to the Loans On Demand podcast, the show where we flip the real estate status quo on its head and put loan officers into the driver's seat. We give you all the tools, strategies, resources, and mindset needed to modernize your mortgage business and thrive. And my name is Luke Shankula, aka Long Form Luke, and this is the Loans On Demand podcast.
Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Loans On Demand Podcast, the show where we help loan officers flip the status quo on real estate agents and put loan officers in the driver's seat. And we're going to have a good one today because today we have Michelle Berman-Michael. She's the CEO of Berman Media PD and the founder of Beyond The Method and really just the IG queen. So I'm excited to have her on. We've kind of been connected online for a little bit and I've seen some of her cool content.
She's connected to a lot of the people that I know as well. So man, I'm excited to dive in today. Thank you for being on the show today. Thanks so much for having me, Luke. This is going be fun. Let's rock and roll and give us a little background. Obviously I introduced kind of your titles, but give us a little insight into who you are, why you do what you do Yeah. I will try to do that as super fast as possible, because sometimes that's an exciting long story that I get into.
But I'll give you the fast rundown. So I am originally from Southern California, I was born and raised right by Disneyland. I've been with the city La Mirada. That's where I was born and raised. But I have always felt really called to be independent. And so I also basically just determined quickly that I was not going to be a homebody and stay in California and I was going to go far away. Now, in that process, I have been an athlete my entire life.
So I started competitively swimming at the age of four, swam all the way through high school, swam for a very competitive team in Southern California alongside Kevin Perry and ended up getting recruited to swim in college. So I swam for Rutgers, actually went as far away as I could from California without going out of the country. But there was something really drawing for me about that and getting out and being able to create my own human.
I ended up graduating in 2012 with a degree in journalism and psychology with the thought process of I'm going to go write a book. I had always said I had a voice and I felt like I had something to say, but I wasn't really sure what it was. And I still to this day say that the only difference is now I kind of know what it is. But I graduated with this degree thinking if I'm going to write about people, I have to understand people.
And I think you and I both can agree that most people go to college thinking, I don't really know how that's going to serve me in the real world. Well, fast forward, you know, close to 10 years after owning my company, understanding how people operate is exactly what I do. And understanding how to make people actually convert, if we understand them, is also a part of what I do. So that's kind of the fast background. On the personal side, I have an amazing husband. We just celebrated five years.
I have a two and a half year old. He is everything. His name is Knox. So you guys will see lots and lots of content of Knox on Instagram. He is super cute, but I'm also very biased. On the other side of that, I am not a swimmer anymore, but I am a competitive CrossFitter. So I just finished the Open, if anyone is listening to this and did it. And I also run half marathons now pretty frequently. And my husband is a road marathon runner and also has done several ultra marathons.
So fitness is a huge part of our life. It's a huge part of our day to day. We literally kind of plan vacations around trails and where we can do things outside. So that's a huge part of who we are just on the personal it. That's awesome. You know, and obviously the family is everything. I mean, I have 4 kids myself. So something that we'll probably talk about a little bit today is the type of content we're going to be posting and stuff like that on these platforms.
But I did want to touch real quick on what you talked about, though, in terms of understanding people. And I think when it comes down to it, sales and marketing is all about understanding people. And as loan officers that are listening to this, like that's what it's all about, right? Like how do we actually understand the people that we're talking to and selling to and putting content out for? That is what actually the secret sauce is to conversion is understanding people.
Then the truth is so many people don't take the time to understand who their target market is and what their pain points are, what their desires are, what keeps them up at night. Put yourself in their shoes, right? So many times we lose focus because we're so caught up in the curse of knowledge, right? We know so much about the thing we do. We think everybody knows all the things about it, and that's not the truth. So, man, I'm excited to dive into, you know, some of the things you do.
So tell us a little bit about kind of like what is the secret sauce? What is the thing that you do? I you mean, obviously know, you have a couple organizations that you What run. is the main thing? What do you guys help loan officers? And I think you have build relationships that are based and rooted in authenticity and rooted in this concept that we're talking about, which is connection, right? We have to understand how people operate in order to connect with them on that level.
So in theory, if you zoom out, what we really specialize in is outbound prospecting on the Instagram platform. So yes, I can certainly teach you everything and anything about content. And I do. But my primary focus is the center phase of what Instagram really which is, is how do we essentially turn the content we're now producing, the video content we're doing, all the things into actual money in our bank account or appointments that can lead to money for us.
And in that phase, we focus on data, basically, that we already have access to, right? So most real estate agents, most loan officers, regardless of what side you fall on, they fall victim to this concept of more. Yeah. Need more engagement. I need more followers. I need more deals in the pipe. I need all these things. More, more, more, more, right? And my word of the year or my kind of phrase of the year for my organization is we don't need more.
