How Guild Mortgage Company closes the gap between leads generated and leads closed

Staying competitive requires the right sales technology

A leader in the mortgage industry, Guild Mortgage has served customers for more than five decades. Today’s home buyers are trusting Guild Mortgage to help them navigate through an unpredictable market and make the right decisions to support their financial futures. And as more homeowners consider refinancing or relocating, Guild Mortgage’s loan officers are seeing even more demand for their services.

Despite working to process requests as fast as possible, loan officers still found themselves struggling to keep up with demand. A slower-than-average response time could result in a missed opportunity, especially with new players offering digital alternatives to traditional lending. Staying competitive would therefore require more than faster response times.

“The service that you provide is the differentiator between you and another lender,” says Drew Gillett, Vice President of Field Marketing at Guild Mortgage. “It's really important for our teams to be efficient but also build and maintain relationships.”

While quickly responding to leads was essential, Guild Mortgage’s loan officers also needed to proactively and consistently serve customers with relevant information and resources. To support that level of service, Guild Mortgage’s sales leaders knew they’d have to invest in their sales and marketing technology.

"Keeping up with demand in this increasingly competitive landscape wouldn't be possible without technology,” says Gemma Currier, Senior Vice President of Retail Sales Operations. “We want to give our loan officers the tools and the data that they need to advise customers and to execute, especially on lead conversion.”

Leveraging sequences to stay engaged with customers across long deal cycles

At first, Guild Mortgage implemented a homegrown solution to streamline how loan officers would engage with leads and with their existing customers. But loan officers found this homegrown solution too prescriptive. And without automation features, the solution didn’t meaningfully impact loan officers’ productivity.

“Loan officers needed to be able to communicate with our customers across multiple channels where they do business, whether it’s on social media or mobile,” Gemma says. “Our goal is to have a high-tech, high-touch approach. So we turned to Outreach for robust automation, communication tools, and analytics.”

Guild Mortgage’s loan officers now use Outreach for a variety of use cases, leveraging sequences to follow up with leads and to stay engaged with customers throughout what are often long deal cycles.

“A client could be looking for a house for a year, and then once they’re in contract for a house, they might need something from our loan officers with a short turnaround,” Drew says. “Outreach keeps our loan officers in communication with customers and real estate agents so we can keep them on track to close.”

And after closing, loan officers leverage automation to maintain relationships with their clients. For example, they set follow-up tasks in Outreach to check in with clients.

“The sequences give us one quick and easy system to call, email, or text our clients,” says Debbie Owen, a Guild Mortgage Branch Manager. “And because Outreach captures these activities, we're never forgetting to follow up or forgetting where we're at with a specific client. I can guarantee you that my conversion rate has sharpened because of it.”

Outreach has streamlined workflows beyond the sales team. Guild Mortgage’s recruiting team uses Outreach to create, maintain, and measure the success of their candidate pipeline, all while ensuring their communications are personal and compliant.

Making contact with new leads twice as fast and closing deals faster

With Outreach, Guild Mortgage has accelerated its sales momentum. Loan officers who are using Outreach are making contact with new leads twice as fast as those who aren’t. They are also closing their deals faster.

“In the mortgage industry in general, there is a pretty big gap between the leads that a company generates and the leads that a company closes,” says Gemma. “We want to close that gap at Guild, and we're utilizing Outreach to do that.”

Michelle Castle, a Guild Mortgage Area Manager, says that Outreach is helping her team be more productive and effective. "As a coach I'm always thinking, 'how do you get more done in less time creating more impact?' I know Outreach does this for us."

According to Gemma, what is even more impactful is Outreach’s potential to shape the future of selling at Guild Mortgage. Outreach is giving leaders visibility into the activities and channels that are driving better outcomes for customers, and those insights are what’s fueling improvements in both sales and marketing.

“Now that our people are using Outreach, they're contributing even more data to our system.” Gemma says. “This helps further optimize our sales workflows, which helps more loan officers win deals, which makes them want to use Outreach more, and so on.”

Adds Drew, “Outreach is helping our loan officers evolve their methodology; modernizing our high touch approach with the addition of new technologies to best serve clients.”