The industry has shifted where we now have to rely on tech and innovation to create opportunities and ride the changing tides. However, the drawback is it keeps our heads in the sand. What we need is to raise the standard. In this episode, Katherine Campbell, Chief Digital Officer for Assurance Financial, sits down with Joe Welu to discuss how we can do that and be pioneers. She talks about building a tech stack to help us stand out from the pack. Addressing the challenges that may come our way, Katherine also gives her insights on getting buy-in from your teams, overcoming resistance, and pitching adoption of tech. Join this conversation as you learn more about navigating the future of the industry.
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Raising Industry Standards Using Tech and Innovation with Katherine Campbell
I’m super excited about this episode. I have a longtime industry expert and sought-after executive, Katherine Campbell, from Assurance Financial. Katherine, it’s fantastic to have you here. Thanks so much for the time.Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here with you.
It’s good to see you again. I want to start out a little bit about you and please chime in here if I’m missing anything. You’re obviously an incredibly analytics-driven executive. You’ve got a lot of expertise, web conversion, UI, technical integration, and years of digital experience in the financial services vertical. Selecting, adopting, and integrating a couple of dozen new technologies in the last couple of years. I know you’ve been actively involved in those projects.
In addition to launching a new brand, you’re on track with the industry to offer end-to-end solutions and fully modern. You’ve been featured on webinars for digital trends. You were named a housing wire tech trendsetter. You were named into the 2022 Legends of Lending. Did I miss anything? That’s a hell of a resume.
That’s good enough. Not to mention, I liked that we were calling ourselves young and I’m already a legend. I don’t know about that exactly.
Legend can mean a little bit different things, but you’ve definitely earned legend status. I want to jump into some topics and have you share your perspective and some of the key learnings that you’ve had with the dramatic shift to the purchase market. We were in a refi. We were talking about it a little bit before we started. We were in an environment where loans and money was falling from the sky.
Now we’ve shifted back to an industry that is, “You’ve got to figure out ways to create opportunities.” Markets now shifted to where you’ve got to rely on tech and innovation in 2023 and probably even into the next few years. There’s not necessarily going to be this exuberant market where there’s an abundance. What changes, if any, have you made to specifically the tech stack and/or strategy to address the market shifts?
I cannot imagine the challenging market like we’re facing in 2022 and 2023 and what they used to do. I wasn’t in the mortgage industry back in 2007 or 2003 era when things were very difficult. I feel so fortunate to have arrived when we do have tools and resources. We are not so heavily dependent on the motivation of the individual LO who is typically self-sourcing. The major strategy I changed is twofold. My internal expectations have changed completely. There is a lot of tolerance when I first got here in 2018. There was a lot of resistance to this. Everybody knows that digital changes.
Every industry is difficult. There’s a lot of pushback and the never-adopters. I’m never using that link. I’m never logging in. Everyone has used the link and logged in. We’ve got single sign-on across a lot of these tools, but it’s no longer a coddling initiative. It is a very much required expectation that everyone in the company is adopting and utilizing this very expensive venture into the new world of this product. It’s not just us. If it was us, nobody would notice, but it’s the whole industry and we will compete and meet the market expectation. We’re laying down the hammer a little bit more on the expectation of the adoption of all these tools.
I want to drill into that a little bit. If I think about what you’re telling me, I agree with you if this is what you’re saying. Technology has gotten to a point over the last few years where there are a lot of great things that are possible. You can use automation, data, and scale what you would normally think is possible for people that are out engaging with customers. One of the gaps that I heard you speak about is people were okay with putting their heads in the sand and not necessarily doing anything different.
For better or worse, it was working pretty well for the last few years. You’re an amazing leader and executive, but I’m guessing you’ve been able to get buy-in from the rest of the executive team that says, “Now is the time to lean in and raise the standard. We’re going to go out to our field and our team and say, ‘This is the path.’” Is that what you’re saying? Fill in the context there.
That is exactly right. We used to call it the happy path. This is the ideal way to go and you better believe it. Our CEO, COO, and certainly our CFO are very clearly defined in ROI, which is what this conversation is about. What are we doing? What is the endgame here? RN Sue Wood released a fantastic article about ROI for Stratmor, and she nails it. There are tangibles and intangibles. Let’s say, auto insurance. If you think before Geico and the online auto insurances of the world where it was so easy to go online and do it. Now, you put your VIN in and it knows where you are and transfers you.
