One of the biggest fallacies in the mortgage CRM business is that you are creating a customer database for repeat business. The fact is that 70% of mortgage customers couldn’t tell you the name of their mortgage broker on their last transaction days later.

That simply means that every customer starts from scratch every 5-7 years when they go to get their next mortgage. What you are playing for is a referral from that past client, based on your lead nurturing strategy.

Repeat Customers

The statistics are what they are: homeowners purchase or refinance a home once every 5-7 years. The average mortgage broker is in business about three years. That means that by the time the average customer goes to get a new mortgage the mortgage broker is out of business. So, most homeowners simply skip that step and go on the hunt for someone to help them online or by asking friends.

Loyal Customers

In a good mortgage CRM you should be creating loyal customers as much or more after the closing than before the transaction. You want them to give you permission to engage them from time to time about mortgage news and information. This permission will not only motivate them to pay attention to their own needs, but they will increasingly be tuned into conversations that are opportunities for you to get a referral.

Referral Customers

Your CRM should be segmented and tracking your top referral customers. These are the people that you should be sending thank-yous and incentive to. Don’t ask them for their mortgage refinance business–ask them to tell-a-friend.

Referral Partners

The same thing applies to local businesses and professional pillar business. You should be creating “channel” partners of your community leaders, doctors, attorneys, and accountants.

Stop thinking of your CRM as a sales system and start managing it like a referral system.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Your Money: When to Use a Mortgage Broker (nytimes.com)
• Lenders Are Dropping Mortgage Brokers (mymortgageinsider.com)

Contact Management

You have to start with the basics–contact management. Your leads need to be easy to import and immediately available for contact. Your lead management process should make it simple to get your next lead, facilitating a swift contact flow.

Your contact manager should be coordinating email and telephonic contacts. Some basic features you should have an eye for:

• Smooth natural telephonic contact process
• In software email sending and tracking capability
• Automated, fluid feeding of leads to your screen
• Integration with Outlook and other calendaring systems
• Ability to send email and text messaging alerts/ticklers

Automated Marketing

Lead management is not all about telephone calls–especially with aged leads. You want your database marketing humming along in parallel with your call campaigns. Whatever solution you consider it must have an integrated marketing and drip email campaigning package.

Here are some basic must haves:

• Support for email templates (HTML and text)
• Capable of creating automated email workflows
• Ability for individual agents to edit or personalize
• Extensive ability to customize with dynamic variables
• Capability to send from your email domain

Custom Sales Process

Even if you are buying a lead management software you want it to be your unique sales solution. Your software should support customized checklists, sales process monitors, and to do lists.

Action Oriented

Of course, your whole goal with a lead management system is to get the maximum work effort on every lead. In order to ensure that look for these important lead processes:

• Productive process to work leads
• Ability to annotate leads with clear and discrete status
• Robust sales agent tracking
• Process to ensure every lead gets worked

A good lead management solution keeps you focused on moving through leads rapidly and consistently.

Top Lead Management Software Providers

• ClickPoint Lifecycle
• InsideSales.com
• Kaleidico icoSales

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Next Wave Marketing Strategies brings over 5 years of integrity, innovation, and client satisfaction to the aged debt leads market. We offer industry leading quality control, data cleansing, and a generous return policy to empower you to build your business in the fastest, most cost effective manner. Learn more about aged debt leads.

(photo credit: jcroach)

However, here is a word of caution. When looking to shave cost from your marketing budget avoid short-cuts and gimmicks, they will ultimately cost you more and yield little. In contrast, the key to developing an economy marketing plan is to look for pockets of inefficiency in traditional marketing. Here are a few gems most neglect:

Create and Own the Local Mortgage Web

Web technology is getting easier and easier to use. Even a non-technical person can get up and running on the web with cheap or even free blog services like:

• Blogger
• WordPress
• TypePad

Set-up one of these simple websites and start talking about your local mortgage and real estate market. Before you know it you will start becoming the top Google search listing for your local mortgage and real estate business. Add to this free professional mortgage news, information, and rates using a variety of mortgage calculators and widgets and your website will have the credibility and authority of much bigger websites.

These larger mortgage websites are forced to focus on national volume and neglect the little local markets. Yet, these are exactly the people you want to serve.

Marketing inefficiency number 1.

Buy Aged Mortgage Leads

On to the next pocket of mortgage marketing inefficiency–aged mortgage leads. Big mortgage companies buy thousands of leads a day, but mortgage lead providers often over compensate demand. This leaves hundreds of customer inquiries a day unplaced and customers unserved.

These mortgage leads quickly drop in value as they age, but the customer is still looking for help. The opportunity for your mortgage business is that as these customer request age their lead price drops dramatically. However, their interest in getting a mortgage is still very much intact.

Developing an efficient way to buy and work these aged mortgage leads is a surefire way to close more loans each month for a fraction of the cost of buying real-time Internet leads. The extra benefit of course is helping a customer that would have otherwise been abandoned–talk about a loyal and trust-based relationship.

Marketing inefficiency number 2.

Don’t Forget Your Past Clients

Here is my favorite marketing inefficiency to harvest in hard times–your own customer database. So often we forget that our own customers have changing and evolving needs. The economy has been in radical change over the last several months. I will guarantee that many of your clients have a completely different financial picture.

Dig into your mortgage CRM or lead management software. Pull out these prime leads–call them, email them, ask them if their current mortgage financing is still appropriate. More importantly ask them if their mortgage financing can protect them from a long economic decline. This can also be a perfect opportunity to capture loan modification leads.

Marketing inefficiency number 3.

Times May Be Hard, But Continue Marketing

Times are certainly hard, but don’t forget marketing is how you touch prospective clients in need. So, don’t stop doing it. Just reposition your marketing to hit pockets of value, saving money without hurting sales.

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Next Wave Marketing Strategies brings over 5 years of integrity, innovation, and client satisfaction to the aged mortgage leads market. We offer industry leading quality control, data cleansing, and a generous return policy to empower you to build your business in the fastest, most cost effective manner. Learn more about aged mortgage leads.