The Blueprint for Funding $50 Million in Today's Market

Hey, it's Jeff Zimmer. Welcome to this episode of the mortgage marketing radio podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Question for you. Do you struggle with getting attention from real estate agents? Do you struggle with getting appointments? Do you struggle with what do I say on the appointment? How do I follow up? What do you do when you get ghosted? How do you identify if somebody is the right partner for you or not? My special guest is going to answer those questions and more in just a moment. But before we get there, it's time for me to tell you about a brand new program that I'm launching. It is called the agent referral accelerator. And it is a 90 day intensive roll up your sleeves, get in the trenches with me, and let's get into the local market and attract instead of chase real estate agents and do what successful originators do. They lead with education, content and value. The most successful originators do not show up as a solicitor as a vendor. They show up as a peer and a partner. And one of the primary ways to do that is by hosting educational events and classes in your local market in person or over zoom. But I know many of you struggle with what do I say? What do I present? What do I get the material? How do I put the slides together? How do I get butts and seats? How do I team up with affiliate partners, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? How do I convert those to attend to conversations and contracts? That's what the agent referral accelerator is all about. We are going to spend 90 days going through and teaching you the entire system and process that I've put together and done myself as an originator helped me go from zero to 37 to $50 million in annual production and more that I've done for the last decade teaching hundreds and hundreds of originators around the country of the book that I wrote 10 years ago called instant referrals. If you are looking to take your realtor engagement and attention conversations that leads to contracts to the next level and you don't want to do the by cold calling chasing, co-paying leads and things like that. You'll want to follow a proven formula. If this sounds interesting for you, I've got a wait list put up. This is not going to be for everybody, but if you want to get on the wait list, we're going to go live with this in June. Go to getmoreagentreferals.com and just simply say, yep, I want to be on the wait list. Be notified of when this thing goes live and I'm going to be basically hosting an introductory session that's going to walk you through this entire process that we're going to provide for the handful of people. I'm only looking for 30 people, 30 people only, so some people will be turned away for a variety of different reasons. But once again, if you're hearing this and you're sounding like, this is something of interest for you, then let me know. Go to the waiting list, getmoreagentreferals.com and you can learn more there. Okay, so my special guest this week, I had the privilege of sitting in and watching her presentation at an event. I recently attended. I've been talking up a lot, which was the Slay with Shay event, Shayla Gifford with Guild Mortgage. She put on this event in Reno recently for a day and a half and it was fantastic. Lots of amazing lessons learned. And one of the key highlights or standouts for me is my special guest, Alison Larson. Alison is crushing it in her market in Minnesota, doing 50, 60 million dollars in this market today. And what I bring to you in this conversation today is how she approaches attracting and engaging and converting real estate agents to referral partners. Her mindset, her process, her strategy, what she says to realtors during the meeting. How she identifies if realtors, which realtors are going to be the right partner for her or not. We unpack kind of her process, you know, both before the meeting during and after. And a lot of other key nuggets and takeaways about how she's quickly built an amazing business for herself in her market. In addition to that, she's also doing some free content with Shayla, a free three week course called Solitude to Synergy. The link to that is in the show notes. So make sure you click that to get on board because there's only two more sessions for that. And that is upcoming on May 29th. And then once again, on June 5th, I believe is the final date for that. Yes, I am correct. So make sure you check the link in the show notes because that is full of some incredible information to learn effective prospecting techniques to elevate your leadership skills, improve your communication, and basically level up your team and get insights from, right, Alison, Shayla, who've got their thumb on the pulse of what's working in today's market because there are people succeeding in today's market. They're just doing some of the right things, the right activities repeatedly over and over again. And perhaps you'd like to get an insight into what some of those activities are. Did number one check and see if you're doing them. Are you doing them consistently enough? And maybe you're not doing some of the activities. So once again, that's you know, check the links in the show notes for that event, Solitude to Synergy, but also make sure you check the links in the show notes after you listen to today's conversation with Alison to go follow her on the link to provide one is her Instagram and second is her YouTube channel. And I encourage you to do that. And if you've connected with her here by way of the podcast, please let her know. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Alison, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I am thrilled to have you here. I had the privilege of sitting in an event that Shayla Gifford put on. Slay with Shay. And I watched your presentation about your process, about executing realtor appointments and stuff. And we're going to unpack that in a moment. And I was very impressed. But before we get into that, what do you want to share with the listeners about who you are kind of, you know, any highlights around your career and mortgage so far? Yeah. I think one thing that makes me very different than a lot of people in this industry is one. I'm 33 years old. I learned that slay with Shay. I did not know that there's only 13% of licensed mortgage originators who are under the age of 40. I had that make sense, but I just had no idea that that was the staff. So that's something that's a little different about me. So I haven't had 20 years in this business to really build 10,000 past clients and all this stuff. And so what we've built is really in the last few years in not the greatest market that ever existed for mortgage loan officers. And so the things we're doing and the things I talk about are I think it resonates with people because they're actually doing them too if they're trying to build