Sales Automation for Mortgage Professionals: Part 2 (How It Works)

If you're looking for ways to close more business for your mortgage company (without spending more time chasing down leads or forgetting to reach back out to a lead), sales automation is a "must-have" for mortgage professionals. Sales automation takes the guesswork out of how and when to communicate with potential new loan customers while improving your customer relationship management success!

How does it work? It's not magic, and it's not simply hitting a button that starts a lead-nurturing machine that suddenly sends you more loans than your loan officers can handle. There is a method to sales and mortgage marketing automation! From the frequency of email communications to your mortgage CRM software, here's how it works.

How Does Sales Automation Work?

Before we get into some best practices for mortgage sales automation, let's take a look at what all goes into a well-functioning platform. Remember that an effective sales automation practice is more than "just" a series of emails to potential clients. The right sales automation strategy includes multiple components and a well-thought-out strategy to nurture leads and help mortgage lenders close more of them.

When planning your strategy, you'll need to consider how many emails should be in the communication stream, and how often you should communicate with your prospects. As sales and marketing automation experts, RentBridge recommends sending out three emails over the course of seven days. 

• The first email will arrive within two minutes after someone submits their contact information on your website. 
• The next email should come in four hours later, and then another email three days after that—which is enough time for someone to visit your site and review all the great content you've provided! 
• The final email could be a brief call to action to go ahead and schedule time with one of your trusted team members. 

This might sound like a lot of communications in a short amount of time, but the timing matters! Plus, you're adding value with information that your prospects want to know more about. Boost the impact of your emails with a simple way to stay top-of-mind and on someone's mind: include a small promotional piece about an upcoming webinar or event hosted by your company.

Sales Automation Best Practices for the Mortgage Industry

Now that we've taken a look at some of what goes into sales automation, let's take a look at some best practices. Even with an excellent strategy, implementing it well is critical for success! 

Here are our top "best practices" picks: 

• Communicate often 
• Personalize your communication 
• Include a CTA in every email 
• Send/schedule emails at optimal times 
• Fail to plan and you're planning to fail!

As we've discussed, communication is key. Mortgage brokers must make sure they're staying top-of-mind by communicating frequently enough so that prospects are reminded about the value of a lender's services on a regular basis. 

We also recommend customizing every email with text, images, and links specifically for each individual lead or customer. This is especially important if you have multiple people responsible for different sections of the mortgage process. For example, maybe someone who works in underwriting wants to chat about how you can help get them authorized to order title reports faster than ever before. 

It's worth mentioning again all these automated campaigns only work if you have a well-maintained and up-to-date lead management system. The right mortgage CRM software helps mortgage business owners find, score, and nurture leads through an automated sales communication process, so choose wisely when it's time to find and set up the best CRM system for your needs. 

Why It's Important for Mortgage Lenders to Utilize Automated Follow-up Communication

We've outlined a short series of emails to new leads, but what about ongoing communication? Since not every prospect signs a new loan after a few communications, it's important to have an automated system in place to manage relationships and keep in touch with prospects that don't convert right away. 

Following up with leads is critical to staying in touch and closing new business. You also know that it can be a time-consuming and frustrating process to remember where you left off in a conversation with a lead in your funnel, what the next conversation should be, and the timing of effective follow-ups. 

With automation, those issues go away! The primary reasons that communication with a sales automation system is important are:

• Your team will close more loan requests if they can focus on closing—rather than worrying about manual follow-ups. 
• You can save time by not having to send emails or make phone calls every day, and instead, automate this process so you only have to do it once. 
• You'll be able to deliver a higher level of service because you're already communicating with your leads when they are the most interested in learning more about your services!

Using automation to keep in touch and time follow-up communications can be a deal-saver for loan pipeline management and new business! It also helps a loan officer prioritize leads in your funnel and nurture them appropriately. Maybe the timing isn't right for a potential customer to go through the loan process for a new house, but when you keep in touch with them throughout an automated series of follow-ups, your mortgage company is top of mind when they're ready to buy! 

Ready to Automate Customer Relationship Management? Let RentBridge Help!

We hope the idea of automating your sales process is exciting! Saving time, reducing headaches, building customer relationships, and closing more new business happens more effectively with the right mortgage CRM software and sales automation. 

We know that getting started with the right plan and customer relationship management system can be daunting, but it doesn't have to be! RentBridge helps mortgage industry professionals find the right software solution, plan effective communications and content, then automate lead generating and nurturing systems. If you're ready to talk about how to get a system in place to grow your business, reach out, and let's talk!