We just have to trust that what we have is enough and we have to dig into what we already have. Right. A loan officer that's listening to this. If you're listening to this, Luke, and you're thinking, well, how does that apply to me? Well, look at the data you already have access to. Right. So you have a big CRM. Most likely you have following on the Instagram platform. You have a LinkedIn following. Most likely you have a Facebook following. A lot of us here might also have Facebook groups.
Maybe we have YouTube channels. We have all of these other platforms that we're utilizing. But how many of the people that are consuming your content consistently are you actually connected to? And there's a big difference between consuming and connecting, right? So the data we have access to, I teach you how to find it, connect with it, and ultimately how to not only find them, but then what to say to them to create the funnel that you need.
So right before we jumped on, I was on a call with a loan officer who's been a client of mine for like 60 days, not a long time. He's got five appointments in the last week through Instagram, through this outbound prospecting method, right? And he's a brand new loan officer, done maybe a handful of deals total in his career, and it's working, right? And it's not because he's unique or special or any different, doesn't have better products, doesn't have better this, that, or the other thing.
It's because he's working a system that creates connection first, and then that leads to appointments. Yeah, we can dig a little deeper. What I liked that you were talking about though, was we all all have data. And you're right. It's funny, because I do put out YouTube videos every week. And the video that I put out a couple, I don't know, maybe about a month ago was how to run ads to generate leads. That's my best performing video on YouTube right now.
One of my worst performing videos was how to convert more leads, right? Like how to actually close more leads, how to have better sales processes. And it's funny because I think everybody thinks they need more leads, more, more, more, like you said. Truth is most people actually need to create better systems around conversion. And that comes down to, you know, you talked about connection, which is using these platforms as a connection platform.
But I also think one of my favorite quotes is little hinges swing big doors, right? It's like, how do we improve the pull through of what we have? And the numbers don't have to be like exponential, right? We think like in order for us to get you a, know, double our business, we need to do double the amount of work.
And it's like, well, no, if we just get 10% better contact rate and 10% better application rate and 10% better pre-approval rate and 10% better, all of a sudden that's like a, you know, a two, three, four X return. And I find myself doing the same thing, right? I need more. I need to post more social media content. I need to do this and do that. It's like, I already have, I don't know, a couple of whatever thousands of people in my database that we just need to nurture better.
We send out emails and all that kind of stuff. But I love this concept because I'm ADHD, if you can't tell. Systems aren't my strong suit. And so I'm actually super excited to hear kind of some of the strategies and systems that you utilize, because I find myself doing a lot of connection, but it's just because I like to connect with people, but not follow a specific system or any sort of process or any sort of like, Hey, I'm going to do this sort of religiously every single day.
So I'm curious, what does that look like from a day-to-day basis? You know, are you specifically targeting specific people? Are you just kind of going through your whole list and just combing through that and just having, you know, random conversations? I mean, cause there's obviously people out there that are teaching stupid stuff, like asking dumb questions, like, how are you doing? And I'm like, yo, I'm never going to respond to that Get them every day.
Yeah. Well, because like what's going to happen next, you a hundred percent know that the next question or the next thing that's going to come after, how are you doing is here's the thing I do. You want to buy it? You know? And so I have really picked up on a lot of those sorts of vibes of the people that have called them poopy prospecting, whatever you want to call it. But you know, there's a lot of bad ways of trying to connect with people. So I guess I'll leave it to you.
Like what is some of those techniques, strategies, like what do you sort of daily basis look like for a new loan officer, for an experienced loan officer? What does that sort of look like? Yeah. So it's really built off of a tracker. So many years ago, I built Beyond the Method. Beyond the Method is the name of the program that I created. And for those grad school dropouts who are listening to this, you guys will appreciate this.
I did all my undergrad, graduated, went to grad school, did all of my graduate credits minus my 40-hour thesis. And at the time, I was really mad at myself because I was like, oh, shit, I really should have finished that. But then I realized now that beyond the method really is the thesis that I didn't pay a lot of money to have a piece of paper mailed to me for. So now I get paid to do it, right? So beyond the method is this process of all of what we talked
about, right? It's a three phases content and prospecting. And then what I call the Instagram flywheel is phase three. But the prospecting piece, if you put a magnifying glass on top of it, it really looks like a five day, two week rotating cycle Google sheet, right? Imagine like the sexiest Excel spreadsheet you can imagine in your mind, that's pretty much what it is. And each of the five days of the week, we have a very specific category for the loan officer to attack, right?
Now, not every loan officer is the same. You Luke obviously do things a little bit differently than a traditional loan officer, right? As compared to someone like the gentleman that I was referring to that I was on a call with before. That's all he does, right? Loans, everyday loans, realtor relationship creates a loan. So for you, it might look different, but in general, the five day tracker day, number one or Mondays is what I call realtor day. So this is a very important day.
And I really want people, if you're listening to this, to take notes rapidly because like you, Luke, I don't have ADHD, but I talk really fast and I'm very, very high D. So I tend to just like go right through it. But realtor day specifically, our job on this day is to connect with agents that we are already working with. So if you are a loan officer listening to this, you probably have 30 to 50, maybe a bigger number of agents that you can consistently rely on. Right.
