With a new technology, you can convert more phone prospects to gain an advantage over competitors

Jim Enright, partner, Lenders Insight

As published in Scotsman Guide's Residential Edition, November 2005.

With lead-conversion statistics at 1 percent to 8 percent for Internet leads and 15 percent to 75 percent for traditional methods, incremental lead improvements have dramatic effects on your net profits.

There's an easy way to convert your phone leads that will give you the unfair phone advantage. It's virtual mortgage meetings.

Seeing, hearing and feeling

Before you can improve your conversion ratios, you must understand the process from a borrower's perspective. It all starts at the beginning.

Generally speaking, there are three learning styles: auditory, visual and kinesthetic. A landmark 1986 book for educators, Teaching Students to Read Through Their Individual Learning Styles, found that approximately 20 percent to 30 percent of students remember what is heard (auditory); 40 percent what is seen or read (visual); and the rest what is felt or touched (kinesthetic). For my purposes, I will assume that we retain these learning styles throughout our lives.

On the phone, you are engaging the auditory learning style. So if you call 10 people, statistically only two to three of those people are likely to process and remember information through hearing it. How effective can your conversations be with the other seven to eight people who learn visually or kinesthetically? With this knowledge, you can analyze things from your client's perspective.

To begin, try this exercise: Check your e-mail inbox and your junk-mail folder. How many mortgage "opportunities" do you see? Read the subject lines. How many get your attention and compel you to open them?

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