A shocking 60% of clients say no at least 4 times before saying yes to a transaction. For mortgage brokers who don’t make a follow-up attempt, just results in wasted potential.
As a mortgage broker, you will be confronted by objections all the time – and that’s perfectly normal in this line of work. Call it the cost of doing business. The hallmark of a great salesman is to learn how to handle their potential clients’ objections and formulate a comeback.
Start by putting yourself in your client’s shoes. It’s not every day that a person decides, “Hey, I think I’ll take out a mortgage today.” It’s a very deliberate process that requires a lot of research.
For obvious reasons, this will be a stressful experience for clients since they will be on the hook for monthly payments that will probably continue well into their twilight years.
This is why clients will put up a few roadblocks after you’ve laid down your offer. If anything, you should be surprised if your clients don’t put up any resistance.
An inexperienced mortgage broker may take objections as a sign that clients are trying to shut them down, but more often than not, it’s a sign that they need reassurance and guidance.
The trick is to formulate a response that empathizes with the client’s objections as opposed to coming across as too defensive or ‘pushy. Buyers rate their experience with pushy brokers as negative. Make use of words depicting collaboration. Top salespeople are ten times more likely to use words like ‘together’, ‘us’, ‘we’, and ‘ our’ to handle sales objections. Gong reports that collaborative words increase sales by 35%.
Therefore, it’s better to appear as a consultant rather than a salesman. We are all trained to be wary of sales people, but by offering your knowledge – while being conscious that your aim is conversion – you can naturally dissolve many sales objections as soon as buyers think of them.
Learning Objection Handling for Mortgage Brokers
As a mortgage broker, objection handling is about formulating a response to the client in a way that alleviates their concerns, changes their opinion, and reinforces your talking points.
Some mortgage brokers double down on their prospects with their sales pitch in hopes of converting clients – but this is an amateurish approach to sales and falls outside the scope of objection handling.
Instead of getting frustrated and emotional, objection handling lets you get ahead of your competitors by responding with patience and candor. Formulating the right response to a rejection requires deep insight into client objections, and using them as an opportunity to convert them into sales.
It’s also prudent for mortgage brokers to make a distinction between an objection and a brush off. You can always turn around a prospect’s objections.
But you can’t really work with brush offs because they often translate to, “I don’t want to talk to you.” In this case, it’s best to give up those leads and cut your losses – for now. The important thing is that they have you under their scopes and can be reinitiated into your marketing funnel via remarketing.
Send them regular emails (usually once a month). Hubspot lays it out better than me here.
The Four-Step Method of Objection Handling
Instead of trying to ‘refute’ your prospects, guide them to come to a different opinion about your deal. And if you still can’t convince them, that’s a good sign they’re not a good fit for your services.
As a general rule, objective handling for mortgage brokers involves four steps: Listening, Acknowledging, Exploring, and Responding.
· The first step is to listen to the objection. This demonstrates to your prospect that you understand their position and care about where they are coming from.
· Step two is to acknowledge their concerns. This is where you demonstrate that you are actively listening in. Acknowledgment can be as simple as a restatement of the client’s objection. A genuine acknowledgment has a calming effect on clients. When dealing with mortgage brokers, some clients just want to know that they’re being heard and taken care of.
· Step three is to explore the root causes of their concerns. It’s important to understand the exact thought process of your customers. People won’t always be upfront with their objections and often use them as a ‘smokescreen’ to hide their actual concerns.
· The fourth and final step is to formulate a response to the objection. This is only possible once you have properly ‘audited’ your customer’s objections. A response can take the shape of a recommendation, an alternative solution, or a next step to close the transaction.
If done right, the four-step guide to objective handling can be used to convert an evasive prospect into a valuable customer. Instead of viewing objections as bottlenecks, you showed view them as an opportunity to foster your relationship with your customers.
Now that you know what objective handling is, let’s deep dive into the 5 most common sales objections for mortgage brokers.
Learn and Overcome their Objections
No one likes parting away with their money, especially when it involves bigger transactions. There’s always some hesitation and pushback involved that keeps prospects from converting – your job as a mortgage broker is to overcome these objections and ease your prospect’s paranoia and fears.
Objection 1 – Pushback
What the prospect says: Let me think over it. I’ll get back to you with a new decision – one week later.
What they actually mean: I’m too afraid to make this decision right now because it’s a major risk for me.
What you can do: Address their fears. If they say they’re not ready and will get back to you in a few days or weeks, let them know that it will be too late by then. Make sure your prospects can see the value of your services.
This is where your understanding of the market comes in to help push them in the forward direction. Listen closely to them, take notes of the main reasons for their hesitation, and try to find a solution for it.
Objection 2: Doubts
What the prospect says: I need someone with experience in my area. You seem to have a lot of experience but it’s not relevant to what they want.
What they actually mean: They have doubts about your expertise and believe they can do better at a similar price point.
What you can do: This type of objection spells opportunity if you know how to turn it around. Try to explain in clear terms why your services are a good fit for them. Are you selling against a competitor? Explain to them why your services are an obviously superior solution.