All you do is opt in yes or no. You don’t even do anything. You don’t have to get up and find anything. It’s there. It’s pretty incredible technology and it’s the expectation. That is a nice place to be. I can promise you, as you well know, we will get there in this market and this industry as well. Until then, they had the same transition issues that we are having right now. You can either feel fortunate like me and you because we love technology. Not everybody does feel that way. You do have to meet people where they are in it, but it’s also a very exciting time. We get to be the pioneers that get to do this.
That’s so true. The one thing I see a difference in the organizations that we work with is you can feel the companies where there’s a mindset of optimism and leaning into the future, which is what you represent and what’s possible. The people are trying to navigate in a lot of ways, behaviors and patterns that have held the industry back from evolving.
If we’re being honest, a lot of the challenges with getting technology fully enabled across the ecosystem have been resistance from the teams, change management, and not wanting to do it. How do you make your point that it’s not an option? Do you come out and say, “If you don’t do this, you’re going to die?” Do you get that dramatic?
Pretty much, yes. We threaten them with their lives.
Not literally, but in business, you’re going to die.
I set very clear expectations. First of all, change is difficult no matter the circumstance. There must be empathy about the fact that you’re asking someone to change their entire livelihood, particularly for compensation. These people are solely getting their own business and compensated for what they eat and what they kill. We created some fun stuff. I have this mousepad called STOP, which is our Standard Technology Operating Procedure at Assurance Financial. We talk about what is the procedure and we’re going to roll it out to you.
We use that subtle approach where it’s like, “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them and then tell them what you told them.” That’s from a marketing perspective. It is important that the marketing team and the technology team work together for internal marketing and conversation as much as external marketing and conversation. That is as vital to us. In fact, in Total Expert, we have a marketing database where we send our monthly newsletters and our messages through to the company. We do our own internal flyers through Total Expert. It’s as much as an internal tool for us as it is an external tool.
If you think about your ROI, and this goes for anything in the technology space that you’re investing in as a company, it’s so directly tied to the buy-in of the people that are out face-to-face and engaging with customers. You’re intentional about running an actual sales and marketing process to your internal team to keep them engaged. That’s very different than the traditional path in which you do a big splash at the rollout, and then every month that goes by after the rollout, it gets diminished a little bit.
I do not tolerate that. I’ve been doing this for many years, so I’ve had the luxury. I’m not always doing this right the first time. I will tell you here, understanding that this is the most laggard industry out there. Even our youngest loan officers were resistant to this because it likely was the only job they had, and this is all they knew. They didn’t realize how advanced other capabilities were in other industries.
We have what’s called Make More Money Monday. We call it M4. That Make More Money always has highlights in some technology, a tip or trick in it, and then we answer any questions that the field has about anything to do with marketing. It’s usually about 15 or 20 minutes. We have pretty high attendance, people pop on and we can answer their questions.
If it is something critical that we’re rolling out like what we had in Total Expert, every single Make More Money Monday was the first four. After that were strictly Total Expert. In fact, I remember my biggest win, and it was a big learning experience. I’m sure everyone had this, where I had a very resistant branch manager. He would not attend any meetings. He would never log in. He was not encouraging his team.
It was about a year and a half later. He was at a conference with me and he said, “Katherine, I know you’re probably going to tell me I could find all this online and I haven’t been showing up, but could I learn Total Expert?” I said, “This is a win. I will take this win. I’m going to call you myself.” It’s not when you roll it out. That doesn’t mean they’re ready when you roll it out. Some people are early adopters, but you never give up on people. When they’re ready, you better be ready.
Never give up on people because when they're ready, you better be ready. Share on X
It’s bridging the gap between you’ve got real humans here that you’re relying on, which is such a critical part. As much of technologists as we are, we both believe fundamentally that the power of human connection and the importance of high-quality advice in these transactions is not going anywhere. It’s probably even more critical than ever. The question is, “How do you create a scenario where you can take somebody and turn them into an even better version of themselves?” Also, the way they were running their business and taking it to a level that they wouldn’t have been able to take it to be doing things all on their own and manually.
