Mortgage sales strategies: Six habits that produce a wildly successful mortgage sales force

The most determining factor in whether a team will succeed or fail is the quality of its leadership. Anyone, whether a recognized leader or not, can play a crucial role in setting their team up for success without reinventing the wheel. There’s a proven playbook for leading effective teams — especially effective sales teams, and it’s all centered around creating a culture of accountability. There’s no single more important strategy to bank on as a mortgage sales leader than to balance autonomy with accountability. In other words, to “trust, but verify.” Let’s take a look at the top 6 habits that will foster a culture of accountability in your organization.

1. Recognize your role

As mortgage sales leaders, we’re responsible for positioning our team members for success, and by neglecting to hold them accountable to the habits that produce results, we’re actually positioning them to fail. And that’s something we have to own and communicate before we can re-institute a culture of accountability. If you opt to simply enforce new accountability measures, your people will recoil against those measures and become preoccupied with protecting their threatened sense of autonomy. By owning that failure upfront, they will be more likely to embrace that shared sense of responsibility to themselves, their teammates and the big-picture vision for your team or organization. So, it’s time for you to get comfortable with being the one who makes the decisions and owns the results.

2. Communicate your commitment

It’s critically important to explain why it’s in your team members’ best interest for you to hold them accountable, and what you plan to hold them accountable for. A component of this step is to make it clear that you’re not just going to hold team members’ accountable to results (though, that’s an important secondary consideration); but that you’re going to primarily hold them accountable to the behaviors that drive desired results. Set clear, universal standards team-wide and institute practices for holding every team member, regardless of potential, to those standards. In other words, communicate that you’re committed to holding them accountable because you love them too much to let them fail.

3. Engage, don’t enforce

To create a culture of accountability requires actively engaging team members in the process, rather than just enforcing standards. Get your people together daily, face-to-face, in-person or otherwise. This allows you to maintain engaged oversight of your team to gain insights about their mindsets and methodology. I encourage you to follow a 5:5:5 model; a 15-minute meeting format that I developed decades ago to set clear goals for the day, train to right behaviors, and motivate my team members to sell. It's brief, it sets the tone for the day and it meets the most-critical needs shared by every team member by providing clear goals, helping them perfect their pitch and keeping them motivated. As a leader, you hold a responsibility to your people to ensure they’re ready to rock-and-roll as soon as their day starts. Holding a 5:5:5 first thing every morning is the best way to fulfill that responsibility.

4. Know your customers’ experience

While accountability may start with a daily meeting, it can’t stop there, because it ultimately has to serve two parties: the team, and the customer. To truly be accountable to the customer, you need to understand their actual experience. While our team is infamous for defending the centrality of phone conversations in modern lending, the reality is that customer interactions are multi-channel in the digital mortgage era. So, you have to find ways to monitor the entire communications landscape your customers are navigating. Understanding all of this is key to identifying where your team members could be allowing opportunities to slip through the cracks. To learn more about how to exceed customer expectations, read ICE Mortgage Technology's "Reimagining the customer experience" eBook.

5. Commit to cross-training

One of the most effective strategies to smooth over friction between different roles and departments within an organization is cross-training. Educating team members on not just the responsibilities and challenges within their own roles, but also those of the roles they must collaborate with to serve the typical customer, invokes a sense of empathy between team members and teams at-large. Cross-training sheds light on how each team members’ actions (or lack of action) affect — positively or negatively — others’ ability to perform in their role. Simply put, cross-training is an invaluable oversight strategy for managers who are struggling to stimulate collaboration between teammates or teams to ensure a seamless customer experience and ultimately improve business results.

6. Reward more than results

It’s rare to find incentives that recognize and reward the right behaviors, not just results. This oversight can severely undercut your ability as a leader to create and maintain a culture of accountability that sustains peak performance in good markets and bad. That’s not to say you shouldn’t reward results; you should. But you should also recognize and reward the behaviors that ultimately produce results. Doing so not only encourages your bottom half of performers but holds top producers accountable to their process — not just their production — while reinforcing your internal training. This is one of the easiest changes to make as a leader and can often be done without spending a dime. From creating awards and recognitions, to engineering fun, team-based competitions, to simply affirming behavioral execution with a comment or note, there are countless, costless avenues for rewarding right behaviors in a meaningful and motivating way.

Next steps

Beyond these tips, having the right tools in place can go a long way toward helping you meet your goals for the last quarter of 2023 and to being prepared for whatever comes in 2024. ICE Mortgage Technology® is a great partner that can help your foster a better, relationship-driven approach by managing repetitive tasks so your team can devote more time to sales opportunities and personal interactions with borrowers. To learn more, tune into my recent conversation with Tom Radle, VP of Solutions Sales at ICE Mortgage Technology, where we discuss how to earn borrowers’ trust with modern technology.

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