and josh right like josh said you gotta slow down for five minutes to put some of those process in place because tools like ours will automate a lot of the initial outbound communication and then we deploy tools where when people engage that's where you need to jump right speed delete like we talked about is really really important so when you have a drip campaign or some type of automation going out when people open respond et cetera you want to be there right you want to be there in a conversation the real the real gold is in the engagement right conversations lead to appointments and appointments lead to deals and referrals and all these other things so you know i'm just a huge proponent of talking to more people right turning that up and going about it that way technology has created a great uh leverage tool and you need to prioritize your time right what are you looking to do and there's areas where you will have to sacrifice and put those processes in place while you continue to build and grow the business based upon your goals obviously you know some people don't have ambitions to just you know double and triple their business every year you know some people want incremental uh you know incrementally do it or they just want to maintain this error because that's what they're comfortable and they prioritize things so that would be my recommendation that's great and a follow-up to that question i know um especially josh friend you had really gotten into the types of follow-up that you can do have you guys seen any success leaning one way or another as far as the type of follow-up so whether it's a newsletter an email send a text message um or have you seen any really unique ways of follow-up that people have had success with randy i'll go to you first on this one you're gonna go to me yeah go for it all right uh text messaging hands down you know text messaging has a 95 open rate you know if we think about how many unread emails we have versus unread text messages yes as consumers right like we go right to it hopefully us as marketers we also don't kill it at the same time the benefit of a text message it's short it's sweet it's direct hopefully it brings value and you've got the occasional call to action in there as well right to create that that sense of engagement so i think that that's definitely uh one of the best things that you can do i call it like engagement missiles and if you want to supercharge that send out video text messages right people remember more of what they see and they hear and they also remember people and connect with people at a whole new level like if we look at any of the platforms today we pull out you know the remote control to our lives all of the platforms are going video and there's a reason behind it yes right so you want to supercharge it do video text messaging because then you can actually have that short sweet conversation face to face and now people aren't necessarily meeting face to face right so what better way to utilize video and text messaging that would be my opinion on what's what one of the best opportunities right now because i think even josh josh friends said it would you say josh like less than two percent of people are taking advantage of texting yeah monstrous opportunity just do it just do it like on the up and up that's all i could say yeah that's that's the challenge and that's why lenders are having a challenge with text messages because of the compliance of it and having the ability to manage it that's what we're seeing as the biggest buried entry is either a they can't track compliance like opt-in or b they don't have mobile access to the text message so their platform sends out a text message to the customer the customer responds back from a drip says yeah i'd love to buy that house i'm ready to make an offer josh you know what can i afford and if i can't respond to that customer then it breaks that whole communication chain if i have to go log into my computer and get in front of my desk and send a message back then i'm no longer in that you know you know connected point straight ahead that's why we see so few lenders that use text or truth is their loan officers are probably using their cell phones and it's just uncompliant they're not tracking they have no idea what's going on so that's actually a you know a challenge that we've seen that you know lenders are trying to solve yeah i couldn't agree more uh i'm glad randy you included the video piece we're finding also that you're able to tap into a much wider audience there are folks that will just delete emails that have too much text in them but if there's a 20 30 second video that they can watch where the broker is speaking directly to that lead or that client you're able to uh engage at a much higher level i also agree it's it's important to tap into multiple methods um you know some people like to they learn by hearing other people learn by seeing so having all of those contact points in one particular email or text message is super important um but yeah text is definitely the way of the future uh much higher open rate um and uh also people are seeing those message messages much faster than an email as well right we're finding most people that look at text messages or opening them within the first five minutes the compliance piece is also super important we've heard some horror stories of folks who are texting information to leads and clients from their personal cell phone and if you continue to text a person that is asked to not receive information via text there are legal headaches coming your way so it's really important that when somebody opts out the system the crm that you're using is no longer capable of delivering text messages to that uh phone number um so that you don't get into hot water so you know we're we're seeing a lot of success with video marketing um companies like bom bom are doing a great job of making it easy for brokers to create great content um and uh we make it really easy to pull that content in you know val if i might share one last thing about what we just talked about and i think josh you kind of mentioned it's multiple channels so what you'd ask the question are we seeing anything that's been unique as far as our contact method strategy so um what you know i think one way to look at it is uh not everyone responds the same way right so some people there are certain ways you're never going to get a hold of me right i i'm just not going to respond and there's other ways i'll give you my own example i've