Boost Your Sales Volume with MortgagePlannerCRM


Mike Gulitz presents features and functionality used by top loan officers who leverage the MortgagePlannerCRM as their primary customer relationship management and business intelligence engine.

Boost Your Sales Volume with MortgagePlannerCRM from MPC on Vimeo.

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Content vs. Technology:

Driving Mortgage Sales in a New Era - Season Premiere with Roberto Monaco


MPC presents influence trainer Roberto Monaco on the topic, Market Domination through Content Creation. Roberto shows loan originators a 30-week, easy-to-publish marketing strategy leveraging video as the preferred communication for most people today.

Content vs. Technology: Driving mortgage sales in a new era, featuring Roberto Monaco from MPC on Vimeo.

For more information about MortgagePlannerCRM: Click Here

SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL: Click Here

TIP #1: Automating Your Follow-up Tasks


The most common mistake that sales professionals make regarding a follow-up strategy is believing that it is not necessary because they gave great service and that has earned them the repeat business and referrals for years to come. The second most common mistake is thinking that they will remember to "check in" at regular intervals instead of setting that new client on a well-thought-out, systematic, automated workflow / follow-up campaign. The third most common mistake is giving higher priority to the transaction-related tasks over the follow-up tasks. They are of equal importance and need to be treated as such if the salesperson stands any chance of building a long-term, steady stream of repeat and referral business. Not respecting this fact, leads to a never-ending cycle of prospecting for new business.

The root of the problem lies in the personality type that is attracted to the sales profession. Pursuing the lead, qualifying the prospect and closing the transaction are all aspects of the sales cycle that appeal to the "hunter" mentality. There is a defined objective and a pay off.

Follow-up requires a different mindset that appeals to the "farmer" mentality. The farmer un- derstands that planting the seeds now and remaining diligent with regards to their care is what will produce the future harvest of sales abundance. Since most sales people are natural hunters, they will not naturally do the follow-up work that is necessary to develop repeat
business, and most importantly, the ongoing stream of referrals from past clients and partners.

The good news is that with advances in contact management technology and some good marketing materials, the entire process of follow-up can be set on autopilot. Imagine that with a click of a button, all of your new clients last month were set up to receive ongoing informative emails, birthday and holiday cards were sent, and you would receive reminders to make regular phone calls for that added personal touch. Not only will this continue to plant you firmly in the minds of your clients as a true professional, but it will secure that much-desired mental real estate that positions you for referrals when your client's friends and family mention the topic of buying or refinancing a home.

You may be asking yourself, when do I begin the follow-up and how long do I continue the process.??
The answer may surprise you.
You begin following up, the moment you receive a new lead or referral and you never stop. You follow-up until a lead becomes a qualified prospect. You follow-up with a qualified prospect until the transaction closes or doesn't close. You follow-up with new clients after the closing and you revisit timing with the prospects that failed to close until one of you leaves this world. There is one exception - The contact asks you to stop or opts out of your email list. Otherwise, you never stop.

If you don't believe it, invite the number one producer in your company out to lunch. During that hour of one-on-one time, ask the following questions:
1. What percentage of your business comes from past clients and referrals?
2. Do you prefer new leads from advertising or referrals? Why?
3. What is the longest period of time you pursued a client from lead to initial close?

The results vary from industry to industry, but top producers in the service industries typically experience a higher percentage of repeat and referral business, a preference for referrals over any other type of lead, and a surprisingly long client-pursuit matrix. I know top producers that can track new business back over 3-5 years of follow-up marketing. It may sound like too much work for the "hunter," but with a CRM that has automated workflow capability, you may only need to invest as little as 12 minutes in phone calls and voice messages over a 3-year period. The CRM software does the heavy lifting and most sales people would prepare to remain on the phone or meet face-to-face to maximize their total income potential.
If the fortune is in the follow-up, then automating the follow-up may hold the key in never letting an opportunity slip through the cracks. Some of the best CRM application providers target niche markets, offering outstanding marketing materials as well as industry-specific sales and process workflows that can transform a self-employed agent into a small business with the volume to match. This will save a tremendous amount of time and money, for a sales professional that doesn't have the resources or the desire to customize a generic platform to meet his or her specific needs.




Stay Tuned for Tip #2: How to Create a Value-added Keep-in-Touch Plan

December has always been the time that motivates me to pause and reflect on the previous twelve months. Did I accomplish everything that I set out to do this year? What were the major achievements of the year? What were the big surprises?

