Pre-Qualification 2.0: Discussing Employment and Income

Having a discussion with your friend that you’ve known for 10 years is just as simple as having a conversation with your client.  You are asking questions, finding out the answers, and elaborating on the answers to establish a better understanding of what is going on in their life.

 

We all know that Handling the First Objection is the first step to solidifying a relationship with our clients.  After we have overcome that first hurdle, we have to get the client as interested in the conversation as possible.  That is done by Selling Emotion, and asking questions that will trigger emotionally driven responses.

 

After we get the interest of the client peaked by seeing themselves in the home, we can then move on to the roots of the application: employment and income.

 

These two topics are seen as routine and really drag the application process down.  You will rarely find a person that wants to talk about how much they make and the address of their company.  Loan Officers and clients alike just want to get this information out of the way as fast and quickly as possible.  However, if we want to make ourselves different from Joe Mortgage down the street, we need to handle this portion of our conversation a bit differently.

 

As always, you want to ask open-ended questions that will allow the client to feel in control and will allow them to provide a full answer.  Here’s an example: “Tell me about what you do for a living”.  This really opens the door for the client to tell you anything that ranges from if they like their job or they want to hit Friday as fast as possible.  It is up to you, at that point, to really elaborate on the response (just like you would with your friend).

 

You can then bring the conversation to how the client got started in their current job, what made them decide to go into that particular field, and why they are planning on staying with that company (or leaving depending on the client).  Throughout all of this, you are essentially getting the employment history, and you are also seeing what is important to your client (stability, etc).  You can now openly ask about any pay raises that are expected, the current pay, and the client’s financial goal in 5 years (if you want to dive in that far).

 

It is extremely important that you keep the focus of the conversation on them, and really make the client understand that you are about to help them into a new home.  So, after this brief (5-7 minute) conversation is done about the employment, you can always relate the key statement, “It really seems like you have a stable career path right now which is going to take a lot of stress off of you when you move into your home”!

 

It’s comments like those that really sell the client on emotion, and separate you from other Loan Officers and Mortgage Brokers, and they will help you improve your overall sales and marketing techniques!