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The Balancing Act of Being a Mortgage Originator · Mortgage Marketing Radio

• 0:00
  Hello, my friend. Welcome to this episode of the mortgage marketing radio podcast, Jeff
• 0:15
  Zimffer, your humble host. Appreciate you tuning in. Hey, real quick, have you ever scored
• 0:20
  yourself when it comes to realtor referrals? Have you ever been curious about your systems
• 0:27
  of your process, your conversion rates from a data standpoint? Recently, I launched a realtor
• 0:34
  referral scorecard, which allows you to discover how your current strategy for attracting realtor
• 0:40
  referrals stacks up. The purpose of this is to help you gain valuable insights to grow your
• 0:44
  referral network and increase your production. It's completely free. Results are customized,
• 0:50
  100% tailored to you. And what it'll help you do is become aware of where you currently
• 0:55
  are and identify potential areas for future growth. I've had about 200 loan officers complete
• 1:01
  this quiz already. And the feedback has been fantastic. The responses have been founded
• 1:07
  insightful. Great questions really helped me get clear on opportunities and weaknesses.
• 1:13
  And so this quiz will literally take about two or three minutes and it'll give you
• 1:17
  a specific score. And overall score, a score on your realtor engagement, your personal
• 1:23
  branding and visibility, the system is systemization and processes you use, and your value
• 1:28
  delivery. And I can tell you that it's very interesting and insightful to know where
• 1:33
  you stand so that you can have a better idea of what your strengths, opportunities, and
• 1:38
  weaknesses are. So if you're at all curious, it's free. And I think if I'm an insightful,
• 1:43
  you can customize PDF report when you complete it. And you can go to realtors.scoreapp.com.
• 1:51
  I'll put a link in the show notes. Once again, it's a realtors.scoreapp.com. Find out how
• 1:57
  ready you are for more realtor referrals and take the free quiz today. Okay, we're jumping
• 2:02
  into my special guest here, bringing you back Kelly Yal. If you recall a couple of weeks
• 2:07
  ago, we released a podcast where I was on her podcast as a special guest. And that was
• 2:11
  a really cool, fun, fiery conversation. And I had promised to bring it back and have
• 2:17
  Kelly on our podcast. And whatever Kelly and I get together, what's cool is like we just
• 2:21
  like, we're just sitting down. We are just like being real, being transparent, right?
• 2:26
  And talking truth. So we spent a lot of time in this episode talking about the customer
• 2:31
  journey, your customer experience, how to prepare for the coming changes in 2025, both
• 2:37
  from an AI technological perspective, what will change, what we think might change, what
• 2:42
  we think won't change. You know, some of that is crystal ball anyways. But you know, Kelly
• 2:46
  is just a wealth of knowledge, right? Digital marketing executive with 15 years of experience.
• 2:50
  She's all about analytic driven technology, marketing plans and not being overly focused
• 2:57
  on the hype, the noise and the buzzwords and the hacks and secrets. But what is going
• 3:05
  to still be effective, no matter what happens in the coming market and technology wise.
• 3:10
  So she's helping a lot of companies with their marketing. She's very savvy when it comes
• 3:14
  to digital strategy, social media content, CRM optimization, things like that. So I think
• 3:20
  you'll find this podcast useful. Please make sure you check the show notes for links to
• 3:24
  follow Kelly on LinkedIn and other places. And so without further ado, let's get into
• 3:28
  this week's show. Kelly, yeah, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, friend.
• 3:34
  It is good to be with you again. And so I love the fact that you and I just get to, and
• 3:39
  it's a Friday. So I'm in a Friday's little saucy little spicy like I just whatever there's
• 3:44
  no rules. How's that? Okay. I'm for it. All right. So I want to open up this conversation
• 3:51
  in because I know based on the conversation you know, I have had before on your podcast,
• 3:58
  you like to point out, well, let me put it this way. You put a post up that says enough
• 4:04
  you guys can visualize this. You're listening. The post says I am in big bold letters. And
• 4:09
  then there's using two CRMs buying leads trying to post videos running social media meeting
• 4:14
  new agents and following up with my database to SOI. So to follow up my database, so I can
• 4:21
  be and all that's crossed out. And what you have on the image is what's actually only visible
• 4:27
  or intended to be focused on is I am closing loans. So hopefully get the visual example
• 4:33
  of that. But what the hell did you mean by that? I am, you know, I used to train a lot of real
• 4:39
  estate agents. And when I and I used to talk to them, I used to say, isn't it amazing how many
• 4:44
  hats you're asked to have? If you think about what a real estate agent has to be the master of,
• 4:49
  right? They have to be the master of like taking pictures and have to be understanding
• 4:52
  videography and storytelling and biore psychology and then go over to the other side where you have
• 4:58
  to be a decent writer. I mean, we have AI now, but you know what I mean? You had to really be good
• 5:02
  at organization, all these different hats you wear, right? And it used to be, it seemed that
• 5:08
  that was only for realtors. And then the last five or six years, it seems like we've taken,
• 5:14
  if you look at like most loan officers like LinkedIn pages right now, it'll say mortgage
• 5:20
  originator and content creator. And you know, we kind of shifted into this, you know, I have so many
• 5:27
  hats that I have to wear. I don't have an L.O.A. anymore. I haven't been able to afford them in the
• 5:32
  last couple of years. I know I need to be doing 10 different things. I have two different systems.