been an amazon prime member for i don't know two three years something and i've gotten emails hey amazon prime video you should log in you've paid for it it's free i've seen banner ads i know amazon prime video actually is part of my service and i can get it when i log into the prime thing there's even something as a little thing that pops up and says hey you haven't used amazon you haven't used prime video give it a try never tried it then one day i want my mailbox opened it up there's some mail and lo and behold there is a piece of mill from amazon i went open it opened it up and said dear josh you've been amazon prime member for you know a year and a half you've never used amazon prime you should log in and try it and here's three shows you think you would like i went logged in that day and use amazon prime so it's a combination what we're seeing is some people you know half people respond right away but some people it's a combination of touch them in different touch points it's like if you guys are buying you know we all have this experience right now in consumer goods go look for a car or for some shoes or for a you know i was looking for a new barbecue barbecue grill for the my backyard i get barbecue grill ads and barbecue ad on my facebook instagram everyone i've seen buying a barbecue well you can do that as a lender people don't realize that you can do that as a lender and it's cheap and it's easy it's one of the things that we do is we automate what we do is it's called custom audience target targeted in facebook and instagram so if i have val miller and you come and talk to me i actually will drop an ad in your feed whether or not you're my friend or not so now all of a sudden i this is what we're seeing a lot of engagement which is customer gets an email they see a facebook post then they get a text the following day and they respond to that text versus customer b doesn't get those first two pieces only gets the text and the lower percentage of those people respond so what we're really looking at right now is just the customer experience how do you really manage a customer experience you don't want to over communicate because you know you make them mad if you text someone every day they're not going to be happy with you no one wants that you don't want to call them every day they won't be happy with you if you email them every day they won't be happy with you but if you know how to create the right pathway and create the right customer experience so you're not intrusive but you're branded around them because you can any broker of any size anyone can also become the biggest lender in their in their consumer's eyes immediately once they interact with your brand and that's really what we what we're seeing is very powerful is touch them in all these channels that way you're you know you're you're always forefront in their mind yeah and i think it's also about creating value when you do the follow-up so if i'm getting a text message every day or an email every day that provides no value to me that's going to be annoying but if someone is giving me something that i can actually use i think that's so much more impactful and they're going to look forward to your content rather than giving them useless information yeah absolutely and we actually start out uh our customers with pre-built templates pre-built drip campaigns um we know that folks are way too busy to sit down for a month and create uh all of that content right away um certainly there will come a time where you have to create some new content and run a new uh marketing campaign but and that's very easy to do in our system but um we are taking best practices uh from folks that have been brokers and loan officers for a long period of time and providing that content right out of the box so you know certainly we want you to personalize it add videos if that's something that you want to dive into but right away we can turn on some of those campaigns based on those best practices and automate that process for people right away instead of wasting time spending six months trying to figure out how to configure your crm that's a huge uh obstacle for people right a lot of the folks that that come to us and i'm sure to you guys as well they've had a not so great experience with it with another crm platform they've they've paid for a year in a lot of cases and they don't know they still haven't gotten any value out of it because they're spending so much time customizing and configuring so again it all comes back to that ease of use piece i think absolutely yeah yeah so from what you guys have seen other than the straightforward these are the things that a crm should solve for what are some creative ways that people can use the crm and they should really be leveraging especially during this time when pipelines are so full yeah um i'll take a crack at it because we're actually coming up with a new product and i'll give a little highlight of what it is but some it's data intelligence so you know we have our partners let's say like sales boomerang monitor base data mix that they're creating watching your past portfolio seeing what's going on with it telling you what's taking place and you integrate with the crm that's going to give you the ability to call and connect to the right people we're also now bringing in and we've had you know our lenders tend to drive the road map and products for us so we've had some lenders who has integrated our platform this data intelligence where a lead comes in and as their customer talks to the lead or their loan officer connects the lead in real time they're pinging uh and pulling back information like the listener and title how the title is held what the value of the house is an avm how many bedrooms how many bathrooms do they have a pool how many square feet do they have what their current rate is who their current lender is and when they took their last loan and what the current equity is they're getting all this in like a split second so now when they're having a conversation they're very efficient they know exactly what to talk to the customer about and then they're leveraging that data on the back end to say hey i want to market to people i am too busy i'm only going to send these text messages out to people with loan amounts are over 300 000 and their ltvs are less than 75 percent and they have in current interest rates above four percent right they start getting very specific with their marketing with their database so now you know if you take you know i when