their business. And so anything I'm talking about, I probably did this week and it's either working or it's not working or constantly tweaking and changing it as we go. For to put into contacts this past year, my branch did a little under 60 million in volume. My branches, myself, a full-time staff member and a part-time marketing person. We did have a junior loan officer for about 60 days who quit to start his own company. And a processor who left us a week before I had a baby. So we were running real skinny there for the second half of the year. Yeah, lean and mean. All right, fantastic. Thank you for that. I want to let's enter this conversation of, all right, so you talked about your quote unquote younger as compared to the average age of an L.O. in this industry. How long did it take you to gain confidence in who you are in your place as a mortgage originator? Sometimes on different days, I don't know if I still have it, but right, there's always that little bit in us that that one phone call kind of scares you to make. To me, that's what makes the business still fun is getting to call that dream realtor, that dream builder that kind of gives you the shivers, be like, oh, can I really get them? Can I really call them? That's what keeps us going. But it took me probably three or four years into it before I really felt like I could sit down with a truly established agent and talk the talk. Maybe I wasn't really walking the walk at that point, but I could at least have the conversation and not feel like I left the coffee meeting wondering, you know, what was the point of that even? Okay, and agents are your primary source of business? Yes, they are. Agents and builder relationships. We get a little bit from financial advisors and past clients, but it primarily agents. So you mentioned, you know, I think you use the word like dream call or whatever, right? Or I call it the chicken list. You know, we all have agents or people on our list that we've been thinking about calling or we see in our market and maybe we're a little intimidated perhaps by them, right? Because of that external perception that they're quote unquote successful or maybe they're doing a huge presence on Instagram or something. Is that what you're talking about when you describe that type of version? Yeah, we all have those people. I don't have as much of it with realtores anymore, but I that's not true even because there's some realtores I've met with that when they do first on that lead and I see that my phone right away. Oh my gosh, they're actually calling me back. They want to send me something and it feels kind of surreal when we win that opportunity still. Yeah. Well, all right. So let's enter the conversation there. What are the primary activities? I wrote down some notes from your conversation or yeah, at the Shayla event and plus, you know, with this three-part series you're doing with her as well. How many let's do it this way? Because I thought this was very useful because there's a lot of, as you know, noise around real estate agents from the loan officer perspective, right? Like I was on a call a couple of weeks ago and one of these mortgage professionals wrote in the chat on the Zoom that that realtors are PITA. And I was like, so John, I just want to call this out for a second. PITA, are you saying that they're a pain in the ass, right? And I kind of pushed back on him, but I want to unpack this conversation for a moment because you seem to be in a really good place when it comes to the dynamics of real estate agents that you appear to be engaged with. And maybe that was a process to go through where you had to maybe work with some PITAs, right? Maybe, but how do you, is there a frame, is there a, like when you think of real estate agents as referral partners, how would you, what do you think about that? Most of my top agents at this point, I consider as friends. Like they are friends and family to me, we've gotten to that point where if they needed a house to stay at, I would say, you can stay at mine. Like these people mean the world to me, they feed my family, they take care of me, they prefer me to other realtors. But that's not how they all start, right? And so I think one thing that's helpful now is they've seen that progression with some of these agents. And so, and some of them who are best friends now, they still can be at PITAs sometimes. But now it's a little different. And go, hold on a second here. This is, we got to do this, we got to do that. Or this is how this has to work. And part of that is finding your own self-confidence and standing in your own power and knowing your own value and worth, because someone will actually respect you more if you're willing to draw a line in the sand and just be stern and say how it, how it is or be sure of yourself versus, well, let me see what I can do. And what about maybe this and maybe that? No, just have one clear concise answer for them. And then they'll start to respect you back just like they have the same respect for themselves. Yeah, I've often described, you know, the, the world of agents working with agents as a moving parade. There's a third come in, a third stain, and a third going. And I'm curious what the movement or influx outgo of your kind of, you know, agent engagement and group that you work with, what does that kind of look like? Yeah, we have our, we have our stable core that we always have. And then we have our kind of segment below that where we probably get four to five transactions a year from them. And then there's a ton of agents we get one transaction a year from even last year we got more transactions for just one off transactions from people than we ever have before because those agents feel scared. They don't have the same business they did. It's a tougher market for them too. I think a lot of times agents aren't actually trying to be a pain in the ass. They have a client who's a pain in the ass. And instead of just calling, we sit and we stew and we're like, what is wrong with this agent? Why would they say this? And why would the clients say this? And instead, if you just call the realtor and say, hey, give me this skinny a little bit about this client and just zip it and listen to what they say. They'll probably start inventing about how awful the client is being to them too. And now we've got to, now we're in this together. How can we go at it with United Front and level up both of our services? And I can have your back too. Most times agents don't want to be a pain. They don't want to call you on a Saturday afternoon. They also don't want to be working on a Saturday afternoon. And so it's figuring out how can we expedite this? How can I help this better? And having those honest conversations with the agent that usually gets rid of some of that. But in terms of agents coming and going, yes, we have some agents we've worked with for years and then they've got three kids who are not