Looking ahead to 2010, what are your plans for the next 12 months and more importantly, where are you planning to be physically, financially and mentally in the second full decade of the new millennium. Think that is too big a planning range? Where were you on December 31st, 1999? That's how fast 10 years passes into the memories.
Let's take a quick inventory of 2009*:

1.    How many units/transactions did you close?
2.    How much revenue did you produce?
3.    What percentage of your 2009 goal did you achieve?
4.    How many new leads did you receive?
5.    What were your Top 3 Lead Sources?
6.    How many referrals did you receive?
7.    Who was your top referring client?
8.    Who was your top referring partner?
9.    What is the itemized summary of your marketing investments?
10.    What marketing program produced the greatest ROI?
11.    What percentage of your overall revenue did you spend on marketing?
                 *If you are using FasTrak CRM or Mortgage Planner CRM this will be easy.

After analyzing this information, how did you do?


2010 Goal setting checklist:

1.    How many units/transactions will you close?
2.    How much revenue will you produce?
3.    How many new leads will you receive?
4.    How many referrals will you receive?
5.    How many new referral partners will you have?
6.    What marketing programs are you dropping?
7.    What marketing programs will you be using again and for the first time?
8.    What percentage of your overall revenue will you spend on marketing?


Now that you have some momentum, consider adding a series of questions for both years related to your personal life. Write down all of your goals for 2010 in the present tense ("I AM closing 15 loans each month" or "I AM Listing 5 new properties each month") on flash cards. Writing this down is absolutely essential. It is not the same if you just think about it. Place the flash cards on your desk, so that you can see them and read them aloud each morning before you turn on your computer! This is a powerful exercise that I have repeated each year since starting MPC. The results have been nothing short of astounding.

I encourage you to commit to this daily practice and let me know how it goes for you in 2010. I look forward to hearing about your success.

Happy New Year and Seasons Greetings!

Mike Gulitz

Have you ever wondered how you managed to accumulate so many emails in your Inbox? If you ever looked at Outlook or Gmail and wondered, "How am I ever going to catch up on reading and responding to all of these messages?", then keep reading.

Imagine for a moment that when you go out for your morning commute that there are no traffic laws, no divider lines, no signs for directions, no red-lights or speed limits to control the safe flow of traffic. What would happen? Chaos! The fact is that we are taught the rules and must prove that we have a good understanding of the laws before we are issued a driver's license.  Without this process and the agencies that patrol and enforce the laws, our roads and highways would probably get jammed up and over-loaded, just like your e-mail inbox.

As traffic has increased on the web and more users have turned to e-mail to communicate, the amount of messages in the inbox has become harder to manage. The problem is that we built and began using the technology, without establishing some basic rules of the road between the other e-motorists.

MPC has created a set of easy-to-follow, electronic rules of the road called DARTS©, an acronym for Delete, Archive, Reply, Task, Sync. These are the five options most commonly exercised when a message enters a user's inbox.
 
 


DELETE
When a new message arrives in the inbox, odds are that a large percentage are promotional or advertising in nature, so we "Delete" or "Archive" these messages for future reference. For clients that are experiencing extreme inbox overload (500+ Message), we recommend unsubscribing from all lists and RSS feeds until your Email Inbox is under control. Since there is a good chance that you are also receiving unnecessary emails from your friends, colleagues, and team members, it is a good idea to have a plan to teach those contacts how to best communicate with you.

A great way to redirect all of that non-business communication from your Outlook inbox is to request that your contacts join you on Facebook and encourage them to communicate with you there. It should be noted that your Facebook account settings should not automatically email you the newsfeed updates from your FB friends.



ARCHIVE
For the messages that are important to keep, but require no action, it's best to "Archive" the message by linking it to the sender, contact and/or transaction to whom or which the message is most directly related. Each archived message should automatically include a time and date stamp. You should also consider the subject line. Does it accurately describe the content of the email? Edit the subject line to make finding it later, easier. This will also provide the CRM user (or a team of users) a system to track all messages related to contacts, projects, transaction, etc. Tier One CRM systems allow users to mass archive multiple messages from a single sender or mass archive a series of emails about specific project.