• 5:39
  I have this one with my old database and this one's through my company. And there are so many
• 5:43
  distractions. There are so many to-do lists. There's so much new technology and new things to learn.
• 5:49
  And at the end of the day, I think it's really taken our eye off the ball, which is how do these
• 5:55
  systems and these practices serve me so that I may serve my customer? Because my job is not content
• 6:04
  creation. My job technically is closing loans for people. And if we can keep our eye on that and
• 6:10
  we're refocus on it, I think that we start to have a new conversation.
• 6:15
  Yeah, so let's kind of pick at this a little bit and peel all the layers back because
• 6:24
  it's isn't that how I get to the loans, though, because there's so many ways today to
• 6:30
  originate, right? There's the fundamentals, which, you know, you know, I know what they are,
• 6:34
  and we'll probably talk a little bit about those. But don't I need to be a content creator today?
• 6:39
  Don't I need to be putting video out? Don't I need to have this personal brand if I'm going to
• 6:43
  actually close loans? A million percent, but I would argue if you don't already have a personal
• 6:48
  brand, you're in deep water right now. But yes, you have to create messaging around your brand,
• 6:57
  right? That's going to be an important thing. But that should be 10% maybe of your week.
• 7:04
  And I think there is so much distraction and so much competition when it comes to how people
• 7:10
  are doing things, you know, watching what other people do, thinking that, you know,
• 7:14
  keeping up with the Joneses, if you will. And so much of that practice can be automated.
• 7:20
  So much of those things can be easier to do. You have to do all of the relationship work. I am
• 7:26
  never going to be on another side. Then you've got to be creating relationships. And sure,
• 7:31
  content is important for that and all of that. But at the same time, the closing of loans and the
• 7:38
  focus on mortgage, I think can sometimes get a little bit lost in all of the other things that we
• 7:45
  spend our day doing. If you told me that somebody was going to spend their entire day on creating
• 7:50
  relationships, and that would be their focus, I would actually take that over the myriad tech
• 7:56
  solutions and chat GPT experts of the loan world. And I just feel like the conversation has shifted
• 8:03
  somewhat. All right. I mean, I'm writing notes and I want to come back hopefully to some of
• 8:07
  these things because you mentioned personal brand. If you don't have one, you're dead in the water.
• 8:11
  I'm going to come back to that ideally in a minute. And if I forget, feel free to remind me. But
• 8:16
  I'd like to then maybe line up how you think if you if you were to map out a productive loan
• 8:22
  officers ideal week, like what would those activities or theme days and structure look like
• 8:28
  potentially? Yeah. Well, it's funny because I used to build systems based on this philosophy,
• 8:33
  right? Because what we did was we would automate a lot of behavior on behalf of the loan officer
• 8:38
  through systems. And what I I used to talk to them a lot about time blocking, right? And our
• 8:45
  in my in my world, right? And keep in mind, not Kelly, it does not have a mortgage license,
• 8:50
  nor has she ever done a loan. So you can feel free to ignore me because in many ways, I am not an
• 8:55
  expert in doing loans, but I am an absolute expert in creating relationships. And if you think
• 9:02
  about the way that your week sits there, right? You have, but let's say you work 40 hours a week,
• 9:07
  which we all know is sort of a joke. But in this in this current environment, maybe you do work 40
• 9:12
  hours a week. How how are you segmenting out your day to be in front of the people that you need to
• 9:19
  be in front of? And who is that audience that makes it smart? A lot of people that's going to be
• 9:25
  meeting new agents. It's going to be talking to the current agents you have in order to create a
• 9:31
  strategy for growth for both of you. And that's reinforcing the relationships with those agents
• 9:36
  who are amazing to you and figuring out how you can become even more valuable to them in 2025.