school aged right now and they're pretty much stay home moms. But we still keep in touch and we still invite them to staff and everything else because when all their kids are back in school, who knows what their career will become, right? And so we're in relationship with them. There's no point to let that go. And people's careers go through segments like that. So when you're choosing to work with real estate agents, I know you've heard of this. You know, some people look at agents and they're looking for a minimum buy side production. How do you evaluate that or is there any framework you put around how you or who you pursue as far as agents? If I'm going to go pursue someone, I typically want them to have at least five buy side transactions in the last 12 months and have been licensed for at least a year. Otherwise, I don't think they really even understand. They don't even know what you do as lender. They don't they don't know what's coming or going. They're still learning it all. If that's not them and they reach out to me or they want to get connected, I'm happy to still connect with them. I'm just not chasing down agents who don't at least have that stat and not anything against those agents. It's just if I went and sat down with them for coffee and told them all the things we do to add value to their clients and had all these big conversations with them about their business, they probably don't even know how to answer those questions yet. That's not even helpful to them. I want to make sure I'm being a good partner to these people and I might not be the best partner to that person. And also, kind of your point, what you might be saying in here is they're too new or they don't have enough transactions or experience yet to appreciate the value. They don't even know they literally don't even know what the lender does. They've never been to the closing table. They also don't know what the title company does, right? I mean, I see in the real estate 101. And so I do every once in a while host a mortgage 101, how the mortgage side of things work, I just hosted one the other week. And any agents I see who are newer, I invite them to that staff. I still want to include them. I want to educate them. I want to help them grow. I just am not physically taking the time to have coffee with them every other month. Then give me some insight into either how when you were growing and building or how currently you are identifying new agents to add to your bus. How does that happen for you? So every month we start with listing agents. Of course, they're your lowest hanging fruit. And if they fit that criteria that I just mentioned, we're absolutely trying to set an appointment with them. If it's outside of that, we're really having conversations with people we know like and trust to see who, who, what realtor would you refer if you had a friend call you and ask who you should work with? Because the days of cold calling, you're going to, no one's answering a cold call. They're just no one's answering a phone number. They don't know. It's likely spam whatever the case might be. Or we will engage with them on social media. But you have to be careful with social media because a lot of the agents who have a lot of time to post these beautiful curated Instagram pages aren't, aren't also the agents who aren't doing a ton of business. So we just want to be really impactful there. And then one thing I think is totally lost on people is when you're writing offers, connect with the other agent who you're writing the offer on, even if your client doesn't get it on social. You're already standing out to them. You follow them, you called them on a Saturday afternoon, you're really going through the ringer to work for your client, make sure they actually know who you are, and then slowly start trickling on that person to have coffee down the road. Hmm, smart. You mentioned listing agents. You start there. Does that mean only listing agents on the other side of the deal you're on or are you looking for listing agents in your backyard? Listing agents on the other side of the deal. Okay. All right. Yeah. So you're kind of just actively prospecting them, reaching out, doing the Tuesday updates as a minimum, right? Yep. Yeah. So we do our Tuesday updates. Well, one they've already heard from us when they're writing the offer because we've already helped set the client apart. We do a lot of strategy call and I dig. I don't just call a generic number and leave a voicemail. I like dig into who this agent is. I see if we have any mutual connections and that they would know before even call them. So I really try and build rapport in that phone call so that they feel excited to work with us even going into it. And I'll say, oh, I follow you on social. Do you have you ever seen my stuff? Oh, wait. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I want to build all of that. I don't want to just be another lender who's checking it off their list on that phone call on a Saturday afternoon. Right. So they're already excited to work with us. We get into the transaction. I call them again and let them know. We've got a Monday. We've got the purchase agreement. This is what's going on. You're going to get the Tuesday updates. You're going to get Milestone updates. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Here's all this stuff. They're excited. We communicate all the way through. And then after closing, I typically don't tell people this. They don't want everyone to copy it, but I'll share it. But I leave a Google review on their business page. And then I snip at the review. And I send it to them via email. And I say, seriously, I mean, you were awesome to work with, yeah, whatever, blah, blah. And then I set the appointment that way. Hmm. Wow. That's brilliant. So back to then identifying those agencies to work with, you know, we mentioned the criteria of five buy sides. You know, I know for years the narrative has been like with the listing. Oh, I'm just a listing agent. Or sometimes the loan officer, they just don't go after listing agents because they think they don't have buyers. I've always pushed back against that because listings or at least this is what my mentor originally taught me was the listing agents are the ones who have the frigging buyers because they're the ones inquiring about the listing. So how do you look at that? Right? So it's a quote unquote listing agent. Why would you still pursue them? Well, if they, well, I look up their numbers first. And I want to make sure that they fit my criteria. Most listing agents have had at least a few buy side transactions. And any agent who's telling you I only sell listings. Well, then who's your buyer's agent? And if they don't have a buyer's agent, well, they're just being polite. That's their reason to not meet with you. And sometimes that's okay too, right? You could call the same, you could call the same realtor twice a year