Jumping On The Bandwagon
Friday, 01 May 2009 15:57
Articles - Sales and Marketing
Traveling down some roads can lead you nowhere, unless you have a plan to
get you there. No longer is a map good enough, you need a GPS. The world
has become a diffi cult place to maneuver.
I recently visited Boston with my son to view colleges. While there I used my
GPS, (tom-tom) to get around in the city. If you’ve never been to Boston or
a novelist to their multi -plex interchanges, you will soon fi nd yourself lost.
Thank goodness for technology.
The whole idea led me to think about how our senior prospects must think
about our world today. Their heads must be spinning with all the ruckus
created by an ailing economy, declining 401K’s, home values dropping, tax
increases, increased medical costs and fraudulent fi nancial schemes just to
name a few.
Now when you couple all the latt er challenges for our seniors, it is no wonder
that our seniors may become a litt le confused, cauti ous, hesitant and drag
their feet before making a decision to do a reverse mortgage. When our
clients fi nally make up their minds, you then tell them they must undergo a
third party counseling. Most seem OK with the HUD counseling, but many
are stressed out and concerned. Not to menti on the added cost for the
counseling. Next, you provide them with a list of 10 counselors and they have
to choose one and you cannot give them any guidance on whom to choose.
Here comes the even scarier part, they might soon have to take a test!
What happened to the good old days?
It seemed things were easier not long ago, for both our
seniors and for reverse mortgage originators. Has our industry
retrenched, rather than move forward? Have the laws of
unintended consequences taken over? Mandatory pricing and
increased margins are adding more fuel to the fi re and adding
more confusion to the reverse process and threatening the
integrity of our industry. I remain opti misti c. I am positi ve that
with pati ence and diligence we will survive and prevail. We
must, we have no choice.
Your choice is simple. You must stay involved, focused,
educated, and up to date on changes taking place within the
reverse mortgage industry, to include Governmental changes,
lender policies, programs and general underwriti ng and
disclosures. Make a habit of a weekly check on the HUD site for
new mortgagee lett ers; you can fi nd them here:
htt p://www.hud.gov/offi ces/adm/hudclips/lett ers/mortgagee/
Keep reading chronicles and magazines like The Reverse Review
or consider joining a member organizati on like REMALO. But,
you must conti nue to hone your sales skills and techniques.
You must learn to adapt to the new changes in technology, also
referred to by many as Web 2.0.
To stay connected with your senior clients you must adapt to the
new landscape. You must learn how to blog, have a web site;
sign up for Facebook and other social networking sites.
However, don’t forget the good old days. The best tried and
true method is fi nding ways to get in front of your senior clients,
through organizati ons, seminars, and direct response mailings.
Remember the word “Trust”. The trust word is alive and well.
Trust is sti ll the most important word in our senior’s vocabulary
and this will never change regardless of the media. Quite
frankly, nothing in marketi ng has changed, only new forms and
methods to spread the word.
Your job is to spread the word using your two most valuable
resources; ti me and money. Leveraging both your ti me and
money is your biggest asset and your biggest challenge. Think
about it, when you spend a minute, an hour, or a day to do some
task, that ti me is lost and never to be recovered. The same thing
is true for money. When your dollar is gone it is gone forever
and will fall into the jaws of “Never Land” only to appear as debt
if not used wisely.
Your challenges -> use both your ti me and money wisely, as if
it were your last day on this earth. Leverage your knowledge
to do the most good for you and your senior client. Hop on the
bandwagon and ride as if your life depended on it.
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