I would argue you don’t want a “Customer” for life, you want a relationship. Relationships build more relationships. Your “customer” is another human being and as such you should make an effort to know them more. Reciprocity that comes from this is limitless.

This LiveTime with Alec focuses on…

• How to create a relationship with your clients
• Ditching the drip campaigns
• Commitment to being a better community member
• Relationship building for not only you but your clientele

Episode Transcribe

What’s up, everybody. Welcome to another Friday.

We’re going live again. And man, we’re going to have some fun today.

First of all, I love that you guys tune in on Fridays, I think it’s actually really fun to get together and talk about, oh man, the reality of our business on a Friday, because everyone’s tuning out, and I love the people that are leaning in, because that’s when we change our businesses and our lives, and all that fun stuff. So I’m going to talk today about, man, the customer for life topic. I Just finished my lunch. Thank you. Some of you guys, or I did, let’s just go with me. I grew up on the customer for life philosophy. By the way, real quick, I have a new mic. Check this thing out. How’s the audio out there? Is it okay? If you can see me, there’s a couple of you guys on LinkedIn already, let me know how the audio sounds, so I can make sure that I’m actually coherent.And yeah, let’s go back. Customer for life. I grew up on it. I grew up on it. And my customer for life strategy when I was 23, in 2003, was a tri-fold printed newsletter that I would buy, and buy in bulk, so I’d buy like 100 of them, and then I would literally use my act database, print out my labels, and then just go in there on a Saturday and be like, “Boop, boop, boop.” And put them all through, and on the back of this generic newsletter was just my face. And I guarantee other people were buying that same newsletter and sending it out with their face, which is hysterical because it’s the same stuff, we’re just sending the same thing with different faces on it. Thanks Scott, thanks John. Oh, the music was coming through. Yes. I never know. I find out after if the music played.Yeah. So that was the strategy, and that was customer for life. You put people into a drip, not even a drip, a hard mail newsletter to their house. Fast forward, man, we are not doing a good job. And I’m generalizing, if you’re offended, don’t get offended. I’m not talking about you. I might be talking about you. Act database, John that’s real talk.We do a terrible job. And let me just back it up a little bit. Today, a CRM system tends to do drip campaigns and we, and we push on this like drip campaign, drip campaign. Dude, you don’t even like getting drip campaigns. How many emails you get a day? Is it like a thousand? That’s terrible. Do you like getting a thousand emails a day? No. And yet you’re getting them. And then, and then you’re putting your customer on them.Guys, it’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for myself, for the industry. And let’s break it down and talk about why. First of all, when somebody actually decides to use you as a mortgage professional for a home loan, man, they get financially naked. They share everything, all their credit blunders come up and they got to talk to you about it and they got to write letters of explanations about it. Their assets, how much money they have in the bank, they have to share all that. There are people who don’t even share that with their family and friends. And then sometimes, the real stuff comes out, right? Tell me if you recognize this, “Hey, what’s that account over there that I don’t know about?” “Oh yeah. Can we not share that with my wife? That’s my secret account.”Dude, that’s real. That has happened. If you have had that happen, throw me a comment right there, because that’s hysterically true, right? You are like a therapist rolled up in a financial advisor for your customers. They share their deepest, darkest hopes and dreams with you through the process. And then you execute against that and you deliver them back a fantastic mortgage experience, a great loan. Thanks, Kevin.A great loan, and then what? You put them on a drip campaign. You put them on a drip campaign, shame on you. If I had the shame bell, I would be ringing it in your face. That’s terrible guys. That’s terrible. Ryan, it happens too often, happens so often, so often. Or we just do nothing, which is equally as bad. We do nothing, we just like, “Hey, thanks for this wonderful transaction. Thanks for providing food for my family. And all the good stuff there.” And then we’re like, “See you later.”We just ghost them. Just ghost them. We could do so much better. There are a lot of great people talking about this topic. In one of my 100 videos in 100 days, I had a topic of your closing gifts suck. And it was the same thread of don’t just … Here’s a great one. How many loan officers do you know, and if you’re one of them, you can raise your hand internally, send your customers a bottle of wine? Bottle of champagne, graduations. Yeah? Anybody out there, bottle of wine? Yeah, I get you. You feel me.You just sent a bottle of wine to an alcoholic, a recovering alcoholic. How do you feel about that? “But I have been, no…” Stop, stop. What if they don’t like alcohol? Oh my gosh, you know guys, we’ve got to listen so much better. We got to pay attention so much better. The customer for life mentality is super dead, it’s dead. You don’t want a customer for life. You want a relationship with that person for life because relationships equal more influence and more opportunity.You feel me on this? Give