Expert on Top Producing Strategies
Interview with Karen Deis
Boni Lonnsburry: Knowing that you currently operate a mortgage speakers' bureau, I'd be interested to hear something about your background and how it provided the expertise that enabled you to help loan officers achieve their dreams.
Karen Deis: I've been in the mortgage business for twenty-eight years and owned my own mortgage company for nine years. Later, I started both my own real estate company and my own appraisal firm.
I began writing the consumer direct marketing column for Mortgage Originator magazine in 1995, and in 1997 I was appointed to their editorial board where I became involved in recommending articles for the magazine and researching data for loan officers. Shortly thereafter, other magazines, including Broker magazine and National Mortgage News, started contacting me requesting information on consumer direct marketing.
Before starting my own mortgage company, I was one of the top 10 loan officers in another company. They brought in a new sales manager who wanted all of us loan officers to fill in call reports stating what real estate companies we wanted to call on. I didn't want to call on real estate companies -- I had a group of realtors that I had been doing business with and had no interest in walking into a Remax agency and talking to all the agents there. I actually refused to fill out the report and they fired me.
As a result of being fired, I started my own mortgage company. I decided right then that I wasn't going to call on real estate companies and that I was going to do things differently. Rather that call on real estate companies, I would only market to specific agents that I liked doing business with and with consumers directly. That is when I started my free report marketing. I offered a copy of a free report covering the mistakes homebuyers make and how to shop for a mortgage. I started that program almost 10 years ago before anybody else was doing it. I built my whole mortgage company on the premise of consumer direct marketing.
Boni: And this report, how did you make it available to the consumer?
Karen: I placed advertisements in newspapers, Homes and other magazines, cable TV, and yellow page ads. If someone is shopping for a mortgage, they get a copy of my free report telling them about the mistakes people make shopping for a mortgage and they study it before they begin.
Boni: Were you getting calls locally or all over the states?
Karen: Locally. My mortgage company was located in South Bend, Indiana, where I advertised within a 50-mile radius of my office. That was pretty much it. By strategically placing those ads and researching the data, I was consistently getting 30 - 40 telephone calls a week. Subsequently, I ended up giving a group of real estate people I had worked with over the years more leads then they were giving me. People would call me for the free report, call me back asking to be pre-qualified, and later call me again to be pre-approved and ask me what real estate agent I would recommend. Some of the real estate agents that I was recommending would wait two or three days to return calls, losing clients in the process.
I thought, why don't I get my broker's license and start my own real estate company? When buyers express interest in being pre-qualified or pre-approved, I can walk them down the hall and introduce them to my real estate agents who can take it from there. And that is what ended up happening. I operated that company for three years. Not only was I making a commission on the mortgage end of it, I was also making the commission on the real estate end, while following the guidelines to a "T." I disclosed how much money I was going to make if they used my real estate company and I informed them they didn't have to use it if they didn't want to. I made sure I met all the requirements.
Boni: And then what happened?
Karen: It went like gangbusters. Many of the real estate people that used to do business with me got really upset and quit doing business with me.
Boni: But you didn't care!
Karen: I didn't care at that point. But I do have to tell you I still ended up with five or six realtors who gave me their business, regardless.
Boni: They just wanted a good, dependable loan officer they could trust who was going to help their business.
Karen: And I would help them. If they gave me a loan transaction, I would give them a referral.
Boni: Are you still in the business?
Karen: No I am not. I quit the business eight months ago. About a year and a half ago, and because I had been on their editorial board, written for them, spoken for them and several large mortgage corporations throughout the United States, Mortgage Originator contacted me. They asked me to take over their seminar division. I decided to accept and I ran their program for them for almost a year.
From January to June 2000, I worked part-time in my mortgage businesses and part-time in the seminar business. Mortgage Originator magazine was sold, and when the new owners brought in their own seminar person in November 2000, I went off on my own under Foundation Marketing. But my staff has stayed with me for a long period of time. One of the staff members became president of the company, ran it for 6-8 months while I was on the road and did a great job. In fact, when I sold my interest in the second mortgage company to my co-owner, and he hired all my employees and assimilated them into the second mortgage company. That worked out really well.
