Forward Event Recap Part II: Proof Over Promises

Hey, what's up, Jeff? Zimfer coming at you. The humble host here of the mortgage market radio podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you're liking the show, liking the episodes, getting value, getting content, please check the link in the show notes and leave us a review. It's called rate this podcast. There'll be a link somewhere in the show notes description, et cetera. If you'd just tap on that and head on over to leave us a review, really appreciate that because it helps us reach more people. All right, listen before I get in today's content, I am coming at you hot and heavy, great off of a rotator cuff surgery. That's right, yesterday. So I'm recording this today. Wednesday, August 14th, yesterday, I went in and had long overdue rotator cuff surgery that had been bothering me for going on year and a half or so, two years, bone spurs developed, which caused a little bit of a tear in the rotator cuff. And so here I am, sitting in a sling, using one arm and still coming at you. So why am I sharing with you that well just because, hey, why not? You've been listening for a while and I feel like we have this kind of connection and relationship now and it's always helpful and useful to share what's going on. And if you didn't see, I posted on the Insta story, a picture of me in the gown or gurney with that wonderful hair and ed on. And I thought I was going to upgrade to the fry station. Anyway, as I sit here and I should probably take a photo of this. Here we go. Let me do this right now. So this is live real time recording. Here we go. I'm going to take a photo with me with my arm kind of strapped, kind of balance the phone in my hand. There we go. All right, I just took the photo. So look for that to be posted somewhere on the social school. Follow me. You can do what to do and look me up, mortgage, bargaining, radio, whatever, all that stuff. And make sure you're subscribed. By the way, I got to share with you a couple of wins of the week also. As you know, what we do is we help mortgage loan originators move from being seen as a sell a stir and vendor to a partner in peer. How do we do that? We help them build a platform that helps them become five mile famous in their local community, particularly amongst their local real estate agent population. Why? Because it's still the single best source for high quality, high conversion low cost low drama purchase referrals. And it's an incredible time to go into your local market and lead with education to help agents navigate this change around the NAR settlement situation. We've got a lot of our members teaching our classes that are doing that. And I wanted to bring with you a couple of wins from the week on that real quick. So if you're listening shout out to you, Tony, what's up, Tony lady, lady, lady, I don't know, you're going to tell me how to pronounce that Tony, light, lighty. So Tony has had two meetings with two different title companies today to talk about partnering on classes and it's the year he responded to my Facebook message. And he says starting September 10th and every second Tuesday of the month, he'll be doing classes at one of the title offices with one of their title reps. Tony has a meeting with her tomorrow to discuss the first few classes and how they will be marketing it. So guys, that's called partnering for profits. That's called leveraging affiliates in your local market. It's highly likely that other affiliates know more agents than you do. Title S grow home warranty, pest inspection insurance, right, all those things. And that is a wonderful partner for you to team up with if you're going to want to expand your network, whether it's through classes, events, headshot, happy hours or whatever it is. So shout out to you, Tony, for doing the work. That's what it's all about. That's where things get done is when you do the work. In addition to that, I have another quick success story coming at you from Brady, Brady says he's been leaning in heavy on the class we have, which is winning the buyer presentation. And then he has one as well called protecting your buyer agent commission. He had 80 agents on a zoom today. And this was an email from an agent that he knows but had never worked with. The agents now fully understand they need us as mortgage professionals. Now is the opportunity to build relationships. So Brady goes on to say, this agent sent him this email, hey, Brady, thanks so much for a really great seminar. I'm going to paraphrase this with some insightful and powerful ideas. Would you be able to share any of the slides? I have to internalize some of these points. Thanks again, such as this brokerage is having something on Wednesday, but I was going to try and catch what I can, I really appreciated the cloud of ideas. Can you see how I can really see how good communication with highly intelligent quality lenders is going to be even more important? So on and so forth, I won't be working with buyers that have their family member from out of town or an internet company lender anymore. This shit is about to get next level complicated. Boom, so he gets that from an agent who he's never worked with but knows and was kind of one of those agents in the peripheral, right? And now this is an opportunity that he engaged with this agent, 80 other agents, and it's an opportunity to move people forward. Guys, you know, the world we're in right now is the, the war of attention, right? The name of the game is attention. The new, as a matter of fact, I heard it said the other day, it used to be that content is king. Now community is king and how are you building a community in your local area of other professionals who can send you business real estate agents are still one of those peer pillars and go ahead, let's go off about realtors versus consumer direct. I'm going to do one of those debates coming up soon. But the point being is it's not one or the other. It's both. It's all, right? And so it still makes sense to have agents in your sources of business. Now how you go about getting that agent business is the area that most originators have struggled over the years. And that's where we come in. We help you attract versus chase top of the funnel awareness and conversations at scale. You've heard the stories on here over week, week after week after week. Oh my