• 9:42
  So you've got sort of those three pillars where you have to set aside time and figure out what's
• 9:48
  actually going to be of value in serving them for your best agents. They may be that may be going
• 9:52
  to lunch. That may be taking a yoga class with them. It may be something that's deeply personal.
• 9:57
  For those new agents that might just be how do I get you to like me to trust me and to understand
• 10:03
  that I'm not here just to take your money. I'm here to truly partner with you so that our businesses
• 10:07
  are together. And then on the other side, obviously, they're talking to borrowers and borrowers
• 10:12
  are much the same. We have borrowers with high intent who we need to spend a good amount of time
• 10:17
  with talking about how valuable working with us is and talking to them about what their overall
• 10:23
  financial objectives are for the next 20 years. And then you have people who you know you have to
• 10:29
  nurture along the way. And if we look at I like to encourage loan officers a lot of the time to
• 10:35
  look at the world as if every single human being could do business with them because every single
• 10:40
  human being can. And that's not true of a lot of different industries. But everyone likely
• 10:47
  is going to be in some situation of wanting to buy a home or know somebody who wants to buy a
• 10:51
  home. And how we show up every day, whether that is ourselves or through systems that we create
• 10:58
  to communicate, it's smart to follow up as a human being. And so when you're thinking about what
• 11:06
  Q1 is going to look like and you're segmenting out your day, what do I need to do to drive sales?
• 11:12
  Those are going to be the top most biggest priorities. But then what are you doing to drive value
• 11:18
  to relationships should be the other part of your day? Okay. Got it. Sales. And I'm drawing an
• 11:25
  arrow to add value to relationships. What I heard in there was a lot of talking to people.
• 11:33
  You know what I mean? You know, to be fair and you know, in an increasingly AI world, I hope
• 11:42
  that sounded super chat to you when I said it. In the increasingly digital landscape, we are going
• 11:49
  to delve into a more robust conversation about this. You know, if you think about the way that
• 11:59
  relationships start, right? And I'm going to use a terrible analogy that's probably not going to be
• 12:05
  PG. But if if I'm on a dating app and I see somebody who I like and I connect with them and my
• 12:16
  first message is can't wait to sleep together. So we got a problem. Well, which app is it? That's
• 12:22
  the first one. So you may actually be messaging correctly and I said correct. But in general,
• 12:28
  think about it, right? How do we start a relationship? Even if that's your end goal. Yeah. If you go
• 12:34
  in guns blazing, then what are you doing? Right? So how do we build a relationship with a stranger?
• 12:42
  Because that actually, yes. So whether that's a new lead or whether that's a new agent, how do we
• 12:48
  start? Well, we can start by stalking to be super fair. There's plenty of information on the
• 12:54
  internet about human beings. And then we know at least the people we have in common, the kind of
• 13:00
  warmer conversations that we can have. Maybe you went to the same school. Maybe you have kids
• 13:05
  the same age. Maybe you used to live in the same area of town that they live in. But imagine how
• 13:09
  much different the conversation becomes when you do a little bit of investigative work and you don't
• 13:15
  act like a stalker. But instead you say, Hey, Jeff, you know, I'd really love to have a conversation
• 13:22
  with you. I know that you know, Brian, he actually was the best man in my wedding.
• 13:26
  So I'm sure we have some funny stories that we can tell. But my agenda today is not to
• 13:31
  sell you on why I'm the best loan officer in the world. My agenda today is to get to know you as
• 13:35
  a human being. Okay. So, but how are we doing that? How are we doing that stalking per se?
• 13:41
  Well, you know, stalking can be a variety of ways. Ideally, you know, you have a system that can
• 13:49
  kind of socially stalk and give you some data. If you don't, that's okay. Because that's what
• 13:54
  Google is for. And, you know, Facebook is preposterous with the amount of information. It will give
• 14:01
  us about a human being, right? We know where somebody just vacationed. We know what people are
• 14:06
  doing. And if it's a real estate agent, real estate agents are on Facebook, period. You know,
• 14:13
  you can play app to app all you want to. But when it comes to real estate agents, that's going to
• 14:17
  be a really good spot to start. I always suggest to loan officers that you start by connecting on
• 14:23
  maybe Instagram first, right? Follow them, connect with them, and then start becoming a cheerleader
• 14:30
  of the things that they do, not obnoxiously. Maybe sometimes you just like things. Maybe sometimes
• 14:36
  you say, gosh, this is a really great listing. I'd love to share it. Maybe you just slide into
• 14:40
  their DMs with a, hey, I noticed what you're doing. It's not easy to create so much good content,
• 14:46
  but you're doing a good job. I'm not selling yet. I'm just talking, right? I'm maybe asking
• 14:54
  you open-ended questions. You know, how, listen, you're 20 minutes away from my office. You know,
• 14:59
  how do you feel about December and January? You know, do we think it's going to be hard or you
• 15:04
  actually seeing some housing prices fall where you are? You know, what are you struggling with
• 15:09
  with getting new listings? Really try and solve a problem in the question you ask so that they know
• 15:16
  that you don't just want to get coffee with them. Actually, if you say, can we get coffee? I want to
• 15:22
  slap your hand immediately because imagine how put yourself for one second in the place of a real
• 15:30
  estate agent for the last year and a half where every single day their phone is full of messages
• 15:36
  from loan officers who want to work with them who are asking them to meet for coffee.
