Lead-Generation

Every loan officer who buys leads eventually has the same conversation with the lead vendor. The pipeline is dry, the close rate is ugly, and the first instinct is to blame the source. The leads are junk. The leads are old. Everybody else got the good ones first. Sometimes that is true. Aggregator leads sold five times over are a real problem, and trigger leads were enough of a problem that the practice got reined in (we wrote about the trigger leads ban and what to do about it separately). But if you have ever bought genuinely fresh leads and still watched your conversion stay flat, the math points somewhere uncomfortable. Why your mortgage leads aren’t converting usually has very little to do with the leads themselves. It has to do with what happens in the first five minutes after they hit your CRM, and what happens over the next two weeks. ...

For years it worked like this: a borrower applied for a mortgage, the credit pull registered at the bureaus, and within hours the bureaus sold that borrower’s information to competing lenders. The phone lit up. Some borrowers reported being contacted dozens of times in the first day, and the National Association of Mortgage Brokers cited cases of more than 100 contacts within 24 hours of a single application (that figure is NAMB’s, from its advocacy for the bill, but anyone who’s had a client apply recently knows the experience it describes). ...

Somewhere around the third Tuesday night you spend fighting with an ad dashboard instead of calling borrowers, the question shows up on its own: should somebody else be doing this? You’re not wondering whether marketing matters. You already know a loan officer without a pipeline is just a person with a license. The real question is who builds and runs the machine, you, a freelancer, or a service that does the whole thing for you. That choice has real numbers attached, and this article puts them on the table. ...