Converting AIP to App

• Firstly, Pick the right enquiry
  You may remember in your SLA was “no fish out of water syndrome”? The advisors at the top of the conversion charts start by being picky. Some are militant when it comes to niche types and will stick to what they know at-all-times. If a juicy enquiry from a director comes in with massive loan size, but you’re not 100% confident reading accounts, DON’T TAKE IT! Learn your stuff, be the expert, then go nuts. Time is wasted when you have to research the basics before lenders.Yes, they will have to research or clarify, but the top advisors are great at knowing their niche, and working out if the client is going to get a deal or not whilst on the initial phone call.

• Introduce yourself correctly
  Making OMA sound great as a business, indirectly helps you sell yourself. Saying something like “OMA is one of the leading sites online for specialist mortgage help, and they work with the UKs top experts in numerous areas. This is why you’ve come through to me, because I handle “[their scenario]” every day“.^^^This is far better than “I bought your lead online”, or “I picked up your enquiry”. You didn’t pick them up – you were hand selected by OMA as you are one of the leading experts in the UK for their type of mortgage.

• Start with the issue and ask the right questions
  Doing a full fact find session on a client who has told you they have a bankruptcy, before asking about it, is bad practice. They want to know you are the expert for their scenario, and you do this by starting with their problem, extracting everything you need to know to establish if you can help, and then progressing to a usual fact find. “OK great – I arrange mortgages for people who have had a bankruptcy all every day”, “When were you discharged”, “what was it for?”, “Was there a repossession at the time?”,” Is your credit file now up to date?” … When Asking all the right questions from the off helps you stand out as the person they have been looking for.If you don’t know what info you need, find out, then start taking enquiries. Help with this can be found on Pete’s Specialist Broker Training portal. Ask one of the team if you don’t have access.

• NEVER use the word “research”
  Pete will have whittled on about this many a time. Ban this word from the office. You wouldn’t want your heart surgeon to sit down and say they’ll research through all the medical journals before he gets to work… you want them to successfully deal with hearts every day. Same with your mortgage. If you are a customer who has been to “whole of market” brokers before, someone who said they will research the entire country for the best deal, and failed, you want to know the next person you talk to is a real expert.Change your language to “No problems, I handle these mortgages every day, and I already know which lenders to go to, I just need some more info from you to match you with the best one”. Then get the info you need and “go and get some figures together” for them, rather than “go and do some research”.

• Position fees correctly
  The top brokers charge fees. They value their time and they won’t race to the bottom slashing it to nothing because another broker the customer has gone to was “doing it for free”. Doing what for free, exactly? Customers just need to know your value, and you set that by charging an appropriate amount for your time, effort, and expertise. If you are actually able to discount this from £999 to nothing, were you ripping them off in the first place? That’s likely how they’ll see it, and can you argue? Work out your minimum case size for your time, and stick to it because you know that’s your value. Remind clients that lenders pay the same whether the case goes through in a week vs 6 months, whether it flies through the system or if the underwriter demands reams of paperwork and a business case to overcome concerns.
  Question why they are making a new enquiry if their other broker was doing a good job? Advise them that actually, if they can get the same service and lender you’ll arrange for free, then they should go for it! And ask them for that brokers’ contact details so we can give them a job as they are under selling themselves!!!

In the current OMA network FCRs have been under-used by many advisors and this is a trend we want to change. If it’s not a sale, and it’s not in the diary for a future sale, then it’s a wasted enquiry.

Top advisors aim for as close to 100% sale or FCR as possible, and want every enquiry to go into the diary for the future if they cannot transact today. To them it’s “never a no”, it’s a “yes, but not yet”. They continue to build a pipeline of potential new clients every day, to the point where many are writing business from enquiries they FCR’d a year ago rather than needing new enquiries. If you convert @ 15% and take an enquiry per day, then you’d be diarising 25 new clients a month, 300 a year. Even with just a 10% hit rate on these is 30 new mortgages a year.

You’ll be surprised at how many customers in your FCR, who are sent your contact details on a monthly basis, come back to you before the FCR date is up, with more deposit or having cleared off that credit issue.

Not to mention of course, that OMA loves advisors who have a high sale or FCR %. You may not know but it costs us approx. £14.84 per enquiry generated in operational costs, so it keeps us happy when wastage is low.