• 15:40
  Differentiate yourself by not swiping right and going, hey, you ready to hop in the sack?
• 15:47
  Don't do that. You know, put a little romance into it. You know, put a little work into it. The
• 15:52
  effort is really going to make a big difference because when you approach relationships
• 15:57
  differently and when you're giving before you're asking, it's a different, different conversation.
• 16:03
  So yeah, some good tips in there. Hey podcast family, are you tired of chasing down real estate
• 16:08
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• 16:12
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• 17:01
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• 17:06
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• 17:11
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• 17:17
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• 17:22
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• 17:28
  Then settle the, you know, and this is might be in my own head because if I go back to that opening
• 17:35
  post right of where you had all those activities that here it is right here, posting videos,
• 17:44
  running social media, right, meeting new agents following up with my database.
• 17:49
  Like those would seem to be, are you, you are not saying that Ellos should not be doing those?
• 17:56
  Is that correct? I'm not saying Ellos should not be doing this, but we are just because we live
• 18:01
  in a current environment where they may be a handful of loans in the pipeline. Let's be realistic
• 18:08
  about six months from now when we're doing 20 to 25 loans in the pipeline. It's easy enough to be
• 18:16
  able to do those activities right now because you're not really that busy. Maybe you're super busy,
• 18:21
  but for the most part, people are struggling to kind of get those new leads and loans. Of course,
• 18:26
  those are going to be good activities for today. But I will argue to Jeff that a lot of people don't
• 18:32
  actually know how to do some of the things that we're talking about today. I think it's that
• 18:37
  situation where instead of like stressing out over that there are actually a lot of solutions
• 18:43
  for how to streamline those. There are a lot of coaching platforms that will teach you how to
• 18:47
  do it. So you're not really stressing out and you're actually able to focus on bringing in
• 18:53
  more production. All right. I'm going to scratch deeper here. I'm going to pull. Let's go deeper.
• 18:59
  You're saying there's a lot of Ellos who don't know how to do that, but they are doing it and they're
• 19:04
  doing it to the detriment of that activity. Or they're not getting a lot of ROI or bang for the buck
• 19:11
  I don't think people are really getting the ROI that they have been promised by the by the people
• 19:17
  who they follow, right? If you like just a normal TikTok feed, right? It's like, oh, everything's
• 19:24
  easy and you can scale this and you can sell your business model and you can, you know, this is
• 19:28
  this is shooting fish in a barrel. And the reality of even an extraordinary video content strategy,
• 19:38
  it may not get anyone to come and do business with you. In fact, if you ask most loan officers
• 19:44
  how many loans have you received from TikTok? What's the answer going to be, right? So you can
• 19:52
  concentrate on those efforts and I highly suggest that you do some, but I would very much argue
• 19:58
  that in the last few weeks of 2024, what we should be doing is thinking about and really
• 20:06
  analyzing. Hey, here's what I did in video this year. Here's how long it took me and here's
• 20:12
  here's the ROI I actually saw from it. Did that help me close more loans? Here's how much time I put
• 20:18
  into my CRM and chat GPTing, everything in the world. Did I see anything from that? Is my system
• 20:26
  providing opportunities for me or am I still having to fish every single day for new business?
