Today's marketing lessons will also be helpful for commercial brokers (commercial real estate salesmen), not just for commercial loan brokers. I built a $50 million commercial loan company using these simple marketing lessons. They should work for you as well.
In my prior commercial loan blog articles, I stressed that list advertising - snail mail, fax, and email - is the most effective form of marketing for real estate sales and commercial loan brokerage. One reason is because you can crank out a commercial loan newsletter today, rather than waiting for weeks until the next magazine is published.
Your newsletters do NOT have to be fancy. For 15 years I personally marketed by snail mail using a plain, legal-sized sheet of copy machine paper. I didn't bother with a logo or with typesetting. I just typed my company name, address, and phone number at the top.
So why would my commercial loan clients even bother to read such an obviously unprofessional newsletter? Because it was unprofessional! Huh? What???
Have you ever gotten a "professional newsletter" from a CPA? Have you ever read anything so boring? Boooooring! Nobody reads professional newsletters. Do you know what real people do read? They read jokes and funny pics sent to them by their buddies. My first piece of advice, therefore, is to stop trying to be professional. Instead, be fun.
Now every commercial loan newsletter (or realty investment newsletter) needs these four ingredients:
- Lots of funny jokes.
- A training lesson about commercial loans (or commercial-investment real estate).
- Some brief words from our sponsor; i.e., you pitching your services.
- One or more funny pictures or cool videos.
I call my jokes, funny pics, cool videos, and training lessons Rat Goodies. In fact, I invented my own theory of marketing that I call the Rat Goody Theory of Marketing. It basically says that if I have to bug my buddies and clients with a sales pitch, then I at least owe them some Crackerjack Treats for opening up the box.
"Gee, George, that all sounds great and everything, but where do I get fresh material for my newsletter every ten days? Your own newsletters contain six to eight jokes, two to three funny pictures, and at least one cool video. That doesn't even include the training lesson. Where do you find all of this stuff?"
Here is where you find the Rat Goodies and the content for your own newsletters:
- You can easily find over 400 cute, clean jokes here. Feel free to plagerize my materials.
- Pinterest has a wonderful collection of funny pictures.
- As for interesting videos, your buddies will send you some. Just be on the lookout.
- As for training lessons in your field (commercial loan brokerage, commercial real estate brokerage, etc.), we all learn things every week. Just be sure to make a note of anything new you learn - like this brand new commercial loan underwriting ratio, the Debt Yield Ratio - and share it with your buddies and clients.
Here is one final thing that I do that has served me very well in marketing over the years. Any time I meet a high-net-worth investor, be it from a commercial loan lead call, at a conference, or on the golf course, I am religious about adding this investor to my mailing lists. This may surprise you but I found the wealthy investors that I needed to fund $50 million in hard money commercial loans when they first called my office in search of a commercial loan. In other words, I turned commercial loan borrowers into commercial loan investors. Huh. Go figure.
My thanks go out to Dan Morris of Summit Finance, one of our lead buyers, for closing a $6 million commercial loan for C-Loans on Friday! If he closes just four more deals, he gets listed permanently on C-Loans as a Proven Broker. From then on, he no longer has to buy leads. He will be set for life.
Hey, did you enjoy listening to my audio and Powerpoint training lesson on the Rat Goody Theory of Marketing. To move between PowerPoint pages, be sure to hit the Play button. This lesson is just one of about 35 lessons in my wildly popular training course, How To Market For Commercial Loans.
Ninety percent of bankers are downright slothful when it comes to working commercial loans. Ten percent of them, however, are real go-getters. That's the thing that C-Loans.com does best - it indentifies those bankers and those Proven Brokers who are ravenous to close commercial loans. Don't poo-poo using our Proven Brokers because they close a hugely disproportionate share of the commercial loans closed on C-Loans. Proven Brokers close commercial loans because they have personal relationships with their lenders. True story: I had a buddy 30 years ago who made a fortune one year because he brought two hookers and some cocaine to his lender's office, whenever he brought him a new commercial loan package. (My buddy eventually ended up on Skid Row in San Francisco, a washed out drug addict.)
The real money in commercial real estate finance is in loan servicing fees. I charge our investors almost 2% per year for servicing their commercial loans. On a modest-sized deal of $1 million, that's $20,000 per year, just for collecting 12 payments and sending them on to our investors.
