On Borrower Intelligence and Becoming a “Smart Lender” with Alex Kutsishin

Alex Kutsishin, Co-founder, CEO and Chief ROI Booster of Sales Boomerang, talks about building trust with borrowers and being proactive in guiding them throughout the entire mortgage lending experience.

I’d been wanting to talk to Alex for a while about Sales Boomerang and how his team is helping lenders set the seal on “no borrower left behind.”

Alex’s team is always acting in advance of the needs of borrowers and creating a seamless experience pre-and-post transaction. Smart lenders partner with mortgage technology companies that can help them accomplish their goals in more efficient ways, as they understand it is central to growth, which is why we wanted to shine a light on Sales Boomerang!

Watch the video interview or read on for the full transcript!

SABRINA PARK: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us. Sabrina Park here from BeSmartee. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Alex Kutsishin, Co-founder, CEO and Chief ROI Booster at Sales Boomerang. Welcome, Alex!

ALEX KUTSISHIN: Thank you for having me.

SP: So excited to chat with you and learn more about Sales Boomerang. So, let’s get started here. You’ve built an automated borrower intelligence platform that alerts lenders when there are business opportunities from within their client databases. With Sales Boomerang, lenders can stay engaged with potential customers and personalize the overall mortgage experience to improve retention and profitability. Can you share an example of how your platform aligns the interests of both borrowers and lenders?

AK: You make our platform sound so amazing. I love it. Well, because it is! Um, so. You know, it’s on our shirt, how it aligns interests. No borrower left behind. It’s a mission of ours. It’s a passion of ours.

By looking inside a lender’s database, and discovering and identifying all those borrowers that are ready for a loan right now. It really allows the lender to say to their borrower, look, we’re a smart lender. We’re not going to hound you. We’re not going to spam you. We’re not going to just call you for no reason. We’re not going to send you recipes just because everyone sends you recipes. That’s not who we are.

We’re a lender. We’re an organization designed to guide you through the lending experience and to be part of this financial journey that you’re on. And, so, we have the resources and tools to know when to call you and what reason to call you for it. And, that way, when you need a loan–not when we’re trying to sell something, and want our commission to go up–but when you are best suited for a loan, that’s when we’re going to reach out to you. And that’s the alignment. That’s the congruence. That’s the family that you can build without guessing. Right now, the lending industry guesses a lot because they don’t know, and that’s OK, right?

It’s an evolutionary thing, and a lot of people would look at Sales Boomerang and say, it’s revolutionary. I always correct them and say, it’s evolutionary. This was bound to happen. We just were lucky enough to be the ones that brought it to market and having the results that we’re having.

But that’s the alignment. Knowing your borrowers, what they need, when they need it and not guessing and spamming openly. You take the sales out of it when you don’t have to guess and force something to happen.

SP: Right. So, in a recent podcast, you described “smart lenders” as lenders who invest in technologies that improve the borrower experience. What advice would you offer to lenders who have not yet implemented new technologies into their mortgage process?

AK: Love this question. So, look, a smart lender… the concept of a smart lender came to us when we were starting to think about the world and the people within it. And so, you know, the rise of smartphones, and then smart homes and everything around this, right? We want them to be smart. And, so, when we broke it down to what makes a smartphone, what makes a smart home, what makes a smart car, you name it. Like anything that has to do with some sort of smart or intelligence is about automation. It’s about simplicity. It’s about assisting. It’s about knowing: hey, if I buy a smartphone, I know it can do what I need it to do. I can trust in it.

And, so, for a smart lender, if you want your borrowers to trust you, if you want your loan officers to believe in you and trust you, if you want to recruit the best and retain the best, you have to become a smart lender. And you have to beat your chest about it, right? You have to be proud of the fact that you’re a smart lender for your referral partners, for your teammates, and for all of your borrowers.

And, so, what that means is buying technology, incorporating technology, partnering with technology companies that can help you accomplish your goals in a more efficient way. And it also means integrations, right? So what makes a smart home a smart home is not that I have a lock that I can open with my phone, and not that I have a thermostat that I can use with my phone, but that they all work together, they communicate to each other, right?

Like I can get a notification from my thermostat that somebody is at my front door. That’s cool, right? That’s an awesome experience. With this concept of being a smart lender, it’s… You have a system where all of your borrowers live, you have a loan operating system that’s intelligent, you have a point-of-sale system that’s intelligent, right? You have marketing automation, you have borrower intelligence, and they all work together. They all communicate together, and they’re all designed to make the experience better for all parties involved, not just you and not just the borrower, but you to the borrower, right?