gosh. You know, what are you waiting for? Do you want to slug it out? Do you want to chase coal call? Do you want to be seen as a vendor and a solicitor? Hey, if you do, that's cool, or do you want to lead with education and build a personal brand that attracts people to you and cuts through the noise? You can do it. Some of the examples I share with you every single week. You can book a call with me, mortgage marketing dot pro, go check it out, mortgage marketing dot pro. It's a 30 minute call. You and I will get acquainted. We'll see if we're a fit for each other and we'll go from there. If not, no harm, no foul. So go check it out. Okay. So this week, I'm going to be coming at you with another solo episode. I'm going to break down a couple of the other key takeaways from the recent forward event that I attended. I did this episode last week as well. There's just so much content in here. It's about time I got to this for you. But once again, if you don't know forward event, you can go to forward event dot com every year. My buddy is Neil Dengra and Trev York host it. Shout out to you guys. It's a great event. Fantastic event. I've been three years in a row and you should go to the next one will be in July 2025. So I'm scanning my notes from a couple of the conversations. I shared with you the Rory Vaden takeaways from last week about building a personal brand and what that really is. I'm just going to do a couple of hot takes from the speakers this week looking at my notes. And some just jump into it. So Gary Vee. Gary was there as well. I mean, talk about the lineup of speakers, man. It is just top notch. So Gary Vee is there and a couple of highlights from Gary business relies on attention. Business relies on attention. What did I just say? It's an attention war. Right? We're competing for attention. 15 mile, five mile famous, okay? So what gets attention, videos, pictures, written audio, right? Selling is what you do when you don't know how to brand. Both are useful. The key is to get people to come to you versus you chase them. Didn't I just say that as well? The name of the, you know, I mean, the whole chasing agent thing has played out. Selling is what you do when you don't know how to brand. When you build a personal brand that attracts people to you that creates awareness and engagement, you don't really have to sell as much. And by the way, I'm not saying selling isn't a useful, important skill. It is. But wouldn't you rather attract than chase? Okay? All right. Let me keep going a couple of the key notes and these are just takeaways. Reminders for you. Aha. It's just to think about this and where are you not applying these? What is the one to three ideas, concepts, takeaways from this session you're listening to right now that you can take away and apply in your business, okay? For those who talk about running ads, go organic, but put money behind performing content. You know, I talk about this a lot with real estate agents. I did a Facebook ads class a few weeks ago here in Vegas for real estate agents. And you know, they were asking, of course, about running ads on Facebook. And one of the questions I always asked somebody when before when it gets into running ads is what has your organic content looks like? Have you been posting consistently for six months, a year? And if you haven't, my advice I usually give is to focus on posting organic content first and get good at that. For all kinds of reasons, we don't have time to get in here today. But one of the best places to start putting money behind an ad spend is on content that already performs. Why? Because you know it's already working because the algorithm's already done the thing and showed it to the people. And now you know, if you just add some money to that, that's going to be gas on the fire. Does that make sense? Okay. Cool. Let's keep going. My, the next shout out for one of the speakers is Shara, Sharan, Sardavatsa. I don't know if I got that right, but he is the CEO, president, founder of Real Brokage, just a superstar dude. I'm going to have him on the podcast actually. And I would suggest you look him up on YouTube. I'll link to it all this kind of stuff in the show notes so you can go follow him. But one of the key concepts he talked about was proof over promise. I love this. Share proof, share proof over promise. Everybody's promising. And that's why nobody believes anything anymore, right? It's like everybody's promising this, that, the other thing. But show me the proof that you've done it. And this is particularly important for you listening to the loan officer. And this is also for real estate agents. Share proof of pre-approved buyers with agents to help them win more listings. What does that look like? Here's what it is. Have a conversation with an agent and say, hey, Mr. Mrs. Agent, are you going on any listing appointments? Yes. Do you have to compete for those listings? Yes. Would it be helpful if you could actually demonstrate to those potential clients, right? The sellers you're going to meet. One of the things you bring to the table is that you've got a list of pre-approved buyers. And it's not just hype or talk. You actually show them a list. And then you as a loan officer, this is your realtor partner, share. Give them the list. Now you can black out the names and all that kind of stuff, right? Or only give up a first name, no last name, black out. But there's a way to do this to still protect the integrity, right, of these clients. And there's a way to explain that. So it makes sense. But let's just say you've got how many pre-approved buyers do you have right now, right? They're just looking for properties waiting or whatever they haven't found a property yet. No offers made. How many of those pre-approved, right, for that particular agent, okay? So think about how you could use that idea to help those agents show a list of pre-approved buyers. That creates confidence, right? That's proof over promise. Does this make sense? Okay. Now, another idea for you, open houses are coming back in a large way. We'll go into that on a future episode. In terms of a source of leads, et cetera, and things like that. And it's about capturing those leads and nurturing them long time. Here's an idea from Sharan. Open house follow up. Give a list of attendees. Now, this is where you get with your real estate agent. This