If that number is less, that's fine. Doesn't matter. But on Mondays, what you're going to do is you're going to go find them and you're going to click the little person with the plus sign button in their profile. Let's say I'm looking at your profile, Luke. I'm a loan officer trying to generate you, Luke, the realtor, or the connections that you might have as the realtor. I'm going to go to your profile, look at your bio. In there, you'll see following.
In the middle, you'll see message, then contact. And then next to that is a little person with a plus sign button. If you click on that, Instagram is going to give you this big, giant dropdown of a whole bunch of other accounts that are similar to you, or that I might know because of my relationship with you. So this is where that concept of leverage comes in.
So what we do is we go and we connect with all of those people that Instagram is recommending to us based off of our super strong relationship with that particular agent that's already sending us deals or already actively working with us. Now, in doing so, we don't send them a message right out of the gate saying, hey, by the way, I work with Luke and you should really work with me too. Right. We're definitely not doing that. Please don't do Please don't do that.
If you're listening to me right now and you do that, I'm throwing a We're excommunicating you. Yes, exactly. But what you will do, the initial form of contact, what it looks like is go to their account, like their first piece of content, comment on something, open their stories if they have one and engage authentically. Now, I don't have time to get into like the message structure of what do we say and all of that.
But initiating contact that way, once they then respond, I use voice notes for that initial response to their response. Now, Luke, I've always noted you, I think, right out of the gate, but that was a little bit different. So out of the gate swinging with a voice note and say, Hey, Luke, you probably don't know me, but I work with such and such realtor. And I was on Instagram. And when I clicked on his profile, it recommended that I start following you and I'd love to take you out for coffee.
Like don't do that. Right? So initiate contact based off of what they're sharing, Right. So if they posted a picture of them eating Girl Scout cookies, then talk about the Girl Scout cookies, ask them a couple of questions about the Girl Scout cookies, let them respond, turn it around and then send a voice note and leverage the relationship with that first realtor that you initially found them through looking up.
So you can say something like, you know, I've loved chatting with you, blah, blah, blah, insert acknowledgement of Girl Scout cookies. And then you can say, by the way, I actually came across you because I'm connected to X person. And I just wanted to reach out and say, hey, we might have some synergy if you're open to a discussion. Nice. Right. So that's Mondays. Mondays is leveraging your pre-existing realtor relationships to create new ones.
So the way I always describe this is really scaling your existing community, right? Through this term of leverage. And I'll say leverage a Real quick, just to touch on this is like, theoretically, I mean, obviously you guys do a lot of Instagram. Theoretically, this would probably work on any social platform that you're prevalent on, right? Yeah. Okay. That's kind of what I figured. You could probably do this with LinkedIn. Again, if you use these platforms, I'm just curious.
I feel like these strategies would probably work almost across any social platform. I guess Again, you'd probably do this with LinkedIn. if you Again, use these I'm platforms, just I feel curious. like these strategies would probably work almost across any social platform. Again, I guess you'd have to make sure that you can find the connections. You can't always find that on all the platforms, but this is cool because I think this could be kind of platform agnostic.
I think IG is the sort of the place to be now. I'm a big Facebook guy. And so I'm trying to get into IG. I'm trying to get into LinkedIn. I'm trying to get all these other platforms, but it's just, it's so different. It's so much work, but I appreciate that. So, all right, let's get into Tuesday. So Tuesdays is what I call your dream 100 day. So on this day, you're going to have your dream 100 agents. It might not be agents for me and you, Luke, it might be podcasts,
right? Getting our names on podcasts. It might be events, right? Doing and speaking at different events is a huge part of how I make money. Just I'm assuming similar for you. So I have a dream 100 list of events, connections that I want to make that can lead to other opportunities. So for you as a loan officer listening to this, maybe that's a hundred agents.
And the way that I would recommend it is it's a hundred agents that you're maybe not necessarily working with right now, but they fit your filter. Now, this is an important thing because when you're prospecting on Instagram, there's a million realtors out there, right? And there's a million realtors in your area out there on Instagram. You don't want every single one of them stop trying to do that, right? So create a filter and whatever that filter looks like for you,
right? So if you're a brand new loan officer, you don't have any realtor partners, then maybe the onesie twosie realtor is a good person for you to help build a relationship with. Now, if you're a really established loan officer, you don't want that guy, right? No offense to that realtor, but you don't want that, right? To determine what your filter is. And then obviously think outside
of the box, right? Vendor partners, CPAs, insurance agents, divorce attorneys, whatever that might look like for you, every loan officer is different, right? If you're recruiting, I work with a lot of LOs that are actively recruiting other loan officers and they are terrible at it in their sales breath, especially LinkedIn. Okay. I mess with people on LinkedIn now because I just think it's funny. But like, if I get one of those messages, I actually respond back and I'll say something stupid.