me like an, “I feel you, Alec.” This is so important to me because these customers, these human beings in your community that you live with, we deserve to do a better job, they deserve a better job. And I’ll set it up for you. I know so many of you are doing what I’m labeling as a hopes and dreams call, where you explore with the customer what they want to achieve with their financing, and you ask all the real questions about their kids and their future, and are they going to college? And are you saving for that?And you just start diving into all like the meat of that conversation. And in that process, you have the opportunity to find … “I feel you dog.” Thanks, TJ. You have the process to find what they care about. Is it a sports team? Is it their church or their charity? What are they leaning into in their life? And man, that’s your opportunity to show up in a really big way to love on those people forever. Ditch the drip campaign and commit to being better, commit to being better. You want better results, you want more success, you want more influence? Commit to being better. Here’s a great example, how many of your customers have kids? A lot, a lot have kids, right? I have a little eight year old and a six year old. For those people, how important are their kids to them? Man, they’re so important, right? So you have the kids’ names and if you’re smart and a great professional, you have the kids’ birthdays.Send them a freaking birthday gift. Celebrate with those people in their life. By the way, here’s another thing that some people aren’t doing, which is totally insane. The people you’re doing loans for you should be adding to your social media community, your digital online community. Yes, all of them. And some of you guys do a great job on that.I feel you, you feel me, you’re good. Some of you do a crappy job on that. And I’m like, “Why aren’t you hanging out with these guys digitally for the rest of your life and sharing life together?” What do you want? Do you want a customer? Or do you want a relationship? You know what I’m saying? Send a gift to their kids, man. Guess what they also don’t care about their loaniversary, Do not care. That does not hold a place in their memory. Unless they’re a weirdo then maybe, but it does not hold a place in their brain. What is in their brain is eating pizza on the floor of their new home on the day they moved in because the furniture is not there yet. That is burned into their memory.How do you celebrate that with them on the anniversary of their move in of their home? This is the kind of stuff. How are you being proactive? Remember the glory days of HUD ones and every year around now on tax time, you would send out the HUD ones to your customers? Remember that, because they need it for tax purposes? And now we have CDEs and blah, blah, blah. But how many of you guys are doing that these days? Some are, I was talking to a guy like last week and he does that every year and I’m like, “Dude, high five, man.” That’s a relationship. You’re thinking about them and their needs ahead of yours and you’re leaning into it, and you’re sharing that stuff with them. That’s a relationship, that’s Epic. A drip campaign, an email video that has their name like embedded in it? Shame on you.We all know that’s garbage. I don’t want that, don’t send that to me. But a text message about my birthday or a Facebook video sent to me on my birthday that says, “I care about you, I remember. How are the kids? How’s the dog? How’s life?” I see it on social, so you can gauge all day. Man, that’s the future. I mean, if you want to have success, I’m just going to say it. If you want to win. If you want to deepen relationships because relationships beget more relationships.They’re going to give you more customers, more referrals, more opportunity if you really take it seriously. And so many of us just are just onto the next one and it’s embarrassing, and so don’t do it. Don’t do it. You with me on this? Okay. Let’s kind of open it up a little bit and talk one layer deeper.I did this in one of my other lives, but it ties into the relationship for life topic and I want to just hit it again. I feel like if we’re going to be relationship builders with our customers, then there is no reason we shouldn’t be relationship builders for them to help them build relationships. Here’s what I mean. I said this before, but it’s just the truth so we’ve got to go into it. Closing gifts in my opinion, should be replaced with community engagement events. I mean, what is more beneficial or more powerful than walking in a community after you closed a loan for somebody and going door to door, to all the neighbors and inviting them over to a house warming for that new person moving in and encouraging them to bring something or whatever and just introducing yourself and your realtor that you love. And just meeting humans that live in houses?I mean, better than sitting in your office and staring at YouTube. Be a community builder, make relationships with these people and then bring the community in alongside it. They’re moving into a new neighborhood too, they’re nervous, they don’t like it. So be a relationship developer for your customer and you will be so shocked at the amount of reciprocity and just good will and karma and influence that you develop through that process.So I have to share something else that I learned from Dustin Brahm and his podcast, so Dustin, you get full credit for this. You’re probably not watching, but I love you. And it was with Phil Treadwell too, so okay Phil, you made it. But I love listening to their podcast, because they were talking about cutting boards and I was dying