Revolutionizing Mortgage Business: Dream Big CRM

Transcription*

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Joey: Episode one of the Dream Big CRM podcast. Man, this is a big milestone. And this is your podcast, my man. This is a Dream Big CRM. I get like a little background. How long have you been in lending?

Pete: I started in mortgage business in 2002. I started for a company called Beneficial Finance. I worked for them for like three years. That was back in 2002. So I've been in mortgage business for a long time, 23, 24 years.

Joey: And you've worked with a couple of different business models cause you worked with some banks. And then you just recently started your own mortgage brokerage.

Pete: Yeah, I was retail for a long time from 2006 all the way till 2024. I was retail and I just recently went the broker model. I currently have my license applied for with the Department of Finance with California. Once that's approved, I'll be completely on my own as a broker. But right now I'm with a brokerage called Expert Home Lending, which they're a great company, great brokerage. And it's very different model than retail, but I can see the retail side, I can see the broker side. And there's just two different ways of doing business really. And I really enjoy the brokerage side of it.

Joey: Now I've worked with you. I'm trying to think, you and I went to ClickFunnels, was it 2018?

Pete: 2018, yeah, we went to the ClickFunnels in Florida.

Joey: You've obviously, I've worked with several lenders and you are far and away on the most technical side of lenders I've ever worked with. You build out so much of your own and you built out your entire process and you used Salesforce, right?

Pete: Yeah, yeah, I really enjoy the tech side. I really enjoy that. I also enjoy originating as well. And so it's been a great combination for me and growing my business. So we went to the Russell Brunson ClickFunnels in 2018 and it was really kind of a big light bulb. So I started using Salesforce in 2008. That's when I signed up with Salesforce. So I've been on Salesforce for a very long time. In 2008, I was like, holy cow, this is amazing. And since then I had spent thousands of dollars and also thousands of hours implementing and updating it and learning how to customize it for my business. And Salesforce is great, don't get me wrong. Like it's a great, great CRM, but it was just very expensive. It was really, really hard for me to scale up or scale down in the mortgage business. I mean, interest rates drop 1% and all of a sudden I need to hire people to help bring on more loans and more paperwork. And it's just really hard. Same is true, interest rates go up 1%, which happens often. All of a sudden I don't have the volume that I need to support the people that I have on my team. And so you constantly have this up and down in the mortgage business every couple of years. And with Salesforce, the challenge was they were charging me $150 per user and I had to pay one- Per month, yes.

Joey: Oh, wow.

Pete: $150 per month per user. And I had to do a year long contract too. Yeah, it was fine scaling up and obviously the money coming in with refinance, boom, and the market getting better, that was great. We scaled up, but then when it came time to scale down, they hit my credit card in 2022, they hit my credit card for $18,000 and I had 16 users on Salesforce system. And I called them up and I just didn't let them know in time. They hit my credit card and I said, hey, guys, I scaled this all the way down to just three people, I just need three users on my CRM. And they said, sorry, Pete, because we hit your credit card, you went into another one-year contract with all of your users. And I was devastated and they wouldn't give me my $18,000 back.

Joey: Oh, man. And that was a nice pain point that was the catalyst for you like, hey, look, there's gotta be a better solution.

Pete: Yeah, 100%. And it was kind of a blessing in disguise. I was super upset, but I started looking for other solutions and I came across an amazing system called GoHighLevel, which as you know, Joey, they allow you to white label and GoHighLevel has amazing, amazing functionality just across all spectrums. Let me explain what I mean by that. So Salesforce, it's a great CRM, it's fully customizable, you can custom and the same thing with GoHighLevel. With Salesforce, I called them and said, hey, how do I create workflows? How can I create a system where I can really easily target market my pre-approved buyers, the people that need equity lines, my past clients, I wanted to retarget them on social media platforms. So I wanted a really easy segregate and Salesforce lets you do that, but also I wanted it to connect to my social media platforms. So I wanted to really easily retarget because it's really inexpensive to retarget your past client database. I have a little over 2000 clients and so it's very inexpensive for me to retarget them and so I wanted a really easy way to do that. So I called Salesforce and I said, hey, do you guys have this availability? They said, oh yes, we have a thing called Sales Cloud and the Sales Cloud was, hey, it's an extra $6,000 and you can now create custom workflows in a really easy way, user experience was easier, it was $6,000 per user per year. I was like, wow. So I actually said, wow, this is kind of cool, I can implement this, I can put it together. Also, I was spending an extra $350 a month for my phone system because I had that connected with Salesforce as well. So $350 a month, I was spending for RingCentral because it connected with Salesforce and so I spent $6,000. Well, what happened was they said, yeah, you also wanna take the training which is an extra $2,500. So I spent the $2,500 for training, $6,000 to learn the system. I got two weeks into the system, into the training and come to find out it didn't actually connect with the social media platforms like I was told or like I had thought that when they explained it to me, I said, hey, this doesn't do what I need and they said, oh, you have to connect this other third party thing to get it to work, to connect it all together but you can create all the workflows. I'm thinking to myself, another program. So I said, hey, I'm gonna look for something else. Can I get my refund back, $6,000? They said, nope, you signed the contract, you're stuck in this for a full year. So all of that got me started to look for another solution. So I found GoHighLevel and GoHighLevel, if you guys don't know what GoHighLevel is, I recommend every single mortgage originator, every single business that's out there, they should use some functionality of this new software. The software is absolutely incredible on how many features that it goes through and it will save you money. So Joey, what I did, it was I fully customized GoHighLevel for the mortgage business. And what I did is I created a mortgage CRM that has every single thing that I had within Salesforce. So I connected it within Compass, I connected it with my other CRM as I went to Broker, we have a API built out to where the information flows seamlessly with my loan origination software. The best way I can explain it now, Joey, is that it's like driving a Porsche versus driving a Honda Civic for my entire business, because the beautiful thing is there's no contracts, it's month to month, I get unlimited users for $297 a month. I can scale up as much as I want and I can scale down as much as I want. It's frictionless and I've made it really, really easy for other mortgage loan originators to jump on and start using this same system. I created like over 30 training videos for you and your entire team to be able to jump on the system and start learning and frictionless, get this implemented into your business if you're using another CRM. Does that make sense?

