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Doug Smith, founder of Douglas Smith & Associates, is a 24-year industry veteran. His career spans the areas of loan origination, sales training, management development, marketing, personal coaching and corporate sales. Doug’s columns appear in Mortgage Originator, Mortgage Planner, The Mortgage Record and Mortgage Broker magazines. He publishes a monthly newsletter, Power Selling, and authored Climbing the Ladder of Success. For more information, visit http://www.dougsmithonline.com/ |
| Power Selling: Success? It’s About Time! |
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During the past two months I have been meeting with branch managers and facilitating an open forum discussion called “Leading Forward.” Our mission in the three hour offsite event is to discover ways they can lead their sales teams through a successful 2010. One of the questions I ask the group is: “For your loan origi-nators to have a good year this year, what’s the most important thing they’ll have to do differently?” The most common answer I hear is this: “They are going to have to work more hours.”Everybody likes the idea of working less and earning more. But the myth of “working smarter and not harder” is truly that---a myth. A common characteristic of top producers is and has always been their work ethic. The people that earn the most money in this business are the people that work the hardest. With all the recent changes to RESPA and loan programs, today’s originator will spend more time on each loan file. More time per file means less time for other activities like sales, prospecting and client follow up. To make sure those things happen, more time will be required. Most managers agree that most of their originators could and should be working more hours. It is common, they tell me, to see an originator come in to work at 9:30 or 10 am and leave by 4 pm. Throughout the day, personal errands and activities also distract many originators from their jobs. The result? Many loan origin-ators are working, in fact, only about a 25 to 35 hour week. Where do you stand in this? How many hours are you investing in your job and career every day? There’s no doubt that if you are producing ten or twenty loans a month, you are working…and working hard. But if your performance results are lacking, the first place to investigate is your time commitment: How many hours do you actually work each and every day? Here’s a great little exercise. For a full week, jot down the exact time you start working every day. If you stop to take care of personal business or run an errand, make a note of the time you stopped working and started working again. At the end of each day, jot down the time you went home. Be absolutely accurate and honest in the numbers you write down. At the end of the week, add it all up. If you just lived through a typical week, that’s how many hours you are truly investing in your job. If the results concern you, that’s good! You’ve just taken the first step to improving yourself: awareness. Now, start adding more time to your work schedule every day until you get to “full time.” According to every man-ager I speak with today, if an originator isn’t working at least 40 to 50 hours a week right now, this is going to be a tough year to survive. Power Selling The editor of Power Selling is Douglas Smith. Please direct any comments or input to 877.430.2329.
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