Reverse Mortgage Leads – Measuring & Tracking Your Sales & Marketing
Metrics. Not the metrics we were taught in school but the metrics of your business, marketing and leads. Simply put, metrics measures the effectiveness and cost of marketing efforts.
The most successful reverse mortgage originators (and lenders) closely track key benchmarks such as the following:
- Lead to Opportunity Ratio
- Lead to Funded Loan
- Cost per funded loan
- Days from lead to funded loan
- Loan fallout rate
- Outbound calls to Opportunity
- Application (meeting) to funded loan
These are just a few statistics that must be tracked for successful reverse mortgage marketing. Why? Trends. If you see a decrease in your lead to funded loan ratio perhaps its an issue of marketing in areas with lower home values and higher mortgage balances thus disqualifying many prospects. Or it may be an indicator of a need for better education and sales. Without careful tracking you will be ‘rolling the dice’ with your marketing dollars and even worse without a system for methodical follow up with prospects your ratios can erode increasing your costs.
You don’t have to have a PhD in Mathematics to track your marketing metrics, just some simple know-how. First, a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager like Reverse Fortune’s RmCRM) is key for tracking and following up with potential borrowers. Your CRM can help you keep tabs on how many leads you are purchasing or receiving and how many of those are becoming opportunities agreeing to move forward with education, application, etc. Also a simple spreadsheet goes a long way. You can build a simple matrix with worksheets for each month within one Excel Workbook and track the above-mentioned ratios. Even easier, for Producer’s Club Members of Reverse Fortunes, we have the Loan & Productivity Manager. Just enter loans, match to or create marketing campaigns and see your numbers, return on investment (ROI) and other important statistics.
The choice is yours. Embrace metrics or lose track of how your business is really doing. We find the most successful reverse mortgage professionals using some system to track their sales and marketing. Now is your chance to do the same.
2 Comments
Like some people never track their checking account and call the bank daily or more to find out what’s left, some originators only get a good grip of how they are doing at tax time. By then it is way too late to make changes for the last year.
Your recommendations are very valid. As humans our most frequent and effective method of learning is through early understanding of our mistakes. BUT if we learn about the mistakes months and months later, the value of those lessons diminishes over time. The sooner errors can be detected the higher the probably they will not become habits.
Good stuff. I hope you had a great Fourth!!!
Great analogy of checking balance! So true!