Joey: Totally, you know, there's a couple of points in there that are popping in my head because my background is tech and digital marketing. I come from the programming side and we've worked with you on DreamBigCRM and you're right that GoHighLevel is a wonderful white label, very, very adaptive platform. But to me, the value that DreamBigCRM brings in is that it's all built. It's like the difference between if you were to just buy a big box of Legos, which GoHighLevel is just this insanely large box of Legos, or somebody says, no, no, here are the blueprints on how to build this particular, you wanna build a ship, you wanna build a Death Star, you wanna build this. It's all, not only do you have the blueprints, but it's all been done.

Pete: Yeah.

Joey: And I think the average lender, because you are definitely, to a hammer, everything's a nail. So to you, you're very techie. You're very comfortable just getting in there. You built it in Salesforce, then you rebuilt it in GoHighLevel. I'm here to tell you, the average lender, the top 2% of average tech lenders don't wanna do that. It's just too much. But when you talk about the pain of 20-something thousand dollars a year, automatically renewing contracts, another $6,000, suddenly now the pain point's high enough. They're like, okay, I've gotta come up with another solution. And that's why it's like, to me, the power in DreamBigCRM is not that it's built on GoHighLevel. That's great. But the power is that you've built out all the workflows. You've built out, and the CRM, lots of times people have multiple CRMs because they'll have a production CRM. These are people that they're actively working loans through, pre-approval all the way through to close. And then they'll have a marketing CRM, which you did back in the day. You also used, what was it? ActiveCampaign.

Pete: Yeah, I used ActiveCampaign, ClickFunnels. I had both of those connected, yeah.

