All of those vendors promise to reduce work, reduce costs, improve the client experience, and/or bring more business to your doorstep.
The question is how to sift through all of the vendors?? And how do you know which vendors to use?
We ignored most of them for years, thinking that our hard work and excellent internal systems would always prevail.
BUT – we would have no future right now if we had continued to ignore all those vendors and solutions.
So what happened, and why did we change our perspective?
First, technology finally started to have a major impact on the mortgage industry and we were missing the boat. I blogged about it here.
Second, we finally climbed out of our hole and looked around :).
Here is what everyone in the Real Estate and Mortgage Industries should do to make sure they are not missing the vendor and technology boat:
1. Align with coaching or industry groups with smart, successful and tech-savvy people who are willing to share what they’re finding. “Willing to share” is key, as many successful people are afraid to share their competitive edges. I joined a coaching group in 2017 with some exceptionally sharp mortgage professionals who are, fortunately, willing to share everything – from vendors to tech tools to consultants – and it has been invaluable. Our lower rates, more efficient operations, and soon-to-be-launched consumer direct focus are all a result of input from my coaching group.
2. Hire tech-savvy team members who are responsible for bird-dogging new tech. We hired a VP of Sales from Silicon Valley last year, and he started to cry when he saw how behind we were. OK, not really, but he was appalled (even though we were way ahead of most mortgage companies). He quickly started to revamp our CRM, our marketing software, our website, our post-client touches, our data reporting and management, and our internal workflows, among many other things. It is his job also to continue looking for new technology solutions and the best vendors available.
OR
3. Join companies with the resources to search for and implement the best technology. We aligned with a larger mortgage company with an exceptionally tech-savvy engineer who instantly gave us access to badly needed vendors and tech solutions.
What about Trade Shows?
I am leery of them b/c there are too many vendors to vet, and they all have very polished pitches that make them seem much more effective than they are in reality.
I know this from experience b/c we have wasted tens of thousands of dollars on incompetent vendors, after falling for well-crafted demos and pitches.
Jay Voorhees
Founder/Broker | JVM Lending
(925) 855-4491 | DRE# 01524255, NMLS# 335646
