How Loan Officers Can Leverage Tech to Compete & Win w/Katie Sweeney

On this episode Katie Sweeney, EVP at AIME, joins Sean and Kenneth to talk about how Loan Officers can win business by leveraging technology. Katie also discusses how Loan Officers should automate the mundane to focus their time on providing value to the consumer. 

2:10 Introduction to Katie

4:30 Why you can no longer avoid tech

7:50 How do you build something that helps the consumer.

10:30 Study, emulate, and win

12:20 What you need to automate in your business

15:30 Technology helps you stay in front of your database

18:00 Lead generation strategies 

21:50 Outsource the five dollar tasks

24:35 You have to know who you are trying to attract

Quotes from the episode:

“With this current environment you cannot avoid using technology.”

“It is about helping independent mortgage professionals compete with the massive call centers.”

“Loan Officer expertise is the value-add in the transaction so let the technology handle the mundane stuff.”

“Focus on the being the best professional for the consumer.”

“Use the space in your head for something that is more valuable than systems you can automate.”

Links:

Mortgage Success Academy -onedollarmsa.com

Next Level Loan Officers -https://www.nllodigital.com/mortgage-success-offer

Loan Officer Events -loanofficerevents.com

AIME – aimegroup.com 

Social Media:

Facebook -https://www.facebook.com/NextLevelLoanOfficers/

YouTube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwSyHzkvBri1YWJSH7df1CQ 

LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/company/next-level-loan-officers/about/

Facebook -  https://www.facebook.com/AIMEnational/

Text the word: nextlevel to 36260 to download our app

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you want to stay in the same situation, then continue doing what you're doing and you guys can get on board and go down this four lane highway and just rock it out and you don't have to have a decade of learning process. Meet people where they are. If you want to have all types of clients, be a Rubik's cube, meet them where they want to be met. We have to know our numbers, we have to know how much we want and then what, how many deals do I have to close to make that a reality? What I want to do over the next half hour or so is give you clarity on the items that really are going to generate money for you and allow you to do the things you want to do. You're not currently being coached by the people in the industry that are doing it at the highest level. Then you're working too hard to get there.

Speaker 2: 0:42

This is the next level of loan officers podcast, a proud founding member of the real disrupt podcast collaborative. You can check out more awesome podcasts@realdisrupt.com and now Kenneth Travis and Sean Zalmanoff.

Speaker 3: 0:57

Hello everybody, and welcome to our next level loan officers podcast, the candidate Travis. Man, Katie, it's always a good day when I get to see you and I get to see you a couple of times today. Oh yeah, man, it's been good baby. I was doing any better. I couldn't stand it. Do we don't want there to be two of you. So right there friends, like our mission is to move the needle for loan officers, continue to make us relevant and make us all better. If you find that with our next level on officer's podcast, do us a favor. Do other loan officers have favor, uh, whether it's iTunes or Google or whatever your favorite podcast, medium, uh, listening device or app happens to be. Go give us a five star review. Leave a nice little comment so other loan officers can find out about us and make sure that we help them to listen. And if you don't want to leave Sean a five star review, at least believe it for me. All right. Like don't like, don't, don't hold it against me, you know, because it's something Sean says, you know, it's, you know, it's weird that the guy who always gets pulled along as the guy that feels the need to say those kinds of things. So we are joined by Katie Sweeney today. Katie is the executive vice president of strategy at aim. Katie, welcome. Like, you know, you are, you had a pretty illustrious career, not only in the mortgage world, but in, uh, in your previous careers in healthcare before you came to the mortgage world. Did you start like your first job when you were seven years old or, Hey Sean, I heard she was the engine for aim. That's what I, that's the word on the street. There's big shoes to fill,

