How to improve mortgage lead quality

"Poor quality leads" is the most common complaint in broker marketing and one of the least precise. It can mean the people are unreachable, or they are reachable but nowhere near ready, or they are ready but want something you do not do, or they are perfectly good and the firm is handling them badly.

Those four problems have four different fixes, and buying a different source only solves one of them. Start by working out which one you have.

Define quality as an outcome, not a feeling

A lead is high quality if it becomes a case, or if it becomes a case later, or if it is disqualified so quickly that it cost you almost nothing. Anything else is expensive.

That gives you a usable definition to work with, and it has a consequence worth sitting with: a source producing lots of enquiries that are politely declined in ninety seconds may be more valuable than one producing fewer enquiries that each consume an hour before dying. Time is the real cost, not the enquiry count.

Rank your sources with a spreadsheet, not an impression

Take three months of enquiries. For each one record the source, whether you ever spoke to the person, whether they were within your criteria, whether they became an appointment, and whether they completed. If you can add a rough figure for the fee you earned or expected, better still.

Now look at each source down those columns. You are looking for shape rather than a single figure. A source with a low completion rate but a high proportion of people who were within criteria has a follow-up problem. A source where you rarely reach anyone has a data problem. A source where you speak to everyone and almost none of them fit has a targeting problem.

Most firms have not done this and are running on the memory of two bad experiences.

Filter with your message before you filter with a form

The cheapest qualification happens before anyone contacts you. If your advertising and your pages describe what you actually want, the wrong people mostly stop reading.

Concretely, that means writing about specific situations rather than "mortgage advice", saying which areas you cover, being open about your fee, and naming the things you do not do. Free-of-charge positioning attracts a different audience from fee-charging positioning; neither is wrong, but you should know which one you are advertising.

Being explicit costs you volume. That is the point.

Ask fewer questions, but better ones

Long forms do not improve quality, they improve nothing except your feeling of preparedness. What matters is which questions you ask, not how many.

Two or three well-chosen fields will separate the enquiries worth calling first from the ones that can wait an afternoon:

• Where the property is, which settles geography instantly.
• What stage they are at, offered as a small set of options: just starting to look, viewing, offer accepted, remortgaging, not sure.
• Anything they already know might complicate it, as an optional free text box. People are surprisingly forthcoming here, and it is the most useful field on most broker forms.

Resist asking for income, deposit or credit history on a form. It suppresses submissions, the answers are unreliable, and you will ask properly later anyway.

Disqualify early, clearly and kindly

A firm that cannot say no accumulates a pipeline of cases it will never place. Decide your criteria in advance: the regions you serve, the case types you take, the minimum loan size that makes a case viable, and the situations where the honest answer is "come back in a year".

Then say so on the first call, and give the person somewhere to go. Naming another firm who does what you do not, or telling somebody exactly what needs to change before you can help, takes two minutes and produces both goodwill and, eventually, referrals.

Record the reason for every disqualification. That record is what turns anecdote into evidence about your sources.

If you are buying leads, interrogate the supply

The quality of purchased leads varies enormously between vendors, and between weeks from the same vendor. Before spending, ask for specifics and treat vagueness as an answer.

• Where was this data collected? Ask to see the actual page and the actual wording the consumer saw.
• What did the person consent to? If they agreed to be contacted by "carefully selected partners", they did not knowingly agree to you, and you are the firm that will be on the phone when they object.
• How many firms receive the same enquiry, and how quickly after it was submitted?
• How old is it? Data resold after months is a different product from a live enquiry.
• What is the replacement policy for records that are wrong, duplicated or unobtainable?

Run any purchased source as a bounded trial with an agreed spend, measured on the columns above, and be willing to stop. Keep the consent evidence on file, because the responsibility for having a lawful basis to contact somebody sits with the firm making the call, not with the company that sold the list.

MortgageMatch does not sell or auction enquiries, which removes the multi-sale problem in that particular channel, but the questions above are worth asking of every source you use.

The quality problems that are really process problems

Before blaming a source, rule out the obvious. Enquiries answered a day late will look like poor quality. A single attempt to call before giving up will look like poor quality. An enquiry form that does not capture a working phone number will look like poor quality. So will a duty rota that leaves Friday afternoons uncovered.

The test is simple. Take one source you have written off, handle thirty of its enquiries impeccably for a month, and see whether the picture changes. Quite often it does, and you have saved yourself the cost of replacing something that was working.