We are in a real treat today as we host Robin Clayton of PRMG, a leading figure in marketing technology, known for managing 80 tech platforms and earning accolades such as HousingWire’s 2024 Marketing Leader. In this episode, Robin shares her journey from a temp job to mortgage industry leader, emphasizing the importance of raw data integrity, empathy in user experience, and the power of authentic, tailored marketing. Discover practical strategies for leveraging automation, understanding audience personas, and staying ahead in social media trends, all through Robin’s expert insights and real-world experiences. Tune in for a concise, impactful discussion on mastering martech.
[David] Listeners, I’m really excited to have joining me, Robin Clayton. I met her last year at the Total Expert Accelerate Conference. I was drawn to her because she’s just got this amazing personality, but she has this get it done attitude and she makes things happen. And then I met mighty Mike there from total expert, and he was saying that is one amazing person then I ran into her again at the Total Expert a few weeks ago Minneapolis. And I go, I’d hear so much about what she’s doing that I wanted to bring her to the program folks, because here’s what’s going on. She oversees 80 technology platforms. She’s managing data. She’s looking and reviewing and handling so many things. She was awarded HousingWire 2024 Marketing Leader, as well as HousingWire Woman of Influence. She’s also nominated and selected to be HousingWire Women of Influence Group in 2023. Robin, welcome to the podcast. My gosh, I’m just so excited to have you here. [Robin] Thank you, David. I’m thrilled to be here. [David] And we should say you work with KP and a wonderful team there at PMRG. I love you guys. What do you do? and what was really fun about this conference is KP spoke on a panel. I loved how he honored you from the platform. He talked about what you do for your organization and how you work behind the scenes it was a real compliment. So, listeners again we are in for a real treat, but let’s start off with this. Would you give us some insights into how you’ve gotten to where you’re at? What’s been your journey? [Robin] Oh, wow. Let’s jump into it. I took a temp job. I think I’m one of the few people who it wasn’t Yeah. My mom or dad was in the industry and I was sitting on their knee. No, both of my parents were in television news. Yeah, I lived in Southern California. And the largest employer was Countrywide Home Loans and they would hire anybody who could fog up a mirror. And here I am 20 years later, still in mortgage. [David] That’s outstanding. And you found yourself a way to an outstanding company again with KP and the whole team there. It’s just really a well run group. In this era, it’s all about managing data and you have done an exemplary job of that. There are right ways to select and optimizing that stack and there’s not. How have you been able to make data work so effectively for PMRG? [Robin] You have to collect it all. One of the things that I dislike is data visualization. So, if someone sends me… [David] You dislike data visualization? [Robin] I do. Yeah. [David] You’re a spreadsheet girl? [Robin] Yeah. [David] Oh, wow. Because I’m all about visualizing. I like pictures. I like seeing things. The pictures is more meaningful. That is interesting. So you are wonderfully wired differently than me. That’s great. So tell us about that, how that works. [Robin] I had a wonderful manager way back in the day that had a little quip that statistics were the work of the devil and you can make the data have any finding you wanted if you manipulated it enough. So that made me distrustful of other people’s interpretation of data. What’s the legend? What’s the access that it’s on? Give me all of the raw data. Give me that big, gnarly spreadsheet. [David] That is really interesting. So, you’re raising a really good point because the devil’s in the details, you can spin the data in a way that, and I hadn’t really thought about that. I like graphical representation especially with the C suite executives. it’s having someone you trust. If someone’s putting that data together in a graphical manner, it’s got to be someone you trust that there’s good alignment in the analysis of the data and I think that’s what I’m I hear you saying a little bit there, so when you’re dealing with all that data and we’re not talking about small amounts, give us some idea, 80 platforms. Are you kidding me, Robin? And then all the data with that? [Robin] Some platforms are less robust than others and just getting reporting is a challenge. They don’t keep good records. I love a platform that has a self-serve reporting where I can download in real time. I love an API connection to a data lake or a data warehouse. The more data that you can provide your clients is if I’m speaking to a vendor right now the more that we are partners, but if you’re hiding data. I once had a vendor, the first meeting, they said, we’re responsible for a billion dollars worth of your business last year. And I’m like, no, you’re not, give me the raw data and when I actually extrapolated it and saw the model they were using, I’m like, this is garbage. I’m going to do the