I don’t think anyone disputes that we are now in a different mortgage market. The economy is shaky, buyers are nervous, and many prospects are not qualified for a variety of reasons. This makes effectively qualifying and nurturing leads more important than ever.

The Everyone Qualifies Market is Gone

During the real estate and mortgage refinance boom products were moot. Everyone could get a mortgage loan and everyone was in the wrong product for a tumbling rate environment.

The natural effect was that everyone with a telephone became a real estate or mortgage “professional” and the true professionals got lazy. So, stop crying in your Cheerios and get back to being a professional–do the hard work for your clients and yourself.

So do you have a plan?

Build a Market Plan (Playbook)

Any plan in this market environment needs to start with your products. For mortgage, start with an inventory of your available products and the qualification matrices. Make sure you also rate the stability of those products and the companies behind them. For real estate, do similar exercise only with housing inventory and the nuances of special property opportunities.

With a good understanding of you product base begin to build a playbook and throw away the scripts. Like a good athlete train yourself to react to scenarios, not memorize static cliches and punch lines. Your playbook, marketing and sales plan, should be based on:

• Local real estate trends
• National and local economic trends
• Current rate environment
• Popular past products in your market (what people are likely coming to you with)
• Lots of graphs of historical home sales, economic cycles, and rate trends for you market

Work the Market Smarter

This will give you valuable insight into what and when to use the specific products in your inventory. These elements, in your marketing and in your sales process, will also educate and build confidence in your customer that they are doing the right thing for this market. It will also make sure you are qualified to make the recommendation you are giving the customer.

The playbook approach makes sure you have the right answer on the tip of your tongue–because you already figured it out.

You will be surprised when you do this research what products will and will not work and how much better prepared you are to know your target customers. You might also identify and decide to target a particular niche customer or market and be the expert provider.