You’re exactly right. It’s for any C-level people that might be tuning in to this. We use two terms in technology, UI and UX. UX is the experience that you have and the UI is how you’re utilizing the tools. You have very different, “Where do I click to navigate?” and then you have, “How do I feel about this experience of using it?” That’s the literal technology that’s important, certainly from the consumer side, but you want your internal teams to have this great UX as well. It’s as important that surprise and delight are part of the UX and everything that we’re transitioning through. Not just the UI. You don’t say, “Here’s how you use it and here’s where you log in.” It’s, “Guess what this can do and guess what we integrated with?” It’s like, “This is cool.”
I’m guessing you have to show them the outcomes that are possible. It doesn’t have to be related to anything with Total Expert or anything in the tech stack that comes to mind. What are the things right now that you’re leaning into when you’re going out and pitching the adoption of tech? What are the big benefits you’re drilling in?
You must build it first. To promise people a lot of information and capabilities and try to get them motivated and then feel demotivated if they’re not motivated is not the path. That’s never going to happen. Build it all out, surprise and delight, and then show them.
You’re showing them a benefit. I’m going to guess it has something to do with surfacing deals that they would’ve not otherwise been able to see. Is that an example?
It’s a perfect example. I’ll give you one great example then and one example now. When we first brought on Total Expert, the marketing department was taking emails to everyone personally. Whoever they randomly wanted to email in marketing, “I want a flyer. I want it to be about this. I want it blue. I want my headshot over there,” was non-scalable. When I came on board, I said, “Here’s the deal. No one can do a marketing request for eight weeks. This is right when we were adopting you.” They’re like, “For eight weeks? You better fire her.”
I was going to say you had a lot of swaggers.
This is having support from the entire executive team. They were not happy about it either. I’m going to tell you no one was happy about it, but I hired an outsource of two very small creative teams that I said, “When these guys call you, get it done.” It’s not that they didn’t have a resource. They just didn’t have an internal resource. We didn’t nearly have much of a brand so I had to be too worried about outsourcing it anyway. They were taking the request, and for eight weeks, we built our brand and filled Total Expert with 200 new pieces of creative.
If you say you’re going to do it, you better deliver. In eight weeks, 200 pieces of creative. Once we got the brand and the templates rolling, when they logged in and saw it, it was like, “Wow.” Now we had a significant drop in the number of requests that came in for marketing because even if they didn’t look, we could say, “Would this work for you? It’d send the link.” They go, “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” type of thing.
Instead of reacting to everything, you were doing the opposite.
It’s the proactive approach. Since it’s evolved and we have many hundreds of pieces of collateral there, now it is a difficult and very creative need. Everyone must be very creative to find business. These loan officers are geniuses. Some of them are really good ones. They’re not hunkering down, whining and crying in their suit. They are out thinking instead of one-to-one, which a lot of Total Expert was one-to-one, if you’re in processing with us from this loan officer to this client, this is what’s going on from the need you have for this particular product. This loan officer is giving you this flyer.
Everyone must be very creative to find business. Share on X
This one house has an open house that the MLS listing single property sites, which are phenomenal, that is a one-to-one conversation. We’ve now taken Total Expert to do a one-to-many conversation. That is by saying, “What are the relationships you guys are building?” Some people are finding all the hospitals in their region didn’t have a preferred lender. They can go on their intranet and offer, “If you’re with this hospital, we will give you $500 off your closing fees.” Now we’re creating sometimes multi-page downloadable guides for everyone to use. All they have to do is trade out the logo of the hospital and say, “We’re your preferred lender if you can get that agreement from people.”
That’s such a great example. Out of curiosity, are you also then packaging that with education-type content about home ownership in general? Is that part of it?
We have what we call Box Campaigns. If there’s an image of a little cardboard box next to the title of a campaign, let’s say hospital partnership, then you know it’s got every piece Total Expert available to you. It has social media, lunch-and-learn graphics, and customizable invitations. You can change the date and time yourself within that invitation. It has postcards if you want to send them. It has Facebook background images for the invites for the lunch and learn and then it can have these downloadable guides. They know they’ve got an out-of-the-box campaign if they want to go pitch hospitals.
