– Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy Podcast. I have with me, Luke Shankula. He is a CEO and leading mortgage marketing expert. And boy, that’s a huge challenge right now when you think about market and real estate in today’s uncertain market. So if you would just tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started in this, then we’ll talk a little bit about what some of the challenges are today.

– Sure, sure, so, thank you for having me, first of all, thank you so much. Second of all, yeah, I mean, so I work in the mortgage industry here, doing marketing for mortgage professionals. The reason I sort of fell into this market was–

– Where is here? Juts a moment, where is here?

– I’m in San Diego, I’m in San Diego. My team’s kind of based all over the place everybody’s remote. So I have people, you know, internationally, I have people here, you know, in Minnesota, in Florida, so we’re all over the place, but, yeah, I’m personally, I live in San Diego, so, you know, I get the horrible weather that we have down here. But, so how I got started in this space is I, right out of college, probably about, probably six, eight months later, I got a job as kind of an entry level job at a mortgage company. I was doing all kinds of different things, worked there for about four and a half years. And then they decided, the company that owned the little mortgage, the division I was under, they decided to shut down our division, laid everybody off, January of 2017. I was like, you know what? I wanna go off on my own. I tried to start a contract processing business. I tried this to, I got my license to become a loan officer myself. And in that time I started to learn Facebook ads, marketing strategies, stuff like that to generate leads for myself, to generate business for myself. In the meantime, I pretty much found out that I didn’t want to become a loan officer, but I did fall in love with marketing. And so I guess the rest is history. I mean, while, you know, definitely it wasn’t a smooth ride. You know, it was probably, you know, a good two years before I made any money. But yeah, that’s kind of the way I got started there with getting into the space because I just naturally fell into working with loan officers because of my background.

– Got it, so you can talk about 2020 being a great year for mortgages, talk a little bit about that. And we’re getting towards the end of 2020, so predictions for 2021 maybe useful as well.

– Yeah, I mean, so, right now rates are about as low as they’ve ever been. And so, you know, for people that have mortgages, refinancing is fantastic right now. Obviously the rates are really low, historically low rates. So it’s definitely important there, and the reality is it’s probably not going to stick around forever. You know there’s some people that say the rates are gonna be low for the next 12, 18 months. There’s some people think that as soon as the, everything that happens with the forbearance like, you know, how many people are in forbearance right now, whenever that sort of shoe drops there may be some issues with the market. So there’s a lot of sort of differing opinions there. But the reality is there’s probably going to be a, sort of an extended period of lower rates, which is good for refinancing. It’s good for purchasing because you have increased purchase power and obviously providing that you have a stable job, stable income, you know, stuff like that. It’s probably a really great time to buy or refinance. just from the standpoint of rates are so low that you purchasing power is much higher generally than it has been in the past.

– So Luke, you focus on what residential property, ’cause I would guess that there’s quite a difference between residential and commercial property today.

– Correct. Yeah. So we work primarily and by primarily we work only with residential loan officers, branch managers, brokers, you know, anybody in that mortgage space that works with residential, we do service those people.

– Okay so you also talk about this as a business opportunity for a lot of people. Talk a little bit, a little bit about that.

– What do you mean? Business opportunity–

– To be–

– For loan officers?

– Pardon me.

– For loan officers.

– For loan, for actually being in the residential business.

– Right, Yeah. Yeah, the opportunity right now is huge, right? Because of the fact that the rates are low, loan officers are probably busier than they have been in a very, very long time if not ever. because again, everybody has the capacity to refinance right now, right? I mean, I’ve heard people that you know are getting rates in the twos, which is pretty much unheard of. I mean, I remember I bought my house in 2015 and we got like 3.25, which was pretty much unheard of at the time. And now I’m seeing sometimes even like VA programs and stuff like that again, this is all contingent on your credit profile and a whole bunch of other things. And I’m not a loan officer myself, but I’ve seen people getting as low as 2.25 even these days. Which is super low and so loan officers right now are very overwhelmed with the volume. I think the applications are like two to three times the amount they normally are. And generally the time that’s the busiest it’s the summer, but it’s really been nonstop since probably about March. March was when the rates really started dropping and then they continued to go lower and lower and lower. And so when you know where we’re at right now, the loan officers are just real busy. And so, yeah, it’s a good opportunity for loan officers, but with the reality that it is gonna change at some point, that the market’s gonna slow down. You know, obviously with, it’s kind of strange because at the back-end of COVID or like when COVID started, that’s really what drove the rates down, which is for this specific community has actually driven business up. Whereas, you know, in some industries it’s actually caused the opposite. So, you know, for right now it’s a good position to be in for loan officers.