Objection 3: Money
What the prospect says: Your fees are too expensive. I can get lower commissions elsewhere.
What they actually mean: This one requires a little bit of research and guesstimates about your competition.
What you can do: If your prospect has a real need for your services and are still objecting, then they have most probably run into a cash flow issue. You don’t have to lower your fees.
Try to justify your fees instead. If that doesn’t work and you really want to convert them, try to make your fees more affordable.
Objection 4: Rumor Mills
What they say: Someone made [false statement about you].
What they actually mean: They’ve bought into rumor mills about you and your services, but you can still turn things around.
What you can do: Unfortunately, it’s very common for competitors to spread false rumors about you or your organization. If this happens to be the case, then refute the false statement and confidently tell your prospect, “That’s not true.” In most cases, resolute defense from your end should be enough to win them over.
You may still have to do some explaining to do in order to convince them and refute lingering doubts. At the same time, don’t sink to their level: don’t talk trash about your competition. Some buyers will see this as petty behavior and won’t want to engage further.
Objection 5: Bad Past Experiences
What they say: I’ve had bad experiences with these services before.
What they actually mean: How can I be sure that I won’t get a bad experience this time?
What you can do: Use this sales objection as an opportunity for growth. First, empathize with them. Tell them you know where they’re coming from – however, don’t complete your sales pitch just yet.
Make them feel heard and valued because it will boost your rapport and establish trust. Ask your prospect about their experiences, and listen intently to each detail they share with you.
Once you have empathized with them, you can let them know about your services and why it will be clearly superior to their past experiences. It is important to be very specific instead of being too generic. This will cement trust and improve your chances of converting the prospect.
When an Objection Really Means No
What they say: I’m just not interested.
What they actually mean: I’ve decided to not use your services. There’s no changing my mind.
What you can do: Remarketing may be your best recourse if this happens to be the case.
Sometimes, prospects won’t give you a chance to explain yourself. They’re just too busy or have no faith in sales reps anymore. In their defense, they’ve heard the same old sales pitch one too many times and are tired of it. Your knee-jerk reaction may be to become more assertive and persistent, but at a certain point, an objection really does mean no.
Once you’ve said your piece and the prospect still refuses, let it go. They’re not going to buy against their will. If, after you’ve clearly had a chance to explain yourself, and they continue to restate their objection, they mean it.
This doesn’t mean they won’t convert later – only – now isn’t a good time. Put them into your remarketing list.
Overcoming Sales Objections Through Deliberate Practice
We’ve all heard the age-old adage, ‘practice makes perfect’, but how many of us actually apply it at work?
Most mortgage brokers fail to overcome sales objections because they don’t leverage deliberate practice. Then there’s the old debacle about ‘talent vs. practice’. Studies show that practice trumps talent. Period.
While it’s true that 50% of a salesperson’s results are due to their natural talents, the other 50% still depends on mastery through deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice requires focusing on acquiring expertise in particular areas, and after attaining a point of mastery, you can focus on another point.
As a mortgage broker, you have to be ready to change your personality like the flick of a switch. This requires being relatively comfortable with the role-playing aspect of your job. Through deliberate practice, you can acquire expertise in overcoming sales objections.
It also prevents you from losing what you learn. Did you know that over 84% of sales personnel will lose the sales training they acquire after just 90 days? Deliberate practice lets you retain what you’ve learned so you can use it to win over clients at a later stage.
An instance is in soccer. Rather than practicing generally, a defender who pays attention to his clearances and then how he controls the ball will be better in these areas than one who spends more hours on general practice, even if the other defender is more talented.
Malcolm Gladwell explains the power of deliberate practice in his book, “Outlier”. He calls it the ‘10,000-hour rule’. Simply put, the more time you spend mastering a particular skill (in our case, overcoming sales objections), the easier it will be to stay one step ahead of the client’s objections.
Given enough practice, the brain optimizes neural circuits that ensure these skills are performed at the drop of a hat and without thinking. You could call it ‘force of habit’.
How Can You Apply Deliberate Practice?
Gladwell whittles deliberate practice down to two major steps:
· Maximize every opportunity to learn
· Practice each learning opportunity until you’ve hit the mark
Apply what you’ve learned to all your sales discussions. Take every discussion with a prospect as an opportunity to learn. Make notes of every success and mistakes you made, and try to find ways of improving it.
With enough deliberate practice, you’ll observe trends and patterns of sales objections from different prospects. It won’t be long before you’ll develop the intuition needed to think ahead and handle sales objections before they even happen.
Studies prove time and again that deliberate practice can eliminate sales objections – like a hot knife through butter.
Conclusion
Deliberate practice helps you to identify, iterate, and improve what works across your prospect’s journey. With deliberate practice and attention, you can become a master salesman and mortgage broker that blows the competition away and convert most of your prospects.
Together, we can optimize your buyers journey together and get you to closing more sales. We are expert marketers and salespersons for mortgage brokers like you. We would love to deploy our expertise in lead generation, search engine marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, and more to elevate your business.
You can email us at info@redriverdigitalmedia.com or contact us now at 832-732-9037.