Like, does that actually work for you? Like, It's funny because, you know, I'm a little bit of a pitcher marketer sort of approach. I did that on LinkedIn as well for a long time. Recently, I switched up my intro message to like, oh, here's a thinly veiled message request where as soon as you accept my request, I'm going to send you a pitch. Ha ha. And then I just kind of like joke about it. Just like basically make a joke because of how everybody works on there.
It's worked so much better to like get connections and have people responding. And if you were, and I said, PS, I basically just send cat memes and dad jokes. And it's just been so much better of a connection request than what I was And what you did was create a personal connection. You made fun of yourself in that, which makes you a real human. We'll talk about that. I'm sure. But the other day is Wednesday. So I'm just going to keep us moving through the five. But Wednesday is CRM day.
So what this looks like for most of my loan officers, I will say is their listing agent day. So they pull all of the agents on the listing side of their transactions out of their database, and they go find them on Instagram. Now, why is this so important? Because guess what? You've already done a deal with these people, just not them directly, right? Because you were helping the buyer's agent. So you were the one that facilitated the loan to make that even happen in the first place.
So almost every loan officer I know has a solid list of agents that were on the listing side, but they're not doing hardly anything with them other than emailing them. And if we have time, we'll talk about emails, but your emails also suck. So we can fix that. But talking to the listing agents on Instagram, building a connection, building, you know, this personal relationship first is really what Wednesday is all about. Now, Thursday and Friday are a little bit different.
So Thursday is LinkedIn day. So you're going to try to find all of your connections on LinkedIn, make sure you're connected to them on Instagram. Most of us, especially LOs typically tend to use LinkedIn really heavily or Facebook really heavily, and they haven't cross pollinated over to Instagram. So don't just go on a follow, follow, follow spree. Please don't do that. Instead, connect with them first.
And when I say connect, I mean, comments on something, respond to a story, let them follow you first, then continue the conversation for 24, 48 hours. It's kind of like the 24, 48 hour golden rule, if you will. And then once they are continuing the conversation with you, even after they started following you, then you follow them back. So this is psychology or psychological warfare, if you will.
I'm a big nerd on the psychology aspect of things, because if we don't understand how people operate, we can't sell them anything, right? the lean out method. We talked about that, too. Even like in dating and stuff like that, if you show you're not interested, people, you know, are like, they're more interested, right type of thing. So not that I know much about dating. was gonna say, I married my husband two months after we met. So not a good example of that one.
But yeah, my best friend still to this day says that all the time, she's like, you are batshit I still cannot believe that you actually called your shot. crazy. And I was five years later and a Here like, we well, in all seriousness, baby. go. No, Thursdays are fun for LOs in the sense of it's an easy demographic where they've already probably put a lot of time and effort and energy into the LinkedIn platform. They just haven't taken the time to move it to the Instagram space.
And then Fridays is re-engage day. So what re-engage means is all of the conversations that you had Monday through Thursday, you have a lot of people to respond to. Because if you do this right, you should wake up every day to a multitude of messages that need to be continued, right? Or a multitude of conversations that need your attention so that you can keep them going. And then Fridays gives you the opportunity to do that, right?
So if you and I talked on Monday, Luke, you responded, and then I got busy, or my kid was sick, which he was this week, right? Then I got distracted and maybe didn't respond to you. But that doesn't mean that the conversation we had been having wasn't good. It just means that I got busy, right? Think about how we text our friends, how many group texts are we on? And you get a bunch of responses and then you're in the middle of dinner and then you forget to respond altogether, right?
It's very normal, it happens. So Fridays is that day. It allows us to continue the conversations. Now, why this is important is the average conversation takes five to seven touch points to convert, right? Which means we have to talk to somebody back and forth, back and forth multiple times before we can then pitch them, quote unquote, or in this case, say, Luke, I've really enjoyed our conversation.
I think the next best step for us is actually to jump on Zoom or jump on a quick call this Monday at 10 a.m. work for you, right? So we can't do that if we haven't built the relationship first. So that's week one. The only difference with week two. So I just described all the way through Monday through Friday. Week two, the only difference is that Tuesdays and Thursdays are different. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and week two are the exact same.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are what we call brand awareness days. So quite simply, that just means follow and engage with all of the small businesses, all of the local people in your local kind of five cities that we talk about. Because a lot of times people are like, how do you get hyperlocal on Instagram? Well, it's so easy if you actually understand what to do. Right? So I tell everybody, pick your top five cities that you sell in or that you want to be selling in.
Find a bunch of hashtags related to those individual cities. Find a bunch of geotags, which is a very underrated part of the Instagram platform and engage in those places. Now, if you look up hashtag Austin Realtors, right? Or just Austin Small Businesses or hashtag Austin realtors, right. Or just Austin small businesses or Austin TX even, right. You're going to look up and you're going to see a ton of content, right? Like that hashtag Austin TX hashtag.
