Lykken on Lending

In our SPECIAL EPISODE this week, we have Ron Vaimberg, President of Ron Vaimberg International, to discuss what he sees happening with originators given the significant slowdown in originations & how someone deals with the uncertainty of a market like this one.

Want to know more about Ron Vaimberg?

Ron Vaimberg is recognized as one of the most requested, in-demand trainers and personal success coaches in the mortgage and real estate industry. He is the driving force and coach behind many of the nation’s top-producing loan officers, real estate professionals, and account executives.

Ron is often referred to as the “street trainer” in that his high-performance marketing, sales, and leadership strategies are easy to implement and produce rapid returns.

Ron’s key to success is that he provides solutions that work with anyone’s natural personality. With Ron, you don’t need to memorize unnatural scripts or become someone you are not. Ron’s strategies allow you to have more influence and control over your business and success while remaining true to who you are.

https://www.ronvaimberg.com/ultimate-originator-live/

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SPECIAL EPISODE: How Originators Can Dramatically Take Advantage of Today’s Challenging Market Conditions

I’m excited to have Ron Vaimberg joining us. He’s one of my favorite guys when it comes to sales and sales training because he doesn’t veer off from the basics. I don’t care what your business model is, consumer, direct to realtors, refinance or whatever it is. The way he goes about it is he sticks to the principles that work. Mark it in, mark it out, volume up, volume down. That’s why we have him here as a guest. Ron, it’s good to have you here.

David, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be part of the program.

Joining me is my co-host, Jack Nunnery.

Thank you, David.

It’s so good to have you here. Ron, I want to get in and let those that do not know you get a little insight into you and how you got to be one of the top sales trainers in the nation.

Before I became a trainer and a coach, I started out as a realtor. I grew up on Long Island, New York. I grew up on the North shore of Long Island. I started out as a realtor and did that for a few years. I then became a loan officer back in the day when rates were 13% and 14%, and our big refi boom was when rates hit 8%. Of course, I was killing it. The short version is I’ve worked for mortgage bankers. I owned my own mortgage brokerage for a number of years. I’ve worked for banks.

In 1997, I started doing training and coaching while I still owned my mortgage brokerage. It got to the point where this was growing so much and I realized that I liked mortgages. I love training and coaching, helping others, and helping many families. For many years, I have been training and coaching originators, realtors, and wholesale account executives. Those are the three lanes that I stay in. I work with people in banks, individuals, mortgage bankers, credit unions, and brokers anywhere on the frontline.

That’s anyone who could spell mortgage with two Ts. I like something that you said. You love this. It’s that old adage that says, “Find something you love to do and you’ll never work another day in your life.” I love what I’m doing here. One of the things I want to get into is we know what’s going on in the markets. I would like to get your perspective on what you see happening with originators, given the significant slowdown in originations. It is a slowdown, but yet we’re still dealing with some of the highest volumes. I mean almost historic volumes, albeit a lot less than the previous couple of years. Talk about that.

It’s interesting you’re talking about high volumes. It has shifted a lot in recent weeks. Not that I’m Debbie Downer here, but the MBA put out something that originations are the lowest they’ve been in 22 years. It’s even worse than in 2009. It has shifted quickly. Honestly, I’m seeing it go week by week because there are weeks that are better than others. That was a report. It was a headline. It got picked up by the mainstream media from the MBA’s report. I’m 99% sure it was the MBA that put it out.

What’s happening is you have a lot of originators that have never dealt with anything like this. They’re beside themselves. They’re dealing with fear, insecurity and uncertainty. A lot of people, especially older people in the industry, feel like they’re going backwards. They’ll say things like, “I feel like I’m starting over again.” Anybody who says that is not helping their mindset. They’re only hurting it because you’re not starting over. You just have to figure out new ways to get business or go back to what you said, which is what I do, which is going back to the basics or the core principles of how you get business. A lot of people are struggling with that because they feel like, “I shouldn’t have to do this anymore.”

“It was so easy. Why am I having to work?”

Ron, I’ve got a question. When I think about this market, I think about volatility. There are layers of challenges and uncertainty in this market. How does somebody deal with those?

The first thing that I do with everybody that I’m working with, and there are a lot of uncertainties, is I’m all about asking questions. One of my greatest mentors, which has been very helpful in my success as a trainer and coach, is Anthony Robbins. One of the things that he drilled into my head is, “The questions you ask make all the difference.” A lot of people have a lot of bad habits of asking a lot of bad questions.

