Every credit repair marketing plan should include a strategy of getting people who need help with their credit score referred to you. Yes, you want people that you know to refer new client prospects to you. And you want your clients to refer others to you. You should have a plan for both. But you also want people in credit-related industries to refer their credit-challenged client prospects to you. This can be a huge source of business for you. These types of referrals are motivated, they have the money to afford your services, and if you coach your referrer correctly, they can give you credibility and trust before you ever speak to the prospect.
So, who am I talking about when I say ‘people in credit-related industries’? Any professional that works in an industry that needs credit-worthy clients to qualify for financing to buy from them. Real estate agents, Realtors, and real estate companies. Mortgage brokers, loan officers, and mortgage companies. Solar professionals, bankers, automobile finance managers, and more.
Solve a Big Problem and Be a Hero
The challenge these people have is that they, or their company, spend a lot of money to bring in leads for what they are selling. Typically, a significant percentage of these leads cannot qualify for financing due to their credit scores. Not only is it disappointing, but it also cost them time and money to contact these leads. What if you could develop a relationship whereby you become part of their team just like the escrow company, the home inspector, etc., and help them close more business? You could be a hero for them, and your name would spread like wildfire.
Do You Need to Pay Referral Fees?
Many people think that they’ll have to give this professional a referral fee. That’s not at all true. Anytime that I’ve had a real estate agent ask me for a referral fee I ask them if they’ll give me part of their commission when they close an escrow with a client that I’ve helped. They usually laugh and so do I. They get it. I’m there to help them make an additional $10,000 to $20,000 and more each year. The referral fee I could give them is meager by comparison.
Be Prepared and Be Strategic
If you include this in your credit repair marketing plan, you need to be prepared. And you need to approach it strategically. Being prepared requires you to know your business inside and out and be able to provide the reasons why they should refer their clients to you instead of another credit repair company. In other words, what makes you different. If all you do is offer credit repair, the removal of derogatory items from a credit report, that could be a challenge. Our Agents can offer multiple ways of improving a prospective client’s credit scores and love it when they’re asked, “what makes you different than other credit repair companies?”
The strategy is to approach a conversation with anyone in the industries I talked about above by asking them questions to identify their pain points or challenges. You already know their challenges. They have a lot of leads that can’t qualify and their wasting time and money on them. But the reason you ask anyway is for them to verbalize that problem. We train our Agents on the specific questions to ask because, again, we have several ways to help a credit-challenged individual improve their credit scores.
What Questions Should You Ask?
The key question of course is, "Do you have people that want to (fill in what they do here such as buy a home, get a small business loan, buy a car, etc.) from you but cannot qualify due to their credit score?
Of course, they do, and you know it. But there's a psychological advantage to you having them verbalize the answer.
Here are a few other key questions:
Do you work with first-time homebuyers?
How many of these first-time homebuyers are currently renters?
What percentage of these people can’t qualify due to their credit scores?
Why do we ask these specific questions? Because we have a service that can put their rent payments on their Transunion and Equifax credit reports and boost their score, sometimes up to 50 points, in as little as 45 days. That gets the real estate agents, mortgage professionals, bankers, etc. attention quickly.
We also ask, “Do you have people that have student loan debt which is increasing the debt-to-income ratio that could prevent them from qualifying?”
Why do we ask that? Because we can offer a program that can potentially lower their student loan debt or lower their monthly payment. This can get them a lower debt-to-income ratio and get them qualified.
Having services to offer other than credit repair is a huge advantage for our Agents in being able to get a steady stream of referrals from professionals in credit-related industries.
I hope this article about adding referral business to your Credit Repair Marketing Plan helped.
If you would like more information about the services our Agents offer and potentially owning a credit restoration agency yourself, click Credit Repair Business Opportunity.
There you will find a detailed 24-minute business overview video. If you like what you see, you can then schedule a phone appointment with us to get your questions answered and determine if it’s the right fit for you. Thanks for visiting ERACreditServices.com
Once you have developed some great relationships with professionals in credit-related industries, now you must manage those relationships. To learn the best way read, Credit Repair Referrals, Managing Referral Relationships.