• 20:33
  And if those kinds of answers are different, right? If you're not, if you're putting time and
• 20:38
  effort into things that are not fulfilling you, then my argument would be we do have to shift back
• 20:45
  to a hyper focus on doing the activities that bring ROI. Yeah, so I wrote down a clarify for a second
• 20:54
  is my system bringing me opportunities. What do you mean by that? Meaning, hey, I'm posting videos
• 20:59
  and I'm truly trying to make it happen on social media. That's a system. And you're saying,
• 21:04
  let's evaluate kind of the return on effort for those. I think you have to. I think, you know,
• 21:11
  we've been the last few years has been heavily short form content, right? And I love short form
• 21:19
  content. But if you are spending, you have like an entire content day and you're writing your
• 21:26
  chat, GPT scripts out and you're reading those and then you're editing those and you're uploading
• 21:30
  those and you spent eight hours on that. My argument would be why are you not using a platform
• 21:36
  like social coach where you can do all of that in about an hour. And so it's really more about
• 21:42
  like how do you make the best use of systems available to really dial in how your efforts,
• 21:49
  how long do your efforts take you? If you're not showing up at all, how can you dive into doing it
• 21:55
  for the first time? And then what are true ROI proven strategies that you have seen work
• 22:04
  over the last few years that you can really, really, really double down on in 25 because I feel like
• 22:10
  the amount of things that loan officers can do, that list just grows and grows. And what we really
• 22:17
  need to kind of get back to is how am I going to get loans through the door? Now, all these things
• 22:22
  factor into it for sure. But are they distractions? Or are they really proving to be beneficial to
• 22:28
  business? Yeah, I guess that goes back to tracking and measuring. I mean, I'm just I'm thinking
• 22:37
  about the social coach thing for a second. I don't know a ton about that platform, but isn't that
• 22:41
  essentially? And I don't know what your affiliation is there, but we can talk about that like
• 22:46
  a social media scheduler and planner and poster? I mean, it is. So I don't have any affiliation
• 22:53
  whatsoever with it. But you know, here's the thing, whenever I see something come up on the
• 22:59
  market, and you know me, I'm not a cheerleader of anything really. But when I see something that
• 23:06
  like makes loan officer lives easier, I'm like, wait a second, hold on a second, I use it.
• 23:11
  Now, I'm not a loan officer. I technically shouldn't be using it. But I I asked them if I could
• 23:16
  because I saw it at a thing I was at in January. I was at a momentum builder and I and I saw their
• 23:21
  platform and I was like, oh, this is really cool. Let me test it out. And I thought, wait a second.
• 23:26
  If I look halfway decent in the morning, I can turn my camera around. They've got a script. Now,
• 23:31
  they don't have a script for me, but they've got strips for loan officers. And I can fire off a 90
• 23:37
  second video for myself. Click a button. And then later than after near the next day, I have a
• 23:44
  fully edited, you know, video that has all of my hashtags, all the things that I just push a
• 23:49
  button to send it out in the world. That to me, that's a huge game changer for most loan officers
• 23:55
  who look at video creation as sort of an enormous sort of hill to climb. Okay. So what I'm hearing
• 24:03
  there is that's an operational efficiency using their platform to go from posting to, you know,
• 24:09
  editing, you know, post production, all that kind of jazz. Right. And so that's that's a,
• 24:13
  that's a possible solution. There are some others. Okay. Cool. I got it. I mean, so so once again,
• 24:17
  just to be clear, you are not saying you shouldn't be creating content. You should be looking at how
• 24:22
  efficient are you at getting it out there? And also how how effective are you in the content that
• 24:28
  you're producing? Meaning it's got to be relevant, impactful. And that by the way, that's part of
• 24:34
  the rabbit hole Kelly that we're talking about here is, and I think this is the struggle. I know
• 24:39
  probably you and me, anybody who's tried to create content, it's not easy. It's I'm going to,
• 24:45
  it's hard like to create really good content. This is what I've really noticed. And I've been spending
• 24:50
  the last three months quick side note here, like really evaluating my podcast, my content and
• 24:58
  my strategy content strategy moving forward for 2025. Who do I want to show up as in the world? Because
• 25:05
  I don't want to have acid. And I sometimes feel like that's what I do just to get it out there.
• 25:11
  Does that make sense? It took me seven years to start a podcast. It's not because I didn't
• 25:16
  understand how to do it. In fact, I had a whole podcast studio built as a gift from my fiance two
• 25:21
  years ago that I never touched. The reason I didn't touch it is because I wasn't going to do a
• 25:26
  podcast like everyone else was. And there was this time in the mortgage industry where everyone was
• 25:31
  like, I have a podcast. And these were my customers, you know, these are loan officers I coach. And I
• 25:36
  was like, time out. Why? Who's your listener? Who's going, man, I'm going to go on an hour walk
• 25:44
  today. And I am going to listen to George from Phoenix, Arizona. Tell me why first time home buyers
• 25:49
  are going to be in a great position this year. Yeah. No one's listening to that friends. And I
• 25:54
  love you to pieces, but come on. Right. So it genuinely is important. I've had so many different
• 25:59
  loan officers tell me that they want to go viral with a short form video. And I say great,
• 26:05
  take your shirt off. And then they look at me and I'm like, well, you said you want to go viral.
• 26:12
  And I don't know that you know this, but ain't no mortgage video unless it is extremely well done.