Boni: And now? Tell me about your current business.
Karen: I felt the industry was missing a clearinghouse for mortgages: a source of unbiased, mortgage professionals who could speak to loan officers about how to improve their business. These professionals would not be representing or selling products, sponsors or anything like that. I decided to take them throughout the country. The format is a little bit different, in that the speakers give a 30 or 40-minute presentation and then I or another MC asks them pertinent questions like: "How do you do this?" "How do you set up your time?" "How do you use your staff to implement some of your marketing programs?" -- that type of thing.
A lot of these speakers, as well as other mortgage professionals sell useful products, but they aren't well marketed and are hard to find. You have to know their websites. The second part of it is that I also wanted to make this a clearinghouse for mortgage specific products.
We provide seminars and have speakers because what had been happening was that companies and associations had been asking people to speak and go on tours who were basically loan originators. Speaking professionally was not their primary business. Now I am acting as the agent, so to speak. If someone is interested, I book them, I negotiate the contract with the association or the company, collect the money, and make sure that their hotel reservations and their audiovisual needs are taken care of.
Boni: That is really neat that you can do that for the industry. I think it is becoming more necessary all the time.
Karen: I think so. I think what is happening is that if someone has heard a speaker and they don't know where to find him or her, I have the contacts to find them and see if I can't book them on a one-speaking-tour basis. I've been quite successful in doing that.
Boni: As you look around at loan officers and what they need -- and I imagine you are pretty in tune with that -- what is the biggest mistake you see rookie loan officers making?
Karen: Actually I can't say that there is a "biggest mistake," but I can tell you that one of the things that loan officers are constantly asking for is information on time management. Even though you have this wonderful marketing program and you get all these people in the door, there is the problem of managing your time so you can continue to do a higher volume of business then you did last year, the year before that, etc.
Looking at it from a different angle, I'd recommend that when they implement their marketing programs, they also take the time to plan how they are going to handle and manage all the business that will be coming through their doors. That's the biggest mistake I notice loan officers making.
Boni: Do you notice any difference with veteran loan officers?
Karen: Veteran loan officers, especially many of the speakers in the mortgage speakers' bureau, have problems taking the next step, which is hiring assistants, or what they call assistant loan officers. The superstar is the initial contact in a superstar's office. They are responsible for the pre-screening process before handing them over to an assistant who does the normal paper work and the routine tasks that the superstar loan officers in the past would have done themselves. That gives them more time to go forward with the next deal. That is basically how they have resolved the time management problem.
Although there is a secondary problem, they now have all these assistants and the assistants' time they have to manage. Their biggest hassle and hurdle with assistants is having to spend a couple of years training them and then losing them when they decide to leave or go out on their own. That does become a problem for the veteran producers. They have switched one problem for another.
Boni: What advice would you give them to keep their team members happy and satisfied?
Karen: I had assistants helping me with my program and I paid them a base salary plus commission. I based some of their commission on closed loans, but I also based a good portion of their commission on qualified leads. I think it is up to the loan officer to actually get people into the door in the first place, each person has to have enough confidence in the loan officer to come in and see her.
How I paid my assistants was on qualified leads. They had to ask a series of 8-10 qualifying questions and also be able to get the person's authorization to run a credit report before we even set up an appointment. That way, we were able to see if we were wasting our time and theirs by setting up a mortgage appointment. If someone had really bad credit or financial difficulties, we would see them, but it would be a different type of appointment.
We would try to give them a game plan for turning their credit or their finances around so they could buy a home within one or two years. We had some long-term solutions for those people. The appointments we set up to handle these credit and financial concerns were shorter than the mortgage appointments we scheduled -- that was part of our internal time management.