What I’m asking them is, “How do you take advantage of what’s happening?” No matter what the market does, there’s always a way to take advantage of it. When you get yourself deep into a world of uncertainty or insecurity, you don’t think clearly anymore. You probably start asking yourself a whole bunch of questions that are going to make matters worse.

As you ask those questions, your brain is going to filter them and look for everything to validate your thought. Rates move in the wrong direction, “Here we go again.” Rates come back, “Maybe it’s getting better,” and then they move in the wrong direction. It’s like this rollercoaster ride. The advice that I’m giving people to start is to focus on what they can control and ask themselves the questions that allow them to see the forest through the trees, see what’s happening, and separate themselves from what I’ll say is average and typical LO thinking. That in and of itself is the starting point to getting yourself into a better place of certainty.

One thing we’ve heard describing our current market is a term called the Mortgage Ice Age. This drives me crazy. Ron, I know we’re like-minded. I can only imagine how you’re responding to that. For those that are thinking that, what are your thoughts on this name that’s being pushed around out there? Are we in an Ice Age?

I’m going to keep this G-rated, but I’m going to tell you whoever came up with that phrase, I hope they’re not in the mortgage industry. If they are in the mortgage industry, I am going to wish them a rapid death in the mortgage industry. In what universe would that phrase ever serve anybody in a positive way? We know all about what labels can do to people. If you attached Mortgage Ice Age to this market, in no way, shape or form is that going to help anybody. Somebody created it to make a headline and it has caught on because I’ve heard it more than once. I’ve seen it in multiple articles and in the media. I don’t know where it came from, but I despise it.

I despise it as well. What you’re famous for is mindset. You talked about this earlier in some of your opening comments. It’s so important to have the right mindset. If you’re in the mindset and we’re in the Ice Age, that sounds like certain death. The game is over. What are we going to do? Go find another career? That person who wrote that hopefully has found another career. Jack, I’ll let you get in on this.

I think Ron brings up a good approach. Much of sales is the state of mind or the frame of mind that you’re in. If you’re positive, you’re going to come across as enthusiastic and much more confident. People can hear when a salesperson is beaten down, whether or not it’s over the phone or face-to-face.

Years ago, I used to do a lot of cold calling. After I had 3 or 4 rejects in a row, I would shut it down for an hour. I would back away from the computer. I go walk outside for a moment, get some fresh air, let my mind go through a reboot, and then come back in and get back on the phone again. I felt that after being rejected 3 or 4 times, I now turned negative. I wanted to keep that positive tone in my voice. Every once in a while, it took a mental reset for me to do that. What do you think about that, Ron?

First of all, I love the fact that you had the self-realization enough to say, “I need to step away and do a reset.” Most people are not going to reset. They’re going to give up. There are two points that I could make here. One is you are absolutely correct. You can tell when a salesperson is desperate. You can tell when they’re uncertain or when they lack confidence. Their tonality changes. The tempo in which they speak changes. Their inflections change. The words they use will change. There are so many things.

Market Uncertainty: You can tell when a salesperson is desperate. You can tell when they are uncertain or lacking in confidence. You can read all of that because it’s being projected out, whether it’s face-to-face or over the phone.

If you’re meeting them face-to-face, you can even read it in their bodies. There are all of these being projected out. If you’re making these calls and you start feeling that way, it’s going to come across. Whether it’s face-to-face or over the phone, it screams through the speaker. What happens is if we’re on the receiving end of it, we’re not going to say, “That person is nervous.” We’re going to detect that something is not right. There’s this thing called congruency in communication. It’s when your words, tone and body language all line up for a message that they’re all basically working together.

If you ever asked a person or the opposite of it, “How are you doing?” “I’m okay.” They said the right words. Some of us say, “Great. They said okay. I know there’s a problem, but let me keep going.” The reality of it is that they said the right words, but their tone and body language were completely disconnected from what they said, which is incongruency. There are a lot of salespeople that do this day in and day out.

Jack, you brought up that you had to do a reset. When I was first starting my training and coaching business, I got referred to a few companies because of the success I was having as a mortgage broker, and then that’s when I said, “I’m enjoying this. I want to build a business this way.” I’m in New York, and I had my plan of calling mortgage companies based on time zones. I was typically calling until 7:00 or 8:00 at night because I would be calling all the way to the West Coast.

I’m not going to say I never got up and did resets. I did, but my mindset is I am not getting off this phone until I get somebody to say yes or at least say they’re willing to talk to me. It didn’t happen every day, but every day, I had to make phone calls. One of the first trainings I ever got was over a Memorial Day weekend. It was a mortgage company. They said, “Would you come out?” It was new loan officers. That’s where I started before I did sales and marketing. I started with new loan officers.