is why you want to consider maybe doing some open houses together. You offer to take the list of open house attendees where you've got the, you know, the information list and those people who signed in and they should be doing digital sign in obviously these days. But you've got this information, right? And you offer to call and check in after the open house. Also, it's the weekend, the open house thing. You call and follow up on Monday. Hey, what's up, Jeff, ABC mortgage, and you stopped into that open house over the weekend hosted by Brad Jones on one, two, three, banana street. Just wanted to follow up and say, how's your search going? I work with Brad Jones and he or she requested that we touch base with you after your open houses to see if any questions, any more details you wanted around financing options, right? You want a second opinion if you already have a financing solution, right? You guys are smart enough to know where, how to, how to take that. But what if you could actually contact the agents and say, Hey, are you doing any open houses this week? And I would love to offer an opportunity for me to follow up on those attendees and see if I can move them forward in the next stage, qualify them a little bit more, you know, et cetera, like just offering to do that. How many other L.O.'s are not doing that, not even thinking of it most, okay? Two great ideas there, guys, use them, okay? Your job, now I'm just continuing through my notes there, back, I'm going to put full circle on this. So our job is to sell the process. The process has proof. Why do you want to provide proof because it gives them confidence and safety and helps establish credibility and trust? How about you as a loan officer? How many deals have you closed? How many of your offers have gotten accepted or won? So this is another idea that you can share with real estate agencies. How many of your offers submitted offers, right? Get accepted. I know when I interviewed Matt Weaver, number one loan officer in the state of Florida and arguably the country, depending on how you're looking, sliced at the numbers. But some ads are doing over a thousand loans a year. And one of the things that Matt brings to the conversation with real estate agencies that I forget what it is exactly, but something like 98% of his offers get accepted. So many teams of the real estate agent, right? When they do pre-approvals together, what's he's focused on? He's focused on showing proof, and by the way, he doesn't just say it. He shows a list of closed transactions, right? To establish credibility and trust that he actually does what he says he's going to do. Very simple for you to put together, you know, in a Canva document, do a screenshot of your CRM or whatever it is. And again, there's ways to work this where you're just going to show transactions, offers, accepted, and things like that. You don't have to show names. You guys get what I'm saying, right? These are high level concepts for you to now take and put the work in your own business. Does this make sense? So Sharon called this show flow demo, right? Here's another idea. I want you to take this idea and share it with your real estate agents. This is a good one. Have a conversation with your real estate agent. Let's just roleplay this. Hey, Mr. Mrs. Agent, do you have clients, prospects, who use Zillow or Redfin to search for homes? Well, of course they do, right? So here's what you want to do. You want to coach the real estate agent to tell their prospects, their clients, send me the homes you're interested in on Zillow or Redfin. And here's the key point. They're not going to know how to do it. So you have this conversation with the real estate agent or even you dealing with the buyers directly, if you're in person with them, show them how to do it on their phone, show them how to forward share listings of homes they're interested in. You may need to get out your phone if you're meeting with the agent or whoever. Get out your phone, get in the app, choose a home and send it. Okay? Show them. And if you're sitting there in front of them, you literally on their phone. You grab their phone and go, hey, I'm going to enter my phone number right now and you show them how to do that. Why do you want to do that? Well, because you want to loop the agent back in, right? You don't want those prospects out there unattended becoming orphaned. We need to build a fence around those prospects. And this helps the realtor helps you, right? Provide additional context, answer questions, perhaps schedule showings about those particular homes that they're interested in and not necessarily, you know, waiting on the timeline of those prospects who may get busy, life gets in the way, or they talk to themselves out of it, or whatever the case is. Again, just another idea. These are ideas, more ideas per minute than any other podcast on the planet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right. So how long have I been running now? Let's see. 16 minutes. So these are supposed to be quick hits. I think I'm going to stop there. Guys, if you're liking these short form style content, let me know. Let me know what topics you want to talk about. How do you do that? Hey, go on my social, go on Instagram, right? Look me up. Instagram. Or join our private Facebook, private face. I think the meds are kicking in on my surgery. Join our private Facebook group, just for podcast listeners, you go to Facebook, you look up mortgage marketing radio. That's where you do it. Or you can DM me on Instagram, head over there, look up my name, G-E-O-F-G-F-Zumford. You should be able to find me there. And let's have a conversation, right? That's it. Quick hits. Do it. Apply it. Guys, this is the opportunity to go grab market share around the SNAR settlement thing. We're doing a lot of conversations and training and teaching agents how to navigate the conversations, how to level up their value proposition to integrate you, the lender, as a key part of the buyer proposal, the buyer conversation, the buyer value proposition. Now more than ever is the time for you to get out there and insert yourself into this. If you're looking for help on how to do that, DM me. Let me know. We're here to help. Check it out. And if you like this episode, remember to rate it. Leave a review. Appreciate you. See you on the next one. Bye for now.