Why Referral Partners Are More Profitable than Paid Leads

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can, too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now. Visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Hey, hey, listener, what's up, Jeff Zimfer, host of the Mortgage Marketing Radio. Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. This is the place where we help loan officers get more agent referrals so they can become the go-to lender in their market. How do we do that? We help you implement a proven system for attracting agents, closing more loans without having a call call, pay for leads, chase, beg, borrow, agents now come to you on demand, like clockwork every single month. It's called the Mortgage Marketing Pro membership and in there we do something called my agent classes. A couple of new success stories to share with you. This one just came across the wire just minutes ago literally from one of our power users Carmella. What's up? Carmella shout out to you. She just finished a class today, 28 of 30 agents showed up from that immediately booked four new one-on-one appointments to set up and go over some marketing strategies together out of be of better value and help agents, which is going to build that trust and loyalty and referrals. And if that wasn't enough, we got another one that came in hot off the presses as well, which is from Glenda, Glenda hosted one of our Instagram classes teamed up with the title company to help her fill the room. The title company did everything, hosted, marketed, paid for breakfast. What did Glenda get out of that? A couple hours of her time. Seven, booked meetings for the next week. That was 100% by the way of those who showed up. Folks, there's something amazing that happens when you show up to give, not take, when you're all about connection over conversion. Trust goes up, resistance goes down, relationships are accelerated, referrals happen. And more importantly, perhaps you begin to build a reputation, a brand becoming known as the premium and at mortgage professional in your area. Why? Because you do things differently. You have a unique, different attraction, right? Principle. You're not chasing, you're attracting, you're leading with value, which induces reciprocation and who isn't attracted by somebody who gives more value than anyone else in town. Want to learn more? Go over to mortgagemarketing.pro, check out the video, check out some of our new success stories over there. And do it quick because we're making some big changes to this platform, mortgagemarketing.pro, go check it out. All right, my special guest this week is a longtime friend, colleague, associate, fellow guitar player, Chris Johnstone, out of our neighboring country of Canada. Chris is a, what I'll call a marketing savant, he's owned a digital marketing agency for quite a number of years, has spoken on many stages and has worked within our field, the mortgage field for many of those years. And Chris has been on the podcast at least once, maybe twice before, and that's because he's always a wealth of knowledge. And on today's show, we're talking about why interesting, why referral partners are more profitable than paying for online leads, than running paid ads, might be something relevant to listen to, based on the success, success stories, I just shared with you, I can't talk today. So anyway, Chris and I kind of unpack the state of online leads, the challenges with the doing online leads and paid traffic, and not that it's right, something you should never do, but as a matter of when should you do it at what stage in your business and Chris is going to unpack that, then he'll tell us about some of how he's helping a lot of officers also get conversations with referral partners. And if you think something's there for you, well, then the links are in the show notes to go check out more of Chris's info. He's also got a podcast that the link to follow is in the show notes there as well. So let's do this. Let's get into this week's show, Chris Johnstone, welcome back to the show. Man, Jeff, thank you so much for having me. I always try to remember whenever I have somebody back on, first of all, it says, and this isn't coming from me as like some big, you go thing, but the fact that you're here again for a second time means the audience responded well. And you are somebody that's looked to as a source of knowledge and information that we need in our hungry for. So that's why I set that up properly. So here's let's do this for those who may not know who Chris Johnstone is. Who are you? And what do you do? Cool. So I run a company on the owner of Connection Incorporated and we book qualified sales appointments for people in the mortgage financial services and insurance industry. And we may be known as a digital marketing agency. So we have done a lot of Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram advertising in the past. And we've evolved over the last year and a half to two years to kind of go past lead generation. We still do a lot of that, but I had this kind of like amazing discovery while running the agency. And now we're just focused on qualified appointments that actually show up in your calendar and close. What was that amazing discovery? Well, online lead suck. