Why mortgage leads do not answer

An adviser rings twelve people, reaches three, and concludes the source is rubbish. Sometimes that is right. More often the nine silent ones are silent for several different reasons, only one of which is that they were never serious.

Working out which reason applies is worth doing, because the fixes are cheap and completely different from each other. Here are the causes worth ruling out, roughly in the order they occur.

Separate the people you could not reach from the people who chose not to speak

The first split is mechanical. Did the phone ring and go to voicemail, did it cut off immediately, was it unobtainable, or did somebody answer and end the call?

An immediate cut-off or an unobtainable tone usually means a data problem. A ring that goes to voicemail means the number works and the person did not pick up. Somebody answering and hanging up means something else again. Your phone system or your notes should let you tell these apart, and if they do not, that is the first thing to fix, because everything else is guesswork without it.

They do not recognise the number

Most people no longer answer unfamiliar numbers, and phone networks now label suspected nuisance calls on the screen before the recipient decides. A broker calling from a mobile they also use for outbound marketing, or from a virtual number with no history, is easy to mistake for a nuisance call.

What helps: calling from a consistent, published number that appears on your website and profiles, so that a search on it identifies you. Never withholding the number. Checking, occasionally, whether your outbound number has been flagged, and dealing with it if it has.

What helps most is a short message sent immediately after the missed call, so the unfamiliar number on their screen acquires a name.

They were not expecting a phone call

Somebody who filled in a web form at eleven at night may have imagined an email. Somebody sent over by an estate agent may not have been told their details were being passed on at all. Neither of them is dodging you; they simply do not know a call is coming.

The fix sits upstream. Say on the form, in the acknowledgement, and in your agreement with introducers, that a named person will call and roughly when. An expected call is answered far more often than an unexpected one, and it costs nothing to set that expectation.

The number is wrong

Mistyped digits, a landline nobody uses, a work number where they cannot take personal calls, a number entered as a placeholder by somebody who was not ready to be contacted.

Check your form's validation. Check whether your system is storing the number correctly, particularly leading zeros and international prefixes. And check for duplicates, because ringing somebody twice from two records annoys the ones you do reach.

If a number fails twice, use the email address before assuming the person has gone.

They were never really an enquiry

Some records are not people who want a broker. Test submissions, competitors, form spam, someone who wanted a mortgage calculator and hit the wrong button, or a person who was researching on behalf of a relative.

If a source produces a lot of these, that is a source problem rather than a contact problem, and it will not respond to better calling.

They have already spoken to someone else

If an enquiry has been sent to several firms at once, the person may have spoken to two brokers within the hour and stopped answering the rest. They are not unreachable, they are finished.

This is worth knowing when you evaluate where enquiries come from, because it changes what a low answer rate means. MortgageMatch does not sell or auction enquiries to multiple firms, so an enquiry through it has not been distributed that way, but plenty of sources do work like that, and you should establish which yours is before drawing conclusions about your calling.

Their situation has fallen apart

The offer was rejected. The relationship ended. The job did not start. The survey came back badly. People rarely ring a broker to say any of this; they just stop replying, and quite often they feel awkward about having wasted your time.

You cannot fix that with persistence, and pursuing it makes it worse. What you can do is send one message that removes the awkwardness: say that plans change, that there is no obligation, and that they are welcome to come back whenever it is useful. A fair number of these people return, sometimes a year later, and they return to whoever was gracious about it.

You are ringing at the only hour they cannot talk

Somebody in a classroom, on a ward, driving a van or on a building site has a narrow window. Three attempts in the same mid-morning slot only proves they are busy mid-morning.

Vary the hour and the day. Ask, in the message you leave, when suits them. Where you have it, use whatever the person told you about their job as a clue about when they can talk.

Decide how many attempts is enough

Persistence is not a virtue in itself and there is a point where it becomes harassment. A reasonable pattern for most firms is three or four attempts spread across different days and different times, each paired with a message that gives an easy alternative, and then a clean close.

Write the pattern down so it is applied consistently rather than depending on how busy the adviser was. Consistency also means you can compare sources honestly, since a source handled with one attempt cannot be judged against one handled with four.

Change the channel before you give up

The single most effective thing brokers do about unanswered calls is stop calling and write instead. A short text or email with one easy question converts silence into information more reliably than another dial.

Offer the alternative explicitly. Some people will never have a phone conversation with a stranger and will happily do the whole first exchange in writing, and there is no reason a mortgage conversation cannot start that way.

Finally, keep a record of the reason each unreachable enquiry ended. After a couple of months you will have something better than an impression, and the pattern in it will usually point at one specific thing worth fixing.