Minnesota Mortgage Blog

1. Understand trust. No doubt you are an honest person with integrity, but trust is a bigger concept than that. To create the kind of trust that will make the sale, clients need to have faith in your abilities and experience, and your ability to help them solve a problem or accomplish their goals. They need to trust your advice and insights. So it is important to constantly reinforce that confidence by maintaining professionalism and functioning as an expert resource for your clients.
   
2. Be the client's ally. The best way to provide your clients with the kind of counsel that builds trust is to ask many questions to help flesh out the client's needs and get them to provide as much detail on their situation as possible. Then start providing them with advice and options so that you can help lead them to possible product or service solutions that will help them attain their goals. But by acting as that advisor, and offering them options, they remain in the driver's seat. By working for and with your clients in this capacity, you ensure their trust.
   
3. Always be up front. There are bound to be pros and cons to the options you offer. Always be up front about the pluses and minuses involved in the options you are providing your clients. Similarly, always disclose any other obligations or variables that are involved in the options the client is weighing. The goal is to help the client make an informed decision, rather than putting the client in a position where he or she feels like she is getting any last-minute surprises. Those "gotchas" — even if unintentional — completely undermine trust.
   
4. Manage expectations. In the same way that you want to be up front about pros and cons, you want to ensure that the client has a realistic expectation as to what his or her success will be with the products or services you provide. Work in as objective terms as possible to project what that product or service will do for the client. The last thing the customer needs is hype.
   
5. Be dependable and always follow through. It sounds obvious, but doing things like returning messages in a timely fashion; providing materials when you say you will provide them; and showing up on time to meetings are pivotal in ensuring client trust. By demonstrating that the client can rely on you, he or she will have confidence that you are responsible and worth their trust. Moreover, you'll deserve it.