• 26:18
  Right. Which is difficult going to go viral. And if it's going to go viral, it has to go viral for
• 26:24
  a reason, which is either because it embarrassed you or because it genuinely is so good that people
• 26:30
  can't help themselves but to share it. Now caveat to that. I do love really solid things that
• 26:39
  realtor partners can share because this loan officer has given something of true and meaningful
• 26:44
  value. That is not loan limits have gone up this year. That is not rates have dropped this teeny
• 26:51
  tiny percent. It's if you're thinking about buying a home in the new year, here are the conversations
• 26:58
  you want to have up front. And I'm the kind of person you could have these conversations with.
• 27:02
  And likely your realtor shared this with you because there's somebody who trusts me. And I'd
• 27:07
  love to have the opportunity to have a conversation. Great video. Now is that going to work across
• 27:13
  all platforms? Maybe, maybe not. But if you think about the way that you're positioning your message,
• 27:19
  you have to take yourself into the mind of your audience. Is someone on TikTok today hoping
• 27:27
  they're going to run across a local loan officer who's going to tell them that conforming loan
• 27:32
  limits are different? How is that going to really bring them into the fold? Or are you saying like,
• 27:39
  hey, not only am I a loan officer, but I have a collection of bulldogs. And here's the craziness
• 27:47
  that we go through every morning before I get to sign in my computer because I got to feed these
• 27:51
  crazy dogs. And you're showing them like a walk in through your life, right? Hey, yesterday
• 27:57
  I was really scared because somebody dropped the ball and my clients weren't going to be able to
• 28:02
  close. And so I worked together with a title company and the realtor to make sure that that didn't
• 28:07
  happen because can you imagine anything worse at the holidays than not having the home that you
• 28:11
  imagine putting a tree up in? Hmm. Wow. That's pretty good off the top of your head.
• 28:18
  Well, you know, I don't know if you know this or not, but I've been in professional mortgage
• 28:20
  marketing for about 12 years now. Get out. Smack me right in the face. Yes. And by the way,
• 28:27
  we're going to link up the ways for people to connect with you, both on LinkedIn and on your
• 28:31
  website for those who want to learn more about what you do. But clearly, the fact that you're
• 28:35
  able to pull that out of thin air means you have a solid grasp on what is the type of content that
• 28:42
  actually will get engagement and resonate because there's a right time, right place. Like,
• 28:46
  there is a right time to pepper in some mortgage or housing related content. But, you know,
• 28:53
  to your point or moment ago, it's like, that's really not going to, you know, I'm not going to
• 28:56
  really connect with you in a big way. That might build some credibility and some trust. And like,
• 28:59
  oh, Kelly knows her stuff, right? But then I'm going to move on and swipe on until something like,
• 29:03
  oh, look at that. That's funny. Like our friend Kayla, right, with the four pit bulls or whatever
• 29:09
  that she rescues. Like that brings people in and shout out once again, Kayla, but go ahead.
• 29:15
  You know, this is the problem is that she, no, let me start again. Obviously, I love her.
• 29:20
  She's a deer and wonderful friend of mine. She listens to all my podcasts and she, I will die.
• 29:24
  She'll be listening to it. She'll go, I heard you mentioned me on the podcast. So here we are doing
• 29:28
  it again, Kayla. I know, right? Twice. Very much. That's a perfect example because you're talking
• 29:33
  about somebody who embraces not only the trends that are going on, right? Because she will hop
• 29:39
  on a trend. She'll hop on a popular song. She will hop on a fun way to edit. So she's actually
• 29:46
  watching social media in general to watch where, like, what's going to be looked at? How can I jump
• 29:52
  on this latest trend? That that's not something that just everybody is doing. But what she has done
• 29:57
  in an incredibly efficient job at is this is Kayla. She's got this blonde hair. She knows what she's
• 30:03
  talking about. She lives in North Dakota and she's got four rescue dogs. Now, I know all of that
• 30:09
  because of who I knew her to be before I met her. That's how you build a brand. But if, let's say,
• 30:16
  you have a loan officer who wants to target the messaging and it can be about mortgage until
• 30:21
  the cows come home. If you think about things like, hey, I live 20 minutes away from a big military
• 30:28
  base, right? So I want to make sure that I'm talking to people about, hey, are you in the military?
• 30:34
  Are you relocating to this area? Here are some of the things you're going to see. Here's why
• 30:38
  having a VA loan is going to be so great. You can use your VA loan benefits the following way.
