Adjusting your style can help build partnerships and close more loans

David Dickey, founder and CEO, National Home Loan Advocates

As published in Scotsman Guide's Residential Edition, February 2010.

One of the keys to gaining more partners and customers — and to closing more loans — is understanding other people’s personality types and your own. When you recognize your prospects’ or referral partners’ personality types, you can better grasp their needs and be more aware of how to influence them effectively.

Your ability to relate, communicate, influence and motivate can help you build your mortgage business.

Consider the people you must influence and communicate with effectively to be successful. They likely are borrowers, referral partners, loan prospects, colleagues, subordinates, managers, processors, underwriters, lenders and third-party service-providers.

As you think about these people, you may realize you communicate better with some groups than others. Perhaps you don’t typically see eye to eye with people in a certain group. Or maybe it’s more individual, and you find yourself interacting uncomfortably with a certain type of person regardless of which group they fall into.

These feelings often stem from personality types and the dynamics involved when people of various personality types communicate and attempt to relate to one another.

Consider the following four personality types and a few common words and phrases that describe people in each category:

1. Dominant: Aggressive, assertive, likes to make decisions and get things done
2. Influencer: Social, optimistic, lively, likes to interact with others
3. Steady: Calm, laid-back, reliable, stable, prefers security
4. Conscientious: Detail-oriented, focuses on facts and information, logical

Now take a moment to think about your natural communication style and professional approach. Often, high-performing salespeople can quickly and intuitively identify personality types and adjust their own style to meet the needs of others. They may not know how to categorize people psychologically, but they can quickly detect other people’s emotions and moods and change their own demeanor and tone of voice accordingly.

Let’s look at a few examples of interactions between personality types, presuming a mortgage broker is the first type mentioned in each.

• Dominant and steady: In this instance, brokers would likely risk a sale and partnership if they didn’t recognize and adjust their style to meet the other person’s needs. People with dominant personality types naturally tend to move transactions quickly without developing much rapport.
• Dominant and dominant: In this case, it is likely that the broker and the other person will see eye to eye. Neither will have a problem getting right to business and, if agreement is reached, moving forward. It could be useful for the broker to let the other person take a little bit of a lead position to avoid conflict.
• Influencer and dominant or conscientious: In each of these cases, the broker’s talkative approach could irritate the other person, who seeks quick answers and details. Some people don’t care about rapport, and it’s important for influencers — and many salespeople fall into this category — to realize this.

By understanding a little more about personality types and how they influence communication methods, brokers can adjust their behavior when necessary, build better partnerships and close more loans.

David Dickey is the founder and CEO of National Home Loan Advocates and an accomplished mortgage-banking executive with more than 22 years of mortgage and housing-industry experience. Dickey can be reached at NHLA headquarters in Dallas at (866) 223-4707 or by e-mail at David.Dickey@NationalHomeLoanAdvocates.com.