– So Luke, you do a lot of work in the digital marketing space with lead generation and you do that specifically for what purpose.

– So we’re looking, we’re helping loan officers identify consumers that are looking to purchase or refinance a house. So we use digital marketing, Facebook ads, Instagram kind of dabbling with YouTube right now as well. And just putting an offer in front of them saying, “Hey, we got these programs that are available “that can help you buy a house. “Rates are at the lowest ever, you know, come check us out.” And then we have our clients reach out to them. Once someone inquires for, you know, let’s say a purchase or refinance, they walk them through the process, they get them approved, and so on and so forth.

– Okay so if you would spend a little bit of time talking about your lead generation process, ’cause I know for most people in the marketing world lead generation is the make it or break it part of the marketing effort, right? So if you would talk a little bit about that please.

– Yeah, absolutely and so, the one thing that I wanna sort of hit on as well on top of just the lead generation piece is understanding that leads are great and all like getting inquiries, getting people that are interested in your services is awesome, but it’s only great if you have a process in place to convert those leads, those inquiries into deals, right? The average, I think the average based off of studies, the average per, the average company only contacts about 50% of their leads. That’s like, if you look at like the stats, about 50% of the leads, most people are contacting them 24 to 48 hours after the lead comes in, which means the person has moved on. They pretty much probably forgot what they were opting in for. So the reality is if you’re going to invest in something like marketing and lead generation sort of activities, you need to have a systemized process on the back-end that can convert people from just an inquiry into an actual deal, right, into an actual customer. Because a lot of times what people think is that by just paying for leads, by just paying for more inquiries, it’s just gonna lead to more business, but you can’t buy, you can’t just put, just pour a whole bunch of leads into a broken system. Which you’re gonna get if you get a whole bunch of leads into a broken system, as you, you’re gonna get broken results, right? You’re not going to convert at the level you want. You’re not gonna get as many customers as you want. And so that, that piece is super important. That being said, I don’t know if you had a question there.

– Yeah, so what’s the ratio that you think a good marketer should be able to achieve in terms of taking a lead to conversion.

– So it’s gonna depend, wildly both on industry. So for my specific industry, our conversion rates fairly low, but because of the price points of, you know, and the sort of size of the transactions that they do, they only need a couple out of every hundred to make a profit, right? So to ROI, right? So for what we do, incredible conversion is like three to 5%, right? In other, in other industries, that’s probably not gonna be the same, right? Like if they’re lower ticket items, if it’s, you know, a chiropractor, dentist, stuff like that, it’s gonna be a little bit different. And it’s very contingent again, based off of the end user, so let’s just say, you know, we’re sending the leads to, you know, a dentist or something like that. They’re not calling leads and all that stuff, they’re not gonna have the same success as the next dentist that is picking up the phone. They are calling, they are scheduling them and then, they are following up with them. Like those steps are super important, but a lot of it comes down to the end user. Who’s the person that’s actually gonna do the actions that are gonna convert leads into closed deals. And so that’s, again, that’s why I harp on that because the lead is such a small piece of the puzzle, but everybody thinks that by just buying a bunch of leads or buying a bunch of, you know, starting to new marketing without having the process on the back-end, that is just gonna miraculously turn into money. But that’s just not really true, right?

– So share with us, if he would please, the back-end process that you use.

