Every business professional has heard the statistic ad nauseam.

It costs 5 times as much to acquire a new customer than to retain and reactivate a current customer.

So you invest in technology to automate email marketing campaigns or maybe commit to a direct mail campaign.

While those methods do a great job of keeping your database warm and maintaining your top-of-mind position with little time investment, they don’t work quite as well as a catalyst for creating real sales opportunities.

Client events and meetups are a great way to have a real conversation and unearth opportunities but they can be costly, infrequent, and once a database grows large enough it’s impossible to invite everyone.

This is where an old-fashioned phone call can make a tremendous difference in your business. The investment is small, the connections are real, and with a single conversation you can both check-in on the wellbeing of your client, and multi-thread your opportunities for referrals, refis, and new purchases or investments.

Surprisingly, while every LO should be dialing their database there is a common objection that often gets in the way.

“I’m Too Busy”

If you’ve got new, profitable loans overflowing your pipeline, this might actually be true – particularly if you’re not interested in scaling up your staff.

But for the vast majority of loan originators, it’s just not true. A couple of additional loans per month would make a tremendous difference on their bottom line.

And usually, the time-thief that prevents these valuable revenue-generating activities from happening is an inefficient or overly manual workflow. Every day, hours are spent chasing down docs (or just finding where they went), fixing or completing loan applications, organizing the loan file, and sending loan status updates.

Each of these common processes can be automated to a great degree by technology.

And once an LO’s workflow has been augmented with automation, an interesting thing happens: they have more time to nurture clients and work their database.

Once your existing workflow is smooth and efficient you can implement new strategies for generating sales. But the key is to make sure those new strategies themselves are also well constructed and designed to be as efficient as possible.

This is where having a sound plan for your calling sessions helps maintain a productive environment. Things to consider when formulating a program:

• Block off your calendar, in advance, when you plan to make calls.
• Get your staff to buy-in to the process and share the load.
• Split up your database so that you’re only scheduled to dial a pre-specified portion each week.
• Use an autodialer like Phoneburner to help streamline sessions so you can make more calls in less time.

The continued activation of past clients, and the generation of warm referrals, is one of the best strategies for organically growing your business and revenue.

Top producers already use this to their advantage every day.

By building their business purely on repeat and referral opportunities they can keep their marketing and advertising to a bare minimum, reducing overhead, and making each loan they close more profitable.