for five years. And on the sixth year, they finally go, yep, I know you're the best. I've seen you in our market for years. You've called on me for years. I know all these other agents that work with you. Let's take the meeting. My guy just retired. Mm hmm. Right. Or you're one of the 13% that are under the age of 40. I need to have a female I'm referring to as well because it's 2024. Ever you can't always just refer to an older guy who sits in his office and doesn't go out do anything, right? Like you got to have your token girl on your list. So sometimes they'll even make jokes like that. And you're like, okay, yeah, fine. I'll have coffee with you. Yeah, I like it. That's good. And plus, you're doing a lot of research and recon ahead of time, like you said, like, you know, stalking people essentially looking up up in social media and see, you know, what connection points do you have in place? So that's kind of like the lost out of selling. And if you, yeah, and if you don't have the connection points, like in our market, I think we have 16,000 realtors license in our area. There's 16,000 of them. If I have no connections, I can't release, I don't really can't really make sense of their volume. They already don't want to meet with me. It, you're probably not going to win it. Like to take the time to go to the coffee and track them down to drive across town and sit there for a half hour and then they're 10 minutes late and the whole, it just, it probably isn't worth it at the end of the day or maybe in the next few years it might be worth it. But if you're trying to gain traction in business right now, that's not which has been my strategy. I haven't done that long-term game as much just because I needed to figure out how to pay my bills and close loans tomorrow, not in five years from now. Yeah. Okay. Good stuff there, which leads me to kind of the next section of you creating a brand awareness for the Allison Larson team in your local market. One of the things you talked about is events. You do a fair amount of events. Is it one a month? What does your schedule look like roughly? It depends. So summer in Minnesota, no one's ever around. Everyone's gone and they're too busy. So then we kind of take a pause a little bit in the summertime and then fall. People are excited to get back together. So we really do kind of dictated on what's happening in the market. What realtors have an appetite for? Are they craving something in person? Are they craving something virtual? Are they craving happier? Are they craving a networking coffee? We have just a goal that we have a minimum of six events a year. In-person events. Right. Right. But sometimes they get more stacked up like all of a sudden the fall, sometimes we're really stacked with things. And we also do quite a bit of realtor partnering with a realtor on mutual clients or their VIP client. We do a lot of that kind of stuff too. Like client appreciation events, things like that or? Yes, but with one realtor reverse that we do our one annual client event. But then we also do a lot. For example, a realtor and I just hosted an event for clients two weeks ago where we did a floral workshop making class. Come join us, apps, wine. We're going to learn how to make floral arrangements and bring a front. Well, one of the things you mentioned on the training was I wrote down that you mentioned if I'm correct on this that last year you received, you closed a deal, at least one deal or more across 94 different realtors. That's a lot. I didn't realize that stat until I literally looked it up myself on Reddit. I looked it up. I was like, wow, that's a lot of realtors. A lot of realtors. The point you made about that, what I love was this is that I've gone through the exercises. I'm sure many people listening have where, first of all, LOs, you spend too much time looking up other LOs. You're looking at their production and I remember I did this with Denise Donahue as well. Denise Donahue is similar to you. She had closed I think 100 plus deals across 100 realtors. But I think the brilliant point you made was to the earlier conversation we had about if they're only doing five sides a year and by the way, you're probably not going to capture 100% of that business. I know you have a couple of realtors where you're capturing 80% of their business or whatever, maybe one or two. But by and large, that's not usually how the business plays out. Is it usually it's across one to three or so deals across many realtors, right? Yeah. If you want proof, look up every when you are wasting your time looking up on officers, numbers. Go look up some of the people you admire the most. This was very eye opening to me. Most of them don't get more than four deals a year from one realtor. Maybe they're getting more leads, but they're not enclosing the deals necessarily. In this market, it is hard to convert that many deals from certain agents. And so really watching where those deals are actually coming from and where the relationships are coming from, half the time we're giving so much attention to realtors and we're actually not closing loans from them. We're just getting leads from them. Excellent point. And speaking of that, by the way, how do you, is there a lead management process you have when you get a referral or something and they go into your CRM or like, what does that look like? We have a lot of people have probably heard of the lead tracker, which a lot of coach students probably utilize something similar. Guild has all of those tools built in to our CRM. So I have a full lead tracker screen that I put in with the notes and the referral partner tagged and all of that that can then convert into an active loan, which is nice because then it's really easy to track your stats from lead to conversion and who didn't get pre-approved and what realtors are sending us the most qualified leads versus not, et cetera. Okay. Another point you made about deals across many agents is that that's number one, how the business plays out. And then, you know, a lot of L.O.'s get caught in their head where they're like, well, I want to narrow it down and I want to work with less realtors who are giving me more and that's a little bit of a separate conversation perhaps we can go there. But the point you hit on was like, it's really hard to stay top of mind with 94 realtors, right, who you close to deal with, which is why I think you dovetailed that back into events, classes, whatever, which is, and of course social media, but that's one of the methods you use to stay top of mind, to stay aware, right, with these agents, these these 90 plus agents, because I think what I love that you said is like, you can't go to coffee, like with 94 agents, right? And no one wants to. They don't want to go to, if you're only doing one deal a year with them, do you really think they want to go to coffee with you every other month? Probably not. I have an insurance