What is the Diamond Strategy?

Even though buying a home is often the biggest financial transaction of an individual’s life, a lot of companies try to commoditize real estate and mortgage. At Total Expert, we understand the importance of the roles the Loan Officer and Realtor play in the home buying and financing process as well as the customer journey. We conducted research over a five-year period to help the industry recognize key things that organizations and individuals can do to grow business. We noticed consistent patterns and built the Diamond Strategy to help MLOs and their Realtor partners accelerate production and create success.   

At the core of the Diamond Strategy is brand. This can refer to the company brand or the brand of an individual producer inside of a company.  How does your brand look to prospects? Listen to our podcast to find out how to audit your brand. Companies and producers take their brand to market every day and use multiple channels to capture and convert prospects. Most of them use a combination of the following:   

  • Print 
  • Internet 
  • Social Media 
  • Community   

There are specific differences between those who succeed and those who struggle. The Diamond Strategy illustrates how to be successful in the various marketing efforts that most individuals, teams and organizations engage in. There are four aspects to successful execution of the Diamond Strategy: 

  1. Clarity. Companies and individuals must create and define their brands in an authentic way so that consumers understand what you represent and stand for. The entire organization must be clear about what the brand is and it must be packaged at the core so that it can be used consistently across all market channels.  
  2. Foundation. Companies must establish a foundation of core systems including a sales and marketing system of record that will allow sales people to execute their marketing and outreach well. Many companies – even producers and teams within a company – send out fragmented messages and marketing materials.   
  3. Consistency. Once a foundation is in place, collateral – from email to print to social media – must remain consistent in look and message. This too will help eliminate random usage of tools and collateral that do not support your brand or deliver your message properly. 
  4. Oversight.  All marketing must be deployed from the top of the organization down, without giving individual sales people the ability to fragment the message or the brand.  Companies must enforce the brand and company vision because sales people are occupied with trying to complete tasks in a given day or week in order to reach immediate goals. Proper enforcement of brand and marketing message will help companies maximize business today and move forward based on where they believe the industry is going over the next few years.    

Effective execution of the Diamond Strategy requires that you define your brand, take it to market in a consistent, concerted way and enforce that brand across all company levels and marketing channels to build trust. Given the entrepreneurial nature of sales people in real estate and mortgage, companies must realize that they’ll never entirely appease everyone; however, it is possible to get buy-in from producers by explaining how use of the Diamond Strategy will help them win. Setting the vision at the company-level and providing parameters for sales people to build their personal brands inside and alongside the company’s will establish a framework for consistency and guard against fragmentation.   

Technology is evolving rapidly and companies must embrace and harness it for efficiency, compliance and consumer experience enhancement. Companies that invest the effort to establish their brands, deploy technology to manage their marketing collateral and messages and position themselves for the future will see exponential growth and separate themselves from the rest of the pack. The Diamond Strategy can be the difference between growing your margins and becoming marginalized.    

Learn more from Joe Welu as he talks about the Diamond Strategy on his Expert Strategies podcast.