The following is an excerpt from Chapter 18 of Volume I of The Mortgage Professional's Handbook:
Sales Coaching: An Unbeatable Growth Strategy
Bobby Welch, President
Welch Business Coaching
Consider with an open mind, what I’m about to say. If you do, the ability for you to scale your sales teams will change forever. We all have similar loan products. We outsource our technology, websites, and customer retention marketing. We all buy the latest marketing tools to capture leads with our referral sources. For many of us, our sales tools and sales training come from the same vendors.
Here is the real rub. Your sales teams aren’t leveraging most of the tools and training you buy for them.
Let’s take the popular joint marketing platforms for real-estate agents which most companies invest in to capture leads. Or, how about the borrower-marketing automation platforms that many lenders now have? These are powerful tools! What percentage of your loan officers is actively using them every day to grow their funding volume? I’d bet money that it is a disappointing number. I’d also bet that if you quizzed your marketing team, your training department, and others that you would find similar trends.
Sales don’t increase when you train or make more tools available to your loan officers and branches. Sales increase when you build a culture of accountability and engagement with the tools and training. Coaching is a cornerstone skill your sales and branch managers need, to accomplish this. Your retention jumps, because loan officers with growing pipelines don’t leave, and neither do their branch managers. Your ability to recruit new producers multiplies when you can sell the sales results of your current team, while your competition continues to recruit with a list of features and tools.
Your ability to scale sales becomes rock solid when your sales management team is skilled at coaching. The reality is that while many companies and managers talk about coaching, most do not understand how to implement it successfully in the workplace. Misconceptions from sports coaching are part of it. The other piece is that most sales leaders have neither received formal training in coaching nor been coached by a professionally certified coach themselves.
Read the rest of this chapter in The Mortgage Professional's Handbook!