agent. We refer almost all of our businesses to this one insurance agent. I've known him since college. We have like childhood friends together. He texts all the time. Can I bring you lunch? Can I do that? No, I don't I don't even need to see you this year. I'm totally good. I'm really busy. I think you're the best. Thanks for checking in. Here you go. But that's sometimes that's all people need. They people don't even have time to see their friends in 2024 or spend a time with their kids. They don't necessarily need to go make small talk with the lender all the time. How what does your agent recruiting process look like? Are you, you know what I mean? You're kind of, you know, you're, you're fishing, right? You're recruiting for other agents to bring on board. Yeah. Other loan officers, other agents. You are looking to bring agents on. Yeah. Yeah. So for example, this morning, first thing this morning is I spent about 45 minutes kind of reverse prospecting the listing agents from April's closings, the reviews, the ass, all of that kind of circling on, okay, we're following this person on Instagram. Is this like a really, really good one that I need a email text call today or is this like a let's just toss out an email and see if it sticks kind of one, right? Like what is the level of interest on this? And then if we don't get a response from them and they have high level of interest and they go on another list or then we're tracking it through our CRM have they've been reached out to every single week for eight weeks to try and get in front of them for coffee. And so then my CRM literally just gives me tasks of this person still hasn't responded. Keep trying to go get that. I am a very ADD person. So I'm really good at something for a little bit and then I'm not and then I'm exhausted of it and I think a lot of us are wired that way. That's how we probably ended up here. And so for me, I love to stack real terapointments. Like I want to stack them all in and get really, really intense dialed in on it. And then the next week or the next couple days, I need to be like really in on my pre-approvals. I don't like to have a real terapointment here and a real terapointment there. I think I forget who they are and I'm not as intentional. I don't follow up as well. And so kind of sparsing those out helps. And so then that way I typically have three or four agents all at one time that I really liked that are new to me that I can make a big deal about coming to this next event. Typically with these events, I have a few people who always come to this stuff. You could almost host the exact same events year over year because you don't ever really get a lot of the same realtors. And the ones who are showing up again, it's just because they're big supporters of you and like the social aspect. You're constantly getting turnover on who actually shows up those types of things. Exactly. That's kind of like I look at events and classes as you know, you're running for office. And that's part of your campaign, right? And you're running on this platform, which elevates you and helps you rise above the noise because it's something out of the usual stream of things you're doing. Yeah. And even with events, it got really saturated for, I mean, and I don't know in our market everywhere you turn every other week, there's a real terapanile. So then I had to get a little bit crafter of like, okay, no one needs another real terapanile. What else can I do, right? Do I make smaller events? Is this a big social event? Like, how do we set ourselves apart and do something differently to still attract people to come? Yeah, it was interesting. I was thinking about this while I was listening to you. It's one of the things that I do with those people, not to sound self-promotional, but it's like we help them teach classes, right? Which is all kinds of different topics and ideas, whether it's winning strategies for buyer's agents in light of the NIR settlement, or it's social media trends, or it's like YouTube, or whatever it is. So there's that constant menu of different things that realtors want to learn. And there's not, there's not always the same topics, right? Like social media and branding have been the topics that every real terapanile wants to learn about every other month for three years right now. It's bringing in different speakers, setting it up differently, bringing it to a new audience. Sometimes we'll do an event on one set of town, and we can do the exact same event on the other side of town and get a totally different audience. Well, it's like you said a moment ago, too. There's like 16,000 realtors or whatever, right? So, I mean, I know a lot of officers who, like one of the classes we do is Google Business Profile, and it's Glenda in Texas. So if you're listening Glenda, shout out to you. She did the Google Business Profile class eight times last year, right? And it's like you said, it's a different audience every single time, or people come back as they want to get the net, you know, they want to continue to learn. So it's just one of those strategies that makes sense to stay in front of people. All right, I'm holding in my hand your real ter executing I love real ter and executing in the same phrase. No, just kidding, just kidding, everyone. What I loved about you is your prep, I think, is spot like before we hit record, I was saying, you know, that you're very professional. And you're one of the most, you know, quote, professional, prepared mortgage professionals that I've seen. And I think that speaks to why you're successful, but why you're also not, well, perhaps at this stage in a way, pulling your hair out like you might have been early on in the career. But, um, you know, I think what I see is the mistake is a lot of originally did you make is that they are not intentional when they're having real ter appointments. And you were very brilliant in that. So I want to unpack this a little bit. If you want to just take us through a very abbreviated version of your kind of how you approach a real ter appointment, let's start with there. What's the mindset you have going into a real ter appointment? Yeah. So many people have eliminated themselves before they walked in the door, whether they have just already discredited the real ter that this is a waste of time. Like it almost makes ourselves feel better if we downplay what we're walking into versus hyping it up. And so it's just human nature that we just kind of like throw our opportunity in front of the boss before we even try and take it. And so we, and I've done it before too, where you show up to a coffee meal like this is going to be a total waste of time. And they're probably going to stand me up. Why are they late? I should be doing this email. This person, oh, I just looked them up again. They don't even do that much business. So they're going to even send me anything. Or they are a really good agent. And we get