At any given time we would have people who were going to be buying homes. It was amazing the number of people who came back to us a year after they originally came to see us and said, "Hey, we cleaned up our credit and we saved some money. Can we qualify for a loan now?" Consequently, we had a continual pipeline of people we knew who somewhere down the road were going to buy a home. We became their trusted financial advisors, so to speak.
Boni: And you were able to retain your team members with this system?
Karen: Yes. I had I think two team members leave in the nine year's time period. One was offered a government job that was really fantastic and another person moved out of town.
Boni: That is a great record.
Karen: I think a lot of it had to with the bonus program because through it they could make as much or more then their regular salary. The bonus counted for double their income.
Boni: And did many of them make good bonuses?
Karen: Yes they did.
Boni: And I suppose that helped with their motivation as well?
Karen: Yes it did. I do have to add that money isn't everything. You still have to make them happy. You still have to provide other thing like company parties, letting them take a day off when they need to, giving them an occasional surprise day off, and bringing in a masseuse who will give everybody a massages. These are the types of things that keep people with you. Money is part of it, but it definitely is not all of it.
Boni: Those are some terrific ideas -- those little things that keep people appreciative and show your own appreciation.
Karen: And I do appreciate them. If somebody mentioned they wanted to see a certain play, I would go out and get them the theatre tickets. I would surprise them with little things like that.
Boni: And going back to what you cited as a common mistake for the rookie loan officers -- the time management -- how would you help your team members and your loan officers gain mastery over managing their time?
Karen: We did that together. It was quite a process. First, we would determine whether a particular person was a morning person or an afternoon person. Would it work better if they did their paper work in the morning, and wait until their enthusiasm and energy peaked in the afternoon to make their phone calls, or was it the other way around? We started at that point. The next step was to schedule times for returning telephone calls, sending out free reports and following up on people who were in our database.
For instance, if someone mentioned he planned to look for a home in 60 days, our processors were on the phone a few days before the end of the 60 days saying, "You told us you were going to buy a home a few days. Would you like to come in for an appointment so you can be pre-approved for a mortgage?" Or we might ask if they would like a real estate referral. We worked with whatever they had told us before.
It would also depend on the time they had told us to call them back. If someone said call me back after work, we had assistants who worked three days a week and would stagger their time, working until 8 at night, because some people could not be called at work or they wanted to be called after they got home from work.
A lot of it depended on our database. We would look at our information, then establish who was going to work and when, what days we needed to schedule for evening call backs to certain clients and how many people we had to call each day. We knew that a year a head of time because we had entered it into our ACT database. We knew whom we were going to be calling, either because these people had told us to call or we because we had put them into a tickler file based on comments made by them during previous conversations. This gave us a pretty good idea.
We would sit down once a week on Monday mornings and determine who was in our lead database and what we should be doing. Based on our telephones calls, we could almost predict how many appointments we would have this week or next. We were able to capture and schedule appointments for about 30 percent of those people we called
Boni: If you had a son or a daughter entering the business, what advice would you give them?
Karen: My first advise would be: Be knowledgeable of all the mortgage programs and know your limitations. Don't be everything to everybody. Know what you can and can't do, and then deliver what you say you will. Set goals and deadlines for the amount of time it will take to get a loan approved or to reach a production goal you have established.
Boni: And let's talk about marketing for a minute. What was your most successful marketing campaign?
Karen: When I started with this free report marketing, I would place an ad saying, "If you are buying a home within the next 60 days, call me for a copy of my free report on mistakes people make." I used "within the next 60 days" in the headline, so I would know it was a shorter period of time. They would call a toll free number and hear a prerecorded message requesting them to leave their name, address, and telephone number. The next morning, my assistants would pick up the telephone calls and call the people back.
We just didn't send the free reports out. We would call the people back and determine their motivation. Did they just want a copy of it? Were they planning on buying a home? Were they thinking of refinancing? Were they thinking of building? Whatever it might be. That is the type of information that went into our database.