– Yeah so as far as the process goes, I’ll kind of like walk through what we do real quick on the front-end since that’s kind of what we had started with and then I went off on a tangent. On the front-end so one of the things that I always try to do is warm up leads a little bit more, as we generally ask people between 12 and 14 questions on the front-end. So what we’re doing there is we’re increasing, we’re finding the people that have higher intent versus just people that have our look you lose that are just kind of like clicking around, you know, especially with a platform like Facebook, because of the fact that people don’t go on Facebook necessarily to buy things. Whereas like Google’s a little different, they’re gonna go, they’re gonna search for something. With Facebook, you need to find a way to filter out the look you lose. So by doing multiple questions like that, 10, 12, 14 questions, you’re gonna weed out some of the people that aren’t interested, so the only, the very most high intent people are gonna fill out the information. Then we feel, we send them into automations because, you know, while automations are awesome, you know, email drips, text messages, if we’re just trying to get some conversation started with that person. And then, then the person and the sales person takes over as soon as, you know, a prospect response. However, on the back-end, obviously that’s super important as well. And that’s one of the things we teach our loan officers is that it’s, again, it’s just such a small piece of the equation is generating the leads, right? Everybody thinks that again, by generating a whole bunch of leads they’re gonna make a bunch of money, but that doesn’t happen if you don’t have the right process. So what we tell our guys is you need to call right away. Like if you call within 60 seconds, you’re most likely to, you’re more likely to get a conversion than if you wait 24, 48 hours. One of the studies that was done was that if you call within five minutes versus 30 minutes, there’s a hundred times greater chance of getting a hold of that person. So just a 25 minute difference between five and 30 minutes will decrease your chances of getting a hold of them by a hundred times. And this was a study that was done in like 2015. So I would imagine in 2020 consumers, a little more savvy, they know that when they opt in, they’re gonna get calls, stuff like that. It might even be more important. Of course, there’s more distractions now than ever. People are on Facebook, they’re on all kinds of places. They might’ve done something else. So it’s very important and speed to lead is the first thing that we tell our people, that’s super important. Also having a good process, right? So a lot of times people will try to approach an internet lead the same way that they approach, you know, referrals, right? And so if you try to approach both of those the same way or people that are like interested in looking for your stuff, you’re not gonna have the same response. You’re not gonna have the same conversion as you will with something like referral or someone that’s literally walked into your office that has an issue, right? So you need to build that, know that, like that trust. You need to build that with them. You have to build a little bit of rapport. So we kind of tell our people, “Hey, spend a couple of minutes “at the very beginning of the call, building rapport. “Oh, cool. You live in this neighborhood. “Oh, I grew up there or whatever. “I lived down the street or, “Oh, I love that area, that’s a great area. “Oh, what’s going on with you? “Are you a teacher, cool.” Yeah, my mom’s a teacher. She’s just kind of building some rapport there. It doesn’t have to be crazy. You don’t have to get super deep, but just building a little bit of rapport so that they can feel that you’re a real person. You’re not just some call center guy that’s just calling them and trying to get a bunch of information from them. You’re a real person. And then also being an advisor, I think so many times, at least again, I’m speaking a lot of this experience from my specific industry, which is working with loan officers. A lot of times people get on these calls and they’re super transactional. They’re just, they’re going for the sale. They almost have commission breath. You know they actually, they wanna just have, they wanna get the sale and that’s all they can think about. So they go straight for the sale, Oh, let me get the application. Let me fill out all your information. And I’m like the person’s like, “Well, no, “I don’t wanna fill this out, like.” So you have to dig into what they want, what their needs are, their obstacles. What’s held them back from doing, from doing that service that, you know, for us service is mortgage. So what’s been holding you back from purchasing up until this point, and then you can start to figure out what’s going on. The other thing as well is some of these people, consumers don’t always know what’s needed to buy a mortgage. And so a lot of loan officers just assume that everybody knows what’s going on, that you don’t need 20% down, that you don’t need 800 credit score to buy a house. All these things that are sort of not myths, but that’s just kind of, what’s pervasive out there is like, “Hey, you need 20% down or you should have 20% down,” but there’s great programs that allow you to put a little bit less down, get into a house earlier. And so you can start to build equity that way. So we just tell them, “Hey, be an advisor, “and short of show them what’s available on that front, “if that makes sense.”

– All right, so what I’m hearing you say is, I mean, I think it’s fascinating that there’s the hundred full differential in 25 minutes. So in order to achieve that, you have to have people answering the phone around the clock for you I mean, and just keeping track of that is quite a process, isn’t it?