in our mindset of, well, I've only done this for X amount of years and then this and that and they're not going to send me business. As soon as you take all of that out of it, when you look up before the meeting and you look up their Facebook or their Instagram, don't just look at all their business pictures of their close signs. Look at who they are. 60% of our people in this country get a divorce. Like, are they going through a divorce? Are they a single parent? Do they have little kids and they haven't slept in three weeks? No one is thinking about you as much as you think about you. They probably can barely remember who you are when they're on the way to that coffee meeting. And so going in there with the mindset of the only goal is to find, understand where their pain points are and find some kind of connection with them so that you can continue to follow up. That's, that's all it has to be. It doesn't have to be any magical meeting where you leave there forever best friends or they've committed their next three deals to you or anything like that. You just have to walk in there with that mindset and know what you're going to talk about ahead of time. There's nothing more awkward than getting to a coffee meeting, not even knowing what the person looks like or standing in line making a small talk and going, oh, so you've got kids, right? And they're like, no, I'm not married and I don't have kids. And I'm like, I've had people have coffee with me who have reached out to me, asked me to grab coffee and I go meet with them and they know they're like, oh, you're pregnant? Yeah. Like, oh, is this your first? No, I have a 10-month-old at home and two stepkits. Like, you asked me to coffee, you said you've heard good things about me and then you show up and you literally don't know anything about me and you're not even leaving the conversation. What, why am I here, right? We never want to give that impression. As loan officers too, if you are like most loan officers, you are, do you do all the things? You're the market area, you're the rate locker, you're the application takeer, you're the whipping boy or girl with something goes wrong and we have to get all of that out of our head so we can really show up and be present for this meeting. So whether it's 15 or 20 minutes beforehand, just making sure while you're in the car, don't answer the phone call. Like, any of those, don't answer the crabby email, don't even look at it. Just, hey, I'm focused in on this meeting on my calendar, I even blocked drive time because that's my time in the car to not bug me with anything to make sure I'm in the right mindset when I show up to something. I'm always there a few minutes early, there's also nothing worse than getting there and being like, oh, we don't even have a table to sit at because the coffee shop is too busy, right? In terms of one thing too, if you're good agents, a lot of times if you text them the day before and confirm, they will cancel on you because they're like, why did I set this coffee meeting? A lot of times, a lot of times I won't do that. I'll play it a different way and I'll text them like 30 minutes before and say, hey, I'm going to be working at the coffee shop for a little bit before our meeting. What's your coffee order? I'll have it ready when you get here. Then if they've totally forgotten, they're going to text you or call you and go, I am so sorry, but they're not going to last minute, cancel on you, it just as an easy out, right? And then you can what a good experience if they get there, if the coffee shop is really busy and you've got the coffee ready, you don't want to waste this person's time, you value their time, just like you want someone to value your time. And then they're there for business meetings, so treat it like a business meeting. It's, if I go to coffee with someone and they said they want to talk about XYZ and we show up and we make small talk about kids for an hour, and I leave. I'm like, well, I could, now I don't just spend time with my kids tonight because I'm an hour behind on my work day because I was making small talk with you for an hour, right? We want to make sure it's an impactful meeting and one we can really both gain something out of. And I truly go in with the mindset of this person's going to sit down with me, they're going to be blown away by how my services can help their clients, which is going to make them look better and help ultimately elevate their business. And so this is a good use of their time. What's your intention on the meeting or the outcome, the desired outcome? To see if we're a good fit to work together. If I sit down with someone and you kind of leave there and you're like, it's very rare at this point that I sit down with someone I'm like, that was awful because I used to cold call and I would sit down with the weirdest people who are like, wait, you don't even have your real estate license anymore? Why were you on this list? I was calling. This is so awkward. Why would you say yes to coffee with me? This is weird. So now with social media, that doesn't happen. It's often typically these people are sign normal individuals, but you'll hear things right away where you know if you're a good fit to work together. My team doesn't pay for any internet leads. It's not our best value prop. It's not we're really wired to help people. So if right away I find out, oh, I'm on a team and we buy Zillow leads, probably not a huge need to follow up. Because they probably, if they have a preferred lender who's paying for after Zillow leads, then I've got a buyer's agent who is already indebted to a loan officer to send those Zillow leads there. That's the only leads they're working. What are they going to send me? I'm not going to follow up the same as I would an agent where I leave and I'm like, I'd like you. I really like you. I want to work together. I would refer a friend or family to you. I would love to. I would, I won't be mad and think you're paying the ass if you have to call me on a Saturday and want me to call a listing agent, right? Or your client has last minute questions. Those are things I want to be in it with people I like. So I'm going to the coffee meeting with the intention of making sure we both fit together to work together. How do you handle a no show? Let's just say, have you gotten ghosted? Oh my gosh, so many times. How do you handle a ghosted? Well, I won't drive all the way to someone else anymore. So if I'm going to depending on the type of agent, I'm usually going to try, we have a intentionally moved our office to a location that is about four minutes from the most central spot in town that has a coffee shop right there. That is where I do all of my coffee meetings. It is very intentional. So if I get straight up ghosted, I typically have another coffee meeting coming up next and I'll just sit there and I work and I'm always prepared for that to happen and have a short list of like, no big deal. This is what I'm going to work through. If I do get ghosted and they're a good agent, I am going to call them and go, hey, I'm sitting at the coffee shop. Must have been a miscommunication. Are you on your way? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nine times or ten people don't mean to ghost you and they just totally messed up and they're going to reschedule. Recently I had someone set a coffee meeting with me, reach out to me. I do the whole thing. I'm on my way there and she lets me know that her spin teacher is going to be going out of town and she really doesn't want to miss the class. So she's wondering if we can reschedule and I was like, I'm not, I didn't even reply. That's not my person. I am, because if you, if that's who you, that's who you are, that's who you attract as clients. Then she's also going to send me clients who don't respect my time and don't treat me as another professional. And so that wouldn't be the right fit for me. If you're a person whose last minute or shows up to work out closed meetings, then that person is a good fit for you. Double, that's your, that's your person, right? That's your spot. Double into it. It's just not the right fit for me. Yeah. Now, who knows to you for standing your ground and recognizing your value, you know? Love that. All right. You also, you're looking for, I'm looking at some notes I took from the Shaila event, you're looking for a something to follow up on to collaborate potentially or work, work together on what would be a couple examples of things where you walk out and you say, you know, hey, can I actually follow up on X that we talked about? What would be an example of that? Yes. So I used to go all in with people maybe like, I really want to do a client event, like, I'll do a client event with you. Let me help with this. Let me help with that. I'll partner on your open houses. And then I found people almost, that almost is not good because then we've like held this big thing that they're going to be accountable for that maybe they kind of set on a whim and they don't even know if they want to do it with me. And now I'm following up with them to try and show up to an empty house with them on Saturday and they don't even really want me there. And so then they kind of start ghosting you. So it's really loose things. It's, hey, I have, yeah, I don't really know my lender. I don't know what really what their follow-up system looks like. Could I follow up with you and show you what our system looks like? They don't need you to tell them like, on day three, I send a handwritten thank you. And on day six, I do that, blah, blah, blah, blah. We just send them the information after the fact on that. Sometimes they'll say, I don't, I just don't know if my lender really educates my first time buyers really well. Perfect. I have an entire YouTube channel built out. Could I send that to you as a resource in case you ever want to utilize it? Little things like that. And because I am a podcast person and I listen to a lot of stuff like that, I'll usually ask them to, some more and it'll come up what they're trying to build or what they're trying to grow. And I'll say, are you a podcast person? Like, oh, yeah, perfect. I'm going to follow up with you on this thing. I just listen to you. I think you're going to find it really helpful. Yeah. So resources, books, podcasts, so things I can email because the other thing is these agents, sometimes they'll give you their home address, sometimes not. They don't go to the office. Sometimes I'll mail things to them. And then they they're like eight months later, they're like, thanks for that book. Right. Right. Exactly. Interesting. Interesting. Speaking of your YouTube channel, by the way, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. Well, actually, hold on. Before we get there, I wanted to finish out this loop of how you close out or how you follow up after the agent meeting. If I'm correct, you send a handwritten thank you card and you have a flip book. Give us that real quick. Yes. So handwritten thank you card. I always ask, hey, what's the best mailing address for you? Sometimes they gave me their office. That's fine. I'll just send that there, but I try not to send additional mail there. If they give me their home address, I do keep out on a separate list. I don't put it in our Salesforce database. I just matched it up because I don't want I don't want them to feel like all of a sudden they're getting spam mail from guild or whatever. Right. Like that all of a sudden, they're in a database. I want to keep that home address separate for the dog dies and I want to send flowers or something along those lines. So that goes on a separate list. That's like a personal connection thing. And then the flip book is that is where we have our I think we call it something kitschy like our recipe for success. I don't remember, but and it's our it's the recipe. And so it's the steps of how we follow up with the pre-approval. It's the things we do after closing. It's how many checkpoints we do before they're pre-approved. It has all of those things broken out in it. And you can see day three, day six, day seven, month one, month two. And our I mean, our agents don't follow up with their people because they know that we're on it. Interesting. Yeah. And so I thought that was very impressive because it's unique and different. And like nobody I know of uses those, even though you had pointed out they're easy to create. Use hazing, HEY, ZIN, hazing flip books. I'm looking at that one right now, which is yeah, and it's free. It's free. Now you could do the video thing too. Hey, what's up, Alison? Just wanted to follow up. Here's my takeaways from the meeting, right? I'm going to circle back on this, this, this. But the flip books impressive, because you get sell your sell your process in there, you know. So I you'll hear me say a million times, I only sell how I want to be sold to. So if I go to a conference and I hear a hundred people send me to text someone a video, but I feel weird if someone texts me a video, I'm not going to text them a video. That's not how I want to be sold to. For me, if someone text me a video, I'm like, I'm with my kids. I don't have to watch this video. What is this? Like I just, I don't, if I'm watching a video, I want to be on Instagram, I want to be on YouTube, but I want it to be in my time when I can do it. When you text me something now, I feel like I have to reply. The only person who's ever texted me a video that I was okay and like was a wild received video was when Shayla called me like over a year ago and then she sent me a video. It was like, hey, like it's really me. I'm calling you. We've connected online. I just want to show you I'm legit. Blah blah blah. Call me when you have time. And I was excited to hear from her. A lot of times the realtor and your client is like, not that excited to