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water, right? No, you're right. So it was for me, I'm, I really care about our customers and I know everybody says that, but I'm one of those entrepreneurs that would stay up at night and I would have a client that just couldn't convert the online leads and we just bother me. And we're at a scale now where it had an impact. And so we would generate the leads and we've given to the clients and they wouldn't call them. So we partnered with a CRM company. We created our own little CRM to do text messages and emails and bring those voice mails to solve that problem for them. Like we used to just drive traffic. Like we'll get your rankings, we'll get your traffic. Then it was, okay, we got traffic and now we've got this lead conversion system that's going to convert those leads into conversations for you. And so we had, I remember vividly, I had a client that canceled, said these leads are no good. And I was like, hey, would you mind just hopping on the phone with me where like I'm not, like I'm going to refund your money, no problem, away you go, but I just want to take a look at what was happening here to see if we can free this out. And we went in in the third conversation that I opened up with somebody who responded back and said, yes, I'd like to submit a mortgage application. When are you free? And he never responded to the lead. And I was like, okay, there's something wrong here. I'm trying to force blown officers to be lead conversion specialists and they're not. And I can't change that. So I can't expect them to change. The onus is on me. I'm responsible. How do I solve this problem? And so I ran the worst job ad in the world. I went on indeed, or zip recruiter, one of these sites and I literally wrote like a three word job ad, not three word, three sentence. It was like, if you know how to turn online leads from the internet into book appointments and you've got experience in the real estate and mortgage world, I would like to hire you for a job, please. And I had just as luck would have it, you know, sometimes when you're aligned on your right purpose, the right people show up at the right time. The first guy that applied for the job had just left one of the major national brokerages and was running their call center for them. So he called me up and he's like, you're generating leads. I know how to turn them into appointments, transformed everything. We would take 100 leads from Google and we'd book 35, 40 appointments from the leads. Just transformational. So that was really, really good. And then I had a friend of mine who's called me up and he's like, Chris, you guys are crushing it. His concierge's name was Lenny and he said, Lenny's like a part of our team. He actually attended their weekly meeting with their sales team to talk about the appointments he was booking and everything. They said Lenny is amazing, but I'm going away on vacation. I'm going to be gone for a month. I've got five loan officers on my team and I don't want their pipeline to dry up while we're gone. And although the Google ads and the appointments that you guys are generating for us is profitable, 90% of my business still comes from my past customers and my referral partners. So what we want to do for this month is we want to take Lenny, we want to order a whole bunch more calls from you guys and we want him to call our past clients and our referral partners. Is that okay? Me being an entrepreneur. Yes, let's do it. Let's make the scripts. Let's do the whole thing. Well, they closed like funded nine deals from the phone calls that Lenny made for them that month. And my whole world, how I viewed, how to help our clients close deals change just like that. And so I made the realization that I've been solving the hardest to solve problem that exists in a business, turning a stranger from the internet into somebody who's moderately interested into a warm prospect into a consultation, then into a mortgage application and then into an actual customer. That is the hardest way to get a customer when we could just take the exact same assets that we had in the business and start calling past clients and qualify for our partners and five, six, seven, X, the response that our clients were getting. And so, you know, it's funny, yesterday I had a call with Parker. Parker is one of our clients and he called us at the very beginning of his career. So he's only been in the mortgage business for like 13 or 14 months. Got his license, the week that he got licensed, picked up his family, moved to a new state in a new city where he knew absolutely nobody and was brand new in the city, brand new in the mortgage business. He called us up because we were working with his dad and said, Hey, I heard that you guys can get a qualified list of referral partners, call those people and set me up appointments. I'm brand new in this marketplace. Can you do that for me? So he's been buying 400 calls or 400 contacts from us per month for a year. I spoke to him yesterday. He has 26 real estate agents that have referred him a funded deal in the last 12 months. All of them are currently sending him business right now. Five of them are actual not the real estate agents, but the broker and the broker is sending them different agents that come to the office. So he has funded $11.5 million in volume in the last 12 months from just the relationships that we set him up the appointments with. So that's the evolution of what we're doing. So yes, we can still run ads on Google and we're still generating a positive return on investment, but I've found that it's far more profitable for somebody that isn't calling their past book of business or they're not consistently calling their past book of business. I would much rather have that person come to me and say, look, don't worry about online ads yet. Like until you've got your database marketing dialed in and you've got at least one to two appointments a day with qualified realtors, financial planners, investment advisors, attorneys. I can tell you've got one to two appointments a day with those people. Don't mess with the online stuff because you've got all this low hanging fruit that's available. And I missed that fact for 10 years. So I'm not like on this podium, like, hey, look, I'm a genius, but I stuck around long enough to figure this out and it's been transformational for us. So that's kind of like who I am in that discovery journey. I love that. Thanks for walking us through that. You're obviously achieving results for your clients and you said something there when you close that out, which is the real lesson, at least for me, from that, which is this is kind of what I've been reaching as well for years is like because a lot of people look to like the online leads is like the easy button and I'm so