Have you seen the 30-year fixed rates on home mortgages right now?  They’re crazy low.  Frankly, I’m a little surprised I’m not hearing from more mortgage professionals asking me if I want to refinance.

If I was a mortgage broker, here are a few things I’d likely be doing:

Drip Campaigns:  Past clients, people in my network, channel partners (Realtors, title company reps, etc.) would be getting not just rate updates from me, but related news from the mortgage markets, success stories of people refinancing and saving a ton of money, examples of how fast and easy it is (less paperwork, faster close times, etc.).  Regular reminders that it’s easy, it’s a short-term opportunity, and it can start right now.  Make it easy for people to remember you, refer you, use you.

Success Stories:  It’s one thing to talk about a 4.6% rate.  It’s another thing to demonstrate a happy client that just saved hundreds on their monthly payment.  That’s real, and helps convert a percentage into real dollars people can visualize in their lives and budgets.  If you don’t have these stories directly, ask around your office and share their stories.

ROI Calculator:  Help your prospective customers do the math.  Plug in a few numbers to give them an estimate of how much they could save.  Make it real.

Customer Pass-Along Incentives:  The people directly on your mailing list have direct relationships with exponentially more potential customers.  What are you doing to encourage the pass-along?  Does your mailing list need an incentive?  Do they need business cards to hand out on your behalf?  Do they need a link to an ROI Calculator that’s super-easy to email along?  How about a pre-written, Twitter-length post & shortened URL?  Make it easy and worthwhile to share.

Realtors:  Why would a real estate agent encourage their customers to refinance vs. buy a new home?  Because those who refinance aren’t ready to move!  A good real estate agent who helps their client save hundreds on their monthly mortgage payment looks good to that client, and knows that could turn into a ton more referrals of prospective buyers and sellers in the process.  Don’t be afraid to work your Realtor network particularly aggressively right now.

If you were a mortgage broker, what would you do?  If you are a mortgage broker, what are you doing right now that’s generating success?

It's easy to make retail marketing too complicated, or entirely too tactical.  But the more retail businesses I see and speak with, big and small, the more I realize they all need to focus on three things:

A great customer relationship management system.  This is key.  It's the hub of all information you have about every customer.  Who they are, how often they shop, what they like, when they last visited, etc.  If it's really good, it stores wish lists that their family, friends, etc. can access.  It tracks their birthdays and anniversaries, their ring size, their favorite candy, whatever is relevant to your business and the relationship you have and are building with each customer.  Without a great CRM system (and there are plenty out there complicated enough for enterprise retail as well as simple enough for small storefronts), it's too easy to commoditize your customers as one.  But when every customer is unique, and you have the ability, knowledge and tools to treat them uniquely, great things happen to order frequency, basket size, and referrals.

Seamless point-of-sale registration & data capture.  Too many retail businesses worry about advertising.  They get fixated on direct mail, or newspaper ads, or other expensive ads to target prospective customers.  Many of those same businesses have customers walk into their storefronts every day (either in person or online) and fail to capture anything beyond the occasional transaction.  How many people visited your business today?  How many email addresses did you capture?  How many newsletter subscribers did you add?  What were you able to learn from them with just a couple seconds, or a simple question at the register, to deepen your understanding, relationship and communications with that customer?  Your biggest marketing opportunity walks in and out of your doors every day.

Regular, contextual, passive marketing.  Yes, you can leverage that newfound information to tell everyone with a birthday this month to come in for a free appetizer.  You can remind spouses that anniversaries are around the corner.  You can get very complicated with your marketing back to the customers you manage in the CRM system, as well as capture at the point-of-sale.  But if you're just getting started, keep it simple.  Start a newsletter.  Teach your customers something.  Demonstrate regularly your expertise and value.  Give them a simple reminder, a quick one, of who you are and what you do and what you can provide the next time they're ready.  It doesn't take much.  Don't overthink this part, just start doing it.  Give your customers an excuse and more opportunities to buy and refer.

Yes, I'm asking about January in July.

You don't have to have your budget set.  You don't need to know your January sales quota.

But at this point in the year, you probably have a reasonable idea of how you'll finish 2010.  Especially if you work in a recurring-revenue business, you have a good idea of expected 2010 revenue and margin. 

So what's ahead for next year?  What's your 2011 revenue and profit goal?  What do you want market share to look like?  And how the heck are you going to get there?

The answer is probably a shift, acceleration or full change to your current strategy.  Not just sales & marketing, but overall go-to-market.  New products, new markets, new partnerships.  Some of these may require new people, new processes, shifts in how you do business today.

That's a lot of new, a lot of potential change, and certainly a lot of things to figure out.  And when you hit January 1, it had better be figured out or you're already behind.

I'm not trying to scare you.  You have plenty of time.  Just get started now.

If you're selling a solution, and you get right to explaining exactly what you do at the start of a sales call or marketing message, you're being direct.  You're telling the prospect exactly what you sell and what it does.

Or are you?  You're describing the product or service, but not necessarily the context.  You're making the solution clear, but without knowing or understanding how it'll be used, how it'll be valued, whether it's even needed.

So if you start a prospect conversation by offering outcomes, by generating interest initially not based on what you sell but what you enable, is that being vague?  Or is it even more direct and useful for the prospect?

I don't care about what you're selling unless (or until) I need it.  I don't need it unless it solves a problem, or delivers an outcome I've prioritized.  I don't really want to buy what you're selling.  I want to buy what it unlocks, what it enables.

What I'm selling isn't a secret.  But I don't want to waste your time describing it unless you need the outcome it represents.