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What is the #1 Mistake Loan Officers Make?

I was talking with a colleague this afternoon and he asked me a very interesting question: What is the #1 mistake loan officers make?

I answered in 2 parts:

1. Failure to have a Personal Development Program (PDP)

2. Failure to go out and get the business even if they work for a company that provides them leads (in short, networking).

Let’s look at these 2 for a minute. In terms of #1, lack of a personal development program (PDP), I find that many LOs don’t have one and don’t even know what one is. Simply put it’s a program that you develop yourself or buy from someone else. It consists of books, tapes or CDs, and seminars and I’ll boldy include Blogs in that as well. Blogging, I think, is a huge new resource for people who want to develop themselves further. In this PDP there are daily steps.

One might be to read 15-20 minutes a day from an uplifting, positive book. Another step might be to listen to one CD or tape a day. As a third step, you could go to a seminar once a month or at the very least once a quarter. Seminars can also include teleseminars which are a relatively new way of communicating that’s very effective - there’s no travel involved, you just pick up the phone and they are significantly less expensive than a live event. With that said, I think the chemistry at live events can trigger big emotional decisions so I’d caution you not to leave them out. Another important step is a daily regimen of listening to professionally recorded self-talk.

The main reason I recommend this is because if you really want to become excellent at what you do, you need to be doing a lot of activities where your self esteem is a factor. So you should constantly be building and reinforcing your self esteem. For example, if you want to begin a new marketing campaign where you’re going out to talk to realtors but you haven’t done that type of prospecting before, you’ll need some support. The type of PDP I describe above will do that.

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