After years of studying the habits and emotions of workers in a mortgage operation, the one thing I learned was that the people I were paying will never tell me the truth about their job.  What they said and what they did was in fact so far from the truth you'd think they really believed what they were saying but only from the sense that they wish they would do the things as apposed to actually doing them.

When it comes to marketing and sales activities we know they work when you do them and we know that do not work when you don't.  Most activities are so insignificant by themselves (sending out a quick letter) that they almost seem like a waste of time.  I have found that the people that mastered the art of always doing the important things first EVERYDAY far exceeded the success of those that couldn't quite keep up.

Most of the activities an originator does can be measured in some way.  Particularly when it comes to sales activities.  So here they are:

Make a phone call

Leave a Voice Mail Message

Talk to a person make a proposal

Send a letter

Send an E-mail

Send a report

Find a Prospect

If you do all of these activities every day, lets say 2 each per day, you can see how a person working a system can destroy a person who is not.  7 key prospecting tasks above times 2 per day equals 14 per day, times 4 days a week equals 56 per week, times 3 weeks per month equals 168 per month, times 12 months equals 2016 efforts a year. 

Interacting with 2000 potential prospects per year along with connecting to each of those persons personal networks of 150 connects you with over 300,000 potential customers of which you may close 100 - 200 loans or a mere 0.005%.

So the simple answer is in the numbers.  How many are really being done?

In our business we decided to always support, encourage and remind our originators to do activities at regular intervals.  We did not monitor how many things they were doing, what we chose to monitor was the number of new prospects and referral sources were being entered into the system.

Here is were the moving average comes into play because its very easy to load in the system 25 new prospects, then work them all to death and never get any loan closed.  If you did that pile in process 4 times a year you would have worked on 100 prospects.  With a closing ratio of 20% you would close 20 loans and be a low producer.

The moving average is really the cumulative effect of your results over a defined period of time.  I use a 50-day period or two months and a 200-day period or 6 months.  This allows for a careful analysis of the trends in a person's business cycles.