tired of dealing with realtors and all the stuff that goes with that and they think, oh, I'll just spend some money and generate some leads. And what you're saying is after you use your number after 10 years of trying to do that, you've realized, wait a minute, the pyramid's inverted, we need we need to have past clients and referral partners at the top and those other colder lead sources towards the bottom. That's it. And the other thing that I think was a major realization for me is that a loan officer in my opinion, now sitting where I am with the knowledge that I have, they should not be making cold calls and they should not be chasing leads. So everybody has inbound leads and take the example of let's say you've got a bunch of really good Google reviews and you're ranked on the front page of Google and you're getting calls from Google or you've got before partners that are sending you leads or past customers that are sending you referrals. If you're letting those phone calls go to voicemail, that right there is the number one activity that you can do something about to make more money right now. So there's a fantastic stat floating around the mortgage industry. I heard Carl White say it and it's roughly 72% of mortgage consumers actually do business with the first lender that they talk to. So picking up your phone is the most important and profitable activity that we have in the mortgage business and yet most people as a general business practice will be too busy throughout the day to pick up the phone and then at the end of the day, they call all the people back that are in their voicemail. And so taking a concierge and making sure your phone never goes to voicemail, everybody gets a call in real time and any lead that you do generate that comes in from an online web form or a live chat or a Facebook ad and a DM, those people are responded back to within the first five minutes. If you can do those two things, you can transform the conversion on the leads that you've already got. So if you spend another dime on advertising, you can literally double the conversion from leads that come in into closings by just making sure nobody ever goes to voicemail and calling everybody back within the first five minutes. So there's two things there though, making sure nobody ever goes to voicemail. How do you do that? So what you do is you use a like we've got a CRM program that we use, but there's all kinds of software out here that do this and they can port your number. So what you do is you call your provider. If you've got a cell phone number that you've got out on all your stuff, you call your cell phone provider and say, Hey, I want to forward my phone number to this number. That number then rings your concierge and the concierge gets the phone call rather than you. And it's all tracked through your software. So you can see how many phone calls did I get? Make sure they actually pick up the phone. You can listen to the conversations, make sure the same quality is still there, but you never, never miss one of those leads. And then you said responding within five minutes as well was part two of that. So and that would be another case where you think somebody would need to delegate that. I believe so because in the mortgage business, we're all fighting fires all day long. We just don't have the bandwidth to be available when that happens. Just the two most profitable things you can do in the mortgage industry, again, in my opinion, is either be talking to borrowers and taking applications over the phone or talking to referral partners who can send you multiple applications that you can then take off, take on the phone and then put into your processing department. Those are basically the two things that you should spend your day doing because those are the highest leverage, highest dollar paid per hour activities that exist in the business. So you should wake up, you should do that for eight hours a day and have everything else delegated in the mortgage business. Just my opinion. No, I agree. I mean, you got to think about what's your, I've been listening to this book lately called Clockworkin. I believe it's the name of it. Somebody turned me on. It's basically about how to build a business that runs without you. And so of course, part of that comes back to systems and delegation and things like there's this concept in there that what is the QBR, the Queen B's role? He gives this cool little metaphor of like, in a beehive, what's the whole purpose and function of the beehive? It's to make sure the Queen B keeps producing eggs. That's it. And so every other thing that exists around that, I think that's happening with those B's exists so that Queen B keeps producing eggs. Side note, by the way, if the Queen B stops producing eggs or produces offspring that are weak or lazy, they kill the Queen B and they create a new one. I thought that was going to just be true nature's brutal, right? But at the same line of thinking of like business is like, what's your QBR? What's your Queen B role, right? It would be to generate opportunities, close loans, right? These little, you know, lay eggs, if you will, right, to continue that thread. And then so, yeah, anything that takes you away from that, right, whether that's using a service like you provide, whether it's using other software tech people, you hire people on your own team, it's like you got to be in your, your lane, right, of generation of opportunities. Yep. 100%. And another little side note, this episode might get sticky because I'm actually an amateur beekeeper. Many people don't know that about me, but you want to talk to these, man, I got lots of knowledge. But I dig guys. Oh, okay. Any, but does that, is that true, right? Because I just heard this audio book. That's what happens. Totally true. And if, you know, they'll even kill the Queen if they feel that she's not laying enough eggs fast enough, crazy thing about it. So they have, so okay, there are all different kinds of bees that are in the colony and they're all specialized to their role. Just like in your business, you should have a concierge. Their only role is to qualify appointments to fill your calendar with a qualified appointment. Well, there are bees within the community and all they do is produce royal jelly. Royal jelly is required to make a queen bee. They will make like three or four or five queen bees all at the same time. They hatch and the first queen to come out goes and kills all of the other queen bees. Most often though, like the bees are very precise and they will make sure that they're all inseminated or germinated at the same time. So literally they will come out, fight to the death and the queen bee that wins, wins the colony. Get out really? Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Wow. So run your business like a bee. They do a pretty good job. I think that's a great analogy. And we, in my opinion, we should be that serious about our business. I mean, it's how we feed our families. It's how we send our kids' college. It's how we really lead the lifestyle that we want to. And man, the mortgage business is such a good business. I understand we're going through a transitional period right now and it's not exactly easy right now. But on the other side, when we get there, there's no better business to create an incredible life of freedom. But I can tell you, if you're going into the next cycle and you haven't taken this downtime to write the scripts, put the systems in place, understand what your hierarchy looks like and what people you need and what roles as you grow and expand, you're going to fall back into, let's rewind 16 months when our biggest problem in the mortgage business was you couldn't hire enough processors to process the refinances that were falling out of the sky. Now is the opportunity to take the business structure, put it in place so that you've got a plan so that when the time comes, you can scale rapidly, quickly, profitably and take advantage of the new market that's coming because us here, we've got market share coming to us. And this is the time to plan and put the systems in place. And I've done the math backwards on a mortgage business and you paying somebody to pick up the phone, to qualify your leads to fill your calendars so that you're only spending your time on money making activities. If you pay that person 20, 22 dollars an hour and I'm talking about North American based people, I'm not talking about outsourcing to the Philippines or anything like that. We are North American based people, 20 bucks an hour, let's say that person can immediately start making you 75, 85, 100 dollars an hour. Everybody looks at it like I can't afford to hire somebody. You can't afford not to hire somebody because if they're not doing it, you're the person that has to be on the phone called calling realtors, cold calling insurance agents, cold calling wealth managers. And the time that you spend doing that is taking time away from building systems, taking applications and actually meeting with the referral partners. All right. So let's unpack a couple of things before I forget for those who want to know what that book is. It's called Clockwork by Mike Calowitz, find that on Amazon, Clockwork, a pretty cool book. Okay. So. He also wrote profit first. Sorry. And also very highly recommended. Yeah. Profit first. I think I have that book too. It's right over here, but I jumped to that one for whatever reason. Okay. So let's deal with the loan officer and real estate agents as well. I'm sure you've come across this, which is you're going to talk to my potential clients. My precious, referred, you know, like I don't know if I can trust somebody else talking to my clients. How do you overcome that? Yeah. Absolutely. First off is scripting is is very important, but the certification process where I should say the training process, if you're going to go out and do this on your own, that training process is very important because you need to instill in that person the culture, which you greet your customers with. And in my professional opinion, that system has to be built, whether it's you doing it or whether it's a concierge agent that's doing it, because if you're just winging it on every single phone call that comes in, we've got good days, we've got bad days, we've got, you know, some days you just don't feel like picking up the phone. Now, so a whole lot easier if you just pick it up and you know your script, right? And you as the business owner, you're going to know your script down cold in two weeks. That concierge agent, we hire people who already have at least one year's experience with professional appointment setting. And I will tell you the first experience that you have with a true expert when you've got the right hire and they pick up the phone and you hear them for the first time, you be like, oh, oh, that was good. Why didn't I do this sooner? This is incredible. Like they can sound just like you, they can put that best foot forward, but you can't just hire the person and be like, okay, here's a, here's a word document, good luck. You've got to take the time to allow them to shadow you. How do you speak to your clients and they can create the system for you? That's the beauty of this thing. That's what I did at Connection Incorporated when we started with our concierge agents. It was like, hey, here's your zoom link and you're going to be on the background for eight hours and you're going to listen to this guy, yeah. And what I want you to do is every time I book an appointment, I want you to have written down what questions did I ask, what process did I go through, and then I want you to structure this script so that you can repeat it. And all of a sudden I realized we've got seven talking points that we talk about all of the time over and over and over in the business. I didn't even realize it because I just kind of go with it, but now the most powerful stuff that I've got, the values that we want to convey in the business are all written down. They're hit every single time. Nobody misses anything and these