data the way that’s defensible to my C suite, not your interpretation of it. Because when I get called to the carpet, should we keep spending money on this vendor? I will be able to answer that. I know the facts and I’m not like, I don’t know, the chart said it. [David] That’s really insightful. Another thing that you are well known for is creating a really good user experience, the UX of technology is something that when it comes unwrapped, it necessarily isn’t doing the job, but you somehow have made this really effective within your organization. Talk about how you’ve been able to create a journey for all of your users where they embrace it and use it. [Robin] Yeah. So one of the things think is really important is empathy. There’s this great quote “know thy user” and you are not the user. So if you think this is an email that I would like to read, or this is something that I would respond to, or this is a sales pitch that I would resonate with, you already know all the jargon that’s in our industry. You already have seen that picture and that logo a thousand times. You need to step into the shoes of the person that you are targeting. Maybe you’re reaching out to a single mom who just put the kids to bed. It’s 11 o’clock at night. They’re blurry. They’re reading every other word in their email. How do you reach that person? And what are their motivations? Classic fear. What are they afraid of? Greed? What do they want? What do they desire? And if you can put yourself in their shoes, use those motivations and then have obviously skilled creative, right? So really good copywriting, really empathetic graphic design and then test. Just because you think it’s a good idea, you got to road test it and see if it works, maybe that great email that you wrote or that great social media posts, absolutely falls flat. Go back out there, try something else. It’s never going to be perfect and then once you got it, perfect, maybe six months from now, it won’t be performing as well because much of the conditions have changed. [David] The market changes, people change on that. What’s really interesting when you’re talking and bringing up like a single mom, late at night, 11 o’clock, put the kids to bed, trying to get caught up in her emails, wanting to buy a house or refinance a house there’s all these different dynamics. How do you deal with personality types as well as just different lifestyles that are going on, especially when it comes to your marketing communication? [Robin] You can start building personas. So, a persona would be a loose affiliation of traits, right? You could have someone who’s maybe credit challenged. there’s heuristic data, demographic data. You put together the traits that define this person. Maybe you give them a name, a little avatar, a character that you can do storytelling with it. What is this person’s story? And then maybe you’ve got another persona of someone who’s a very savvy real estate investor. They have multiple properties all over the United States. They’ve done this a million times. They want a process that’s online that they can fill out a loan application on the way to their airport. That’s a very different type of person and they’re going to respond to different marketing messages than the other person and one of the things I noticed early on when I would meet with loan officers, I do a consultation just like you and I are talking and I would ask them, who is your customer? And if they look me in the eye and they say, everybody. I know they will fail in this business, because you have to focus. You have to know exactly who you’re talking to, what they want, where they are, where they’re hanging out online and in person, and then you’ll be successful. But if you think you’re going to split, I do mortgages. Everyone should do a mortgage with me. You’re not going to resonate or get success. [David] So, when you’re talking about empathy, you’re giving us some insights into how you’re looking at the different customers. Dive into a little bit more when you’re saying empathy. I need to have a little more empathy, but as you’re doing it from a borrower, how do you bring empathy to a borrower where you don’t have any knowledge of really, I guess you can form the different groups, but explain a little more, dive a little bit deeper into this empathy. It’s really intriguing to me. [Robin] So as a marketer I have the privilege of sitting in my cushy office. I get paid a salary. But the people that really understand this are our distributed retail loan officers, they’re out in the field, they’re the ones getting the calls on the weekends. They’re in these people’s homes. They’re in the community. So, spending a lot of time with our salespeople and not talking, but listening and seeing what the stories that they’re hearing, as well as talking to customers directly and finding people that are happy, finding people that are unhappy. Just ask people and they will tell you. We will look at our reviews, we see the feedback where it was like no one ever called me back. I got really frustrated. We learn so much from negative feedback and bad reviews and we use that to shape either from the salespeople who are in the trenches every single day, or the verbatim directly