Speaker 4: 2:46

big shoes to fill. No, I got, I honestly think I just right place, right time coming out of school. Um, I worked in sports broadcasting when I was in college, shifted my focus over to business. I did some work with Nike out in LA. Um, when I was there I went to Pepperdine. Um, so it was out on the West coast for a little while and decided I wanted to come back. My family was in Dallas and it was a big healthcare and a big mortgage industry down here. So, um, met the right people, took the right risk at the right time, you got a little bit lucky and then just powered through mortgage was a complete accident. I had no intention of getting a mortgage, didn't know anything about it, had planned on staying in healthcare for my career. I've got family that's been in healthcare for a long time so I was familiar with it. Um, but what I did over there was focused on competitive intelligence and market research and behavioral profiles and building your brand online. And all of those things, as you guys know, are just as applicable in the mortgage space. And both of those industries are highly regulated. They're really big decisions for consumers to make that often take a lot of time for somebody to make them. So there's a lot of applicability that crossed over between the two. And I got a call about a job at, um, a lender here, local in Dallas and decided to jump over and here we are four, five years later.

Speaker 3: 4:05

Oh. And Katie knows we're Gilmer and Longview, Texas. I know only one who's known that too. I'm pretty excited about that. I mean, you know, that's just taken a valuable brain cells that Katie, so we were talking a little bit about technology before we hit the record button. So like T tell us what you're seeing for loan officers because I can tell you on my end, like I've been trying to help our loan officers for like four years, five years, and I've like been shoving their head in water, but I've been drowning them because they won't drink the technology water. And then all of a sudden a pandemic happened and they're like, Hey Sean, tell me a little bit more about that technology we have now. No, it's true. It's,

Speaker 4: 4:54

it's become something that people can't avoid anymore. Right. I think especially the last few years, if you look at individual on officers, whether they're in the independent channel or the retail channel and they're running out of their own branch, everyone's had so much business coming in. Mortgage market's been in such a great place since really since I got into it. I, I started in mortgage in 2016 so when I came in, everything was booming, revise. We're flying out the door. We had a massive portfolio retention team. We built a huge consumer direct team. We had a huge retail branch network. I mean it was, it was super popular across the board and you didn't really have to change what you were doing. You could continue to run. You had so much business. The, the automation didn't become a requirement because there was enough on your table. Right. And stopping for a month to implement systems is really scary. Like, Holy crap, I'm not going to work in my business for 30 to 60 days because I'm going to implement all this stuff that I don't know anything about and I've got to learn it and now I've got to figure out which system to use and do a lot of the vetting upfront. It's, and it, you get to a point where you say, right, I'm just going to keep slapping a bandaid on it and not worry about it and continue down the path that I'm on. Cause it's good enough. And now with this current environment, you can't avoid it anymore. You can't depend on those face to face conversations. You can't drop by someone's office. You can't be out in your community as often as you were before. You have to do things online and it's different. Um, I, I'm with you. I've been preaching this for the last couple of years. I've shifted my focus over to the tech side a few years back for the sole purpose of we've got to bring enterprise level systems that you could get in a mega consumer direct call center and bring that out to individual locations, retail branches, individual independent brokers, whatever it is, they need access to the same platforms if we're going to compete longterm and, and to me the big call centers are the ones that we're competing with. It's not always retail versus wholesale. It's independent loan officers that are competing against the mega shops that have the marketing budgets. They've got the massive technology, they've got huge servicing teams. Those are the ones that we have to fight against to make sure that we're doing what's best for the consumer. And the only way to do that is if you invest in technology and automate a way, all of the tasks that eat up your time. And that's to me, tech shouldn't be a replacement. It should be okay, what am I doing in my day that takes up 50% of my time but yields less than 50% of my revenue, whatever that is automated. If you're not automating that, then you're wasting your time and your, you're valuable. You are a valuable resource. You know, things that a computer doesn't know. Let the computer do the stuff that it can. You be the expert. Right. And you can only do that if you invest in the tech.

Speaker 3: 7:37

So Katie, I just want to, I want to pause because like I want to pause too, cause I don't want to, I want to say that it's just refreshing to hear someone speak our language. Like it's like wow, well it is and like, you know, whether you're a banker or broker, if it's right for you then that's what you should do. But I see you all and I know that no call center people are listening to this right now unless they're, they're looking at joining our industry because that's really an entirely separate industry that just keeps pulling loans from our sides. So every time that one of y'all wants to waste your time preaching on Facebook or somewhere about who's better, we are losing loans in market share to somebody that we might not get that loan back from again. So like just get what you need to out of this. Get the technology you need, get the branding that we're going to talk about and how to build things online and don't, don't worry about it. It's like whatever you're doing is working for you and it's right and we're, we're better together working towards a goal than we are fighting each other because all that does is take away from our industry. So thanks for having that same message, Katie. I appreciate that. Yup.