Joey: And all of this is in GoHighLevel, but you still have to understand how to wire it up, which you do. And then we've worked with you, and GoHighLevel to me does about 75% of the workload, but there's a bunch of little like, oh, it doesn't do that. Oh, it doesn't do this. And so our team built out basically an add-on, a side server that connects to GoHighLevel and says everything that GoHighLevel can't do. There's just certain little things that they're not make or break, but they bring incredible help in wiring everything up so that not only are you seeing your production, but you're seeing your prospecting pipeline in the same CRM. And things like when you're in the loan, I mean, obviously you're doing things like getting the pre-approval letter, credit run, all the various docs. There's a whole thing that goes with production, but with prospecting and pre-sales, that's what you're talking about, about retargeting. I know you and I use this language. We're so comfortable with this vocabulary. We just drop these words. But I think a lot of the people I talk to, our clients, they're like, what do you mean by that? And it's like, oh, okay, well, here are your prospects. Here are people that are interacting with your brand. They're either going to your website, filling out a form, maybe interacting with you on Facebook, Instagram. And so you have them segmented by maybe how far out they are, what stage you might see. Like, ah, they're thinking about buying in a year. They got to buy right now. They got to improve their credit. Whatever it is, you segment them. And then with the system that you've built with Dream Big CRM, you can make sure you create ads. And I want to come back to that. I want to talk about the power of retargeting ads, but also emails. You've built out an education system. So when your customers are constantly asking the same questions over and over, you've built these little videos and PDFs that you can just deliver to them and say, hey, here are your next steps. Here's your action items. Here's the things that we talked about. And they can revisit that, and that gets sent to them in text message or email. Back to the retargeting videos, I try to tell my clients, I try to explain the power of video, how it's just a superior medium over anything else. It just is. We live in a time, it's 2025. We have a very short attention span. We don't need to get into why, whatever, but we just do. And I think the average person would say, yeah, you're right. We do have a much smaller attention span than when we were growing up or 20, 30 years ago. And as such, people, you send them these two, three, four page documents. They don't really want to read them. So instead, if you can summarize them in like a two minute video and attach the PDF and say, hey, look, I'm giving you this PDF. Here's the main points and takeaways for you. It does a couple of things. Number one, it summarizes, simplifies it, but it also brands you because it's Pete telling them. And that just puts, that's just branding, right? So I try to get our clients to make these, we'll say like, well, they'll say, what video should I make? I say, okay, what are your USPs, your unique selling propositions? If somebody walked into your office and said, hey Pete, we're gonna buy a home and we wanna get a loan and we're gonna talk to multiple lenders. We're just being honest with you. Why should we work with Pete? You'd have a list of things you'd say. You'd give them a list of reasons, whether it's one, 10, 20, three, it doesn't matter. Tell the clients, make short little videos of those USPs. And then what we'll do is we'll wire those up with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, sometimes even TikTok if they're in the right marketplace. And we will wire up your CRM with that person. So when a prospect comes in, we can wire it to the ads platform and say, hey, can you deliver these videos to them? And you don't, if you have seven USPs, the other thing is you don't make one seven minute video. You make a USP for each, you make a video for each USP and deliver it to them. It's just, it's a superior way. And all our clients that do that, they always have much higher conversion rates than the ones who don't. And everybody's got like, they don't wanna do video, but it's like, trust me, no one cares about your hair or your shoes. It's, they just need the information and you're branding you.

Pete: Yeah, no, that's huge. Video, I mean, Joe, you've taught me so much with video and with a lot of this marketing piece to be able to get myself in front of my past clients in front of my leads, and a very simple, easy to do system that allows my clients to see me and for me to become kind of like a local celebrity. And I've used this DreamBigCRM, I've used GoHighLevel to be able to implement this in a very easy way to my past clients. Joey, I mean, me and you go back a long time. You have helped hundreds and hundreds of realtors on the real estate side, and me and you kind of formed this great friendship and partnership, and you've helped me a lot. And with your piece of helping large, large real estate teams, bringing that into the DreamBigCRM is just a huge added value to anyone that's gonna sign up to use our system.

Joey: Totally agree, man. Iron sharpens iron, you've helped me. My clients have driven me in them bringing their pain points to me and saying, Joey, how would you solve this? It's, well, it's teamwork. You know what I mean? Because I'm not a realtor or a lender. I mean, I'm comfortable with the space, but it's them coming to me and saying, hey, look, this is what I want. This is the pain point I'm having. How would you solve that? And me going, okay, I'm gonna focus on getting good with the ads platforms and the integration. How do you get platform A to talk to platform B, and then deliver your solution? So that's, because somebody could go out and get GoHighLevel. They could, but DreamBigCRM pricing is the same as GoHighLevel. Why? Because the way that GoHighLevel works is when you went, you went and got a master account. And the beauty of it is, is you build out all of this funnel, all of this logic, all of this wiring. There is a tremendous amount of customization here. And then when someone signs up for DreamBigCRM, you could say, okay, just duplicate this. But now, you know, let's say Lisa Lender comes to you. You can just collect some data from her, you know, logo, branding, ask her what things she wants, what functionality she wants, because she can turn it on or off. And then she has her own customized version of it. And it's the same cost as GoHighLevel.

Pete: Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, that I did build out from start to finish. So when lead comes in all the way to loan closing and also post-closing, there's so many templates, emails, text messaging, many, many custom functions throughout the whole loan process. And I call this a perfect loan process. So I built out a baseline for your perfect loan process. And all you have to do, you know, to get the system and to move, let's say you want to move from a Salesforce, or let's say you want to move from another CRM. Well, we make it super, super easy for you. We'll help you transition that data over into the new system. And then we have all of the training videos. And then we also have weekly videos every single week that you can jump on, you and your team, to learn and to start implementing. The beautiful thing about the process from start to finish, you have this blueprint per se, and you can actually perfect it with your own experience that you want to give to your customer. I call it the perfect loan process, and you can create your own perfect loan process and make it seamless for you and your team. I mean, your entire team can be on the system as well. It's a beautiful thing.