from the customers. [David] When you’re dealing with the different dynamics, you were talking about almost a somewhat of a profiling a bit of the personality, a single mom, bad credit, someone who’s buying a jumbo. How do you find yourself adjusting the communication with them? Are you finding trends as far as certain groups like texting more than email or generally interested in what you’re finding the best path, the most effective path. [Robin] And this is where you have to have a customer journey mapped out and you have to capture that data inside your CRM, right? So, we were at the Total Expert Conference. This is where if you defined it. Hey, these are my credit challenge folks. These are my savvy real estate investors. These are my people that work in the local school district. Maybe I partnered with the teacher’s union and then have specific types of marketing that goes out. Now your point is well taken, right? There are certain times of day that will resonate with different types of people. There are certain medium that will work better. There’s some people who are, Hey, don’t email me. I haven’t checked my email in months. I’m never going to get it. I work in a retail job and I might get fired if my phone’s dinging all day. And then we also think a lot about social media channels, different social media channels have different audiences. The type of stuff you post on LinkedIn will not work on TikTok. [David] I’m really interested in with you having the awards that you’d be giving, you’ve obviously been focusing in marketing and what works and you have the advantage of having a husband in the other room that you get to consult with. Some of the ways that people are struggling in their marketing, there seems to be a lot of people struggling right now. That’s what I’m seeing and trying to get an effective message engaging. I love what Total Expert does. They have a lot of really great tools, engagement, the journeys that they help create, but it still is always needing some tweaking. What is the secrets you’re finding that is working for you and how you’re tweaking their journeys and what they’re trying to do? [Robin] The people who are succeeding are actually using the tech. I just got off a call where we were looking at someone, they’ve been here a couple months, they have zero production. I’m like let’s look into the data. And they haven’t logged into their CRM once. They haven’t pulled any data. They haven’t posted anything to social media. They haven’t attended any classes that I host. I teach every day of the year. They haven’t engaged us at all. If you are using all the systems, all the techniques, all the coaching that I provide you, and you’re still not seeing success, that’s something I need to take back to the corner on the whiteboard and figure out. But if you haven’t even logged in to the CRM, then I feel pretty good and when I see the people that are using the tools as I’ve prescribed funding, Six, seven, eight, eleven times more funding, than those who are not that I know what we have built works and it’s just a matter of having people have the focus because it takes time and it takes discipline and consistency. It’s not an easy button to get. [David] I’m really intrigued by the training. When you’re talking about it, I’m not aware of anyone else out there in marketing doing the training you’re talking about. Talk a little bit more about that. [Robin] So we offer all sorts of classes. Some are… [David] you talking classes to your MLOs? [Robin] Yeah. All internal training and coaching. So, we offer classes on all of the software. So, all of these vendors that we manage, we want to make sure we provide training for them, everything we do is recorded on demand, transcribed. Today I did a social media lab on LinkedIn. So went really deep for a full hour and tactical push this button, push that button kind of strategy. Then we have office hours. We’re all just sit, enjoy a cup of coffee. And if you want to hang out and maybe have a one-on-one kind of question, we do that as well. [David] That’s really good. Are you finding that to be really effective? And we know how independent mortgage loan originators are. Anyone in sales, they’re an independent group. And it’s I’ll call you when I need you. And then when they do need you, then it’s I need you now. How are you managing the adoption and getting the adoption rate up? because it’s a struggle across the industry. [Robin] Yeah, I wish I could tell you that I’ve solved that and I’m a rock star in that, but every month and certainly every quarter I bring the team together and we look at what’s working and what’s not. I was actually really inspired after meeting with a lot of the marketers at the Total Expert Conference because you’re right, no one’s doing what I’m doing. And it’s not, I’m not getting the results that I thought I would get. One of the things that people were talking about I had a great meeting with Jalair who is talking about Top Down. You need the CEO to buy in. You need the regionals, You need the branch managers. You need to teach them one thing, not forty things, one, and then they do a teach back to their team. You hold them accountable. And I was just like, what a great strategy. [David] That