– Right, 100% right. And so that’s why I mentioned like, you know, and one of the things I learned as well is, when I kinda first started, I just thought I could just throw a bunch of leads at them and you know, and that didn’t work. And then I, then I thought by, you know, hey, we’re gonna increase the intent. And we do the long form, like I mentioned, right, with 10, 12 pieces of information that still didn’t work. Our clients are still not converting and they were still leaving, or then I introduced automation and I thought that was going to help . Then I realized no automation is not gonna close the deal. So one thing that we introduced back in December of this last year was we actually brought in two LO coaches, people that have experience in this industry. So we actually have them do weekly calls to train up our clients on best practice, on what to do, on how quickly to call them and what to say, how, you know, once they get the application, what happens after that? What does that process look like? Are they following up with them? Hey, how do you get them in contract? How do you, how do you get them in contact with a real estate agent that can go out and get them looking at houses? You know, stuff like that, that most people don’t think about, right. Again, it’s just the little tip of the iceberg with leads, it’s like, that’s such a small piece of the puzzle. But again, if you pour a whole bunch of leads and like you said, you know, having a CRM taking notes, we found that the people that have the best success are ruthless about taking notes, they know exactly what they’re doing. They know where they are in the process, and that’s why they convert at such a high level.

– So, the back-end process is hugely important. The speed at which you manage people is important. Where else can people fail in the process?

– I mean, so I would say, I would say that probably one of the biggest, and I think this applies to everybody and for everything is mindset. It all comes down to mindset. I think if you approach anything with a bad mindset, the outcome is likely not gonna be what you want it to be, right? So, in this case, if you get on a call and you just assuming that every single call is gonna be, that they’re not gonna want your service, or you just don’t have the energy or whatever. So you get on a call and you like, hi, this is Luke, and I, you know, just was calling on your inquiry like that energy, like they can feel that. They can feel that you’re not motivated. They can feel like that you don’t actually want versus being excited, getting on the call, like just seeing them as another person that you can serve, you can help. And I think that applies to everything. If you approach anything with a bad mindset, again, it’s going to generally have a bad outcome. And so, and you’re gonna blame, oh, well, I tried it, but no, I think they’re really, it comes down to mindset, having the growth mentality, knowing that, hey, you’re not gonna be perfect when you first start, it’s all about improving, reiterating, continuing to improve on your processes because you know, even people with experience come in, they have to learn our process. They have to learn exactly what we do. And even though they’re great at already doing some of the stuff, they have to implement some of the additional tools and resources that we have. And so it takes a little bit of time for people to catch on. And we noticed the people that have the right mindset that understand it’s a long game. And that’s the other thing with marketing. It’s a long game. Some people try to do it for a month and then they’re like, it didn’t work. You know and the reality is marketing takes time. You’re building a pipeline, you’re getting people inside, into your sort of sphere. And over time you can convert them. You can give them value, you can send them emails just saying, hey, you know, here’s some free value on X, Y, and Z type of thing and so that’s huge as well.

– So the part of what I’m hearing you say is you’ve developed a process for working with loan officers to help them, really understand the process that creates success. You want to talk a little bit about that, process that you take people through and what you offer in terms of those services.