The last time I looked at this for a client, it had like 590,000 uses. Like it was a massive hashtag. So if you're the loan officer looking at this hashtag and you're like, well, who do I engage with? Right. Here's where the psychology piece comes back in. Our eyes are naturally drawn to things that we like or that we're attracted to. Right. So for me, I'm not a golfer. I don't care about golf. It's not something that I enjoy. I'm terrible at top golf. Don't invite me. Right.
Unless you want to go to the bar and have a drink. Cause like, I would rather do that at top golf. I'm not going to engage on Topgolf content or golfing content. What am I going to be naturally drawn to, right? The CrossFit side of things, being a mom, different food. I love cooking. I don't want to say I'm a chef cause I'm totally not, but I'm a big macro cooking person because I love eating really well. And I love serving my husband in that way by feeding him.
So that's the type of content that I'm naturally going to be drawn to. So if you are opening the hashtag Austin TX, and you see a ton of content, let your mind, let your eyes go to where it's going to go so that you're engaging on things that you actually care about. Because what will happen is you'll end up having better conversations, you'll be more invested in the conversations to continue them.
And ultimately, it's going to just serve or fill your cup a little bit more than it would if you're just, oh, Michelle told me I have to do this. And this is painful. We don't want that. So that's the only difference between week one and week two. But hopefully that was helpful. I know that that was a lot of information. helpful.
So if you're listening to this, you're probably gonna have to listen to like three times and take notes and, you know, slow it down a little bit, you know, because I know both of us speak very, very quickly. So, you know, maybe don't listen to this podcast on 2x speed. I listen to a lot of stuff 2x speed, but I never can quite listen to myself on 2x speed because it's fast. It's already pretty fast. Yeah, it's kind of funny, especially when I'm excited and explaining stuff.
You know, it's pretty funny. But that is fire. That is obviously tons and tons of value. And for loan officers, I mean, this was just like the play by play. we don't have the scripting and stuff like But it I this was just like the play by play. Like, yeah, obviously, that. doesn't, mean, Like, yeah, obviously, we don't have the scripting and stuff like But that. it doesn't have to be that crazy, because you don't really need specific scripting. It comes down to just engaging with people.
And this is what we talked about on all the platforms, obviously on Facebook. But one thing that I've learned with Facebook platform that applies to every other platform is I've built relationships with people on this platform. So it's so hard for me to go to other platforms, because I don't have that like, relational equity that I've built over the last five years of posting content, providing value, engaging with people, building relationships.
I go to these other platforms, I post the same exact content in the right format, but the same exact content get like no engagement. I'm like, man, this sucks. This platform sucks. Like, no, this platform doesn't suck. It just, I haven't built relationships. I don't have a following. I don't have any of that stuff.
So it's just pretty interesting that, you know, the same concepts that I talk about, even for something like Facebook is the exact same thing you're talking about on something like Instagram. You've just created a process that's awesome. Like, to be honest, it's an awesome process. Now, obviously from what you're talking about, the most important part is outreach, is having the connections, is the engagement.
And I think that's one of the pieces that most people miss out on a lot is they think it's just a bunch of content. We talked about posting and ghosting a lot. But I assume that content is also a piece that needs to happen, right? That you can't not have any content on your page. So do you recommend any sort of cadence on that? Is it like once a day? Do you have any sort of suggestions on that front? Yeah, I mean, I can talk about content all day.
And I have a big belief system around the pillars. I think everybody sort of describes them slightly different. What I will tell you is the two main pieces of content that I will tell you about, and I'll leave the whole four pillar concept out. Maybe we'll just do another show loop and we'll get into that side of it. But because I do know that there are a lot of other very talented people out there that talk about pillars of content.
So I think you need to do what works for you and what you're going to do in the first place. But there are two main pieces of content that I would recommend as non-negotiables and I'll explain why to both of them. So number one is what I call value series. So I coined the term close to five years ago when I developed Beyond the Method. Value series is how a loan officer or how a real estate agent, whoever, you don't even have to be either one.
You could just be a business owner listening to this, right? Value series is how you build credibility. It's how you get to talk about things in a way that sets you apart. Now, how to do that, right? How many meetings has a loan officer gone to and said, here's why I'm different. And you're like, okay, I've heard that 74 times from every other loan officer that's taken me out
to lunch, right? So how you are different actually has nothing to do with the products you sell, has nothing to do with your rates, has nothing to do with your systems behind the scenes, because everybody's going to say the same thing for the most part. They want your business. But how do you stand out? How do you become different? That's how value series gets tied into this. So the concept of value series as a whole is one topic divided into five sub questions.
Each of those five sub questions is a video of 90 seconds or less. So you have a maybe 10,000 feet above the ground topic and you are putting a magnifying glass on top of it and making micro snapshots within that, right? So there's five sub questions that fulfill that one topic. Now, let me give you an example of a couple of clients that I've recently done this for. So I have a client who is been in the mortgage industry since 1973. The guy's been through all of it.