That’s incredible. You have taken a strategy of being a preferred lender for a very tight-knit organization where, in this case, a hospital workplace. You’ve strategically went through all of the components that they need so they don’t have to think about, “What do I say? What should I do? What do I hand them? It’s perfectly packaged.” You and your team have done that from what I’m hearing.
That’s exactly right. We do something called Bizbox. Have you ever heard of a Birchbox?
Yes.
It’s like you’re surprised.
Is that the one where the dog stuff gets delivered or is that a different one?
They have them for everybody, I’m sure. Let’s say it’s the dog one. I’m willing to spend $50 or $100 a month on my dog. Whatever comes in the mail as a surprise and you have fun with your dog. We call it a Bizbox. We do the same thing. We write before we release it. We upload it to Total Expert and we mail it out to everyone. We go into everyone’s accounts who have signed up for this.
Eighty percent of our loan officers are signed up for this. They pay a whopping $25 a month and we subsidize the rest. We send them this Bizbox that has a nice slick flyer that’s now uploaded in their Total Expert account so they can continue handing them out. We send them 10 with 10 little tchotchke giveaways that match that flyer. In other words, we did financial fitness.
If someone is getting fit, they’re getting fit for the New Year in January. They get this nice gift. They can fill it with hopefully not candy since we’re getting fit, but whatever they want to fill it with, like pins and tchotchke or whatever. Now when they walk in, they can talk about financial fitness and helping realtors clients prepare to buy this year. They may not do that in January.
It’s like, “What do I even talk about in January since they’re probably not buying in January?” I can give them a financial fitness free consultation and you can give this to your borrower to call me, or you can have it. I can’t tell you how many times our Bizboxes go to a realtor and then go to a borrower that comes back to the loan officer and said, “Thank you for this gift.”
That’s some of this stuff. I’m sure you don’t have all of the data on, but I’m so impressed at the thought that you put into this and then the execution. I’m guessing the results. What are you seeing from the results? What is the feedback you’re getting?
The loan officers love it. Again, it’s so exhausting to try to come up with a conversation every week when you walk into a realtor’s office that they’re like, “What do you say?” Because we then send a matching email from that flyer to everyone in their database, the realtors are getting that email. It’s the same week we do social media things.
Are you automating that to the realtors then?
We don’t automate it because we do have to make sure the tchotchkes come in and get mailed. It’s a little bit of a process. We have many things automated, but not that.
Are you sending it out for the loan officer, or do they have to go in and push send?
We send that out for the loan officer.
You send on behalf of them.
Likely, the realtor has received the email, then they walk in that same week with a matching slip. We printed on a nice paper flyer and a little giveaway and then they’ve seen it on social media in their feed. What we can start to see is a trend of engagement. That’s one of the major tools to your Google Analytics.
It’s fantastic to be able to go in and not only see what the keyword searches are, what are people searching now, and what are rates versus refinance now. What is the conversation? Is it a good time to move when I’m pregnant? Should I wait until next year to buy? These terms are different so we can trend that and then we can put those terms into the messaging that we have. It’s a great combination of staying in touch with what’s going on in the market.
That’s incredible. What is super cool about what you’re talking about is it’s shifting the entire conversation from, “I’m going out to talk to my referral partners about, ‘Do you have a deal for me to be strategic?’ Let’s start educating tomorrow’s buyers now so that we take them through the entire journey.” You’re going way up the funnel and controlling the conversation.
That’s exactly right. We are always thinking what’s happening next quarter. Let’s start talking about it now.
The loan officer feedback is great. I’m guessing the realtor feedback is great. From an application standpoint in some of these initiatives, as you launch these campaigns in your business, what is the proper word, Business in a Box?
It’s called the Bizbox.
Have you seen the numbers translate into applications yet? Obviously, the engagement is happening, but have you been able to tie those things together?
The market has been so volatile that it is very difficult to say, “This particular month, the Bizbox was so successful because it is subjective feedback.” You know how difficult that is to get from the field. What I can tell you is we had an M4. Remember that’s our Make More Money Monday. We had our M4 this Monday, and we were talking about something that went out in the Bizbox and someone had success with it.