was good. I listened to her speak and I go there was just something really solid about her approach. And it’s going back to simplifying things but we’re really struggling as an industry to get MLOs do it. I look at what Total Rxpert has done. They’re a brilliant company. They’re doing such a great job of trying to help people by creating a system and what I love about Total Expert is they’re doing a great job of intentionally building a system that will help MLOs, but the number of MLOs that are really adopting is universally a struggle. So you’re talking about training. That’s one of the tools that’s really starting to help open up. What are some other things that you’re doing that’s getting better results? we’re all struggling that what we’re talking about here, but what else is working for you in other areas? [Robin] One thing that I have noticed historically always works is peer to peer endorsements. So, if I can get a top producer who can get on camera or even better face to face and say, Hey, I’m the number one, number two person in the company. I have great production. Here’s what I do. So, I log into the system every morning is my routine. All of a sudden, the thing that I’ve been saying every day for two months straight yeah, whatever mom. Now they hear this person on stage. And they’re like, Oh, that’s a great idea. Never heard of it before. So, we really are trying to find case studies. We’re trying to find champions, a salesperson talking to a salesperson that seems to be a lot more effective. [David] I think it’s good to have Top Down as you talked about in just a moment ago. It’s good to have the support of what you’re doing, being supported from the top, but I think there’s nothing like peer pressure or peer dynamics that’s really working. At the end of the day, I want to talk to someone that’s in my shoes, walking what I’m doing, finding out what’s working for them. You talked when we talked the other day, you talked about time is more valuable than money and using automation for non sales generating activities is something that you have really focused in on. Talk about that. [Robin] Yeah. So one of the things that and I stole this deal, the idea from KP, Kevin Peranio is he introduced this concept of time. It’s all like we want money and it’s looking at the studies that show your typical salesperson, regardless of industry, could be food service, automotive, doesn’t matter. They are spending about 70% of their time doing non sales generating activities. This is stuff like data entry or writing down notes or sending out a happy birthday email or cleaning your desk, right? It’s stuff that makes you feel busy. I did a thing, but at the end of the day, that’s not going to get you sales in your pocket. And I realized this phenomenon took me a long time to finally put the pieces together is I would have a loan officer. Who would come to every single class I teach. They log into the system. They take very detailed notes. They’re really engaged. They watch all the videos and they’ve been there for three months and they feel like, Ooh, I have been so busy. I have done all of these activities, but you have nothing to show for it because they’re scared. They don’t want to actually get out to the phone. They don’t want to do cold calling. You don’t want to go to real estate agent offices. So, if I say, all right Every day you wake up and you send a birthday email, I’m gonna take that off your plate. I already know their birthday. I have a system that can schedule emails. I can now actually personify you in a video at scale. I’m going to stitch all of that together. So, you are not spending your 5-10 minutes every single day, sending out a birthday email. You’re going out. I know it’s scary. Go call the real estate agent. Go call for referral partners. That email is now off your plate. So, I’m taking all those tasks and replacing them with automation and technology, AI, whatever we’ve got so they stop using that as an excuse and go out and sell. [David] Let’s talk a little bit about the difference between email texting and then you really using the digital marketing platforms out there that we have social media, email versus AI, text, all the various ways. When you talk about email, sending emails, birthday greetings and things like that, I’m sure they’re appreciated. But isn’t text a lot more effective in doing that? [Robin] Text is massively more effective, but boy, have you got a lot of hurdles? The recent regulation on a federal level, I’m in California, so the California regulations are even stricter. If you’re following the rules you can’t just text whoever you want. You need consent. You need someone to opt in and most people, if you text them and say, Hey, do you want to receive marketing messages for me from text? They’re going to say no, or they’re going to ignore you. So, it’s really hard to get opt in consent. We have different strategies where we try to get it very early on in the sales process. But even then, it doesn’t last forever. A lot of them have expiration dates, or if you’re not actively involved in a transaction, you can no longer text them. Same with ringless voicemail. It sounds easy. If I am a selling cookies or t shirts or I’m a