• 30:43
  When you're using your VA loan to move here, here's where you can live. I don't know if you know
• 30:48
  where some of these bases are, but here's some neighborhoods. Now you're talking about, here's
• 30:52
  a strategy. I'm going to talk nothing about loans and a specific kind of loan, but you've geo-targeted
• 30:58
  the area, the messaging. You've thought it through and you know that that sort of information
• 31:03
  is important to the people who you hope to have follow you. So I'm not saying don't do loan,
• 31:10
  obviously we still want to do a lot of loan videos, but how do you make it personal to who you are?
• 31:16
  And then how do you really think about the audience? That's good point and that's relevance as well.
• 31:23
  I was thinking about that. I had a conversation the other day, Tony, if you're listening,
• 31:26
  what's up, Tony? Shout out. He is in a military heavy area of the country and I asked him if he had
• 31:36
  done VA loans, first of all, and understood how to do them. He said, yeah, I've done a ton of them.
• 31:40
  And I was like, well, why aren't you leading with that, man? I mean, it's right in your, like,
• 31:43
  if I was living in San Diego, I'd be like, double tap in this VA thing. If I wanted to do VA and
• 31:49
  become known as that person. And he said, he, here's the interesting thing. He got in his head and
• 31:55
  he had never been in the military and it started to have imposter syndrome about, well, who am I,
• 32:01
  right? And I'm like, well, dude, you don't have to have been in the military to care about the
• 32:06
  military community and the service and like, having a affinity and a connection for that. Like,
• 32:11
  you can help them save so much trial and error and overcome some of those BS that's out there when
• 32:17
  it comes to VA and I'm like, bro, like, you should go back and double tap on that thing.
• 32:21
  Wouldn't that make sense? This is kind of like the exact scenario you just described.
• 32:26
  It absolutely is. Look, I think one of the strangest and hardest parts of the last couple of years
• 32:32
  for this industry is that, you know, you have to have a certain swagger and a certain amount of
• 32:39
  ego to sell, right? Confidence. Confidence. And the confidence to sell. And then somebody
• 32:46
  put us all in like a rock polisher for a couple of years, right? And we've just been tumbling
• 32:53
  around in there and hoping that when we come out, it will be nice and shiny. But when we went in,
• 32:58
  I think we were shiny to begin with and then we've just been tumbling ever since. So I think that
• 33:03
  there's this crisis of confidence that everyone has kind of experienced at one point or another
• 33:08
  in the last couple of years. I think that with so much talk about like where the industry goes,
• 33:15
  we start doubting like our own importance or whether the robots are coming to take our jobs or
• 33:20
  all the things. And we've forgotten this one simple philosophy, which is if you show up as a good
• 33:27
  human being and you want to help others, and that is the overall message, it doesn't matter who
• 33:32
  you're going to help, whether you do reverse mortgages, VA first time home buyers, it doesn't matter.
• 33:38
  You should and need to stand in yourself in that confidence and say no matter what at the end of
• 33:46
  the day, I'm here to help some people. And if I can hit this target audience with a message and
• 33:52
  I'm showing them my heart is to serve, then obviously if I'm marketing to people whose heart was
• 33:58
  to serve in the military, that's already a match. So then it's a blend of the two disciplines
• 34:07
  if you will, the discipline of fundamentals being brilliant in the basics, which is conversations
• 34:12
  with the right people. But it's also the flip side of that, which is being a modern and mortgage
• 34:19
  advisor and then having some relevance and means by which people today can connect and engage with
• 34:28
  you via these modern methods like social media online, etc. Is that accurate?
• 34:34
  I absolutely think so. And look, are there people who are killing the game who are still working
• 34:40
  in an Excel spreadsheet and have never done a video in their life? Absolutely there are. This isn't
• 34:45
  for everyone, it isn't a one-size-fits-all moment. But I think as we go into the future,
• 34:52
  we put a ton of emphasis on am I a thought leader? Are people following me? How many followers do I
• 35:00
  have? How much engagement did I get? Were people negative in their comments on my post or
• 35:05
  did it not get any action at all? And I look at content like, here's this short burst of me being
• 35:13
  full of myself because that's basically how I do it. And I'm going to talk about something that's
• 35:19
  on my heart to talk about today. And I think that is a stronger approach to short-form content
• 35:28
  than having 12 different scripts around like, you know, borrower qualifications or three hacks
• 35:36
  to buy a home. Exactly. Or you're pointing at things that I just don't think that those are
• 35:45
  the right fit for us. But we get swayed because we see these big influencers, air quotes,
• 35:51
  or people with tons of followers like doing this thing or hopping on trends. And, you know,
• 35:57
  trends can be great for the right people. But for most, yeah, it's like it's a whole new skill to
• 36:02
  learn. And in and of itself is almost a full-time job learning how to create content with your mobile
• 36:07
  phone. And I think what I'm hearing from you if I was to like put a cherry on top of this is
• 36:13
  place that attention. It's important. Learn the new skills, right? Don't be, quote,
• 36:21
  left behind, but don't do it at the expense of what we know always works, which is the fundamentals
• 36:28
  and conversations and FaceTime with people. And also, you know, you're the SME. You're the SME
• 36:34
  of loans. You don't have to, you don't have to be a content creator. You know, you don't have to
• 36:41
  actually wear all these hats. There's a lot of ease. Yeah, but tell me, I feel like if I don't,
• 36:46
  I'm going to miss out. Like that's the pressure. That's the phomo because we see other people
• 36:52
  doing it. Well, I mean, this is an industry of people who are afraid to know what happens if they
• 37:01
  don't or what happens if they do, right? It's the same thing you'll hear from like Morgan C.