It’s someone they never met who came to them and said, “Thanks for my gift.” They were explaining this. About three other loan officers on the call are not receiving Bizbox. As I said, 70% to 80% of them are. They’re like, “How much is that again? What do you all get there? Go ahead and sign me up.” If these guys didn’t find value in it, they would not keep doing it even at $25 a month. Frankly, I don’t want to do it if they don’t find value in it. There are things to be done, so this is working.
There’s no question. We see the data in a bigger form when you’re doing things that look at the entire funnel in your driving engagement so far up funnel and the consistencies happening. It sounds like the numbers all always follow. The important part is you guys are adjusting to the fact that your incubation time period for many of these buyers is simply longer. What you’re doing in the financial fitness component of it is so powerful and very cool. We’ve hit on this, but if you think about the top performers, what do you see them doing that’s so different from the middle of the road?
Now I’ve been here for a couple of years, I can see the cycles of at least the times of the year. The best loan officers I hear from are less when it gets serious. That’s when I know it was really serious. He hasn’t reached out in a while and say, “Great business.” That means they’re working much smarter and not harder. We had our National Sales Conference, and I always present at the conference about whatever is going on in technology and marketing. I talked the first ten minutes about gold. The metals media that’s going on worldwide and shipping gold and silver all around.
What is that about in our lifetimes? Have you ever heard that? I got into the history of gold and we essentially had lost the perception of the value. The value was always there, but we got off the perception of the value. In the earlier days of gold mining when people would go in, they pan for gold are rushing out to California to pan for gold. They were finding little flakes and getting so excited in a very crowded area. Everybody was panning for gold.
The smart one said, “Screw that. I’m going out. I’m digging down and deep. I’m going to have my own gold mine and mine it. I’m going to put a fence around it. I’m going to say there are no trespassers allowed.” I ended it with like, “Good news for you. You all have a gold mine and we forgot the value of your database. I’m going to help you mine if you have the market to it. We’re going to dig deep. You’re going to put a fence around it. None of these other loan officers know what’s in your goldmine and we’re going to teach you how to get back to basics on a one-to-one level with these guys.”
It was this a-ha of like, “I do have to use those sales boomerang alerts.” I was like, “That is your goldmine going out. When you go out with your big heavy pan to go sifting and looking for gold that day, you are determined to go to that realtor’s office. You walk in determined to start filling it with all that dirt so you can find the gold. If there are three other loan officers in there, you’re not getting any flex that day. Can you intersect?” Go back to your database and mine that you own all of those nuggets.
That is so powerful and it’s such a great analogy about the value, your database, people that already know you, have done business with you, trust you, how people have forgotten the power of that, and how it compounds. You can build an exponential business by doubling down. I always talk about it. Put your arms around your entire customer base, which you’re saying put a fence around it.
What you guys do which we fundamentally believe in is you’re also protecting the pipeline by getting intelligence and alerts. I know you guys are a boomerang customer and they do a great job of having data and alerts coming in. We have multiple sources of that intelligence, but you’re surfacing that intelligence to help protect those opportunities.
It’s all about the tools. It’s initiating across the different tools. Another strategy change I made in 2022 is taking complete ownership of the end-to-end solution, both for the loan officer and the borrower. If you look at the ability to get an alert in Total Expert from sales boomerang and put the relevant information into a mortgage coach output, that is real insights. That is a differentiator between our loan officers and maybe anyone else. If some of them are saying, “What am I going to send a mortgage coach for? Rates are worse. They’re not refinancing.”
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I said, “That is the conversation. Let me compare the mortgage that you got in 2022. Let me compare what your options would be now. I am so glad you got that mortgage in 2022. Look how well I served you. Look at the numbers.” The beautiful format on their phone where they go, “Thank God we did this. Look where we are.” They can’t translate that interest rate says rise and what that means to them right now because they likely have no intention of moving to understand that the rates are higher.
You’re keeping them educated on the market and what’s happening. You’re keeping them educated on their whole financial picture.
We’re serving them with their own information.