He's seen all of it, right? He hasn't used Instagram. It's not been a platform of his choice until very recently. He also came out of the wholesale space into the mortgage broker space. So he didn't have a database. He didn't have access to any of what he had previously. So I ended up talking to him for about 45 minutes. We came up with the concept of archeology. He loves archeology. Him and his wife are diehards. They travel all the time.
They have an RV and they go to all these really cool places around this concept because it's fascinating to him. And I said, okay, how do we tie that into what we do for work? Right. And he's like, I don't know. And I said, well, what is the premise of archeology? Right. It's studying how our world was built, right. Or kind of the foundations behind how animals became what animals became. Right. And the evolution of these over time. Right.
So if you think about it, how can you tie archeology into mortgages, the evolution of the home buying transaction or the evolution of the mortgage process. But here's where a value series gets really fun. I told him, I said, go out to one of the sites that you regularly visit, record your video content there, right? Stop doing the fancy. I'm sitting in a podcast studio with E-roll behind me of people that don't look like me and stock
photos off Google, right? So if you're actually doing it in a place where it is a passion project of yours, you're going to get way more views, people are going to be like, where the heck are you? And it's a story parallel, right? So tell a story about archaeology and how that ties into even the foundations of homes, right? The difference in how a home was built in 1973 versus how a home was built in 2024. There's a lot of fun ways to tie that in.
So pillar one, I'm talking about value series specifically allows you to share your knowledge, your expertise in your space, which we all have, right? But tie it into a passion of who we are because people want that. People want to relate to you and you will build a sphere of people that are just really into what you're doing. And just real quick, just to your point is people don't really want to hear the conforming loan limits. Like they don't want to hear that.
But if you are able to tie the conforming loan limits into whatever archaeology somehow and tell a story about it, like that's pretty cool, right? Like using analogies and using parallel stories, because again, stories is what's actually going to get people to take action and to understand it because people don't understand what a conforming loan limit is. I pulled that out of my hat because that's one of the worst things that loan officers do is talk about conforming loan limits.
No one knows what that means. Realtors probably don't really know what that means. And consumers definitely don't know what that means. And so you're just posting that for no one. Importantly, no offense to the loan officer, but I don't really care. agreed. It doesn't really affect me, but it doesn't really immediately affect, hey, if I can go see this house, that's what I care about. Can I afford to go see this house or can I not? Right, right.
Like at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. So I think mortgage professionals as a whole do a bad job at understanding that the consumer doesn't need the definition of amortization. I don't care, right? Because it doesn't mean anything to me in the actual act of buying a home. It doesn't change the act of me going and doing it, right? And so I think what you have to focus on is how do you initially build the connection in the first place and then find your tribe, right?
So this particular gentleman, he's not going to be for every single agent. He's also not going to be for every single consumer, but the people that are going to choose him are people that are fascinated with how his brain works and are fascinated with the way that he talks and articulates things and are probably into similar things that he's into. And that's the beautiful side of this is let's build a community of people that want to work with us, right? How beautiful is that if we can do it?
So stop trying to be everything for everyone because you're not. The second one is lifestyle content, right? So lifestyle content is exactly what it sounds like. It's stuff from your camera roll, right? So who are you as a human being? Now, this is really important because this ties into how we prospect. this is really important because this ties into how we So when you asked me the question at the beginning of this part of the where you said like in how important is that?
I'm sure you have an Now, Lifestyle content is the foundation of how we prospect. So if there is nothing on your account that has anything to do with who you podcast, then I'm not going to hire content, Because I don't at the end of the day know who you opinion. are and I'm not going to hire right? Because I prospect. at the end of the know who you are and I'm not going to feel connected to you. are, you. Right. you, don't, day, And it also
becomes second to that, right? Like let's pretend I'm trying to prospect you, Luke, and I'm DMing you and I am talking to you about my kid, right? Like my son Knox. And you go to my account and you see nothing but business, business, business, business, boilerplate template that some in-house marketing chick posted for you on your behalf. Are you going to give me the time of day? No, not Just I mean, yeah, I'm like, who is this person? They're trying to get for me.
And they're talking to me about their kid. And I go to their account. And I see literally nothing to attest to that. So the connection that we're trying to build is now gone, No congruency. There's no congruency in the messaging either right there. Because you're like, on one side, you're talking about on the other. And I understand some people are scared to post their kids.
And so you know, I get I talked to people about that all the time, because there are lots of people that have that weird, I don't feel comfortable talking about my kids posting my kids. I respect that as a mom, I fully respect it. But what the point is, is, if I'm talking about a half marathon in my DMS with somebody, and they go go to my profile and they see nothing about running anywhere at all ever, then they're going to be like, I'm confused, right? So the connection is missing.