• 37:06
  Sweet, well, if we make this decision, what if all the sales people get mad? Well, okay, what if,
• 37:11
  what if what if, you know, like, yes, you didn't, you have to look, I want you to have the foundations
• 37:20
  of an excellent business. And that is your brand is strong. People know who you are and what you
• 37:26
  stand for and they understand your why. You surrounded yourself with the right kind of people,
• 37:31
  the people in your sphere understand how to advocate for you. You have your systems lined up
• 37:37
  and you're always looking for opportunities for relationships and sales within that group and
• 37:43
  with within outside of that group. But there are simple ways that you can have content creation
• 37:50
  work for you. There are simplified ways that you can have systems work for you. But if you're having
• 37:55
  to do all of that yourself, ask yourself how much time that takes every week away from really
• 38:03
  creating those relationships and closing those days. Okay, I think that's a good good note to end
• 38:09
  on right there. It's not that those media strategies, content strategies aren't important or can't
• 38:17
  help you move the needle and create some deals. It's question ask yourself the question of,
• 38:21
  right, how much time is that taking? Is that affecting other activities for you generating business?
• 38:27
  Is that fair? Okay. So if we also want to connect with you, by the way, great conversation. Thank
• 38:32
  you so much for bringing all this to light. How would you like people to connect with you? We'll
• 38:35
  make sure we link it up in the show notes. Well, you know, one of the fun things about having a
• 38:40
  social media company before social media really existed is that I am tagged myself as my name on
• 38:45
  all platforms, which means I can never get married or divorce or anything again. I'm at Kelly
• 38:50
  Yale on every single platform. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Got my name. Well, I mean, look, there were 12
• 38:56
  people on Twitter when I started, okay? Because people genuinely didn't know what social media was
• 39:02
  going to be and certainly weren't starting an agency around it. And that's what's so funny is
• 39:05
  here I am trying to talk people out of social media a little bit. I don't know. I'm not really sure.
• 39:10
  But I am at Kelly Yale on any platform. And then, you know, I have a company called
• 39:15
  Octo Strategies. And, you know, that particular post that you mentioned, the reason that I have
• 39:21
  that is because, you know, we have a group of eight C-suite individuals who help companies grow
• 39:28
  in scale, right? And whether that is companies or whether that's really excited individuals who
• 39:33
  understand the power of aligning process and marketing and tech to create these relationships,
• 39:42
  I have a company called Octo Strategies. And so I'm fortunate to get to work with some really
• 39:46
  amazing human beings who lean infractionally for people who can't afford a full-blown sort of
• 39:53
  agency, you know, relationship, but do need to have some of the fundamentals
• 39:58
  dialed in for their business. Okay. And that is octostrategies.com. We'll link that up in the
• 40:05
  show notes as well. Awesome. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Kelly. And listen, if you guys
• 40:11
  like this episode, you know what to do, please share it with somebody else. Leave us a review that
• 40:14
  does help us reach other people. Appreciate you tuning in. And we'll see you on the next one.
• 40:18
  Bye for now. Okay. That's it for today's episode. Before we wrap up, I just wanted to remind you
• 40:22
  about my agent classes, your proven system to double your agent referrals in just 90 days. Imagine
• 40:28
  never having to co-call again, instead building real lasting relationships with top-producing agents
• 40:34
  who want to send you business. With done for your presentations, marketing automation,
• 40:39
  weekly coaching, it's all designed to make growing your business easier and fun. So if you're
• 40:45
  ready to take control of your agent referrals and grow your income, visit mortgagemarketing.pro
• 40:49
  or check the link in the show notes. And while you're there, don't forget to check out the success
• 40:53
  stories from other mortgage pros who've already seen incredible results. Thanks for listening,
• 40:57
  and I'll see you on the next episode.