hear from the mortgage person via text video. They're like, well, what does it say? Can you just text it to me? Is it 96 or 98% of things on our phone? People don't listen to. They just read the subtitle. So if I'm sending someone a video that they have to turn the sound down, now I've taken up their time. So I don't do the text, I don't do the text videos. That's why. But there are a whole demographic of people out there who probably love it. Well, I think the point is context, right? Context is important of that relationship. Okay. Let's pivot briefly to you mentioned your YouTube channel now. Now so oftentimes when I prepare for these these interviews is, you know, I'm going to get on your various channels and links or whatever and go through your stuff. And I thought it was really cool that on your Instagram, you have this link tree and you've got these different links over there. And one of them is first step to buy, which brings me to your YouTube playlist, which is 10 short videos. I'm talking like less than two minutes most of these, which is like how to get pre-approved. How long does a pre-approval last? Do you have any sense of how many people? We so we created the YouTube channel probably like a year or two ago at this point. And I, you know, I don't think a lot of people really go and watch all the videos, but it was one of those, I always get the same questions and I want people to be able to look online and go, oh wow, Allison's resource for this too. And Allison can be a resource for this too. I don't need them to go watch the video instead of me answering it. I just want them to go, I can ask her about any of these things and she's happy to have a conversation with me about it. I'm just going to message her. We send those out to realtors as a follow-up point and then they also go out as a follow-up after our pre-approval meeting. I think it's one of them is I'm pre-approved what next or something. And so that is essentially the same things I talk about in the pre-approval meeting, but sometimes both spouses didn't hear it or sometimes you're not listening at all because you're distracted by your kids. And now you're going before bed and you'll actually listen to some of this stuff. So it's supposed to be just an extra place for someone to receive the information if they want to. And for someone to go through and just go, oh she's credible. Okay. Right. So many times you look people up on Instagram. The amount of loan officers actually who followed me after yesterday's webinar. And when I go to their Instagram, I can't even figure out what company they work for. If they do mortgages or if they're in real estate, what city are you in, I have no idea when I look at their social media. Even if I click on their link tree, I still can't figure out. Apply now, but where am I even applying it? Well, company do you work at? I don't even know. So just sharing more information. So someone who has you have their attention for one second goes, oh wow, she's like kind of the real thing. Okay. Yeah. I don't know. Seems legit. She's not some girl just like doing mortgages out of her basement. Exactly. Which I actually did all the videos in my basement. So that's a look at her too. Awesome. Well, I mean, let's let's be honest, right? First impressions matter. We do judge a book by its cover, by its title. So if you are, yeah, I remember somebody used to say is, you know, so people are going to look at that's what they do. They look you up online today. Obviously. And the question is, what do they find? Like, is it professional? Is it clear who you are, who you help? Like I'm looking at your Instagram bio and your, you know, your bio is very clear, helping you finance your home, home buyer education resources, NMLS guild mortgage, right? Then your link tree. So it's very clear, like who you are, what you do. Yeah. My last tidbit would be we all look to each other to copy other mortgage people and other real estate people to copy each other. Guys, we're like decades behind the times on technology and marketing all these things. Like look to other industries and see what they're doing and take advice and tidbits from there who have whole marketing teams. Not just, I mean, I don't have a marketing team. I have a part-time gal who is related to me that helps me post on social media. We're just doing the best we can. So everyone then goes and copies my stuff. I'm like, maybe a marketing company would say this sucks. I have no idea, but maybe just take a little bit here, take a little bit there, piece it together, make it your own thing, do a little research, make it impactful. You don't just have to copy literally everything you saw one other person do. Yeah, exactly. And remember, we're all, you know, what makes us attractive or stand out to whoever it is we're trying to engage with is us, who we are, our uniqueness, you and the fact of your story with your family and the kids and your pregnant again right now. I'm grateful for you being here doing this. So the goal isn't to copy and have us all look like clones. Like we've already made that mistake enough, right? Now it's time to like embrace the uniqueness that we have. So listen, Allison, this has been a fantastic education, a clinic for everybody listening. So I'm going to do this. Let's link up where people can follow you. Is there any recommendations where you prefer? Because I'm going to link up, you know, YouTube, Instagram, what you want to do. Yes, go, go follow me on Instagram. We're doing a three week webinar series right now. We're going to be doing more things like that to come. Our one of our reasons of moving to guild was to have the platform to help lead other lawn officers. And we are totally looking to engage with other like-minded people who want to grow into the same thing that I've done in the last few years. So go follow me on Instagram, MPLS made mortgage, and follow me and say hi. Well, would you like people to sit in on the final two sessions of that webinar you have? Yes, yes, there's also a link in the bio. Go ahead and sign up. You can sign up for the next couple of weeks on there as well. And if you miss the first one and you sign up, you'll get a recording too. Well, I'll make sure I put that as a primary link. It's called solitude to synergy. I sat in on the first session with you and Shayla. It was fantastic. The next sessions are coming up May 29th and June 5th, 11 a.m. Pacific. So make sure you check the link in the show notes to get registered for that because you know, whatever you're doing with Shayla is always fantastic. And I've learned a lot and I'm sure everybody else will too. So thanks again for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. All right, everybody. You know what to need to do. If you like this episode, go check the links in the show notes and leave us a review. If you're so inclined, we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now.