people are just cheerful and happy to be on the phone and they do a better job than I would. And so when you look at it that way, it's creating an extension of yourself. And even if they only do it 80% as good as you can, they have freed up eight hours a day of your time so that you can focus on those leveraged opportunities. So let's say there's 10 phone calls and they missed two of them. Well, you just had eight really good phone calls that you didn't have to do that are growing your business while you're focused on doing other things. And I think this might be helpful. So I'll run through the numbers, Jeff, if that's okay with you. So a concierge agent should make around 150 phone calls a day. Some days it's a little bit lighter, some days it's a little bit more. It depends on how many people pick up the phone, but an average is 150 calls per day. They should speak to between 30 and 40 people a day and on average a full time concierge agent books, five qualified appointments a day. And those could be applications that come through your past customer database or that could be referral partners that are already pre-qualified because you've vetted the list that the concierge agent is calling before they make the calls. But where do you draw the line? For example, you know, I know you've interviewed Wally Ellibary recently, and I, and he's a big advocate of the mortgage efficiency calls and things like that, right? We also refer to as the annual mortgage reviews, you know, the, he's got this amazing plan. As I'm sure you know, the 30, that's the 90, the six months, right? Yep. Should those calls, though, be being done by the individual loan officer who has the relationship if we're talking past clients? So the actual meeting with the client should either be done by the loan officer, but then once you scale, it's either your L.O.A., your loan officer assistant or somebody that's in that role that knows how to do that. But the person who calls the client to make that first point of contact, explain the value of why that's so important, getting the referrals from that person so that they can call the referrals and get those and actually booking the appointment should all be done by a concierge. Because I mean, just think about how much time it takes to actually get an appointment with a client on your calendar. Does Tuesday at four work for you? No. Another email. Okay. Great. How about Wednesday at five? No. Here's my calendar link. Wow. The link is broken. I can't act like you can go back and forth seven to eight messages with a client before you can just get them booked into your calendar. It's just like take the example of going to the doctor. Nobody expects to show up for surgery day and have the doctor greet them at the front door. Hey, welcome. Here's your little booties that you put on and go check in, right? And you go to the check encounter. You'd be freaked out if the doctor was sitting on the other side of the wicket being like, here's your paperwork. Don't forget to fill out form three, right? The doctor, the person who owns the business, the expert, the person who is put in that level of authority to take care of that client, they show up at just the right time for five to ten minutes to do that highly specialized thing and then systems and people take care of everything else. It happens in the law office. It happens with really good financial planners. It happens in almost every high level business that we associate with except the mortgage industry. And I don't know why that is, but a lot of reasons why I mean, you know, number one, most of them are running, they're basically just a salesperson, not running a business. Number one, number two, they're control freaks, so they feel like they need to be in control of all those things. And they believe that they can do it better. And by the way, that might be true, but you talked about earlier, which is what that book talks about as well, clockwork and profit first is, if somebody can do it, 80% is good as you, you know, and that frees you up for the, right? The Queen B roll to be able to produce the eggs more often, aka loans, opportunities, or actually have a little bit of margin in your life. And you've got like, like, because what you're talking about here, this is a process for people to take on psychologically, 100%. Because it's all about mindset. It's all about like, how do you see yourself? And it's all about like being open to, to, in a lot of practitioners, you know, this as well, reading the book, emith, Michael Gerber. A lot of people are, are, are tacticians, they're great at, right, performing a task. And then they're like, oh, I'm going to start my own business, or I'm going to be an L.O. Great at taking apps. I'm great at solving problems to get the loan done. But that's not a business, right? That's just doing it right. Yep. And I'm, I'm, I'm hanging out here and pausing pregnantly, purposefully, there's three peas in a row, because I think those that are listening to this right now, some get and some they're like, you know, this makes sense, but I don't have the money to do it, or whatever the thing is that comes up in their head. And then some are listening, going, I don't know if I agree with that. I don't know if I want anybody else talking to my customers, you know, and, and what I would propose to you, if you're struggling with that side of it versus the financial side, is what do you want your business to look like, you know, I mean, do you want to stay at three to five loans a month, or do you want to go to 10, 20, 30? Which is totally attainable in today's marketplace, if you're talking to the right people. And so Jeff, I had a really interesting conversation with, I love to network. My wife is a phenomenal entertainer. So we bring, you know, people and so she does a really great fundraiser every year for the project that she's involved in and the charity that she runs and I get to meet all these really interesting entrepreneurial people that we've come together with in our community. And I had a conversation