– Yeah so, the process that we really take them through is, and I’ll start just from my own mindset and the way I’ve built my business and the way I’ve kind of shifted the way we do things, as well as it all, and it’s, what’s funny is that I’ve had multiple marketers. they do a lot of organic marketing, sharing my results on Facebook, and I’ve had other marketers reach out how are your clients getting such good results, asking me stuff like that. And what I tell them a lot of times it’s like, hey, I know you’re looking for tactics. I know you’re looking for strategies, but I’m not gonna give you any of that. I’m gonna give you the mindset behind why it all works. And again, I’m here on mindset, the strategy and the tactics, obviously that that matters. But you have to have the right, tactics generally are not gonna work longterm unless you have the right idea or the right philosophy for the way you’re building the business. And so the way I do it is like, hey, I’m selling them on the long term, on my ads that are on the front-end. I’m selling them on a longterm, on our sales process. Hey, it’s going to take work. It’s not easy. Like these leads are not just gonna convert themselves. Like I almost like tell them it’s going to be hard. So if you don’t wanna work, it’s not for you type of a thing. I almost, I don’t, I try not to oversell. I try to undersell and then over-deliver because I just found that by selling them this huge dream, all of a sudden they get in and it’s work and it’s all these things and so it’s like, but having that mindset of like, let them know, like, just give them the roadmap, this is what it’s gonna look like. It’s gonna take six months, 30 days, 90 days, 120 days, 180 days for you to start seeing results, especially in my industry, because the average sales cycle for mortgages, like six to 18 months, right? As soon as someone starts to buy a house or wants to buy a house, they don’t, all of a sudden 30 days later go buy a house. They start thinking about it. They go look on Zillow. They start talking to their friends about it. They start finding a loan officer, a real estate agent that they can talk to. They start figuring out their finances. Okay, well, how much money do I need down? That’s the reality of the sale cycle for mortgage, right? And so if they have that mindset that somehow marketer’s gonna miraculously compress a sales cycle under 30 days, that’s probably not the right fit for our organization. And so we choose to work with people, or we try to work with people and choose to work with people that we think we can get results for. It doesn’t always play out that way, you know, it’s pretty hard to get 100% results, but that’s what we’re striving for. Because we don’t wanna work with people that we don’t think do to have the wrong mindset. Maybe they don’t have the resources, maybe they’re too new, or maybe, you know, maybe they’re too busy and we can even sometimes tell them that, hey, like it’s not gonna be a good fit right now, figure out your processes on the back-end. And so that’s the big thing is like walking them through that whole process, the whole time. We have an onboarding call, where we basically set expectations. Again so we do the sales, the sales cycle, the front-end ads, the onboarding call. On an ongoing basis we talk about it as well. Just again, setting that expectation, marketing is a longterm game. But the way we sort of have that process in place as we have an onboarding call. And then we also have a training portal with all kinds of information on here’s what the sales cycle looks like. Here’s what the processes look like. Here’s the scripts that you can use. And then on a weekly basis, we do have our two coaches that do live training calls in our groups as we have a Facebook group as well, like a mastermind sort of thing that can go into, ask questions, interact with other high level loan officers and stuff like that as well. And what we find is that the people that come onto those calls and implement what we talk about, those people see success, and there’s the people that don’t show up to any of the calls. They don’t, you know, they don’t respond to any of our emails and all of a sudden, three months later, they’re like, “Hey, this isn’t working.” And so it’s like, we try to put the roadmap in place for people to succeed. But you know, people have to be willing to do the work and have to be willing to reach out to us and allow us to help them get to where they wanna get, right?

– Right, right.

– That makes sense.

– So how is it that people find you Luke, what’s the, if I’m a loan officer listening to this or in the real estate business, or any of the tangential pieces that go with this, how do they find you?

– I mean, so how would someone find me if they were to look for me today? So generally you can find me like luke@paragonbmg.com. You can find me on Facebook, I’m on Facebook a lot. I’m a, you know, I’m a marketer, so you can find me there or shoot me a message there, check out our website, paragondmg.com. That’s generally what we do. Obviously we run Facebook ads and other ads as well, and that’s how we generally get people. But, yeah, it’s kinda hard to find those.

– So for those of you who are listening, we will have this information also in the show notes. So you will be able to get the information that you need to find Luke. Luke, our time unbelievably, it’s almost over. Yes, I know it goes so quickly, doesn’t it?

– I know.

– So, the thoughts, things we haven’t talked about that you really would like to talk about, or that you think people should know.