So the personal content creates the opportunity or builds the bridge from, hey, we're having this conversation in our DMs. Maybe I'm into this conversation. Maybe I'm not. But then I click on your profile and I look at your account and I'm like, wow, this person is exactly who they say they are. I feel like this is somebody that I actually like. Now you are more inclined to actually respond to me.
You're also more likely to see the content that I do post about business because I'm focused on building the relationship with you personally first. So the whole concept of personal and business being separate, throw that out the window and never open it again, never even ask the question again, because it's got to be both. And I think to your point a little bit before about like the kid situation, everybody's got their line, right? Or sort of their boundary that they're willing to go.
If you're a big hunter, maybe you don't post a dead animal, but maybe you post out in front of the car with your camel on getting ready to go on the trip. Sure. Right. I'm married to a green beret. So we have a lot of guns in our Right. But house. maybe I'm not going to post all of that. Maybe I'm going to talk about my husband being who he is because I'm super proud of him. I'm a proud wife of that. Right.
So finding your line is an important piece to this, but you can't not do it because if you're not doing it, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. If you want Instagram to work for you, if hell, you want any social platform to work for you you, have to be willing to do Because it. if you're not doing you're it, basically shooting yourself in the If foot. you want Instagram to work for you, if hell, you want any social platform to work for you you, have to be willing to that.
I 100% agree. And I think so many people are, they think that what is going to attract business is posting business stuff. And what I've found is it's almost the exact opposite, right? Like the pillars I typically talk about, I have three typical pillars. And it's like, you've broken it up into sort of like a better structure. But I talk about family and like just life. I talk about thought leader stuff. And then I talk about sometimes my business, right?
I say no more than like 10 to 30% of your post should be like promoting your business, right? I give value then leads back to my business, but I very rarely actually talk about my business. And I think I need to do a better job of actually doing that because that's one thing that I don't do very often, like one in every I don't know, I don't even know the percentage, I'm actually talking about the business and having an offer out there. Right.
And so you know, there's also that side of it that I may be a little bit better. But in general, I find that people are more likely to engage with you if you are a human being, because ultimately, that's what social media is about is about being social and about sharing who you are. And I know the word authenticity gets thrown around a lot. But the truth is, like, you're going to be found out if you're not who you are online, like you
are in person, right? And so like, if you meet me in person, you're gonna find out I'm the same crazy dude, probably even crazier in person, to be honest, you know, people get a little overwhelmed, I'm six foot four, I'm loud, I'm obnoxious, I have high energy. And that's who I am online most of the time too. Right. I just kind of speak my mind and I say things. And I was talking to a guy yesterday and he's like, you know, I just don't want to offend anybody.
I don't want anybody to be like, you know, mad at me. And I said, why? I said, who cares? Like, just be who you are. And if you be who you are and you say your truth, like I even brought up a Bible verse. I'm like, it's like the Bible verse that says, like, if you're lukewarm, I'll spit you out. Like if you're just in the middle, if you're vanilla, like you're not going to attract anybody. Yeah. You have to be who you are. Right.
Like if you post guns or whatever, like, okay, there might be the people that are like, I'm against guns and they're not going to follow you, but that's okay. That's probably not your ideal client Yeah. Right. I think being okay with that is half the battle. Right. And I think that the authenticity piece, and I'll speak just about myself. I mean, I assume you're a high D just from our conversation so far already. If you haven't done that, you need to find out and then tell me.
So I've done the test five different ways and I'm a very high DI, right? Which essentially means I'm very assertive. I'm a little bit more of the type of person to make the mistake and then learn from it versus be so structured so that I don't make the mistake. That's just my personality. I also don't operate on any other wavelength other than 100%. So I crash sometimes. I'm doing better at not doing that, right?
Like I went and did a 45 minute like infrared red light sauna session this morning because my business coach is like, you really have to start to take care of yourself or else you cannot operate like this.'s funny is as an athlete we're taught like especially a competitive athlete we do that right we work out we eat we recover we work out we eat we recover we sleep right so like we're really good at that when we're athletes but then when we
translate that into like running companies we're terrible it so right but i say all of that to say that as a very high DI female, especially, right, I can come off as very hard or sort of intimidating, right? And people might say, oh, I'm a little bit nervous about working with her because what if she yells at me, right? Well, the personal pieces to us soften that blow, right? So I went through very severe postpartum depression. I had my son when we were in Arizona.
My husband now works for the military. So we found out we were moving to Louisiana when I was 37 weeks pregnant. I lived in Arizona for seven years. I had tons of family and friends very nearby. I had a really big CrossFit and gym community that I was very ingrained with. And finding out that we had to move across the country to a state that nobody wanted to live in, in a place where I knew no one, especially in a town with 5,000 people where I came from Phoenix. It was really a culture shock.
