Happy Sunday Everyone:
Our company has partnered with Tom Ferry as his lender of choice. Tom Ferry is the #1 real estate coach in the county. He had 3 events in S. Cal last week, San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles. I attended OC and LA. Its impressive to have the ability of selling out a 1000-person venue, all within 50 miles of the other, in 3 days. In each city, an individual CCM person talked for a couple of minutes with him on stage. I was that person on Thursday in LA. Some would say I should change my mindset, and I should, but the reality is this, I have a 2-minute sound bite for a large audience of Realtors who are not overly excited to hear what I have to say. It’s a very different feeling speaking to a group of people who are excited to hear from you vs. not.
The day before, a Realtor had talked about social media, getting 400K views on a post they did at a restaurant. I started thinking about how much lenders are like restaurants. The loan officer is the server, the operations/product/execution team is the back-end kitchen. If you don’t have a great server i.e. the LO, you probably don’t come back. No matter how good the server is, if the food sucks i.e. the products/execution of the loan, you’d never go back. If you have a great loan officer, and that loan officer has great ops/execution/products on the back end, it’s just like having a great restaurant to go to, fair? I decided that was my 2-minute sound bite for the next day, each Realtor should consider if their lender relationship represents a holistic picture of the LO and what stands behind them for support. Put yourself in my shoes, what can you possibly say in 2 minutes that’s going to move the needle on these Realtors wanting to talk to our company?
One person I failed to mention is one of Tom’s keynote speakers is a S. California Realtor who closed 400 mill in production last year. She’d be the polar opposite of me on the scaling of who the audience wanted to hear from. They paid to hear her. I met her a few months ago while visiting one of our loan officers in LA who recently started working with her. I knew we had 3 very different types of loans going with her right now, which is exactly part of Tom’s pitch on why use CCM. About 30 minutes before my time, I sheepishly asked her if I could reference her on stage and the 3 client scenarios as a point of reference, she graciously agreed.
Fast forward, I’m up there with Tom, I walk through the restaurant analogy, audience is 1/2 listening, and then I added the example of one of our great loan officers (aka the great server), currently working with Stephanie, and the 3 very different type of products to help 3 very different client types (i.e. the chefs cooking diff meals). Bottom line is if the audience heard anything, they heard we’re working with one of the people they came to hear. Side note-someone sent me a video of my quick talk, my dumb ass, to close it out said “if Stephanie is good enough for us, don’t you think we’re worth a shot”…instead of saying “if we’re good enough for Stephanie”…..WOW.
Closing this out-and the primary point of this, I had to leave after my talk but was told the LO sitting at the CCM booth picked up 20 + new Realtor opportunities. It serves as a reminder for me to be intentional about how we conduct ourselves. Always think with the end in mind. Our great LO in LA put me in a position where I could reasonably ask Stephanie if I could reference her and stand behind it. I never want to be that annoying person asking for referrals or references, at the same time, when you’re deserving of them, people don’t mind giving them. The balance of the two is an art form of which I have yet to master but will be more intentional on it moving forward.