laughing.We have such an ego that we assume that sending a customer a cutting board with my name, my logo, my company on it, get over yourself a little bit. You know what I mean? It’s tacky. It’s like setting them a wineglass that has your initials on it. Why? Don’t do that. Give them a cutting board, but then don’t put yourself … Do you get my point on this? If you’re going to give somebody a gift, a closing gift, do it with authenticity and without this desire to get something back from them. This like, “Oh, now they’ll look at my cutting board every day with my name on it and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I remember that guy.'” I was dying, the whole podcast went on the same topic, the same thread.But you get it, right? Building relationships isn’t about this like, “Here’s a cutting board with my name on it. Now you’ll remember me.” Building relationships is like, “Hey, I know you are a chef and you’re into cooking. And so I bought you these really executive knives that are pretty expensive.” But man, if they’re into cooking, you know how precious some knives are to people that cook. That’s a real, thoughtful thing. That’s a big difference than I give everybody a generic cutting board and a bottle of wine.I think we can do better. I think we have to do better if we want to play in the macro game. If you want to earn head space with your customers and your community for a long time and cut through the noise of the Super Bowl commercials and the constant harassment and phone calls and the flyers coming in … Happy Friday, dad. Then you’ve got to play a bigger game and go deeper with people.Man, Todd Duncan talks about this all the time. If you follow anything that Todd Duncan says, man, some of his stuff is all about going deeper into relationship. Yes, Leanne, it’s about being thoughtful and intentional, going deeper with relationship with human beings. And referral partners of course, is one of the things Todd teaches, but man, I’m talking about your customers right now. Don’t lose the opportunity. There are about 30 people watching right now that I can tell, what do you do? What do you do as we kind of roll down here? If you’re watching and share the comment on LinkedIn and on Facebook and what do you do that you think sets you apart as a thing? Let’s share it. And let’s be kind of communal on this, because maybe we can pick up a cool idea. Don’t don’t live in scarcity like, “Oh, someone’s going to steal my idea.”I live in abundance. We all grow by getting better together, challenge each other. I’d love to hear a comment that you guys have on what you do that you feel makes impact. I don’t care if you’re in the mortgage industry or not. Some people following this are in their own careers, but you’re building the same type of intentionality with your customers, I guarantee it, the same type of thing.So what are you doing that sets you apart from your community? I want you to share it in the one or two comments and just fired in there, because I really believe that if we pour into each other, we get better. And I really believe that if we’re just unabashedly living in abundance, we can transform our businesses. I shared a couple of examples from people that have shared with me before from the community building events and the door knocking to the gifts that …Oh, I love it Joey, “Be yourself and show humility.” Yeah, man. It goes back to that cutting board thing, dude. No one wants your name on it. I mean, I don’t want my friend’s name on it. I want something thoughtful and amazing and nice, and that, to me transforms the space. So I’m going to wrap it down here. I appreciate you guys tuning in on a Friday, we’ve been hanging out for about 16, 17 minutes.I’m still looking for those comments though. I got one from Lortis on Facebook, I’ll share this thing. “Traveling with an agent to film distressed homes on-site.” You do that after closing? That’s pretty interesting. I love the fact that you’re out there in the community and that’s my whole point with developing relationships with your customer for life strategy. I don’t even want to call it that anymore, don’t call it that. Relationship for life. And if you’re in a relationship for somebody, you hang out with them, you talk to them, you encourage them, you’re in community with them, you give thoughtfully to them without trying to get something back and you change your whole business.It will change your whole business. Yeah, Scott said, “Self-serving House Happy.” Yeah, there’s a great service called House Happy that customers can connect to and can manage their whole living in a house experience, which is a pain from contractors to gutter cleaners and all that stuff. I feel you. It’s the game.All right. Joey says, “I always ask two things I did well and two things I can do better.” Oh, for the customers? That’s really interesting. I wonder how many of us ask our customers what we could’ve done better to improve our experience. That’s putting yourself out there, man. “Hey, what are two things you think I did great? What are two things you think I could have done better to improve my experience?” Man, that’s going right into relationship, because now you’re asking for direct feedback and you’re not just one siding the whole experience. I love that Joey, thanks for sharing.All right guys, I appreciate you hanging out with me. Go out with me and let’s be better relationship builders in our communities with our past customers, kill the drip campaigns. Kill them. They’re terrible. Start doing real stuff for your people and make real impact. I appreciate you guys, have a happy Friday, have a great weekend. Talk to you later.