By Pat Sherlock

As everyone in the mortgage banking industry knows, loan origination is a hard job.

The emotional roller coaster that originators go through on a daily basis is not for the faint of heart. Today, in our more difficult marketplace, this is especially true.

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[caption id="attachment_9789" align="alignleft" width="290"] Pat Sherlock[/caption]

Whether it is coming from the company, or the individual, the pressure to perform is tremendous. In my opinion, there are three primary factors, or habits, that distinguish originators who generate leads successfully--from those who fail in this arena:

1. The best originators serve as great teachers to their clients. What does that mean? Selling at its core is the ability to influence another person. Many average originators can't or won't take on this role and are more product experts than anything else. Product specialists are more likely to be successful during a refinance boom because customers are coming to them. On the other hand, top salespeople form a credible relationship with customers and prospects by aligning their efforts with the customer's emotions and mindset with the goal of making the best decision for the customer. Weaker originators want the product to sell itself.

2. Top originators recognize that the selling environment is changing and are willing to learn new techniques to adapt accordingly. This is no surprise to any sales trainer who has top producers in a class. They are the best students and the most demanding. A teacher must deliver their "A" game to them.

If the marketplace is first-time homebuyers, these originators are texting updates because that is what their customers want. Top originators are continually learning and tweaking their sales models. They have coaches, read books, and go to advanced training classes.

They are proactive and don't wait for the company to provide what they need to be successful. They do whatever it takes to get better.

Also, top originators also realize that they don't know everything and are willing to do the work needed to meet customers' needs. Low-performing originators tend to make excuses for why they aren't doing more production and want the selling world to stay the same. They are stuck in the past.

3. Top salespeople have a great attitude and lift the people around them up including operational staff. Sub-par originators have the opposite attitude and blame everyone else for their failures. They do not recognize or admit that to change poor sales results, they must first take responsibility and own their situation.

There is no question that today's selling requires originators to cast a wide net and make lead generation an integral part of their daily sales activities. The reality is that originators always need to replace customers or referral sources who do not match their current selling model or sweet spot.

Originators who aren’t continually prospecting are destined to be left behind.

About the Author: Pat Sherlock is the founder of QFS Sales Solutions, an organization that help sales organizations improve their sales talent management and performance. For more information, visit https://patsherlock.com

The term “sphere” might be the most overused term in sales and marketing literature.

For some, the sphere is represented by one’s immediate friends, but for others it is someone’s previous customers.

A sphere is a compendium of someone’s life, and includes their background, contacts, experiences, interests and more.

In reality, your sphere includes these elements and much more. It is when we define the sphere in the right way that we find out how important our sphere is to our marketing plan. In the long-run, our sphere should be the basis, or foundation, of this plan.

[caption id="attachment_9654" align="alignleft" width="280"] Dave Hershman[/caption]

First, what is one’s sphere? A sphere is comprised of those you know and those who know you as well. Put it this way--if you were walking down the street and passed someone–would you say hello? If you would, they are part of your sphere. In addition to this relationship component, there is also a component of commonality. There are those you don’t know, but with whom you have something in common.

For example, let’s say you go to church or temple. There may be 500 families and 1,000 members of the religious organization. You probably know 50 of these people because you live near them, sit near them, or even have served on committees with them. But there are 950 people that you don’t know who are part of the sphere.

It has a commonality component and a relationship component. The commonality component adds the largest numbers to your sphere while the relationship component adds the most important individuals to your sphere.

The next segment will look at the seven all-important segments of one’s personal sphere.

About the Author: Dave Hershman is a VP of Sales for Weichert Financial Services and founder or OriginationPro (www.OriginationPro.com), providing marketing content and training programs for the industry.  Email him with questions or comments at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

[caption id="attachment_9831" align="alignleft" width="291"] Rick Grant[/caption]

By Rick Grant

When I started tweeting, there weren’t a great many serious mortgage industry professionals on the platform. What could an originator say of any importance using only 140 characters? It turns out, quite a lot. Today, there are thousands of originators using Twitter to get attention, share information and get more business.

By making it easy to send out a tweet when they posted to LinkedIn, the most popular social media platform for business people, Twitter introduced many industries to its platform. Using Twitter can boost your business, keep you in front of clients, realtors and other influencers.

But how do you know if your posts are actually connecting with anyone? Twitter has released a tweet activity dashboard that will allow any user to learn more about their tweets and how they are resonating with their audience.

According to Twitter, it’s dashboard can allow any user to:

• See how people engage with your tweets in real time.
• Compare your tweet activity and followers and see how they trend over time.
• Click on any tweet to get a detailed view of the number of retweets, replies, likes, follows, or clicks it receives.
• Get detailed insights into who your audience is, especially those who engage with your tweets, and
• Download your tweet metrics.

Using the tool, it’s quite easy to see a detailed analysis of your Twitter activity. For each tweet a user sends, they can use the dashboard to track:

• How many impressions the tweet got.
• How many other Twitter users engaged with the tweet, and
• The engagement rate (impressions divided by engagements).

By clicking on individual tweets, users can then get more specific information on each engagement, such as:

• Video views
• Link clicks
• Photo or video clicks
• Likes
• Retweets
• Replies
• Detail expands
• Profile clicks

You can see all of this data over time, so you can track average engagements per day and how your numbers are changing throughout the month. This will allow you to determine what is resonating with your audience so you can tweet out more of it.

The available data goes back to October 2013, so if you’ve been tweeting as long as I have, you’ll be able to track your performance over time.

 To access your tweet activity dashboard, visit analytics.twitter.com. It is also accessible from the iOS and Android Twitter apps.

The  dashboard makes it easy for an originator to know his Twitter strategy is working and he can continue on it. Or it’s not, and changes to the strategy are necessary.

About the Author: Rick Grant is the president of RGA Public Relations and a frequent contributor to mortgage industry publications. Email him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.