So, as a smart lender, you should be able to tell a borrower: hey, we implement blank, blank and blank technologies for you, right? And the loan officers… we implement blank, blank and blank technologies for you. Together they create this concept of one plus one equals three because together the technologies that you implement should give you more value than the sum of its parts, right? And that’s what being a smart lender is. It’s, it’s all the automation and all the efficiencies you get from having technologies to communicate together.

And, I also recommend this: Find a system of record that becomes the hub that everyone goes to, right? You can get to your point-of-sale, you can get to your LOS, you can get to your marketing all from one place, so that your loan officers aren’t trying to learn 15 different systems. That’s my big dream for this industry, one hub and everyone works from that.

SP: Yes, that sounds great. I like that point you made about trust, very important,

AK: Very important.

SP: So, last question here. What is next for Sales Boomerang?

AK: Well, we’re very excited about what’s next. Historically speaking, we have been delivering information about a borrower that has had an event that the lender should know about, so they can reach out to the borrower and help them get to the place they’re going to, right? We’re tracking events, and that means you’re reacting, right? That means the event happened and then you act. And, so, what we are creating now is… we want to become the event, right? We want to become the reason you’re reaching out to the borrower, rather than something happening, then you reach out to the borrower. So, what we mean by that is instead of tracking something that a borrower’s doing, we’re going to track: what is the best loan for this borrower right now, and are they qualified for it and can you offer it to them?

So, we’ll be able to take a look at a lender’s database and provide all sorts of loan scenarios for the people inside that database. Say, you have a database of a hundred thousand records, we can identify and say, look, there’s 8,342 of them that could benefit from a better loan than what you have in the system right now, and they’re qualified for it. They have the equity, they have the credit, they have too high of a rate compared to what you’re offering now. All of the things are aligned and they can absolutely move forward today, if they’re interested in moving forward, right?

So, what this does is a couple of things. Number one, it gets you to be completely proactive, and then you’ve got a hundred percent wallet share. When we track events, like a mortgage inquiry or a listing alert or equity, you may not be the only person going after that borrower at that time, but with this system, you have a hundred percent wallet share, all eyes on you. You’re not competing with anyone because you’re actually bringing the event to your borrower versus the other way around.

The other thing this does is it truly creates a level playing field. If I’m new to the industry and I’m a new loan officer, I’m just getting to know things… If my lender provides me three different alerts today of loan scenarios, this is a conventional cash out, this is a VA, this is an FHA streamlined. OK, fantastic. I know how to talk to customers about these, but I may have not come up with those concepts myself this early in the game. So it levels the playing field a little bit. And for those experienced loan officers, it allows them to really multiply their success, and get their loan officer assistance and get their teams looking at their customers in a brand new light, offering opportunities that they simply wouldn’t have been thinking about because they’re buried in your database.

The future is being able to give you loan scenarios and being proactive, rather than waiting for an event to happen.

SP: That’s fantastic. When is that going to be available?

AK: Great question. So it’s in pilot now. We have two lenders on it now that have been producing amazing results and giving us great feedback.

In Q3, we’re going to be rolling out to more of our customers on pilots, and by Q4 we should have it available for everyone. And, then, in 2021, it will just be a public offering. All of our existing customers will get to use it by the end of this year, and then all new customers will be able to use it by 2021, which also then opens up the door for scheduling future loans. If we can confirm that somebody in your database could benefit from this particular loan, then we can also schedule the next best loan based on their current one. So, if you do a loan for me today, I know when the next best loan is based on this loan, and I can schedule that with you, just like your schedule oil changes with your mechanic.

SP: Wow. OK. That’s great news. Well, very excited for you, Alex. Thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people find you online?

AK: Salesboomerang.com is always the best place to go. And then you can find me Alex Kutsishin on LinkedIn, for anyone that wants to follow me there. We posted a lot of great content.

I don’t think it’s completely launched right now, so look out for this. We have a Sales Boomerang experience community on Facebook that’s launching. But it’s not launched yet. So, no place to find it just yet.

SP: We’ll keep an eye out. Thank you so much. We’ll talk to you soon, Alex.

AK: Take care.

END OF INTERVIEW

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