Many people mistakenly think that working as a mortgage loan officer must be a pretty easy job.
After all, the vast majority of people need a mortgage in order to buy a home.
Therefore, as long as someone qualifies, you offer them a mortgage.
What could be easier?
As an actual mortgage loan officer, you know there’s much more to it than that. People have options. If you want to grow your business, you need the mortgage sales techniques required to beat out your competitors or you’ll soon provide irrefutable evidence that the job isn’t nearly as easy as so many people think.
16 Mortgage Sales Techniques to Start Using Right Away
Fortunately, the following 16 tips for mortgage loan officers will help you quickly increase your sales without requiring years to master. In fact, once you’re done reading through this list, you’ll know everything you need to start implementing them right away.
1. If You Aren’t Using Salesmanship, Your Deals Are Lacking
If this is your first time reading about loan officer sales tips, it might be because you have a low opinion of salesmanship. A lot of people do.
However, know that without learning how to better sell your mortgages, you’ll always be missing out on better clients.
This is self-evident. The ideal borrower has options. If you’re going to win their attention – much less their business – you’ll need to know how to use the rest of these mortgage sales techniques.
2. Yes, Honesty Is Still the Best Policy
At the same time, this isn’t an endorsement of the types of techniques that give salesmanship a bad name.
Instead, be 100% honest with potential borrowers. Go out of your way to make the facts clear to them and you’ll soon find that the truth is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal.
3. People Love Confidence and Positivity
Taking out a mortgage is a huge decision. People want the help of someone who sounds like they know what they’re talking about.
If you come across as unsure about your abilities or the mortgage you’re offering, don’t expect prospects to turn into borrowers.
There countless reasons to adopt confidence and positive thinking, but the reason it’s on our list of loan officer sales tips is simple: people will want to be around and prospects will want to become clients.
4. Speed Wins the Day
Put yourself in a homebuyer’s shoes for a moment. Finally, they’ve found the home of their dreams. The only thing standing between them and the house they’ve always imagined is the loan they need to secure it.
This is why selling mortgages requires speed. Obviously, you need to do your due diligence, but you also want to offer short approval times and quick responses. From the first time you meet, you should be looking for ways to make this entire process a fast one.
5. You Won’t Get What You Don’t Ask For
One of the oldest pieces of sales advice still applies: you have to ask for the sale.
Yet, many mortgage officers clearly haven’t heard of it. They think they can simply produce a term sheet and the prospect will pound down their door to get to it.
When you have a prospect, at some point, you must ask them to take the loan you offer. If they say they’re not ready for a mortgage, that’s fine, but ask them to call you first when that changes.
6. Understand Your Clients’ Schedules
Of course, none of these mortgage sales techniques will be much of use if you can’t actually get in front of your potential borrowers.
The best way to do this is by, once again, putting yourself in their shoes.
Sure, you may work 9-to-5, but when are they most likely to be around?
You’ll probably find that the best time for phone calls and meetings is after normal business hours or on the weekends. Make yourself available by thinking about their schedules and you’ll have a much easier time earning their business.
7. Expect Multiple Touchpoints
Don’t expect the vast majority of your market to feel comfortable accepting a mortgage the first time you meet. Instead, anticipate that it will be a prolonged process and you’ll be better prepared for it. When you try closing them too early, you run a great chance of missing your mark and losing their business forever.
8. Know What Comes Next
Along the same lines, always do your best to think several steps ahead.
What’s going to come next in your sales process?
Every meeting you have with a prospect is only going to have one of a few different outcomes, so plan them out ahead of time. This will give you the advantage of speed we mentioned earlier.
As much as possible, prepare them, too. Something as simple as a customized timeline that shows them the path forward will help you maintain your mindshare.
9. Always Follow Up in Writing
The classic follow-up email is utilized in just about every form of business and, yet, most mortgage loan officers hardly ever use them.
Again, if you want to stay top-of-mind, follow-ups are the perfect method. Of course, you only want to use them when appropriate, but you shouldn’t lack for opportunities. After any meeting you have, send your prospect an email that summarizes what you talked about and provides them with whatever resources they may need to move forward.
As long as these emails are actually helpful, you’ll find that this simple tip can pay off in a big way.
10. Be Proactive, Not Reactive
To plan ahead and send out follow-ups, you must be proactive.
Make room in your schedule to send out these emails, consider where your prospect is in the buyer’s journey, and otherwise ensure that you’re not constantly trying to keep pace with a potential borrower. It’s all about staying ahead.
Anytime you have a touchpoint with a prospect, you should give yourself ample time to prepare. For example, the best salespeople give themselves 15 minutes before every sales call getting ready to make the most of it.
11. Know Your Market
Mortgages may be an extremely specific financial product to sell, but, as you probably know, the market is far more diverse.
This is why you need to understand your market before trying to put these mortgage sales techniques to work.
As we mentioned earlier, confidence is important, but you can only have confidence when you’re sure of your customers.
When someone comes to you because they’re interested in a mortgage, you want to understand what type they’re looking for, what kind of timeframe they’re thinking about, and, in the case of couples, who makes the decisions.
12. Qualify Your Clients
This kind of high-level understanding will also help you better qualify clients. Learning how to qualify clients is absolutely vital or you won’t know which are worth your time and which are going to cause you needless overhead or, worse, be nothing but trouble.
13. Treat Referrals as a Top Priority
All of these mortgage loan officer tips will help you attract prospects and close them, but there’s no point in doing all the work on your own.
Instead, build a referral network that includes real estate professionals and other business people in your community whom you can compensate for bringing you new leads. This will save you time and improve your ROI.
14. Relationships Build Revenues
Whether it’s a prospect, past client, or someone in your referral network, get good at building relationships. This is another of those loan officer sales tips that can help you build a passive form of lead generation.
Among other things, this means getting to know about their families, jobs, hobbies, personal interests, and anything else that will help you build an actual relationship with them.
15. Provide Impeccable Service
We’ve touched on different ways to do this, but it’s still worth reiterating one last time that you should do everything in your power to serve your prospects as best as possible. All of the mortgage loan officer tips in the world won’t make up for bad service.
16. Add Value
Finally, always look for ways to add value to the borrowing process. This will become easier to do over time as you better get to know your market and grow your understanding of what they need along the way.
Over time, you’ll also get better at building the aforementioned network of professionals, which means you’ll have great inspectors, appraisers, and real estate agents you can recommend.
Putting These Mortgage Sales Techniques to Work
The prospect of instituting all 16 of the mortgage sales techniques we just covered may be a bit intimidating, especially if you’re not currently making use of any of them.
So take it slow.
Begin by adopting the first three from the list above that you’re currently operating without. Then, as you become proficient in one, adopt another and continue on until the entire list is at your command. While you will eventually benefit from mastering all 16, proceeding slow and steady will produce plenty of powerful results, along the way.