Prioritizing your leads (to sell early and often)

Jake Vermillion	Welcome to Up-Market Sales Success, a series designed to help busy loan officers just like you make the most of high-volume markets. My name is Jake, I'm a member of the Mortgage Champions team, and we are incredibly excited to bring this powerful offering to you. Let's dive into the topic at hand, Prioritizing your leads (to sell early and often), with Dale Vermillion. Hi Dale!
Dale Vermillion	Hi Jake!
Jake Vermillion	In this installment, we want to explore the best way to prioritize a lot of leads, as is common in a high-volume market, as well as unpack your advice for loan officers on selling early and often. Let's start with prioritizing your leads. How do you do it? When do you do it? And maybe most importantly, why do you need to do it?
Dale Vermillion	Boy, you nailed that one Jake. The most important thing is why you need to do it. You're absolutely right. And the reason why you need to do it is because here's what I want you to remember for the rest of your life: there is a priority order to everything in life. To everything! Every decision we make, every single minute of every single day, should be made from a priority mindset of, "What is the most important thing I should be doing?" if we want to truly be successful people. if you start your day, let's say for example, and you've got 10 leads that you've gotten that are in your queue. Here's what I know: one of those is the best and the most important lead you've got, one of those is the least sellable you've got, and the other eight fall somewhere in priority order between those two extremes. What we have to do is we have to learn to go through the things that we have and ask ourself the question: "Of all of these things I'm working on, where should I begin?" Because, what I've learned is if you start with the best lead, you're going to get a sale. If you get a sale, you're going to build confidence and momentum. And you're going to have that absolutely golden day that you've been looking for—the Midas touch day. The bottom line is this: most loan officers, what they will do is the opposite of what you should. We get our opportunities in front of us. And what do we do? We try to get rid of the bad ones so that we can move to the good ones. No! Start with your success first, get successful, get that momentum, and now start selling the rest. As leads, keep coming in throughout the course of the day, keep reprioritizing all day long. Because you might get one at two o'clock that trumps the other three that you had when you were coming in at two o'clock. You want to get to your best customers, your most qualified customers, those ones that you know you can sell, first, so you enhance your chances of success.
Jake Vermillion	You know it's funny, pretty often when I catch up with someone who you trained quote-unquote "back in the day," I hear the same foundational pieces of the Mortgage Champions Selling System. And one of those is almost always, "Sell early and sell often." Can you unpack that phrase as well as give some guidance on how a loan officer can do exactly that in a high-volume market?
Dale Vermillion	Well first, I'm so excited that in 37 years I actually got one of my quotes that got coined. So, people do remember that one! And here's the reason why it's so important: the reason you sell early and sell often is because of confidence—because of that momentum thing I talked about. And let me unpack that for you. I tell the story all the time. When I was a manager, when you came in and you worked for me you were not allowed to check your email or voicemail until 11 o'clock in the morning. Why not because I knew there was nothing good in there. What I see all the time—and this is the mistake, this is the number one mistake we make in a high-volume market, or in any market for that matter—and that is we come in, we got all these leads we're dealing with and we just start slogging through it. It's very reactive. It's, "Okay, you know, I'm just going to get to the first one that called me," or, "I'm going to deal with the biggest problem first to get it off my desk." No! Take a minute or two to stop. I want you to make sure that before you ever start doing any of that, that you're focusing on sales. You want to sell early and sell often. If you get a sale early, you're going to get sales all day long. And here's what I know. We've said it so many times: one sale a day is about 15 loans a month. Two sales a day is about 30 loans a month. And three sales days, about 45 loans a month, based on normal conversion rates. So, what I want you to do is I want you to come in every day with the mindset, "I'm going to prioritize my opportunities and I'm going to start selling. I'm not going to start working on pipeline problems. I'm not going to start trying to call customers that are upset and mad. I'm going to set my day up so that my out of office says that I don't start till 11:00 even though I started at 8:45, cause from 8:45 to nine, I'm prioritizing my leads. And at 9:00 baby. I'm hitting the phones. I'm selling." And I want you to be that kind of loan officer that focuses on sales first so you build your pipeline, you build your momentum, because here's the beauty: if you sell in the morning and then a deal does fall apart, which they do, you've already covered it. Your whole. If you don't sell in the morning and you lose a deal, your entire day is going to be shot and you can't afford to lose days in this business.
Jake Vermillion	Any parting thoughts on this topic, Dale?
Dale Vermillion	You know, the bottom line to all of this is simply this: I'm trying to make the most of my day and I'm trying to guard and protect my positive attitude. Look, there there's not a single sales person I've ever met in the 1,000,000+ that I've trained. And if I asked them the question: is positive attitude and important part of your success? Everybody's going to say yes. There is no "negative Nelly" top-producing loan officers. There, there is no crabby top-performers. It just doesn't happen that way. You've got to have the right mindset. Well how do you do that? Work smart, don't work hard. Be proactive, not reactive. And make sure that you start your day right by prioritizing, prioritize all day long, always work on the best things first because that's going to produce the most fruit.
Jake Vermillion	Don't forget to complete today's skill challenge by taking the time to prioritize your leads today! As Dale mentioned, lead prioritization is something that you do constantly throughout the day. So, even if you're listening at three in the afternoon, it's not too late to identify and call your best lead right now. And then, as always, let us know how it went by clicking the feedback link in the show description. Coming up next, Streamlining your value prop (with a 30-second pitch).