We discovered that out of every ten telephone calls, about eight were valid. Some callers just wanted something free, even when they didn't know what it was, sometimes it was a kid calling a toll free number, sometimes it was a competitor wanting a copy of it, and sometimes it was a fellow loan officer. That is why we decided to make the telephone calls: to screen those types of people out.
We sent out the free report and called back a week later to follow up and make sure they received it and to ask if they would like to come in for an appointment. We assumed the free report told the tale: that they should be pre-approved for a mortgage rather than just be pre-qualified, that even though they didn't think they had a whole lot of money for a down payment, that didn't mean they couldn't buy a home, and that there were zero down payment loans.
The free report talked about PMI insurance, the importance of getting their credit report ahead of time to see what is on it -- regardless of whether they buy a home or not -- and explained that we could help them decipher the credit report codes. Since we were in touch with the real estate community and the builder community, one of the key elements of this free report was our ability to refer people to them. That is how we pre-programmed people to ask us for referrals; we did that in the free report.
Our assumption was that pretty much everything they needed to know about buying a mortgage was in that 12-page free report. And there were only two responses they could give when you asked if they would like an appointment: either, "yes, I'll set one up," or "no, I don't want to." If it was the latter, the next question was "Why not?" If they said they didn't plan on doing anything for four-months, we asked them if it would be okay to call back in three months. They would usually agree, because people don't think you will ever call them back.
So I think our persistence was instrumental in getting the information into the database. Ninety days later they would get a telephone call from my assistant who said, "About 90 days ago, after we sent you our free report, you asked us to call you back. We are calling now to see if you want to come in to obtain a pre-approval on your mortgage."
Boni: And did you keep in touch with them in any other way?
Karen: Yes. We had monthly newsletters that we sent out. We sent out a monthly newsletter to everyone in our database. We also held monthly seminars for the general public nine times a year and sent out notices about them. At any given time, we had 900 people in our lead database who had contacted us one way or another saying they were planning on refinancing at some point down the road. Until they asked to be taken off the list or told us they had gone somewhere else, they remained in our database.
Boni: So you kept them right there and kept marketing to them. And this was different from your customer database?
Karen: My customer database consisted of all closed loans that I could sort by occupation, interest rate or loan amount. I also had their debts in there and the ages of their children, so I would know when they were close to starting college. I could solicit them to refinance for the college fund. I had all kinds of data in there. Usually, after I had them in the database for three or four years, I would assume they were already looking for another house, so I would start that marketing campaign.
Boni: And what did that one look like?
Karen: On a 6-month basis, I would go into my computer to determine who had been in my database for four years. I would ask them if they were thinking about buying another home. I would give them the latest market information, interest rates, and the various types of mortgages available. I would let them know I had both listing and buying agents I could recommend to them.
Boni: And you contacted them for this via phone, letter, or postcard?
Karen: In a letter.
Boni: But you did keep in touch with them regularly -- even up to that point?
Karen: Yes. And then if they bought another home their old information would be updated in the ACT system. We put in their new interest rate and that kind of information. A lot of our business was referral based and in all of our marketing materials and discussions, we always asked for referrals, like everybody does.
However, the one thing we did differently, is that if someone gave us a referral and the referral called up and said something like, "Hey, Boni told me to call you," we would give the person who referred them two movie tickets and free popcorn, whether we closed the loan or not. Another thing we did was to go into our database and mark down who gave us the name of the person that gave us the referral and who referred them to us so we would know whom our top referral sources were. We had clients who referred anywhere from 8 to 12 people a year to us.
Boni: Probably more than that. Those were the people you knew about.
Karen: Yes. The assistants were trained to ask who referred them, and if they should ask, "What difference does it make it?" they were told it was because we wanted to send the referring party a free gift. We let them know that if they sent us referrals, we would send them a free gift as well. It was all part of the script and was pre-programmed: that everybody should know that if they sent referrals they were going to receive movie tickets and popcorn.
Boni: Great. And did you send past customers the same newsletter that you sent your lead database?