Joey: I always get asked the question, what's the best CRM? And it's a generic answer, but it's true. It's the one that you'll use. I see a lot of realtors and lenders where we get pulled in and they'll have multiple tools that pretty much do the exact same thing. But they're in the sales field. Their job is to stay on top of like, hey, how do I get this loan approved? And they've got to balance this. I've got to go get clients, but then I've also got to be really good at what I do. And so now on top of that, they're bombarded with marketing that's, oh, this, this, this, and this. And they'll go and they'll get two, three, four, five, six tools. And you're like, these tools all do the same thing. But it's because, you know, like you said with the Salesforce, and it's not a dig on Salesforce because this is just, you and I could insert 30 companies instead of Salesforce. You talk to a sales rep, they promise the world. And then as soon as you sign up, it's like, here, here's, you know, a thousand page PDF on how I set this up. And they're like, whoa, wait a minute. The other big thing is if you go and try to find somebody to customize this for you, it's now proprietary. And any, you've got to stay on top of any changes like, oh, Google just said they want to change how you interact with your GBP. They've just opened up LSA. Facebook says, now you have to do this. It is, it's too much. It's a fallacy.

Pete: You got to continue to, continue to pay the money because, you know, it's, it's complicated. Your average loan officer is not able to branch manager, broker, you have to pay somebody.

Joey: Yeah.

Pete: Thousands of dollars to continue to update your tech.

Joey: The tech is in a constant state of change. It's in a constant state of growth. I just, I see it a lot where we come in and immediately within two months, we have trimmed off. We've, whatever they're paying us, they've got in savings two or three times, just by saying, you know, you don't need these seven tools, you just need one. We just need to set up that one tool the right way. It's, it's all the functionalities in there. Or you can just pay for like, hey, I want to get a Twilio account to do some stuff or one or two add-ons. We usually, it's, it's very rare that we don't save our clients our fees the first month, first or second month.

Pete: Yeah, absolutely.

Joey: Yeah, and with DreamBigCRM, you've got it. I mean, it's wired in, but also, you're in a constant state of growth just because you are very techie. So you're like, hey, I have an idea. I want to do this soft credit pull, but I want to have the customer pay for it because I'm, I'm paying these enormous fees in pulling credit, right? Yeah. And so instead you set up, you wired it up to her, like when someone comes in and go, here you go, here's how you can do your own credit pull. You pay for it and it'll automatically just come into the system. That was a huge thing. I mean, would that save you?

Pete: Oh, I was spending three to $4,000 a month on credit reports. And that wasn't, that wasn't even like a ton of applications. So like now on a, if you, if you do a soft credit pull right now with most credit companies, it's $50 per person for a tri-merge soft credit pull. And Joey, the reason why we do soft credit pulls before is because if we do a hard inquiry, that first day that we talked to that customer, they're going to get slammed with thousands or hundreds and hundreds of calls within minutes after pulling credit. And so now the industry, we've gone to soft credit pulls. So initially when we first, you know, a couple of years ago, a soft pull was like $6 for a tri-merge and the credit companies were getting thousands and thousands of millions of dollars because they were selling the hard inquiry to hundreds of other lenders. Well, because our industry switched and started doing soft pulls, that three credit companies were not able to sell that information to hundreds of lenders. And so the soft credit pull has quadrupled in prices. Now it's $50 per. And so for your average bank, branch manager, loan officer to be just willy nilly pulling soft credit pulls for any person that comes in, it makes it very, very expensive. It does. Yeah, and so what I built out was an amazing way to get your customer to just go ahead and pay for that soft credit pull. So in the last three months, I turned this system on and it all comes with the DreamBigCRM. You send them the link for the application, it's in an email and it walks them through the process of pulling their own soft credit pull. It explains it to them in a way where they're not going to get upset and also explains it to them where they, it answers all their questions right there within that little automation.

Joey: If anybody wants to know about this, they can go to DreamBigCRM.com, right?

Pete: Yeah, you can go to DreamBigCRM.com.

Joey: We'll link everything below in the video too.

Pete: Absolutely. And this one little automation saved me $4,000 every single month on soft credit pulls. There's a science behind the way I did it. I'm getting 90% of my customers paying for those soft credit pulls automatically upfront and without any friction.

Joey: The thing is, I know how much functionality you have built in this. We could sit here and talk for hours about it. You've already created a library of stuff, but you're going to continue to create these videos. So as new features roll out, you notify your customers, hey, look, there's a new feature in DreamBigCRM. Here's a video of me explaining it. Here's some documentation. And if you have any questions, you have a support team for it.

Pete: Yep, 100%. Yeah.

Joey: That's awesome, man. Thanks, Pete. I appreciate your time. If people want to know more, they can go to DreamBigCRM.com. We're going to link to it below in this video. And they can reach out to you. Do you have an email address?

Pete: We have Instagram and Facebook. You can also email me, [email protected]. Would love to talk with you, help you any way I can in your business. Thank you very much, Joe. I really appreciate your time too.

Joey: Likewise, man. You have a good one.