5 Tasks to Outsource to Virtual Assistants as a Loan Officer

How often do you find yourself putting something on your to-do list like working “on your business” instead of “in your business.” Only to reach the end of the day, week, or month without ever completing the task? 

Being a mortgage loan officer in today’s market can be a wild balancing act, certainly when you haven’t established systems and processes for a successful business model that makes money and helps you grow. When you started how many loan officer strategies and loan officer tools were preached to you, that didn’t really pan out?

 We all know that getting to the point where you can say that your daily routines are enough to bring in the guaranteed mortgage leads for your life and business, AND also drive growth, is a dream for most loan officers. I started Empower LO as a producing loan officer so I completely understand why it's a fantasy for so many. 

I mean picture it, what other industry are you the salesperson, marketing department, operations manager (for your business operations, not the processing or underwriting), and assisting real families with one of the most important financial decisions a person can make? 

Two years before we started Empower LO, I read a life-changing book The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. The most sagacious concept I picked up was the idea of taking charge of outsourcing tedious tasks to a virtual assistant. 

I read online about platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, websites where you can hire real, skilled people from all around the globe to handle tasks ranging from simple and mindless, to building your business an app based on your vision and guidance. Often times these assistants are college-educated staff in countries like India or the Philippines who work for less than 5 dollars an hour (which is quite often decent money for them).

Virtual staffing is of incredible value and sometimes necessary at times, but it can still be a giant pain in the ass. This is why we’ve compiled five simple and cheap jobs that you can use to get your feet under you with your mortgage virtual assistant. 

I’m not just coming up with these out of thin air, these are all tasks I’ve had virtual assistants help me with. So if you have any questions, feel free to email me at [email protected]

1. Building Lists of Real Estate Agents in Your Market

The first thing I had a virtual assistant help me with was building a list. I had a program from an awards banquet I attended and it listed a few hundred top-producing agents in my local market. What I needed as good contact information for each of those real estate agents, put into a single excel sheet, and formatted properly (to fit my CRM requirements). That way I could easily upload that list into my Marketing Automation System (MAS) and begin marketing to them right away. 

What did I do? I paid a wonderful person from the Philippines 10 dollars to scrape the internet looking for up-to-date contact information for each agent. The best part? Within 12 hours I had a spreadsheet back with the correct email addresses, website links, and phone numbers for Every. Single. Agent. 

Another great tool for your virtual assistant to help with is to also collect interests and hobby information that your dream real estate agent shares with you. This may cost you a little more, as it takes some more effort and thought from your assistant. I’m sure you know the value of a strong personal relationship with your business partners. One way to ensure you’re finding the perfect fit is to break the ice immediately with your research done ahead of time. 

The issue we see many loan officers struggle with is communicating with agents and finding out how to get mortgage referrals from realtors. This is where your mortgage virtual assistant comes in. Take the list of attributes or shared traits, give it to your VA who created your list, and tell them to use search engines and social media platforms to find agents who are active online and share those traits. Give your assistant a time frame you want the list back by, your minimum expectations, and bam! You have a list of perfect agents to work with, and now you just have to win them over.

Not sure how to win realtor partners? Check out our Realtor Outreach Playbook for more information.

2. Updating Contact Information for Uncontacted Leads 

I’m going to start by saying that is likely going to be redundant if your lead generation and automated follow-up system are functioning properly. 

But if you’re hitting up all your leads on your own and your lead list has some bad information on it, then there’s something you can do to salvage some of that value. 

Websites like Spokeo and Intelius collect data on normal people from all over the web, and keep it in one spot. Your mortgage virtual assistant can search these sites with nothing more than a full name to find current contact info for your leads. 

NOTE: After you do this, you NEED to scrub this updated contact info list against the DNC list because it’s not data that was given to you directly. 

In your CRM, you should have specific dispositions for your uncontacted leads. You can provide your mortgage virtual assistant with login credentials*** to your CRM or you can just export leads with specific dispositions into a spreadsheet, and send it over to be updated. If you send your virtual mortgage staff a spreadsheet, just have them update it with current information, and then upload and update your current records instead of creating new ones. 