Speaker 4: 8:50

It's at the end of the day, right? And this comes from my background in healthcare. Think every job that I've had has been how do you build something that's going to help someone else, right? Whether that's in healthcare, working for hospitals or group purchasing organizations or startup technology companies or in the mortgage space, running consumer direct models. It was how do we build something that's going to help the end consumer. And the only way that you can help more people is by automating the crap out of your day. Right? Like get rid of the junk, automate it, and focus on being the best person to help your consumer. Not necessarily, you're going to compete with five, 10 15 people every single day. Forget about what channel those people exist in, compete for what's best for your consumer and how do you build your business to be able to serve more people. And you can only do that to compete with call centers if you are focused on being the resource that's valuable and not focused on doing all of the operational stuff that sits underneath it. Quite honestly, you're probably not an expert in, I mean, let's be honest, like, and that's okay. Not everybody's an expert in, in operational efficiency. Not everybody's an expert in process implementation or in remembering to follow up with individual text messages, automate it, get rid of it. Don't take up the space where I keep Gilmore stored in my head. Don't keep the reminder to follow up with text messages, taking up space in your brain, put that on a system and use that space in your head for something that's more valuable. Cool.

Speaker 5: 10:22

Yeah, I love it. You know, I remember, uh, it was a few months ago I went to, I'd read an article about better.com, I don't know if you've heard of them, but they're a fan, big fan tech company and it goes like$700 million worth of production this year. Whatever it was. That's a lot. And I was thinking, wow, that's smoking, right? Like how you do that? And I read the story of the CEO that he had a poor, uh, I guess by home buying experience and he was kind of a tech guy. And so he ends up getting into the banking industry in, I said, I'm going to go like, I'm gonna go check this out. Like I want to go see what the experience is like from a consumer, a consumer perspective. And I went to their website, fill out an application, and it was kind of a lengthy process and it was easy to use for me as the consumer man. I was like, Whoa, I got when I was out, when it was done, they do a soft pool. It's all technology, right? So it's, and these are all things that we do as originators in this business, right? It was really good eyeopener for me to really know what my competition looks like so I can emulate the same thing. Now that's not for everybody, right? So it's like, let me be able to emulate for the people that like that and desire that way to be communicated with and then still be able to have some of the hands on things that other customers prefer to have. And it's just being open to that man. I'm gonna tell you, they set me up with a realtor they sent me. I mean, they gave me the whole approval. It was all was quick. It was easy. Was it accurate hail? No, I know it wasn't accurate. You know what I mean? And that, and knowing even where their deficiencies were were really good for me as an originator to be like, okay, I know rock and beat him. You know what I'm saying? And that's how I think that we have to look at our business. Um, and that's how we embrace technology with everything that you said. Like, that's like, and I just wanted to give you an example. So Katie, what are the individual, like if you're talking to a branch or a loan officer right now, like what are you telling them? Like these are the things that you need to implement and automate inside of your business. Yeah.

Speaker 4: 12:29

So to me it's a lot of the communication, right? Follow up communication. There are so many systems out there. Let's just take CRMs as an example that will individualize all of your messaging. So it doesn't look like a blanket text. It doesn't look like a blanket email. You can drop variable, um, fields in, right? So where it'll say, you know, when you look at an email text, it'll have a bracket and say first name, and then have a closed bracket. You can do that stuff really easily. And when your consumer gets it, they're gonna feel like it's a message that's specific to them. You can pull specific LEDs that are just for that individual user. You can record videos that feel like they're for that specific consumer, but automate the followup as much as you can and make sure that you're maximizing every lead that's coming in. I hear so often that people say, well, this consumer's not ready, so I'll call them back in 90 days. Well if you don't talk to them for 90 days, it's too late. They've already found somebody else. They've moved on. Put a system in place that continues that communication so that it's not taking up your time, but you're following up with them on a regular basis to see where they're at. Do they have a realtor yet? How's the home buying process going? Are they more interested in refinancing, set up rate triggers within your CRM that let you know all of these consumers closed at this percentage and when you see rates hit a certain number, all of those people pop up as tasks on your, your CRM view to say, should I be calling them or not? Right. So not necessarily an automatic blast that goes out cause it's not going to work for everyone just because the rates dropped, but have those create auto tasks for you. Um, all of that can be done. There's so many systems out there that do all of this stuff that you just have to find what works for your process. And I would say don't over process. I think so often people are afraid to invest in technology because they want it to be perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be 50% better than what you're currently doing. And you're already going to save time and see the ROI and make it incrementally better as you learn what works and what doesn't work so that it's not such a huge chunk to bite off at the very beginning.