It was a mortgage company in California. They said, “We got a bunch of new loan officers, would you do it over Memorial Day weekend?” I’m like, “Are you serious?” They’re like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “I’m there.” I explained to my wife that I’m going out there Memorial Day weekend. She’s like, “Are you serious?” I’m like, “Yeah.” San Diego is supposed to be sunny and beautiful. I got the only four days that ever rained.

I had two mortgage companies there. We lived there and it was some of the most boring weather. It’s always sunny, warm, 78 degrees or something. It was beautiful.

Not when Ron Vaimberg goes there.

Ron, as I got a little smarter on the way that I reset myself, I stopped calling it cold calling. I called it first call. I would tell myself, “I’m nice and knowledgeable. I bring a lot of value to the table. This person, if they engage with me, it’s their lucky day because they met a mortgage professional that understands their business and can bring substantial value to what they’re trying to do.” It’s one thing to go out, smell the flowers, look at the clouds, and let the brain reset itself. It’s another thing to positively drive that reset. I always disliked the phrase cold call. There’s something negative about that. I flipped it to first call and talked myself up like, “This can be their lucky day if they engage with me because I’m going to help them.”

Jack, I’ve never heard that before. I love it and I’m going to use it, but I’m going to give you credit for it.

Thank you, Ron.

It’s like one person, “I’ll give you credit for the first three times I use it. After that, it’s mine.”

When people start offering me money for it, then, of course, it’s mine. That’s a brilliant way of looking at it. It’s a reframe. If I remember correctly, Mike Ferry, the real estate trainer and coach, had a concept of starting every day at zero. Every day, you have no business. You have to go out and find business. There are many ways for originators to get themselves in the right place. We are in a very negative world, and you have to be very careful about what you’re exposing yourself to, whether it’s in business or outside.

The majority of it is not positive. It’s negative. You have to isolate and ask yourself questions like, “What value do I bring? How will somebody benefit by working with me? What is the opportunity that I can create for them? How can I help them in their business?” Start thinking about what you have to give versus how you get.

In my trainings, one of the core principles I always teach originators is that the question they should ask, especially with referral partners, is not, “How do I get business?” It’s, “How do I get them to want to do business with me?” Want is always in bold and all caps. When somebody wants to do business with you, there’s no combat. You’re using their energy to get them to say yes. The great thing about it is when you ask them the right questions, they’ll tell you everything you need to know to get them to want to do business with you, but if you’re doing all the talking, you can’t make that work.

Market Uncertainty: As an originator, the question you should always ask yourself when dealing with referral partners is not “how do I get business” but “how do I get them to want to do business with me.”

For a true salesperson, that’s always a bit of a challenge. Going to sales managers, what are you saying they need to do to assist their sales team in this market?

A couple of things come right off the top of my head. Sales managers, the first thing I want you to understand is you’re talking to people who are not you. All I mean by that is if you are a sales manager, I’m going to make the assumption that you have been successful as an originator. Maybe you were a successful owner or whatever it is. What I see, and I witnessed this time and time again, is that sales managers will go into meetings and they’ll say, “Get out there. You got to talk to more realtors. Go out to lunch and find out about their business. Take an interest in their life. Connect with them and build rapport, and get them to like you.”

I’m not going to disagree with any of those strategies. The problem is, in most of those meetings, that is the extent of the real substance that is given. The people who are sitting in your room, on the phone, in the conference listening to you, you are speaking from a place where you understand what everything you said means and you already know how to do it. The people you’re talking to, many of them don’t.

You’re telling them, “Go meet with a realtor and find out about their lives.” You have to tell them what questions they need to ask to do that. You have to say, “Get appointments with realtors. Go out and see them.” The loan officer is sitting there saying, “I don’t know what to say.” What is very important if you don’t detail the how is you’re setting up people to be scared and afraid because they’re going to fail.

You bring out a great point. I do quite a bit of coaching myself, usually on the executive side of it. As I’m coaching different ones, we explain this. It’s so important to get into explaining how. “When I say do this, I mean this.” You give them examples and you break them down. That’s a big mistake. People want to please their bosses so they act like they understood and then they go out and fail. You raise a good point. Jack, I’ll get it over to you.

