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When trying to get the most out of anything when it comes to leads and sales, we first need to figure out what metrics actually matter and move the needle.
When it comes to getting more settlements out of your leads, there are 2 metrics that matter.
Lead to appointment rate and appointment to settlement rate.
Your lead to appointment rate should be 70% to 80% and your appointment to settlement rate should be 20% to 30%.
So out of 20 leads you should have 14-16 appointments and 2-5 settlements if you’re doing things right.
Many brokers that we speak to tell their online marketing or leads isn’t working or hasn’t worked in the past.
Maybe that’s because the campaign sucked, or it might have just been because there were a few missing pieces.
Here are some stratagies we use for our clients to get these metrics where they need to be.
Lead to Appointment Rate:
In an ideal world, we would create some seperation between the broker and the lead at this stage.
We want to do this because this helps the broker be positioned as an expert in the mind of the prospect.
When you go see a surgeon, how many times does the surgeon call you or pick up your call when you make an appointment?
Almost never.
Their assistant or secretary does this, because they spend their time seeing patients and fixing their problems.
It’s no different for a broker.
So thats the first thing, the broker shouldn’t be the one making the call to the lead to book or confirm the appointment.
The second, and most important part of maximising your lead to appointment rate is your time to contact.
The lead needs to be called within 5 minutes of entering the CRM, or at least within 15 minutes.
Any more than that and they will begin to forget who you are, what they’re looking for help with and why they made an inquiry to begin with.
If you don’t get through on that initial call, leave a voicemail, send them a text and an email.
If you don’t hear back, you want to call them an additional 2 times that day.
Research shows that the best times to call are mid morning and in the afternoon between 5pm and 6:30pm.
Research also shows that 43% of salespeople will only make 1 call to a lead before giving up.
That’s not going to cut it here.
Takeaways: The broker should not be making the call to book or confirm the appointment. Time to contact must be within 15 minutes of the lead entering the CRM.
Appointment To Settlement Rate:
This is the big one.
This is where you get paid.
Now as a marketer, I’m not going to try and tell you how to close a mortgage client.
But I can share with you some of the lessons we’ve learned from working with more than 100 mortgage business as to what’s going to move the needle.
Pre-Appointment Qualification & Nurture:
In order to get settlements, they obviously need to be qualified.
This can be done in your marketing by having a criteria built out in your forms, which we recommend.
But it also needs to be done by the person making the appointment setting call.
The appointment setting call needs to cover the current situation, why they decided to reach out, and what they’re looking to achieve.
And based on the criteria you have, the appointment setter will be able to determine whether you’re going to be able to help this person or not.
This alone is going to filter out a lot of those unqualified leads that waste your time.
But if you can help the prospect and you’re going to be a good fit, you need to have a pre-appointment system that shows the prospect that you can help them and builds excitement for the meeting.
This should include case studies of clients showing the results you got from clients similar to your prospect, and relate it back to what the prospect said they were looking for on the call with your appointment setter.
If you don’t have a pre-appointment system in place, and the prospect receives no communication prior to the meeting, their skepticism is naturally going to take over.
And it’s going to kill your settlements.
Takeaways:Ensure the appointments are going to be a good fit and get an understanding of what they’re looking to achieve prior to your meeting. Have a system in place that shows the prospect you can help them prior to the meeting to build excitement for what you’re going to show them in your meeting