barber shop, I can do that. But when you’re in the kind of industry we’re in, you really are handcuffed and the fines are out of this world. [David] It’s just something else, but it’s really growing across the country. It starts in California, moves across the whole country. So, we need to be aware of it. Talk about the social media trends that you’re seeing, TikTok, Instagram, My kids tell me if Facebook’s just such a. We don’t use it, dad. We post there just for you grandparents. But what do you find it to be most effective in your marketing? [Robin] Yeah. So it’s interesting, they’re teasing you, nobody’s on Facebook anymore. They’re not on Facebook, but the demographic that is buying homes is. So, if I want to target a 55-year-old who has owned three homes in their lifetime and is looking to do a refinance for renovation, you’re darn I’m hanging out on Facebook. But in terms of trends TikTok, Unbelievable. If you are not on TikToK, you are missing out massive opportunity. And the way, the reason why I’m so excited about it is the way that it works, that’s very different from Instagram or Facebook. So the way that TikTok works for those of you who don’t know, I’ll give you a dumbed down version is that you can go viral with zero followers. So if you’ve never made a video in your life, you’ve never done anything on TikTok, you’re like, I don’t know, Robin told me to set up an account and you do a video, TikTok will take that video that you made and it will automatically serve it to 200 people and if all 200 people are like boring, don’t like her face, blah, blah, blah, then it just stops. If enough of those 200 people are like, Oh, this is interesting. I’m going to comment. I’m going to watch it a little bit more. Then it spits it out to 700 people and if those 700 people engaged, then it knocks it up to 1800, then 200,000, a million and if you get a video, that’s got enough meat in it, it will start serving to more and more people and then all of a sudden people are commenting, they’re DMing, they feel like they know you. It’s so intimate. It’s your face on their phone that they start engaging and you’re able to generate a large amount of leads. [David] I haven’t heard it quite done in a way that’s so compelling to want to draw me in. And so it’s really getting stuff out there. Is there a strategy to send it out to a group that you know are going to be responding that you can engineered in a way to get that initial response and help create some inertia. [Robin] So this is what’s funny about social media in ads you can target certain people, but when you’re posting, you don’t know. It could be served to people who don’t live in the US, It could be served to children. It could be served to people anywhere in any walk of life. It just goes out to the internet. Now what you can do is you can start to establish yourself as an expert in a very particular niche. Okay, so, for example, if I said, Hey, I am based in Denver, Colorado. I’m next to a military base and I specialize in helping veterans find home loans. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I used to serve and you start doing content about that. You will start to build a following and it’ll serve it in the algorithm to people who have similar attracted to similar kinds of accounts. We see this in Instagram a lot. And then you can build a following in your niche. [David] I need to get you back and sharing some of your wisdom on that. Let’s talk a little bit about AI. AI is exploding everywhere. Everyone says they have AI. Talk about how you guys are using AI effectively. [Robin] My favorite AI tool or tool that uses AI is Capacity. I’m a huge fan of what they do. We’ve been using them internally for all of our support tickets, natural language processing. And now if somebody asks anything close to that, it’s able to synthesize that and give them answers 24/7. So right now I’m on this call with you. We’re having a great time, but there are tickets being answered. There are emails that are coming to me that are being rerouted and answered by AI. [David] I love it. Yeah. We’re adding a tool to our podcast and we’re all 15 years content has been dumped into a database. You can now go out and very soon be able to search our entire database of anything and everything we’ve ever talked about on this podcast, and it’ll bring it up and reference it specifically and bring you relevant information that this is just changing our world. What is the vision for marketing moving forward? [Robin] One thing that I think is interesting is that in a world full of AI, where it’s generating, I was watching a video this morning. you can have AI write your social media caption. You can have a mid journey, do a picture for you. And then I’m thinking, but what I want to interact with that, are users going to be responding back to that empathy thing? And I think there’s going to be a premium on authenticity. The fact that you and I, two humans having this authentic conversation, I think there’s going to be a real appetite for live interactions for humans who kind of fumble their words or maybe mix things up, it’s genuine. [David] when you try to make it too perfect. I think it’s what you’re trying to say is just be real. Empathy