*** DO NOT do this if your company provides your CRM or if you have protected/sensitive data stored in there. 

Either way, give your mortgage virtual assistant your credentials for your Intelius or Spokeo accounts, have them update your information, and then drop your fresh list back into a follow-up campaign, or start dialing them! 

You can have a VA who you routinely have doing work like this in real-time. 

New lead, but they gave you the wrong number, or did your email bounce?

Tag it, flag it, forget it, and have your VA check it out and send back updates every day.

 

3. Writing Blogs and Newsletters

If you’ve been following Empower LO or myself, you already know how much value I place on producing regular content as a loan officer. One of the most beneficial habits you can form is daily blog writing, assuming you know how to leverage your content. 

Don’t worry, I know that not everyone is amazing at, or likes to write! I certainly didn’t when I first started out, I could barely come up with content for mortgage email marketing. Blog writing can easily eat up a lot of your precious time, and that’s where a quality copywriter comes in. 

Before outsourcing your blog writing, you need to keep in mind: 

• Your blog can be a powerful extension of your brand, in positive or negative ways. So you probably don’t want to hire a mortgage virtual assistant whose main language isn’t English. A US-based writer will cost more, but it pays off.

 

• Make sure you’re not undermining the direction and themes of your other content, you’re the expert on your brand after all.

 

• Don’t just tell your mortgage virtual assistant “I want blogs on home-buying tips”.

 

• Don’t copy and rewrite content that other mortgage blogs have done. Why? Because it’s already been done, that need has been met.

 

• Stand out from the crowd by answering relevant questions that real borrowers are asking. This is how you produce quality content, rather than uninteresting junk.

Newsletters follow a similar path, as far as hiring an assistant goes. If you find a good blog writer, they could write your newsletters. This will save you time hunting for new staff, onboarding, and editing their work. The main difference is that you want your mortgage newsletters to have a recurring theme, so you can set it and forget it. 

Newsletters are one of my favorite forms of content to help me perpetually stay in front of my leads, prospective agents, and rising industry stars. You can send your newsletters out at whatever frequency you want, the important thing is to be consistent. 

You can do newsletters multiple times a day, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc… However, each newsletter needs to follow the theme, have quality content, and come out regularly with no interruptions. 

Taking advantage of this form of content will help position you as a resource and showcase your follow-through. On the other hand, it can show your impulsiveness and lack of attention to detail if the sending schedule is inconsistent. 

4. Building Drip Campaigns

Okay, I know this is pretty close to number three, but there are a few reasons I consider them separately. Firstly, while your blog and newsletter writer can be the same, you may need to hire a separate writer with a background in sales writing. This is because a drip campaign targets a specific list of people and usually has a CTA (call to action) or specific target. These aren’t perpetual and you don’t have to write a bunch of content for them to be effective. 

Your best choice may be to include content in your mortgage email marketing that you recycle from your blogs or link to those blogs through your automated mortgage drip campaigns. 

A sales writer will be more effective and efficient at getting your prospects to take a specific action. This makes them the perfect candidate for writing your mortgage drip campaigns. Again, this person should probably be based in the United States or a primarily English-using country (be careful, as dialects and casual speech differ in various countries with the same base language, think London-English to Southern America English).

You should have mortgage drip campaigns built for:

• New Leads

• Contacted Leads, Not Applied

• Leads Applied, Not Qualified, Haven’t Signed Up w/Credit Repair Partner

• Pre-approved Leads, Not Shopping

• Refinance Prospects

• Renovation Prospects

• Etc…. You get the point

Before you start feeling overwhelmed by how many different drip campaigns you can/should use, keep in mind that a good mortgage drip campaign should only cost what you’re willing to pay now and pays huge dividends in the long game. So try starting out with the campaigns that are the most vital to your business and slowly increase from there as you see your payoff rise. 