just a couple of months ago with a plumber. And so he comes up to me, he's like, Hey, Chris, thanks so much for having us. I'm a plumber. And I was like, Oh, great. Awesome. Like what type of plumbing do you do? And he's like, well, I guess I'm not really a plumber. And we had this really interesting conversation because he was a plumber and he used to be the guy that would get the call and they did 24 hour servicing. So he would get a call at 2 30 at night. And there's some apartment building with a clog toilet and he'd go get in his truck and he'd go do plumbing, right? And so he came back and he's like one of the transformational moments that I had as an entrepreneur is I hired my first business coach. I did not have the money for a business coach, but I knew that I wasn't going to be a plumber for the rest of my life. Like this guy's an entrepreneur, like a legit, super successful entrepreneur. He owns the largest plumbing country in like our part of the province is massive. And he said, the business coach got on me on the very first call, he says, what do you do? He said, I'm a plumber. And he said, no, you do marketing and sales to sell plumbing services. That's your job. You're not a plumber. And he said, I had this light bulb moment where it was like, whoa, like I can only get so good at the plumbing aspect. But if I can figure out how to get four times more phone calls to my cell phone, I can have guys or girls on trucks doing the plumbing. And I don't have to be the guy that goes out at 2 30 in the morning, but I still get the paycheck. And he's taken that to 15, 20, whatever it is, trucks out there. And all he does is I'm not a plumber. I'm a sales and marketing specialist that sells plumbing services. And so in the mortgage industry, we're not loan officers. We're not loan takers. We're not loan processors. We run sales and marketing businesses that sell mortgages and that provide financial services. And I think if we can get that across today, I think we've done a pretty good job. Yeah, if all we can do is make a shift in mindset to start changing how you see yourself, your role, a couple of quick points on that. And that's a great example, by the way, of kind of what we talked about being the tactician. There's only so many things until that you can unclog personally. And if you ever want to grow and scale and make more money, you've got to remove yourself from the equation. Yeah. Same with a member I was listening to that book we talked about and he was talking about like everybody seen that picture of Jeff Bezos sitting at his desk back in the early days. And back in the early days, Jeff Bezos used to have books shipped to his garage, right? And so he was like the intermediary. He was shipping, taping, sending, like he did it all. Why? Because he had to when you first started out. Now, do you think if he had never outsourced all the roles and functions of fulfilling on the outcome, filling the blank that you, Amazon would be what it is today? Of course not. Obviously. And the last point is, I've interviewed, I know you have to, but I've interviewed a bunch of top producers. And when you get to the only way, most of these people that I'm thinking about when I ask them what their loan process is, there are, I'm going to try and guess what they're just with the percentages, but it's a total guess. But all right, let's just say that the majority of people who are doing 100 million a year who are doing 30, 40, 50 loans a month have removed themselves from the front end. And they're only, I think of Denise Downey here, for example, who I recently had in our small group. And people are, I'll also surprise when they hear, like your example of the surgeon, they show up for a very specific task for a very short, brief period of time. And then they're out. And that is how you get to scale because there's no other way to do it. So how do people start though, like, because we got people listening who are like, yeah, I'd love to do that. Yeah. That sounds great. But what do I do next? Yeah. In my opinion, the first is the marketing and sales and getting to a point where you can reliably and consistently get referrals into your business because then you've got the deals in order to create the process. The worst thing that you can do is spend all of your time trying to architect the perfect mortgage fulfillment process when you don't have deals to run through it. Because then you're spending time being the tactician with no business. It's got to start with making the phone calls. If you've got a past customer database, I don't care if it's five people or it's 500 people, but if those people have not gotten a phone call from your office in the last 90 days and you're not calling them four times a year, 100% start right there, right? That task number one. I believe everybody should be doing, and again, this might be a different conversation, but you should be leveraging social media. Your personal social media, you should be friend requesting all your clients as they come in so that you can have direct message conversations with them so that on the annual mortgage checkup, you can reach out through DMs and just say, hey, just checking in. It's time for your annual mortgage review. Can we get you booked in for a quick call? Our concierge agents that are using DMs are getting even better responses than phone calls and text messages. So implement that into your marketing, but you will get results right away. Just start reaching out to your past clients through those channels and asking them for repeat business, referrals, and five star reviews on your Google profile. Those are the three things that you need to be doing with your database. Do that first. Do that while getting a qualified list of realtors in your local marketplace. It is a different list today than it was just nine sure it wants to go. You'll get that data. You can get it from MMI. You can get it from Modex. You can get it from our company, but get that list of qualified real estate agents and you need to be working