Speaker 5: 14:28

Yeah. You know, Sean, the number one question, I'm not getting you like we get this question all the time. What CS? I was going to ask it to you. It was the orange and the CRM. And so,

Speaker 4: 14:43

I mean the cliche answer, right is the best ones, the one that you're going to use. But I will say every CRM has, has a niche, right? Look at what's your business model. Do you run more online, lead gen, do you run more referral based business that's going to make a difference. Do you want a CRM that's more focused on marketing or are you going to write the emails yourselves? Cause there's some CRMs that have great campaigns and then there are others that will let you build campaigns, but the content sucks. So which one? Like what category do you fall into? Are you a marketer or are you an operator? Because everybody has to be good at sales. So if you're good at sales, you can be good at one other thing. You can be good at marketing or you can be good at ops, but very rarely can you be good at all three of those. So find the CRM that's going to fill the hole for the thing that's not your strength.

Speaker 5: 15:26

Yup. Bingo. Took the words right out of my mouth. That's exactly, uh, I don't remember when this was some years ago. This is before I embraced technology and actually, um, you know, put these systems and stuff in place that you're referring to. Uh, walked into Starbucks one day and I seen a former client of mine and, Hey, how are you? How's the house? Oh, by the way, we moved. Oh really? You already closed? And they're like, yeah. I'm like, Oh, what would you buy? I'm trying to be nice. You know, they tell me where they bought, you know, and you're just like, as always ask the question, well, what's it, how much do you pay for that house? 300,000. Then you go back and you start 300,000 times, you know, Oh my gosh, just lost$55,000 or six, whatever it was. And it just puts you in a state of like, frustration, you know? And why didn't they call me? And they were like, Oh, Kenneth, we were going to call you. But like our realtor referred us to someone else and we didn't have your contact information. And it wasn't their fault. It was me for not staying in front of them, but you know how many times and so that happens, right? It happens to loan officers all the time. There's also what happens, I think as long loss, just get a stack of files on their desk or on their floor and they have this like three and a half feet tall and then they're following up and they're, you know, they're busy working in their business and, and then when things get slow in November, they start going through these old files calling you guess what? Oh we went, we already pretty close, right bro? Like I know that you're in Gilmore, but you don't need to put those files three and a half feet on your floor anymore. Like they make these computers and that like you can have them all inside of there. But I'm telling you, people do this. People still think they still do. They still in there. And I think, I think what we're talking about is embracing technology and putting all of this stuff on oral college. And there's really two pieces to it. There's the upfront communication and then the after communication during the loan process and then after the loan closes and are really three. But yeah, it's just, it's just really knowing who you are and how to, how to scale that because it will be different for, for everybody. And then if you, once you have that built and you have those systems in place, then you know, you can start talking about building your brand and building your online presence. And you know, there's two ways to go about that. You can pay for that

Speaker 3: 17:49

or you can do that organically. And you know, we were, we were talking before this and like all three of us are of the mindset that if you do it organically, you're going to win. So, so what are the strategies that you're teaching ellos right now, Katie, to do that organically?

