You can have exceptional sales skills, send out great marketing materials, and have a vast array of products and services. You can even have great rates, but without the numbers, you will only be mediocre! The numbers never lie, the numbers always get results, and the numbers create the foundation for all success. Many sales people do not understand the numbers and so instead, they wait for rates to drop or for the company to do more advertising or give them more marketing dollars. The exceptional few who understand the great power that exists in the numbers are well rewarded. They have endless sources, strong relationships with Realtors, builders, and other sources of business, and never worry about the next loan as it is always in the pipeline. Many loan officers try to "fool" the numbers. These unfortunate loan officers wait for "the one thing" that will suddenly fill up their pipeline: the next great technology, the miraculous marketing program, or the one source of endless sources that will create magical success. Understand the numbers and you will prosper. Try to ignore or cheat the numbers and you will fail, guaranteed. What are the numbers?
There are really two types of numbers. The first number is simply the number of activities performed that leads to success as well as the quality of those activities. Sales calls would be one example. The more sales contacts you make, the greater possibility of success. Add quality into the numbers and your ratio of successful calls increases. In mortgage banking, ten sales calls will usually yield one or two possibilities for a potential relationship. If you make quality sales calls, that number rises to three or four per ten calls. If you were playing baseball, that would put your batting percentage into the 300's to 400's! Those are Hall of Fame numbers!
The second set of numbers and maybe the most important is the number of follow-up calls on the same prospect. If you found three or four potential clients from your sales call efforts, the tough numbers come after that initial contact: the follow-up calls. Did you know that in outside sales such as mortgage banking that only 1% of sales are closed after the first contact? After two contacts, the number increases to 3%! It is not until after the fifth sales contact that over 81% of all sales are closed! Very few loan officers ever get to the fifth call on a Realtor or builder. There are many excuses why average sales people never get that far, but the simple reality is that they do not understand the power of the numbers!
The really wonderful thing about the numbers is the predictability they possess. If a loan officer knows he or she wants 40% of loans to come from Realtor sources, and overall wants to close 10 loans per month, then four closed loans must come from Realtors. Accounting for fallout, non-qualifiers, and those consumers whom decide to take application with another loan officer, we need at least six or seven loans to reach our goal of four closed loans. If we get only one loan per Realtor, we need six Realtors who send one loan per month. Some will send more, some less, but that would be our average. If we only have four Realtors who currently send one loan per month, we would need at least two more, probably three. If ten sales calls on ten Realtors get three opportunities, then you need to make at least ten appointments with ten Realtors to reach your numbers. Once you found three, you need to make at least five quality sales contacts on each one, or fifteen total calls, to reach success! This is oversimplified, but in reality, it works! Ask the successful loan officers!
I like to attach a dollar value to every sales call. Figure out the potential dollars you will earn from a new relationship and you can attach a dollar value to each sales call. If a Realtor is worth twelve loans a year, six of which close for an average commission of $1,000.00 or $6,000.00 total, then each of the five sales calls on that Realtor is worth over a thousand dollars each! Each quality sales call is money in the bank that cannot be withdrawn until you complete your obligation of five quality contacts.
When I evaluate the over seventy sales professionals my team coaches, the ones who reach the most success are those who realize that it is not the single blow of the hammer that splits the giant stone, but the hundred that came before that final blow. Become an expert in "the numbers" and your reward will be beyond measure for you, your company, and your family!