Karen: Yes, they received the same newsletter. In addition, the people in that database (as well as the closed loan database) were sent specific letters triggered by a variety of things such as: the ages of their children, the fact that they had lived in their home for four years, comments they may have had made, etc.
At the beginning of each year, my marketing assistant and I walked away from the office for two full days. I have a cottage on the lake and we would stay there and set up a marketing calendar for the entire year. We knew, for instance, that on June 6 we would be pulling our database for people meeting certain criteria and sending out a marketing letter. We had our whole campaign planned for a the year, including all the seminars we would be giving, all the shows we would be sponsoring … absolutely everything we were going to be doing during that year was on that calendar.
Boni: What are your thoughts about getting exposure?
Karen: I would say the best way to get exposure would be to put on seminars. With me being in the mortgage business all these years, it amazed me that out of 30 mortgage companies, mine was the only one that consistently put on a finance seminar. Everybody knew that if they were going to be buying a house they should be attending this one seminar. There were mortgage companies and an occasional real estate company that would try it for a month or two, but when they didn't get the response they wanted, they would cancel it. Then the next company would try it and cancel after one or two attempts.
But we succeeded by being consistent, holding a seminar and giving out information. One of the hooks that we had was that with their signed authorization we provided a free copy of their credit report on the spot. We would take our credit bureau machine, plug it into a modem, and get the information as the seminar was in progress. After the seminar was over, the people would receive their credit reports as they walked out the door.
Boni: That is pretty amazing.
Karen: Yes, but putting the seminar together, getting the advertising, the place and the speaker required considerable effort.
Boni: Did you do it in conjunction with a realtor?
Karen: Yes, with a realtor or a builder.
Boni: And you advertised in the local papers, radio, and places like that?
Karen: No. Just in the Homes magazine. There was an ad in the Homes magazine and my database of 800-900 people. They would receive a mailer on it.
Boni: Did you do this on the same Tuesday of every month?
Karen: Yes. I did that on Tuesdays. Wednesdays are usually worship evenings -- there are a lot of people who go to church on Wednesday evenings. Thursdays, believe it or not, have all of the TV shows and on Fridays everyone has other plans. We even had that down to a science. Our other secret is that it only lasted for one hour. If we had too many things in the seminar to finish in an hour, we would cut something out, because we had promised people we would take only one hour of their time.
Boni: And did you serve them snacks or anything like that?
Karen: No, we didn't. The title company brought in coffee and cookies, but almost no one ate them. The title company didn't even speak; they just brought in the cookies and stuff and asked us to pass out a brochure about title insurance, which we did. Then one of my loan officers or I would speak for about 45 minutes. The last 15 minutes were for the real estate agent or builder, depending on which way we wanted to go.
Boni: Did they start out slowly as most of the others did in your area and build as the months went on?
Karen: No. We consistently had between 20 - 25 people at every seminar. We never had any huge numbers, but what happened is that because we were marketing to qualified leads -- the people that had called us and whom we knew were going to be buying or building a home somewhere down the road - they would call and sign up for the seminar. They were willing to take some time out from their busy lives to attend the seminar because they were either planning to buy or to refinance. We had pretty qualified leads and again, we knew we could turn about 30 percent of them into loan applications because of the way we had marketed to them.
Boni: And what percentage of these was actually closed?
Karen: I would say another third.
Boni: So one or two closed loans per seminar.
Karen: I do have to tell you that the results were part of our screening process, also. When we pulled the credit reports and found problems with them, we would kick these people back into our database. We would tell them what they needed to work on and let them know we would call them back in six months or a year, whatever time period we thought it should take. So out of the 20 -25 people in the seminar, I would say five or six didn't even qualify to begin with.
Boni: What or who was the biggest contributor to your success?