Speaker 4: 18:04

Yeah, and I think just to clarify on organic for me is not, it doesn't mean that you can't put money towards paper click campaigns or you can't run Facebook ads, but organic is that you're not buying it from a lead aggregator somewhere. Right. I think there's this conception that especially in the independent channel or in retail where you're not as used to the lead buying world, that you're going to buy a lead. You're going to pay$50 for it. That consumer is going to call you right away. Their contact information is not going to be sold to anybody else. You've got a hot lead for 50 bucks and you didn't have to do any work. That is not true. I did the lead buying. I ran it. I did it. I competed in that space for a couple of years. That lead is being sold to 17 other people who are going to call faster than you are. They're going to call more often than you are. It's just tough. If you're not set up to be a call center, buying leads is really, really hard. It's very hard to compete there because everybody else has invested in technology to maximize their ability to call. They've got dialers, they've got lead routing set up, they've got algorithm. I literally built algorithms and Velocify to know as soon as we bought a lead what where that person is located, what kind of product they're looking for, what about their age, gender, race, location, anything that I can find from the lead record that's coming over and then routed it to the loan officer that was first available and second most likely to close that loan based on the profile of the consumer. Are you going to do that? No, those the, that was my only job. I didn't have to sell anything. All I had to do was figure out what borrower is going to match what loan officer and the most effective way Quicken's got it. Loan Depot's got it. All these guys that are out there that are working in big call center atmosphere, they're doing the same thing. Don't waste your time trying to do that. Go create your own leads by pushing your brand out there. Not only are you building community awareness, but you're also going to get consumers that are a lot more likely to resonate with your business model because they're coming to you based on what you're putting out in the world, not because you bought their contact information when they don't know anything about you. So for us, I think pay-per-click campaigns are a great way, keywords that you can run online through SEO optimization. But again, if you know you're an operator and you know your sales person, you're not a marketer, outsource it. Pay somebody else who knows what they're doing to do it for you. Don't try to waste your time on something that you know you don't have any interest in. I don't know about y'all, but in college, like the classes that I wasn't interested in or not the ones that I wanted listed on my record when I graduated because they didn't, I didn't have any reason to want to go invest myself into the kind of gen ed classes that I knew that I had to take. Cause I, I didn't care. I didn't like it. I didn't want to do it. So I wasn't going to be any good at it. Right? You're the same. Don't try to be a marketer if you're not a marketer, right? Pay somebody else who's going to run campaigns for you. Um, I think Facebook ads right now targeting online, I mean everybody, everyone's sitting at their computer, right? There's a bigger opportunity to get in front of eyeballs right now than there ever has been in the past. So take advantage of it. And you can do it pretty cheap. It's not an inexpensive investment to try and test out and test the waters and see how it runs. I mean, we, we recommend everybody run lead pops as a partner of ours. They've got this do it for you. Marketing campaign that they'll listen to you, listen to your brand, figure out what you're like, who you want to target and attract. And they'll run all this for you every month. You don't have to worry about it. And you'll just start to see leads funneled directly back into your CRM, not even into the lead Bob's panel, but back into your CRM where you can live and work and manage your database out of. And that's how you start to pull all of this stuff together.

Speaker 3: 21:39

Yeah. If you don't have a website to Andrew will, will, their, their site will help you capture more business. Um, you know, I was, I was just, uh, I've been relistening to a book. I was on a run this morning and I was relistening to the book clockwork. And the, uh, one of the things that he talks about inside of there, he's like, you could make 50 bucks an hour or you could make$5 an hour. What would you choose to do? And of course everybody's going to choose, well, I make 50 bucks an hour. And he's like, okay, well if you had to work for 50 bucks an hour, or if you made$5 an hour by doing nothing, what would you choose to do? So you're like, well, it's still only making$5 an hour, but if you can put more systems in place, do you continue to make$5 an hour with a whole lot of times over? Very quickly, you're making more than 50 bucks an hour not working. And so this is what technology does. This is what building an online presence does. This is what having a robust CRM that works for you because the perfect one for me, and there is no perfect one by the way, but the right one for me is not the right one for you. But all of these pieces together really help you grow your business. I mean, and that's one of the things that the CRM does. Like you know, that's one of those$5 an hour, 10$1,500 an hour, things that if you just use it correctly, it prints out money on the other side because you're not chasing them. People call you up and they say, Katie, and you did my first purchase for me and my realtor just referred me to somebody else. But dude, you've been in touch with me nonstop for the last five years. Ain't nobody else. I'm going to be you. And if they are choosing him a second time, man, they're going to cheat. And I'm just, I'm just, I've always been really, really big on, um, on organic and, and, and, and, you know, online presence and all that. But I've also been really big and Katie, you and I spoke about it earlier, um, is consumer direct. You know, I want people sold