5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Administration

A key detail that I cannot emphasize enough for any loan originator is keeping as many of your database details in your CRM as possible. Automated marketing is in a massive growth boom and we aren’t all that far off from having AI robots that can automatically segment your lists based on the notes you’ve kept, and instantly create unique campaigns for each individual.  This includes tone mirroring if you’ve kept your email messaging in your database (hint, do this). 

I know it sounds kinda freaky, but if you wait for the technology to reach that level BEFORE you start truly valuing your database, then you’re going to be left in the dust, very quickly. To succeed we need to be ahead of the curve, not close behind. 

Now when you’re keeping detailed, private notes on people you want to be incredibly vigilant about who you’re allowing access and to what information. To learn more about this, check out Virtual Freedom by Chris Ducker, it’s a fantastic book that explores all aspects of virtual staffing and information security 

Back to the point, what do you have your mortgage virtual assistant do with your CRM? Most people don’t update their CRM daily, and if they do that’s often a short-lived habit that falls out when business picks up. 

I personally prefer to take notes by hand when I’m on a phone call, but I hate doing a task twice. It feels like I’m wasting my time and effort. Sound like you?

 If so, make a call log your notes in a spreadsheet template (hell, even have your virtual mortgage assistant do this) and keep a printed stack of copies by your phone. When you’re done with your day, scan or take photos of your sheets, send them to your mortgage virtual assistant, and have them enter the information into your CRM- updating disposition, adding people to mortgage drip campaigns, etc… 

A company called Rocketbook made a reusable notebook, Everlast, that has small icons at the bottom of each page. When you first get the notebook you connect each icon to an action, anything from uploading to Evernote/Google Drive, to emailing a copy of the note to a specific address. If you take lead notes here it can further reduce the extra steps of sending it to a VA yourself. 

Don’t Let All This Overload You!

We just went through a bunch of actionable items, and it can seem overwhelming but this is all you need to get started today. 

You can go a few steps further by brainstorming the different tasks you can outsource and how, buy 4 Hour Work Week and Virtual Freedom, and learn everything you can about outsourcing BEFORE you hire a mortgage virtual assistant for your first project. 

But then you may never do anything with all the information you gained here. That goes for all my content because I keep it at the front of my thoughts to only give you content you can put to work RIGHT NOW so you don’t get stuck in research mode.

Don’t just observe and wait, take action! The easiest way to try this all out would be to hire a virtual mortgage assistant to help with a task you understand the most. Virtual staffing requires you to clearly understand what you want so that you can find the right writer and communicate with them concisely and efficiently. 

If you try the tasks above or run into issues, you can always start with something easier to get the process worked out. A great starting point would be the lead contact template I mentioned previously. Not taking notes on every call with a lead or prospect? You’re totally messing up. 

Now assuming you are, or you’re starting to now, you’re probably doing it on scratch paper or a notebook. Organize your notes better by using a templated note sheet. Here’s how to set yours up:

• Take five minutes to draft what our ideal lead contact form would look like. 

• When you’re finished with that go to Fiverr.com or Upwork and sign up for an account.

• Search for “basic excel” or “basic spreadsheet” 

• Find a freelancer whose work you like, message them, and get started!

You shouldn’t have to pay more than 5-10 dollars for this job and it shouldn’t take you more than 30 minutes, including signing up. Now the next time you do a simple task like this, it’ll take you 15 minutes instead, then it’ll be 10 minutes, then 5. 

Pretty cool isn’t it? Just do something with this knowledge to respect the time you put into reading this! Maximize and use all of your time.

Anywho, I hope you found this information useful. If you do, give it a share, it’ll not only help me and show your support, but it’ll show the people in your sphere that you take the 80/20 Loan Originator Law and mortgage lead generation seriously. As your authority and reputation grow you can build a professional network that’ll keep you accountable and you’re more likely to get help from your management and company when they recognize this isn’t just a fad for you or something that keeps you from producing. 

Thanks again for reading, I’ll see you at the top!

Michael McAllister