[jotucker1983]

Ride Extreme,

I think you make some good points, but I wanted to add to the discussion between you and John Galt.

...I hear reps asking all the wrong questions which are only going to scare him off such as "How's your credit? Any tax liens? Any previous BK's?" Once they start hearing this they are going to think (especially if he's never done this before) "omg he's asking about my credit I'll never qualify. I'm not going to waste my time filling that thing out".

I agree, and maybe he shouldn't fill it out. If his FICO score is 480 where is he going to get approved at anyway? If he has tax liens outstanding with no payment plan on them and they are very large tax liens, he isn't going to get approved/funded anyway. So why even have him fill the application out?

It's not a waste of my time to send out an app in an email and get in his submission.

Actually it's a waste of everybody's time, your time, the merchant's time, the data entry team at your Funder's time, and the Underwriting Team at your Funder's time to go through these "procedures" with a merchant that doing pre-qualification on at the beginning will tell you he clearly doesn't qualify for anything.

this is another big mistake people are making. If a guy grosses 50K and he's asking for 200K, NEVER EVER tell him "There's no way you will qualify for that". Guess what. He's not going to send the app to you, because he's going to send it to me instead after I tell him "Ok great send me this this and that and I'll submit it for 200K". Then when I call him back to close him on 35K "Your credit score is 565 and you have a few negatives in your bank. they wanted to deny you but I talked them into an approval. I think you should jump on this and try to clean up your bank so next time around we can give you more".

Okay but that's a bait and switch. Why not just tell him that our industry approves based on 5% - 10% of your gross annual sales, so if you are doing $600,000 a year expect an approval of $30,000 - $60,000 for this product. So maybe you can get him $40,000 on an MCA and to raise the additional $160,000 maybe he also have outstanding commercial receivables? You can do some A/R factoring on the side. Then maybe he has some commercial equipment that's already paid off? Maybe you can also do a Sale-Leaseback on that equipment as well to further help raise the additional $160,000.

In our industry he is getting multiple calls every day and if one guy tells him he will never qualify for the 200K and another guy says he will submit his app and come as close as possible, he's going to send it to the guy who was more open rather than straight out telling him it's never gonna happen.

And this here is the problem as I outlined above. We aren't paid on application submissions. We are paid on fundings. It's a complete and utter waste of time for you to sit on the phone "convincing" guys to just "shoot you over an app" if the deal isn't pre-qualified to the point where you at least "think" you can fund it.

Unless you are getting paid on application submissions, this approach might do nothing but just clog up your Funder's pipeline with tons of apps and no approvals.

Some Funders might just cut you off altogether if it becomes a pattern.