Even if you’re an honest mortgage broker, you’re still a mortgage broker

Seth Godin writes in his latest post Just because they say it that:

The challenge to a marketer that chooses to enter a market with a miserable history of customer abuse is obvious: you can claim to be better, to be unevil, benevolent even, but people just aren’t prepared to believe you. It doesn’t fit the consumer’s worldview. So, you could be the honest politician or the quality contractor or the direct marketer with no fine print and no spam, but you better be prepared to prove it over and over before we believe you.

This is the problem that faces mortgage brokers; in fact Seth must have been in a hurry to not mention us because the mortgage/real estate industry is the poster child for this type of customer perception. We face this problem every day at my company, and if you are an honest, upfront, ethical mortgage or real estate professional you’re confronting it daily as well. It doesn’t matter what you say, or how inviting your voice is, your marketing materials are, or how friendly your web site is. Customer’s aren’t prepared to believe you.

Your explanations, assurances, everything are falling on ears that are waiting for the bait and switch – that are EXPECTING the moment to come when YOU drop the hammer on them and their worldview is validated by you screwing them.

This is what makes the "honest" approach in our industry such a hard sell. It doesn’t jive with the customer perception. Everyone says they’re honest and there is nothing you can do to earn the trust of your customer until you deliver on what you promised. Even then many customers regard themselves as lucky, rather than regarding you as living up to your word, when they get the loan that they want. Their world view of our industry doesn’t improve that much. You can deliver on your word and give them the loan that they want and were expecting (itself remarkable in our industry) and it still isn’t remarkable to the customer. Their world view has not changed enough by you delivering on your promise just once. They go out and do their next loan with some one else.

So what is a mortgage broker to do? They have to build a network of customers that they have proven themselves to over and over, so that the world view of this small group of customers is changed enough to where their view includes you as the honest mortgage/real estate professional. There is no way to do this other than deliver over and over on your promise to these customers.

An example. My friend is a commercial real estate loan officer who has been delivering on his word for 10 years. Now he spends exactly $0 on marketing. He has developed a network of customers who trust him implicitly to handle their commercial real estate deals. He is a master networker and relationship manager and he used those skills to develop trust with this network of customers over the last 10 years. He used his ability to deliver on his word plus his ability to foster relationships and turned those abilities in to a dream job where he doesn’t call on leads – his phone rings every day with people seeking him out.

In the mortgage industry this is the only way to do it. You have to prove yourself to customers, both borrowers and Realtors enough times to change their world view – to one you have rewritten to include you as an honest mortgage professional.