comes across as human. And when you’re more human, which means air prone to making mistakes. I do gaps all the time with words. I think you need to bring that out to a certain degree because it does make you more authentic seeming or human [Robin] That’s one of the trends that I think has been harder for some of my older loan officers to realize Is that 10 years ago or earlier, if I was going to do social media coaching, it would be like, okay, you need a green screen and you’re going to have a suit and you’re going to have lighting and a script and you’re going to be very stiff and formal. You want to look like a TV newscaster. Now in 2024, that’s a turnoff. People think that’s a commercial. I don’t want to watch that versus if I were standing in my kitchen and you can see pots and pans everywhere. And I’m making a racket and I’m like, Hey, I’m trying to get this lasagna on the table for the family. But I wanted to talk to you about this new down payment assistance product that came out. This is so rad and so powerful. [David] Yeah. Best example of this is KP. I watched one of his very first videos that he produced. He says, I’m going to try this and he bought a selfie stick of the way he was holding. It was funny, but he was out on a walk. I’ll never forget that and I saw that and he did it so well because it was just organic, authentic and in motion, and he talked about things and I had him come on my podcast because I wanted to share this because I want to celebrate someone who is just willing to get out there and start doing it. KP has now become famous. Everyone wants him at the conference. We want them to speak at the conference on the panels because he’s done such an amazing job branding himself out there just being KP. [Robin] He did a video last night. Where he was in a hotel room that got double booked. I don’t know if you saw it. And he just flipped his camera on and he’s laughing and there’s this other guy and it’s this whole thing had huge engagement. People want to watch that. They want to see him. One of the things that did a thing about was have a messy office and then… [David] No problem with that, I show the camera around, he’ll see it. [Robin] And I tease all the owners of PRMG because their offices are all disasters, but people love it because they’re like, Ooh, what’s that over there. And is that thing going to fall over? It draws people in. [David] That’s hilarious. Robin, this is delightful. I got to have you back. You have so much knowledge. I would love to have you share some excerpts from your training, because I’d love to encourage you to take this out to the industry that a lot of people need to benefit from PMRG has got a real treasure with you and what you’re doing. I love it. It’s no wonder that HousingWire has named you the marketing leader in 2024. And that you’re a woman of influence, great influence in 2023. You’re continuing to do that. You can carry that award for a long time. Thank you so much for being here. I just love it. I enjoyed meeting you. You are just one of the most authentic real people and it’s just delightful to meet with you and interact with your conference and then have you here. Thank you so much. [Robin] This is a bucket list goal for me. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you. And yeah, I’ll come back anytime. I love talking about this. [David] You’ve touched on a lot of different things. I want to go deeper into empathy. I want to talk deeper about when someone is doing social media authenticity, because they go, yeah, I’m authentically weird. and they have all these self imposed limiting factors that keep them from doing that. So if you’re willing to come on and share some of that training with our audience, I’d love that very much. [Robin] Yeah, of course. [David] Thank you so much for being here. Have a great weekend. Thank you for all that you’re doing, for stepping up and standing out in our industry. As you are, I’m going to Keep doing it. We need you.
Important Links
Robin Clayton was recently awarded HousingWire’s 2024 “Marketing Leader” for her extensive work with data modeling and technology utilization, as well as receiving HousingWire’s “Women of Influence” recognition in 2023. She currently co-moderates the Technology & Compliance working group for Lender’s One, and was one of 4 marketing leaders selected to serve on the exclusive Masters of Marketing industry panel, and has enjoyed roles at Countrywide, Bank of America, Washington Mutual, as well as large and small independent mortgage banks. At Countrywide, she became the first national trainer and technical writer who served both operations and sales professionals. In 2020, Robin joined the team at Paramount Residential Mortgage Group, and within 6 months, was invited to join the senior management team to pioneer strategies in digital marketing and vendor management.
Currently overseeing 80+ technology platforms, Robin leverages large volumes of data to select, review, and manage a best of class tech stack. In addition, Robin believes that automation is a critical component to an originator’s success and uses innovative techniques to reduce repetitive tasks, increase time for sales generating activities, and generate higher revenue.