REPLY
For messages that require a response, we recommend that you edit the subject line if necessary and it's best to "Archive" the message into your CRM by linking it to the sender, contact and/or transaction to whom or which the message is most directly related. Follow the rules of the road and do not cc other contacts on your reply message unnecessarily. The members of your team should always be able to access the message from the CRM.


TASK
For messages that require an action on the part of the CRM user, best practices dictate that the e-mail be archived into your CRM by linking it to the sender, contact and/or transaction to whom or which the message is most directly related. This should be followed by the creation of a task, series of tasks (project), or the launch of an automated workflow that contains a series of tasks assigned to multiple users.
 Each task should contain a due date, subject line, detailed instructions, priority and status. If the CRM offers an email notification, use sparingly. A good use of the email notification option would be when one or more of the team members is mobile, but is able to receive email on their iPhone or Blackberry.



SYNCHRONIZATION (SYNC)
CRM solutions may offer manual and automated SYNC options and both should be used based on individual needs. The primary benefit of SYNC is to connect multiple devices and contact management systems for continuity and to eliminate double and triple data entry. Advances in synchronization allow users to stay connected with wired and wireless option. Look for flexibility and device compatibility  when considering CRM solutions and the devices that will be able to support it.




If you would like to see an example of DARTS™ IN ACTION, check out the web video at http://www.mpc-co.com/blog/2009/10/darts-basics.html



 
 

Great article from Darren Hardy on Virtual Assistants: projects to delegate, how to find quality virtual assistants and more!
Love it!

Click Here to read the full article

One of the earliest lessons that I learned running my company is that I would fail more times than I would succeed. It's a sometimes painful, but necessary part of the road to success. Entrepreneurs tell legendary stories about the challenges and set backs that paved the way to their ultimate achievements and epiphanies. My business coach would teach me that I needed to embrace my struggles, because it usually meant that I was on the verge of a breakthrough. Its also at this critical point that many business owners give up.

According to the small business administration, 95% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years and half of them will fail in the first year. That's an astounding figure, but it gives us a clear indication that failure should be expected and worked into every business's strategy if we are going to turn the corner toward success.

Once my team began to understand that failure would be an integral part of our business experience, we began to grow more comfortable. We even decided to identify resources to deal with failure and turn it to our advantage. The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard was critical in cultivating this process in the team enviornment. Now, there is one caveat to the formula - Learn from your failures and do not repeat the same mistakes. Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is the well-known definition of insanity.

We embraced a new mantra, "Execute. Fail. Adjust." We soon discovered that we were not really committed to a philosophy of continued failure, but rather on one that would propel us into action. Once we were in motion, we would stay vigilant in identifying mistakes, logging set backs and communicating our challenges. Constant course corrections were made, until we found way to smoother processes. We also found that by executing and being " in action," we were making a considerable amount of forward momentum and progress.

This was a welcome change from my medical technology training of analyze, react, analyze some more, execute, analyze again. What works well in the lab or in any bureaucracy, may not stoke the fires required to create something out of thin air. Entrepreneurs have an amazing capacity to believe in themselves and see the destination even if the road may not be completely clear when they take the first step

If you doubt that this has been a formula for success that you have ever been apart of or witnessed in a viable business model, ask yourself how many MS Windows and MS Office updates and upgrades you have installed on your computer. I helped build 2 enterprise software companies from 1996 to 2001 and one of them, B2B solution for the hotel & gaming industry experienced the 5th largest gain per share of all the IPOs in 1999. Neither of those products were complete or fully-functional when we released the alpha or beta versions. In fact, our first clients played an integral role in determining which features would be added and removed from the final product. What made those companies successful was the team's ability to execute, fail and adjust. Most of our greatest achievements and upgrades came out of a massive failure in an a functional client's production or operations facility, not on the development platform back at headquarters.

Featured Guest Speaker: Bryan Yaninek

Find out how a Nurse became a Mortgage Mastermind generating over $300M in Loan Volume!

Bryan has an incredible story to share with 14 years as a loan officer. We talk about the power of mentorship and how this self-taught originator grew into a top producer for First Magnus and is currently setting the bar as the #2 producing Loan Officer at Castle & Cooke Mortgage. Bryan shares his insights about profitable database management, developing partner relationships that drive referrals, and his ultimate client appreciation program. Bryan will also give us some of the strategies that he is using in the current market that have kept him hovering around $5M per month during 2008 and 2009 in his home of Colorado Springs.

Watch and Rate this Video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s20YaZnM0fs