Speaker 5: 23:46

on using me before they've even spoken to me. That is like, that's, that's like having them chase me instead of me chasing them. And I just feel like a lot of the loan officers are in a position I'm always chasing for business and I just don't live in that world, man. Like I want people sold on using our services before they've even spoken to someone on my team. And when you can figure that out, which is a whole nother podcast and a whole nother day and a hundred hours of training session. Right. Um, I think that that's what really, um, that's really where a lot of loan officers want to be. Right? And it's not, it's not just one thing. It's several things that you gotta do in addition or at the same time to make that a reality. So, and you gotta, you gotta embrace technology. I think that just means we have to have Katie back again on another podcast.

Speaker 4: 24:33

I was going to say, we could spend all day talking about data and analytics. I love it, but it's true, right? It all, it all circles back, right? Organic brand awareness and brand development. You got to know who you're trying to go after and then put yourself in their shoes, right? If make yourself your ideal consumer and what would it take to get you to make the decision to use your company? And that's what you need to be doing and the information you need to be pushing out there for those people to be attracted to what you're building. You can't, can't just say like, Oh, this is my brand. I'm Katie Sweeney. All my information's on my website and expect people to come find you. You've got to proactively push it out there and you can do that through these organic lead gen opportunities. And then once you know who those people are that you want to attract, use technology to do exactly what you're talking about. Can it pull them in, convince them that you're the right person for them to work with before you ever even have to get on the phone, right? Our big initiative right now, and one of the reasons that I moved from arrive, which was a whole tech problem or project that we were working on through aim and came over to aim full time, was to build a network of platforms that all integrate with each other and call it the Bab network on our side. Um, but it's all of these different systems that we know can work really well together that an individual person can piece together to create that enterprise level solution with whatever flexibility they want. That's, that's the goal, right? That's the key. Find all of the things that you know that you need. Figure out how you want them to work together and then have those companies do the hard work, right? You don't need to be the one figuring out how to integrate home bot and lead pops in lion desk and all. And my credit guy, don't worry about that. Have them do that work for you. Just figure out what you want that suite of programs to be. What are you trying to solve for? What kind of consumer are you trying to attract? Find the solutions that are going to help you automate all that communication. By the time they hit your desk and you're ready to give them a call, they're 10 steps down the path. You've already got them halfway through the funnel and the work is so much simpler and take so much less time.

Speaker 5: 26:33

Yep. Katie. So if somebody wanted to find some more information about you, about aim, what is the best way to connect with you?

Speaker 4: 26:42

Uh, well, you can follow us on any of our social media, uh, platforms that at aim national or our social handle on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of that. Um, you can find me, Katie Sweeney on any of the or Katie Sweeney aim I think maybe on any of those platforms as well. Um, or you can always visit us on, uh, aim group.com. Uh, all of our projects are out there, our initiatives are all on there. Um, and then last but not least, of course we've got our brokers are better group on Facebook or coming up to about 7,000 brokers that are part of that network now. So if you are in the broker world, definitely come over and join us in that channel as well. If you're not, I would still love to talk to you and hear what you're doing. Um, just running your own retail branch and what's working and what's not working because again, at the end of the day, we're trying to help individual loan officers compete with mega call centers. That's, that's my goal. That's my creed, my mission, what I'm working towards. Um, however we can best support that. I'm all in.

Speaker 3: 27:38

Awesome. Well, Katie, thank you for joining us today. Kenneth. Thank you for letting me see you again today. I'm excited for this post covert world where we get to, you know, hug manly and old fashioned together. I'm looking forward to that soon. Hey y'all. Um, again, if, if this podcast has moved you, if our podcast is doing something for you, go give me a five star review online and, uh, if you want to download our app to see what else is going on, text the words next level to three, six, two, six zero. We appreciate y'all have a great day. Okay guys.