I love Dave Savage with Mortgage Coach. I caught up with him in California at the conference and we’re both very passionate about the power of talking about financial health and wellness, that holistic picture, and it all feeds into that.
I heard you rocked it. I wish I’d had seen it.
I don’t know about that. It was a good conference.
I heard it was great. I heard you did great.
It was fun. One of the things I wanted to drill on is when we talk about putting a fence around the pipeline, your database, and past customers using alerts. What we have seen breakdowns with certain organizations is sometimes they have data teams and insights teams. Those insights don’t necessarily go into a workflow or automation. You’re reliant on somebody to do something. I should probably know this but are you guys utilizing automation to surface the best practices and say, “Here’s what you do and say.”
You better believe it. We have different messages based on the type of information that we’re getting, but nothing is better than the alerts that say, “Right now, this is what’s going on.” Sending out messaging images based on that behavior, some people get very Big Brother about it. “I see that you pulled your mortgage credit somewhere else.”
We send something out in that particular circumstance that says, “Is mortgage on your mind? Don’t forget we have five-star service. Read our reviews. I’m still here for you. We have free quotes.” At some point, within the 24 hours that gets sent, the loan officer or the loan officer assistant calls. Often, I’ve heard them say, “I did see that email. Let’s talk.” It wasn’t such a cold out-of-the-blue conversation. They were a little warmed up to, “That was the guy’s name. That’s right.”
This is important. You’re getting a piece of content in front of the consumer which refreshes them, even if they don’t respond. When they call, they’ve got another point of reference and it’s not so out of the blue.
All marketing can do it. Particularly, in a difficult industry like this, read the signs. That’s Google Analytics. What is the word search volume? What are the regions that they’re searching for more? Warm up the conversation for the loan officer. At that point, it’s a sales job. Those guys are good. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t. They could use a little warmup. That’s what we did.
When you initially are using alerts and intelligence to surface opportunities and automate things, did you get resistance from people saying, “I don’t want something going out to my customer automatically?” Did you get that resistance?
Mostly. Most people said, “You will not end process communication. You will not let my borrower know they’re in underwriting before I do.” That was very important support from the executive team. That’s where I said, “We don’t want to control the relationship between the loan officer and the client, but we will control our brand. We will control that they got communicated to as fast as we have that information.”
Of course, your system allows us to delay. We can say, “From this time, wait 24 hours and then send that message.” There’s some synergy between how it works best, but that’s where they’re not allowed to opt into or out of very critical communications with borrowers. They are allowed, oddly enough, to opt out of some of the blanket-wide communications. It’s the automation that we do every month, and none of them do whereas initially we probably only had half of them opt-in.
Many people said, particularly when it was busy, “If those emails didn’t go out regularly, my phone rings. They get them on.” If someone is only doing a transaction every 2 or 3 years, they’re not going to remember your name necessarily unless you’re keeping in touch with them or you hit them right when they’re ready. That database was their goldmine during the busy years of 2020 and 2021.
I love the conversation. I’m not at all surprised to hear some of these insights from you because you’re at the absolute top of the game in this industry without a question. In closing, if you could look at everything that you’re doing, is there one piece of advice for the readers out there that you think is important to be successful in 2023?
Do not alter your plan. Do not stop going forward. Share on X
We may have to alter our budgets and patients because everybody is a little stressed right now, but do not alter your plan. Do not stop going forward. It may be more preparatory than action for some people. Fortunately for us, we are so dedicated to the end-to-end solution in making it very streamlined for both parties, the loan officers, the operations teams, and our clients that we are continuing to develop. It’s tough. These are tough decisions to be made, but whatever you do, don’t stop the vision because when this turns around, it will not look like 2019. Those of us that stayed in it and dug in will come out of the other side night and day from those that didn’t. That’s where we can compete.
I believe that. Homeownership in America is not going anywhere. Using this market as an opportunity to dig in and grow the business is exciting. In your position, I can see why you’re so excited about some of the great things that you have going on. Katherine, as always, it’s fantastic catching up. Thank you so much for sharing the knowledge. It’s much appreciated. I look forward to seeing you guys win in 2023.
Thank you for being such a great partner. We couldn’t do it without you. Thanks, Joe.
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About Katherine Campbell