– About marketing? I think we’ve talked about a lot of it. I think really when it comes down to what you’re doing, you know, especially if you’re a loan officer, but I think really anybody, right? Anybody who wants to use marketing or anybody who wants to build a business, it really comes down to your mindset. We just find that the people that have a growth mindset, that are willing to learn, that are willing to change, that are willing to put in the work. Those are the people that see the success. It’s not necessarily that they’re better salespeople, maybe they are, but a lot of times it comes down to, they just know that if they put in the work and they do the actions that are required to get the results, they’re gonna see results, right? And so I think that’s huge for anybody that’s, kind of wanting to start their own business or wanting to start marketing is realizing that it’s not gonna be easy, there’s no easy button, right? Like, so either you’re putting the time in, you’re gonna go network, you’re gonna go do all these things, and find business that way, which is great as well. I think you should do both. Or you can spend some money and you can mark it, but realizing that you’re probably not gonna be good at it right away. And that, you know, really need to have that longterm vision of, hey, I’m not gonna be good at this. And just like I tell my loan officers, I’m like, you didn’t become a good loan officer in 30 days. So how do you expect to become a good person at selling internet leads, people that are coming from the internet that don’t know like, or trust you, they don’t know you from anybody other than they saw one ad, they clicked on it and they put their information in, but you need to build that trust, right? So when you get referrals, you’re borrowing that trust from someone else because that person that that’s referring you already built that trust with that person they referred. So again, just having the right mindset to me is huge.

– Your sense in terms of advertising venues that are most successful, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, what are you finding?

– So we primarily do Facebook and Instagram. For our purposes, LinkedIn is great from a B2B sort of standpoint. I think there’s some people that have done, you know, sort of the B to C business to consumer. Google and YouTube and those are our great as well, Google’s great, generally it’s a little bit higher cost, but the intent seems to be higher as well. So, you know, there’s all sorts of different venues depending on what you’re looking to accomplish. What’s cool about Google again, like I said, it’s, there is the higher intent because they’re going in there, they’re searching for it and they’re clicking on it. And that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. Facebook is interruption marketing. So that’s why I talk about increasing the intent by asking them to fill out more questions, but having sort of some barriers to entry into opting in. So, but there’s all good venues, Facebook organic. So posting your results. what you do on your profile is huge. I mean, I built my whole, pretty much my whole entire business up until about eight, nine months ago off of, literally just posting client results, talking about my business, but then also being a person. People forget that on social media, like people like are gonna connect with people that are similar to them. And so if you try to just sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, like, you know, you see real estate agents all the time. They’ll just post all their listings and that’s all they post, listing after listing after listing. And you see, it’s just crickets ’cause people don’t want to, like, people don’t wanna just be sold all the time. So if you’re gonna do that, it’s like 10 to 20% of your time. That’s a good free option. You can do the same thing with LinkedIn. It can be a little more salesy on LinkedIn, ’cause it is kind of that purpose, but still people want to connect with people that are like them, right? And so by being authentic, by being yourself and that word authenticity, obviously is a little kind of a buzzword. But it’s true, if you really are authentic and you really do put yourself out, you’re gonna track the people that are similar to you. And that’s probably who you wanna work with anyway.

– Right, I think that’s so often true. We tend to think of wanting everybody and so if you move into that you tend to serve nobody because you can’t sift out the people that you don’t work well with. I think our revenue generating and growth mindsets take us to let’s do everybody, but the ones who really do the best are the ones who are focused and look at who’ve made really relating to the best and then go for that.

– Well, and that was funny that you said that as a, for a while there, we were working with real estate, mortgage, insurance, we’re doing multiple things. And really in December of this last year, I decided, you know what? I’m just gonna go all in on mortgage. And literally the next month, my business, like the size of business doubled in one month. And so I think there is, and it’s scary because you’re like, oh man, I’m like, I’m gonna completely turn away everybody else. But what’s funny is like the fear of losing that business is actually, generally it’s wrong, right? Because you’re actually going to be able to provide a better service, you’re able to be more entrenched and people are gonna be attracted to you ’cause that’s all you do. You’re the expert at one specific thing versus you’re the general guy that does everything.

– Right?

– Right.

– Luke thank you, this has been a wonderful discussion. And I think, for people who are thinking about marketing, you know, the whole concept of what’s the front-end, but really also the back-end. And have you put that together thoughtfully, so people don’t get lost or feel like once I opted in that I’m now just sort of taken for granted. And that’s really what you’re working around and avoiding. So those of you who would like more information about Luke and his marketing process, let us know we’ll be glad to get you in contact with Luke and the information will also be in your show notes. So Luke, thank you so much for being with us today. And for those of you who are listening, thank you too being with us on Building My Legacy Podcast.

– Thank you.

– Thank you.