Listening to Ron and then your comments, David, I’m going to quote the Beatles. It ties into taking an interest in the realtors’ lives, but the Beatles quote is, “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” When I say that, your interest has to be sincere. People can detect phony these days a mile away. If I were coaching, I would say, “Be sincere and be yourself.” Don’t try to manufacture it. Sit down and behave like you’re talking to an old friend that you haven’t seen in a while. Take a sincere interest in their life and be enthusiastic about it. When you were talking, Ron, I’m sitting here going, “The Beatles. This song is playing in my head right now.”

Jack, you said to be sincere and be yourself. I’m all about that. I always tell people, “It’s not what you say. It’s what you ask that makes all the difference,” but there’s a problem that a lot of LOs deal with. That is they could be whoever they are and they’re not killing it. They see someone in their office who is killing it and rocking it, and that individual is not them. That person could be mild-mannered or a quiet person who doesn’t talk. It could be on the other extreme end or the person who wants their name up in lights. It’s about ego, accomplishment, or whatever it is. It’s a very different personality than they are.

I tell people, “I don’t care if you have a big ego or have no ego, or if you’re high intensity or low intensity, you can still be successful being you if you know what to ask.” The best part about asking questions is you don’t have to talk. In all my seminars, I would say, “By a show of hands, how many of you have ever been in a conversation or a presentation, know you’re talking too much, and don’t know how to stop?” Everybody raises their hand and I go, “Do I have any two-handers? Does anybody want to throw a foot in there too?” Almost everybody is in agreement with that. It’s because you’re trying to convince. You don’t have to talk to convince people. All you have to do is ask the right questions, and then people convince themselves.

Earlier in the show, Ron, you talked at a high level about taking advantage of a market like this. How does somebody do that?

In this market right now, the way I see it is there is not nearly enough business for all the originators. The way you take advantage of it is you have to be willing to do what the average and typical originators will not do. You have to prospect like you never have a prospect before. You have to take the time to master the skills to be an effective communicator, to know how to get referral partners’ attention, and how to become better at converting leads.

Market Uncertainty: If you want to take advantage of the market right now, you have to be willing to do what the average and typical originators will not do. You have to prospect like never before.

The way you take advantage is by knowing how to either do what average and typical loan officers will not do or are incapable of doing, meaning they don’t possess the knowledge. The best illustration I would give is we are in sales and the majority of people in our business don’t practice anything. We go out and do it. If we get success, we go, “This works,” so we keep doing it.

I’ll give this example. Let’s say you need a life-saving operation. It’s guaranteed you’re going to be alive if you go through the operation as long as you have a competent doctor. You’re on the table. The surgeon looking over you and says, ”Do you have any questions before we put you under?” You say, “Yes, just one. How many times have you practiced this surgery?” The doctor goes, “As often as you practiced selling” Would you stay on the table?

That’s a great question.

The answer for most people is no because they have fallen into sales. You can be successful that way. The last few years have given us that, no matter what. If you could answer the phone, you could be successful. Now, that’s not getting it done. The way you take advantage is by being willing to put the time, effort, and commitment into mastering your profession, which is not mortgages. It’s sales and marketing. It is your product.

That’s such a good point. One reason I’ve enjoyed referring business to you is because you keep people centered on the basics. You keep coming back to, “You are in sales.” Talk about some of those principles that are the basics that you put out, no matter if the market is raging or it feels like it’s collapsing.

The principles that never die are one, you have to know how to get people’s attention. If you don’t have leads, I don’t care how much you know about the mortgage industry, you’re going to be the most intelligent broke loan officer there is. By the way, I went through that in a period of my career because when I got into the business, it was the first refi boom ever. I made great money in my first year. I thought I was good.

In 1987, that little thing happened when interest rates went up in one day. It was Black Friday and Black Monday. It was a very dark day. We’ll put it that way. Rates went up by 1% and my pipeline wasn’t locked. It was refis and it was over. That’s when I realized, “Ron, you don’t know anything about sales or marketing.” You have to know how to generate leads. That can come from referrals and networking. You’re talking about referral partner relationships, which I am very big on, especially in a purchase market, because everybody is trying to bypass the realtors.

Eighty-eight percent of all residential real estate transactions are handled by realtors. From the age group of 22 to 39, it’s 92%. Why would you try to avoid them? Now they’re getting bombarded. Everybody is calling them. You have to know how to get their attention. I call that positioning. Some people call it USP but it’s the same thing to me. Positioning raises more awareness to the point I’m trying to make because you got to have multiple positionings. A position comes from 1 of 2 places. It’s either what problem you are solving for the realtor or how you are making their life easier.

