Many people think the best way to grow their business is to hire more Mortgage Loan Officers to develop relationships with real estate agents to start bringing more customers through the door. Others wait too long and suffer from disorganization and missed opportunities.
That’s why we’ve put together this comprehensive guide, so you don’t miss out on any lending opportunities. A quick hint? Not all of it comes down to adding more people. You can leverage your current workforce more efficiently. Take these factors into consideration, so you can make a more informed decision about how to effectively win more mortgage businesses.
Hiring another Mortgage Loan Officer can seem like an exciting part and sign of business growth—maybe it means that you won’t have to do it by yourself anymore, and you can add incremental sales volume!
But building an efficient sales team isn’t easy. To start, there’s the entire hiring process, which includes:
That’s a lot. In fact, the hiring platform Workable found that it takes an average of 44.7 days between opening a job position and extending a job offer within the finance industry. The time spent on finding another sales rep could result in several lost opportunities for your business. Furthermore, posting jobs on more trustworthy platforms such as LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter can cost $250-$500 per month.
This isn’t to say that you should rush to find another Mortgage Loan Officer. As with any employee, putting together the right hiring plan is crucial to making sure you bring on the right person for your team.
However, even the most extensive hiring process doesn’t guarantee that your newest employee will drive your organization’s success. Maybe they don’t fit in with the company culture. Maybe they aren’t as driven as impressed upon during the interview process. Or maybe the sales training hasn’t sunken in despite your best efforts.
Sales training for mortgage lenders is an especially complex process. Although employees don’t need a specific degree to enter this field, Mortgage Loan Officers must pass a licensure test, take the required courses, and submit information for approval by the National Mortgage Licensing Service (NMLS). Loan officers are also required to complete eight hours of NMLS-approved continuing education every year to qualify for license renewal.
Once hired, a new salesperson takes an average of 6 to 9 months to ramp up, on top of the 45 days it took to find and hire them. A recent Sales Benchmark Index survey also found that average sales turnover is just under 40% with 29% of these people being new hires. Through reviewing 746 new hires in their sales consulting work, SBI found that “over ⅔ of new hires expressed dissatisfaction with their first day because their Manager was too busy to give them the required attention.” The new hires also reported that “a detailed onboarding plan that separated Doing vs. Knowing made their first 6 months more impactful,” and SBI suggests providing new hires with a dedicated peer mentor.
Training a sales rep up from their first day to when they achieve full productivity clearly requires a big investment of time, resources, and money that may ultimately not pan out. When you’re running lean, bringing a new salesperson up to speed may require more than you can give.
Then, once they are trained and become a star performer, they get recruited away by the competition, and they take their referral sources with them… and then we start the entire process all over again.
So how can you grow revenue in an efficient and sustainable way?
The landscape of mortgage lending has changed and become increasingly competitive. Mortgage lenders need to adopt new technology-driven ways to reach their audience: 98% of all homebuyers now use the internet to shop for their homes and last year, 80% of all Millennials and Gen Xers found their home with a mobile device. On top of that, lenders lose 93% of mortgages from their own customer base every year to Agent referrals. This is because many buyers still use agent-centric ways to schedule showings—even though they are time-consuming, slow, and inefficient.
In contrast to developing an extensive hiring and training process where you finally release your newest salesperson into the field, HomeTraq gives you a proactive approach to securing lending opportunities. No more cold calling. No more direct mail.
In the same way, you use Uber or Lyft to quickly find a driver to get a ride, house hunters use HomeTraq to quickly find agents to easily schedule a home showing in an average of 3-5 minutes. By offering HomeTraq to your clients, they enjoy a home buying experience that’s free from unnecessary hassles and annoying solicitation while you get home shopping alerts sent immediately to your inbox.
HomeTraq thus solves the problem with re-capturing substantially more mortgage opportunities from your current customer base. Without HomeTraq, lenders only capture about less than ½% of the mortgages from their own customer base each year. But with HomeTraq’s 50% conversion rate of home showings eventually leading to closing, we can help you regain the offensive position to win mortgage business faster than your competitors.
And an extra bonus?
You don’t have to write a single job posting or sort through an entire stack of job applications. Getting started with HomeTraq is easy: after a simple onboarding, all you have to do is prepare for the leads that will arrive directly in your inbox.
We have found that HomeTraq can become a fantastic recruiting and retention tool because now the newfound opportunities can be delivered and serviced by your existing Mortgage Loan Officers. HomeTraq can become the Rainmaker you have been searching for years to hire.
Traditional Lead Generation: 12 to 18 months for a new hire to fully ramp up with traditional lead generation methods and over $75k in expenses. HomeTraq: 1 month to get rolling, $2,500 for 100 showings which leads to about 25 closings.