and setting up enough appointments where one per day, you just need to meet with one qualified referral partner per day. I will save doing the math on the spot. But if you do one appointment a day and you do that for just 10 months, you will have 40 referral partners sending you business by the end of a 10 months period of time. If you do just one appointment a day. So in the beginning, you might have to be the one that's making those calls, but your goal is I don't stop calling referral partners today until I get one qualified appointment. And that's your job. Is that in person or virtual appointment or both? Either or. And I'll tell you, the realtors are just as open to either or. So we have some clients that are booking in person appointments. Most of them are happening over Zoom. Some of them are in office. There's all kinds of different variations of that. And the offer that we give is also different. But I don't want people to get mixed up in the different offers that we offer. I've got a great training that shows you all the different offers. But it is the work of picking up the phone. Because if you want to figure out your script, call somebody. You'll figure it out real quick, right? It only takes five conversations until you're like, oh, hey, I know what to say, because you're not going to call somebody and be like, yeah, you got to figure it out. And along those lines, I'm going to, all right, let me press you a little bit if I can on that with the last couple of minutes we have is, can you give us a sense of what is said to be able to schedule an appointment for a loan officer? What gets the realtor to say yes? Yep, absolutely. So that comes down to the offer. And so in the beginning stages of the script, it's just an opener. And I will speak from the aspect of a concierge making the call, not you making the call yourself. So ring ring, hey Jeff, this is Chris Johnstone calling from Chris Johnstone's office. How are you? Everybody fine. What do you want? You know, we've heard some really great things about you in the industry. As a matter of fact, we've done the research. And the reason that we're calling you today is because, and then you insert the offer. There are three basic offers that we see working really well in the marketplace right now. The first is what I call a platform presentation. So that's either an invitation for them to be a featured expert on a webinar that you're hosting. So you know, Chris, the loan officer is hosting a webinar next month. And he wants the best specialist in the moral in the real estate industry to come on and talk about what are home prices doing right now? What's happening with inventory? How to sell a home in today's marketplace and how to buy a home in today's marketplace? Would you be willing to be our featured expert? So you're offering them a platform. If you have a podcast, invite them to be on your podcast, but it's a podcast or it's a webinar and you're offering for them for free to come on and be on that platform with you. It's very simple to run some very basic Facebook ads to hyper targeted traffic in a local marketplace and get webinar registrants for that webinar. The reason why I love that strategy so much is the realtor will promote the webinar to their list of past clients. They'll promote the webinar on their social media. So you're hoovering in the leads that they've got in their database and their personal connections to show up on the webinar where at the end, you get to do a mortgage presentation of the things that they need to have, you know, three C's of credit, that sort of thing. And then at the end, it's if you would like to move forward, the thing you need before you speak to the real estate agent is to know how much home you qualify to buy and what your rate and payment is going to be. And I help you with that information. So let's set up a quick call. You do a call to action on the webinar. Consierge agent calls everybody who's registered for the webinar books more appointments. But that webinar offer is phenomenal. I absolutely love it. So that's offer number one that you give to the realtor. I'll put you on my platform. Number two, we call the irresistible offer. This tends to work really well with top producers because they're all trying to grow their businesses right now and a lot of them are investing in marketing and advertising. They're on social media. They're generating leads and you say, Hey, has your conversion on your online leads? Not great. I'd like it to be better. Great. Do you call your leads within the first five minutes and do they get at least seven phone calls from your office when you're working them? The answer is no. Hey, great. Well, I've got a piece of software and a concierge agent. And that person will work all of your leads for you. I'll get them prequalified for mortgage and then refer them back to you. Does that sound fair? So Parker, the gentleman who I was talking about earlier in the presentation who has 26 new referral partners now at the end of the year, that's the offer that we're using in his business. So not only has he gotten 26 new referral partners, each of which have sent him a deal, he's also getting lists of 100, 200, 300, 400 leads that he doesn't have to pay for from each of those partners. The concierge is working the leads and generating applications from the leads to then refer back to the realtor, but those are also deals that he gets in his mortgage business as well. So that's the irresistible offer. And then the third is the good old, I like you. And we call this the mastermind. So basically it's, look, what Chris is doing is he's networking with the top professionals in this marketplace, realtors, financial planners, investment advisors, attorneys. And what he's doing is putting it together so that all of us can refer business back and forth together. And he feels like you would be a phenomenal candidate to join the mastermind. And he just needs 10, 15 minutes of your time to see if you're a good fit. And so again, the reason why I love that offer is