And on top of that, my husband went from being home all day because he was getting his master's after being medically retired to now he's gone for 12 hours a day. Now he's gone for 12 hours a day. And I had a brand new And two-week-old. I had a brand new two week old. Holy shit, Holy shit. The trifecta of all of that was right? awful, But I really focused on sharing it and being very vulnerable and opening my soul really up about it and leaning into my faith and talking about it.
And the people that came out of the woodwork, the people that heard me on podcasts that sent me messages saying, Michelle, like, I really don't have a lot of money, but I know I need to hire somebody and you're it like I need to hire you, right? Or the opposite of, you know, I've interviewed 15 social media companies, and I just listened to you on XYZ podcast, and you're it, right?
Being able to talk about those things makes me as a very high D female, very, very approachable to the general consumer. So it's really shifted my perspective of like, what am I willing to share? And what am I not? Because at the end of the day, I think we're all in the same boat going through different crazy parts of life together, you know, and funny enough, I just checked and I have taken this and I am a DI. So that's funny. That's funny.
I knew that I just went and searched my email because I'm like, I think I actually have taken the disc So profile. I went and I'm looked. like, I'm a yeah, So that's DI. That's funny. I just funny. went and searched my email because I'm I think like, I actually have taken the disc So profile. I went and I'm looked. like, yeah, I'm a DI. So that's funny that you actually knew that. So yeah, it's amazing because you're right. I do the same thing on.
So, I mean, I do mostly Facebook, but I'll talk about the hard times of business and stuff like that. People reach out. I talk about going through depression. I talked about like the hard times and all that kind of stuff. And I had people reaching out, not even so much about business, but it's just about like, you know, connecting and like saying, Hey, thank you for posting that. Right.
Like it just makes me feel like I had people reaching out, not even so much about business, but it's just about like, you know, connecting and like saying, Hey, thank you for posting that. Right. Like, it just makes me feel like I understand people are going through the same thing. I'm like, it is. It's, I mean, we're in a tough market, you know, in the mortgage industry, mortgage and real estate, we've just come out of not even come out. We're still in a tough time. Right.
And so understanding that is huge. And, you know, that's a massive opportunity to showcase that you're actually a human and be vulnerable. And you don't always have to share everything you're going through at the time you're going through those things. You can share it in the future lessons learned and things like that. But I know we're running out of time here. So Michelle, what's the best place for people to find you online? Where can people connect Yeah, the easiest place is Instagram.
That might seem silly to say, but truth, I answer all my own DMs. So feel free to reach out to me, Berman Media Social on Instagram. My favorite thing would be for you to tell me that you heard me right here on with Luke and let me know because I love getting to screenshot that and sending it to the person that I was interviewing with. So that's a good way of saying to Luke that people are listening.
But more importantly, the easiest thing I can say to you guys, if you're listening to this and you're like, what do I do? What's next? And how do I make this make sense for me? I do one hour private coaching sessions all the time. So it makes it really easy for people to figure out how to get their feet wet because I think it can be really overwhelming. And so we've really leaned into that to alleviate some of Nice, nice.
Cool. Is there one thing if you could tell someone one thing to do right now? I mean, we talked about a lot of tactics, so it might just be implement one of the things we talked about. But one thing that you would recommend for a loan officer to implement right now to try to get business? because why do I say that? We are consumers of information, right? As humans, we like to consume, consume, consume, but how many of us are actually doing what we are
supposed to be doing? So I think changing your mindset from, and this is the question I'll pose to you, it's rhetorical in the sense of, if you know you have to make calls anyway, right? In order to generate business for yourself, how would your calls change or what would your calls look like if let's say you had a list of 20 people in front of you.
And next to each of the 20 names, you had three to five bullet points about who that person was, maybe a passion of theirs, and maybe one other fun detail about them. And then you picked up the phone and called them like, how would that change the conversation? And again, it's rhetorical in the sense of if you're listening to this, ask yourself that question, because that's what prospecting on Instagram and doing it correctly can do for your calls. Love Yeah, that's amazing.
And obviously getting some insight from their profiles is awesome. So thank you so much for your time today, Michelle. Masterclass in IG prospecting. Honestly, like I said earlier, you could implement this into any of the other platforms. I really believe that you could do this with LinkedIn, Facebook, any of these platforms use similar they're strategies. a little Obviously, do this with any of LinkedIn, these Facebook, use similar strategies.
platforms, Obviously they're a little bit different in platform, but you literally gave us a play-by-play, day-by-day process. So if you're listening to this, go back and listen to this again, take a bunch of notes, implement what she talked about today because this was fire. Michelle, thank you so much for your time today. And loan officers, if you are looking for some help on flipping the status quo, learning how to get direct to consumer and market to the go to consumer, flipthestatusquo.com.
Thank you so much for some help on flipping the status learning how quo, to get direct to consumer and market to the consumer, go to flipthestatusquo.com. Thank you so much for listening and have a great day. guys. Thank you for tuning into the Loans On Demand podcast on loansondemandpodcast.com.