Karen: Well I would say way back when I started out in the mortgage business there were very few women loan officers. In fact, I started out in the closing department, and after doing that for three or four years, I asked the manager of my company if I could be a loan officer. He said, "You know there aren't very many women who do this, but I will go ahead and give you shot at it." What was really funny was that right after I went out on the street, so to speak, I got a telephone call from another company, a competitor of my mortgage company, and they said, "Hey, when you don't make it as a mortgage loan officer we want you to know there is always a job for you in our closing department."
That pissed me off. But mind you, those were the times -- it was the late 70's. That is just what they did then. They figured women couldn't do things like that. My then boss really supported me. What ultimately happened, and what got me into this kind of marketing was that he was promoted and I took his place as manager of the mortgage company in South Bend. After managing the company for four or five years, they asked me if I wanted to take a transfer to Houston Texas to turn around a branch that was failing and having trouble with quality control on their FHA loans. I told them I would go and try it, and they transferred me.
My husband and my daughter went with me to Houston. I didn't know a soul and I said to myself, "How am I going to get to the people of Houston Texas, population 3 million, and let them know I am alive?" That is what started the whole marketing program. I had to do something differently and I had to get noticed, so I thought about how I was going to do that. I was down in Houston for four years and was very, very successful. My husband continued to work for the company back in South Bend.
My old boss -- the one who initially made me a loan officer -- actually started his own mortgage company in Indianapolis and recruited me to go to there. I accepted, since it meant I would be closer to home and I stayed with him for a couple of years, but then went back home when my mother became ill, and ultimately passed away. After that, I worked for a company for about two years before starting my own mortgage company. That is how the whole marketing concept came about: going into a new location where I knew no one, forced me to do that.
Boni: What are your goals at this point?
Karen: I see myself giving back to the mortgage industry by providing these speakers and sales products. I do have to tell you, I screen them pretty vigorously. Not everybody who wants to speak gets on the Mortgage Speakers Bureau. The same goes for the products. I look at the samples to ensure they will actually be helpful to a loan officer and make some money.
If it is just copied from something that has been done before -- a flyer or anything like that -- it doesn't make the cut. It has to be something truly worthwhile. I look at it this way: If I don't want to buy something, I am not going to try to convince someone else to buy it.
My goals are based on the products, the speakers, and the seminars. I love going out and talking to other loan officers throughout the country. I like to see what they are doing, get their feedback, and hear their ideas. Every time I go out, I come back and say "Gosh, if I had a mortgage company I would be doing this now." That is what I see myself doing. I sometimes miss the excitement of the mortgage business, the closing of the loans and all that related activity.
Boni: As we close, is there anything else that you would like to leave with loan officers as far as information that might help them become successful and happy in their business?
Karen: My recommendation is to avoid being all things to all people. Specialize in one type of mortgage product. To give you an idea, when I started my mortgage company, I decided I was not going to be doing FHA, VA, or B&C loans. I decided my loans were going to be "paper conventional" and they were also going to be over $100,000. That was my criteria for doing loans. If the loan were for less, I would refer them to another loan officer. If it were a B&C or FHA, I would refer them to another mortgage company. I picked a niche market, marketed only to that niche, and stuck with it.
There are a lot of people out there whose ads you see in the newspapers and magazines claiming, "I can do everything. I can do FHA, VA, conventional, no money down, state housing fund loans, all these kind of loans." To me that is like the general practitioner. I would rather be the specialist. When you narrow your market and you do business with people you want to do business with, you end up making more money and getting more referrals.
Boni: And not make yourself crazy.
Karen: After a while, after you put all your systems in place, it becomes easy. A lot of superstar loan officers will tell you that once they got their systems down, they worked 30 hours a week. And most of them specialize in just one area. I can tell you that all of the loan officers on the superstar panel have a specialty and that is what they focus on - focus like a laser beam.
Karen Deis is considered an expert in consumer-direct marketing for the mortgage business. Visit her website at consumer-direct-marketing.com to order her marketing program which contains an Audio CD and 6 different consumer-direct marketing campaigns. She can also be reached at 715-426-3647.
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