because it elevates you and it puts you in the position of running a mastermind and being the person that they need to reach out to in order to be qualified by, which again, it's super hard to make that call. If it's you making the call to the real estate agent, it's hard to be like, you know, I'm the guy running the mastermind, but I'm also the guy that's calling you and inviting you. And the concierge makes the call, it's like, oh, hey, business systems, they've got staff, they've got employees, that sort of thing. So the mastermind offer is also a fantastic offer to get out there. And then I'm not discounting just the coffee offer. I'm just like, hey, we've heard great things about you. I'd love to take you out for a cup of coffee and see that still works. I know a lot of people think like it's too basic, simple works. So even if you just do the coffee appointment, just make the calls. That's where the results come from. Wow. That's cool, man. That's true. Those are three things people could do immediately in their own market, different versions of that. If you don't have what you think you need to fulfill on that, right? Which of those three could you implement today? That's the real question. Right. The mastermind is super easy because literally all it takes is just calling professionals in each marketplace. I will share this with our listeners. So we make a lot of appointments with financial planners, wealth managers and attorneys. They're very difficult to get on the phone because they all have gatekeepers, right? It's not like the mortgage industry. You've got to go through their concierge, right? So what we've been doing is we've been using a system on LinkedIn in order to reach out. And there are like, there are more of them on LinkedIn than there are on Facebook and Instagram and that sort of thing. And those DMs go directly to their cell phone and bypass all the gatekeepers. So we're actually booking more appointments by opening up those conversations through LinkedIn or through the concierge. So the concierge is using LinkedIn to book the appointments. And that's how we're getting through to financial planners and some of those other ones. But all it takes is one professional in each of those niches. There's seven of them and all of a sudden you're at the middle of all of the referrals from all those people. All the referrals come to you. And then you refer them out to all of the other people that you've set the relationships up with. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Another version of this, I've seen personally been involved in. I'm sure you've seen this as well as the mastermind. You could also be somebody who does a quarterly panel, right, in your local area and just brings in five, six subject matter experts. You could mix it up with the type of industries that you talked about. But again, it's kind of like somebody, what's that phrase from GaryVee where you're like the hot thing at the high school reunion or whatever, you know what I mean? Like it's all, it's all I have no experience with that. But figuratively, I guess it's like, you know, it's kind of like that digital mayor concept. But in this case, you're putting yourself at the center of all these like, you know, incredible engagement opportunities. So the mastermind cool of something is something people could do right now for sure. All right. For those people, we're for a second time. We want to learn more about what you guys do over there. Tell us how do people connect with you. Yep. So we put up a website with a free training that walks through in detail what we've sort of discussed today. It's mortgagemarketingclass.com. It's a fantastic outline of how to implement these systems. So mortgagemarketingclass.com. My name is Chris Johnstone. You can find us on all of our socials. And I would love to shout out the podcast if that's okay. Yeah, please. Yeah. So it's called loan officer wealth. And it's a fantastic listen. And again, I'm Chris Johnstone on all of the socials and love to have a conversation. All right. I'm going to put links to all of that in the show notes and I've sat in on your webinar by the way. So it's great content. If anybody just wants to kind of like kick the tires a little bit, right? You go to that website, mortgagemarketingclass.com, link in the show notes, and no risk at taking a peek under the hood and seeing what's in there. So always great to chat with you, Chris. Thank you so much for bringing your wisdom and serving the industry like you do. Awesome. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Listeners, you know what to do. Check the links in the show notes. Hey, if you like this episode, leave us a review. And we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey, guys, what's up real quick? You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before and I just want to quickly remind you of that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchased loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. Our mortgage marketing pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling done for you agent classes, expert training videos, a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you, everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market, attract and convert agents into referral partners. Plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seeds, partnering with affiliates real easy, but that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top LOs, authors, speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time, for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere to from eight to 50 transactions in the last 12 months and we'll provide that list uploaded into our platform for you so you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents. So what are you waiting for? You can check out more at mortgagemarketing.pro, see more of the success stories there. And if you feel compelled to do so, book a call, we'll have a chat, we'll see if it's a fit. 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