For most loan officers, I ask them this question, “I’m a realtor and you’re a loan officer. Why should I do business with you?” I get the whole dump of, “We got good service.” I’ve never heard an LO promise bad service. “I make myself available.” I never heard a loan officer say, “I’m not going to return your phone calls.” The list could go on and on.

You have to know how to get noticed. You also have to be prepared for objections and challenges. You have to know what to do when a realtor says, “I have an existing relationship. I have an in-house lender. I only do listings. I’m winding down my career.” If you don’t prepare yourself for these responses, you’re going to get sunk every time you get one and you’re going to get a lot of them. Those are reflexes, by the way.

It’s the same way when you walk into a store and the clerk comes up and says, “Can I help you?” What do we always say? “No, I’m just looking.” We then get annoyed three minutes later when we can’t find the person that we sent away, but that’s a different situation. You have to know how to overcome those objections and how to do a presentation.

People say, “I’m talking to one person.” If you’re talking to 1, 20, or 100, you’re doing a presentation. You have to have a strategy. You have to have a path. The joke I always make is the number one sales presentation used by loan officers and realtors has a name. It’s called winging it. That’s what people do. What happens is they’ve winged it and they’ve made sales. It worked, so the brain links up, “This works. Let me keep doing this,” instead of saying, “Is there a better way to do this?”

That’s a very great point. We got to wrap this up. What would be your advice to them when looking for a new originator? What does an originator need to be effective at competing and succeeding in this market? What is the core competency that we should be encouraging our recruiters to be looking for?

Character. You can teach anybody with the right character in the mortgage business. When I say character, I’m talking about somebody with energy. Energy doesn’t mean they’re bouncing off the walls. It means energy and passion towards being successful. You want someone who’s willing to learn, someone who understands a great soldier, or someone who says, “Show me what to do and I will follow you.” After that, they can develop their own personality, ways of doing things, and their own nuances.

Market Uncertainty: An originator in today’s market needs character and energy. Someone who is passionate, teachable, and willing to learn.

Whenever I’m dealing with anybody, even when I’m talking to somebody who inquires about coaching, the first thing I’m looking to is, who am I dealing with? What is their character? If they’re not even able to demonstrate that they’re willing to learn, there’s nothing that I’m going to say that’s going to, all of a sudden, change their character about learning. I look for people that are focused on, “How do I do this?” They’re not coming into the business with the mindset of, “Let me give it a try.” A lot of people go into mortgages and real estate who are like, “Let me give this a try.”

There has been research that I’ve seen that has shown that when you actually advertise and you use the word career in the advertisement, you get higher quality candidates. You’re looking for someone who’s talking about it or you could even ask a question like, “What does the word career mean to you?” That’s a great question in an interview. I also work with leaders and managers and help them with interviewing strategies and recruiting strategies. That’s going to reveal a lot about their character.

It does. Good point. Jack?

There’s something that Ron said a while ago in the show with regard to sales professionalism. I think that what can distinguish somebody in this market now is when you ask them, “What are you?” They say, “I’m a mortgage professional.” No, you’re a sales professional. Treat sales like it is a craft to become a professional at what you do. Whether or not you’re in the mortgage, you’re selling cars or heavy equipment, or are an international harvester like David, you will do well. Go back to the fundamentals that say, “Before I’m a mortgage professional, I’m a sales professional,” and hone your craft.

Jack, you nailed it. I start every one of my live trainings with a question to the audience. I go, “What business are you in?” I’ll go with 3, 5, 7 or 10 people. I can tell you that it averages about 1 out of every 50 to 75 people that somebody says sales, the people business, the mortgage business, the lending business, the home business, and they’re all thinking product. They’re not thinking profession, which is sales. Jack, thank you for saying that.

That’s a good note to wrap this up. Ron, how can people get ahold of you that want to reach out to you and say, “I got to have this guy come and speak to my organization.”

The best way to get ahold of me is you can email me directly at [email protected]. I’ll even do this, David. Forget my main line. Here’s my cell phone number, (914) 589-1315. Call me or text me. I answer my calls. If not, I will return them quickly and I would love to have a chat with you.

I’ve referred you to great businesses and a good number of our clients. They all benefited from working with you, Ron. Pick up the phone and call him, text him, and get ahold of him. Jack, thank you for joining me on this show. I always enjoy your commentary. You bring in so much and add so much.

Ron, it’s a pleasure to meet you.

You too, Jack. Thank you so much. I appreciate both of you. David, I’ll be getting those sound bites over to you.