i was a loan officer uh 1999 i worked in emac bank and i remember there was a time we had three hour hold times in the queue you could pick up the phone there would be three hours that people are in hole waiting to talk to you which is great and i'm sure any macbank would have loved it if they could have made sure all the people the high low amounts came to the front of the line and you know but we didn't have that ability you do with technology though so that can do you can use out technology you can make sure that you're messaging the most to your highest value customers you can prioritize and connect to the highest value customers and that's how you become most efficient so we're seeing people use data and we're it's now a product we're gonna be offering soon just in our platform are you gonna have data intelligence so now you know who to market to when to talk to them who to call etc yeah i love that randy yeah so i think i i think kind of more what we talked about a little earlier by deploying these strategic blended campaigns you know where the text message goes out the video goes out the facebook ad goes out right all through the system i think is one of the best things that you could possibly do we've launched or we're launching uh some artificial intelligence via sms as well where it actually engages with the customer has real-life conversations with these people asks the appropriate questions and then automatically automatically will log the conversations into the contact record so that you have a full trail unfortunately we do have a mobile app so you can actually see that conversation happening in real time and that lo can take over so it's kind of like having that virtual assistant that's a robot doing a lot of conversations for you and i think with what josh said i think that this is just the beginning i think between data intelligence and ai we're going to be able to deliver more value more precise information based upon that customer faster and more effectively which hopefully will reduce the potentially takes from a conversion and a follow-up standpoint so i think that those are some things that are definitely moving moving the game forward and i mean it's going to it's going to come down to where you're just basically making sure everything is happening right and you kind of got to be like odds and with with a lot of these tools and a lot of this intelligence uh that's really where i think that the future of of this stuff is going yeah and to your point i i know you said about weeding out the higher loan amounts or the fico scores that you want to work with but i think it's also important too to look back and see these demographics i i did the best with um i tend to work better with people under 30 years old or in a suburban area and that kind of thing because if you had success with those people in the past it's likely that you're going to have success with them in the future so i think that's a great point josh cohen how about you yeah i agree uh data and analytics is is incredibly important we are providing again right out of the box a lot of pre-built reporting so that you can track all of this information you can also create custom reporting and then we provide filters uh with a couple hundred data points so that you can quickly and easily just pull up any list or demographic of folks that you want to target so i agree with with everything my counterparts are saying here but uh we've also included some additional functionality uh that makes this even simpler for the broker so these are things like prioritization right every one of the pipelines that we have in our platform are automatically prioritized so that every time you pull up a particular pipeline whether you're focused on new you know leads previous clients uh referral partners you may want to do a marketing campaign to them as well everything is prioritized for you so that all you have to do is focus on folks from the top down right again creating efficiencies and saving time we also provide things like lead distribution rules so that as leads come in they are automatically being delivered to the appropriate broker based on whatever criteria you have set could be geographic criteria it could be a loan value criteria it could be a language criteria right a spanish lead comes in we want that to go to our broker who is fluent in spanish so instead of having to open that lead figure out where it needs to go and reassign it to the appropriate ta member all of that is automated um and then we also have created a couple of ways to make sure you're getting the most value out of your leads um so we have something called shark tank right so if a lead is not being uh communicated with or followed up with in a timely manner it can go into a pool where anyone on the team can go grab that lead uh and work it um so that they again are not shopping for another broker option we also have something called quickfire connect when an inbound call comes in it can notify everyone on the team or the people that you want it to notify and whoever accepts that notification first now owns that lead and is working it right away so um incoming leads are being worked immediately they're being followed up with by a human being through quick fire as soon as possible um and then again yes it's certainly incredibly important to make sure that you're following up with previous clients that are sitting in your pipeline and they are not being ignored so um pulling up a list of your clients filtering based on interest rate or other criteria and then being able to target them you know when you have an hour of free time to pull some additional deals into your into your business is is incredibly important yeah absolutely you guys all have such great insights so thank you so much for jumping on with us today um as we say at aim the best crm is the one that you actually use so i think it's so important now more than ever pipelines are full make sure you're really leveraging those crns keeping track of who you're working with and getting that follow-up in place so that your pipeline can be full in the future as well so if you guys are in the market for a crm make sure to check out all three of these crms you can go to our brokers our better network page or if you have any questions and want to get connected to the team you can email bav network aimgroup.com so thank you guys so much for jumping on today this was really valuable thanks for having me thanks for having us thank you thanks for tuning in guys take care