What Makes You Different?

You are ready to buy a home.  You’re not rich.  You know you are going to need a mortgage. So you do what anyone would do – you Google “mortgage lender”.  Google returns 31,000,000 results.  Yes, 31 million.

Every one of those 31 million is fighting to get your business. Unfortunately, they are all saying the same thing.  Every website you click on says, in some variation, “Choose us.  We’re great.”  “We have great rates.”  “We have great products.”  “We have great customer service.”

And therein lies the problem; every lender is saying the same thing, and nobody is standing out from the crowd.

As a mortgage lender or broker, you need to change your pitch from “We’re great” to “We’re different.”

Which begs the question – what makes you different?  If you can’t answer this question, you will be judged on one thing – rate.  If you can’t show the consumer what makes you different, they have no choice but to compare you by rate and rate alone.

I cannot tell you what makes you different, but I can tell you that your differentiator should contain three elements.

1. What makes you different should be provable and/or measurable.
   “We have four-hour turn time” will beat “We’re fast” every time. “98 percent of all people who come to me for a loan get approved” will be a persuasive statement to a first-time homebuyer who is concerned about qualifying. It is one thing to claim that you provide excellent customer service.  It is much more impressive when you can say, “Our last 100 customers rated us an average of 9.9 out of 10 when it comes to customer satisfaction.” Additionally, detailing a differentiator as provable and measurable allows you to compete effectively with the customer who is shopping.  Arm your customer with the facts to make them a smart and confident shopper.  Maybe someone will beat you by an eighth of a point on rate, but when your competition can’t definitively answer what their turn time is, their customer satisfaction rate or their approval percentage, the customer knows who the true professional is.
2. Your differentiator must be ‘talkable’ – meaning it should be easily said by you and easily understood by the customer.
   Too often I hear people tell consumers about reserves, agency ratings and warehouse lines.  These are terms that most consumers are not familiar with. If your “in-house servicing” is what makes you different, make sure you explain what “in-house servicing” means to the customer.
3. Your differentiator must be ‘feelable’… to the customer.  The differentiator must be for the customer.
   If you have four-hour turn time, how will the customer feel that and what will it mean to them?

In summary, what makes you different should be:

1. Measurable / Provable
2. Talkable
3. Feelable

If your differentiator contains these three elements, it will make you stand out from the 31 million.