You don’t need 20 years in the mortgage business to be considered an expert. If you know your stuff and you can convey that knowledge to others, you’ll have no problem establishing yourself as an expert. You can confidently make the claim — and your knowledge and aptitude can back it up. Your prospects and referral partners want to work with a professional they can trust to get the job done. Positioning yourself as an expert is a great way to build trust and get more attention from the people you want to align yourself with. Here are a few attributes that will help you establish yourself as a mortgage expert:
Passion
Maintaining your passion for why you do the work you do is crucial, even if you’ve been doing it for years (or decades). When you’re visibly excited about your work, it makes a strong impression on others. That enthusiasm shows confidence and a desire to share what you know. Passion demonstrates that you know the industry and you care about your work.
Curiosity
The mortgage industry is always in flux, and LOs need to be curious if they want to stay on top of all the changes and trends. You’re never going to reach the point where you know it all. A mortgage expert stay engaged with everything happening in the industry, and they know it well enough to explain it to others. I wrote last week about why LOs need to be educators, here.
Sharing Knowledge Consistently
As you learn more and more throughout your career, you need to be thinking about how you can convey that knowledge to others. You need to share what you know. A great way to do this is through content marketing (more on that, here). When you share content that breaks down complicated topics, answers questions, and addresses common concerns, you’re sharing something of value that your audience will want to see more of. You’re also demonstrating your expertise.
Just as one great transaction doesn’t solidify your reputation as the go-to LO in your local market, sharing one article online won’t do it either. To really position yourself as an expert, you need to be consistent. By regularly sharing content and engaging with your online networks, you and your brand will become associated with expertise within the industry.
Confidence
We’ve spent a lot of time on online presence, but you need to communicate your expertise through your in-person interactions too. This means carrying confidence with you wherever you go. This, of course, can’t cross the line into cockiness — a true expert is honest when they don’t know something and takes a pause to find the answer. When you’re truly confident, you have a much easier time building trust, be it with other LOs, prospects, or referral partners.
There are many industry “experts” that aren’t experts at all, and on the flip side, there are plenty of LOs with 3 years of experience that wouldn’t call themselves expert… but maybe they should. If you find that you possess the traits of an expert, then who’s to say you’re not?
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