Loan Officer

Challenges of Sharing Your Brand In A Co-Marketing Partnership

5 mins read
July 7, 2016
By
Total Expert

Some of the most successful marriages are those in which the partners complement each other, work on life’s inevitable challenges in tandem and then provide the world a united front that’s secure in the knowledge that two is stronger than one.

The same can be said about co-marketing relationships between those who sell real estate and those who fund it.

But what makes a good partnership and what happens when it all falls apart?

The Right Co-Marketing Match

Before couples walk down the aisle, they’ve evaluated their potential mate and found something that convinced them to commit to the marriage. In business relationships, that commitment means:

  • Finding a partner with similar values and goals: If you’re a real estate agent who has developed a reputation for selling homes in a particular community, you probably shouldn’t hook up with a lender known for financing projects that have upset the public. At the same time, if you’re a lender who has steadfastly worked to build a reputation for speedy resolution and approval, you don’t want a real estate agent who doesn’t even return home buyer calls promptly. You need to define what you value and how you want to be seen and find a partner with similar goals. According to an Inman study released last year, the top reason real estate brokers pick a lender is a cultural fit. Make sure a potential partner has the same marketing ideas and goals.
  • Finding someone you can trust: All good company arrangements only go so far as the humans behind them. You need to know whether you can trust your partner from the get-go, which means you need to conduct due diligence and research your partner’s past dealings to establish a level of trust. You should expect the same from that partner.
  • Looking for someone who compliments you: The main reason many people attach themselves to a partner is that they see something that fills a hole within themselves. Good partnerships are a give-and-take based on the individual strengths of each partner. Look for someone who has projects that might fall in line with what your eventual plans are. Do you want to expand geographically? Then find someone already established in a new area. Do you want to upscale your products and your image? Then look for someone with proven abilities to deal with affluent buyers.

The Warning Signs

So how do you tell when the partnership is faltering?

First of all, you need to have a method of tracking return on investment to know if the joint effort is on solid ground. But you also should be wary of:

  • A partner who stops communicating or provides inconsistent information. If you find you can’t trust your partner, to be honest, and straightforward, you need to pull out quickly. It’s likely that party does the same thing in other business dealings, including with the public.
  • A partner who takes on too little or too much of the workload. If you’ve found someone who spouts the terrific benefits of marketing together but doesn’t come through when it’s time to roll up the sleeves, you can be assured the situation is not likely to get any better. At the same time, if someone seeks more control over what happens than you’re willing to concede, your togetherness is probably going to suffer. You should define exactly what duties each partner has before you enter an agreement.
  • A partner whose values appear to change. If you are driven by more than economics in your efforts and projects, you need a partner who has the same values and doesn’t change those values along the way to make a few bucks. If that partner starts pushing and shoving on petty issues, you may need to re-evaluate the agreement.

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The Divorce

If you’ve committed to an agreement and shared your brand or created a new co-branded project, it can be hard to free yourself when the marriage or the project sours.

When things go wrong, our instinct is to turn tail and run without looking over our shoulders at the havoc that’s been created.

Break-ups are never easy but it’s crucial to face them in the right way to protect your brand. The damage to your reputation is at stake.

If you find out your partner has acted unprofessionally or has been untruthful, you need to go on the offense. Here’s some of what you should do:

  • Have an exit strategy in place before you start. After all, this is a business relationship, not a commitment to a person with whom you’re supposedly in love. You should have a prenuptial agreement in place before you enter the partnership. In fact, if you truly put your image and brand first, you should think about establishing a protocol that instantly freezes what will happen if the agreement doesn’t work out. What happens with leads and prospects? Who will do what to ensure an amiable, smooth parting?
  • With individual partners, you also should develop a checklist of joint assets and efforts that will be terminated immediately if things go wrong so that you have specific actions to take.
  • Your exit strategy needs to address every place the two of you have touched together, which should be included on your checklist and kept up to date. That means you need to be prepared to take down websites, cease use of jointly developed logos, brochures, and printed products, stop using the joint phone number or contact location, pull down any landing pages you’ve created together on the internet.

As the world of real estate becomes more complicated, our need to share costs and our desire to find new channels for marketing grows.

A partnership can go a long way toward building a business while sharing costs.

At the same time, while no one wants to enter an agreement or project thinking about how it might fail, you need to ensure you’re protected before you launch.

Be assured, it hurts a lot more if you’re unprepared for the separation.

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AI is no longer a future state—it’s already here, embedded in everything from ride-sharing apps and food service to factories and farms. In the world of financial services, though, this ubiquity comes with pressure to integrate AI fast, appear innovative, and keep up with competitors—all while being mindful of evolving federal and state compliance requirements. Moving fast without a plan or awareness of up and downstream implications often leads to AI-enabled solutions that either underdeliver or don’t deliver at all.

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Where enterprise AI goes wrong

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AI that thinks and adapts: Welcome to agentic AI

Let’s make one thing clear: not all AI is created equal.  

Chatbots have been commonplace in financial services for a decade now, but remain rigid, rule-based tools that handle repetitive tasks.  I’ve worked with “AI” services for more than 15 years and each had their own place and potential when used properly. Herein lies the opportunity. Modern lenders that are focused on retaining and growing their customers in an ultra-competitive market need something more dynamic. Enter AI agents that can understand context, adapt on the fly, and speak in a human-like way. These agents are coachable, brand-aware, and learn from every interaction. They don’t follow scripts—they think in real time. And when built correctly, they become a seamless part of your customer experience.

This is the evolution from AI as a support function to AI as a trusted team member.

Total Expert recently launched an AI Sales Assistant that puts this principle into action. It functions as a scalable, intelligent teammate—able to engage leads, deliver personalized conversations, and identify high-potential opportunities—all while staying aligned with your brand voice and compliance requirements. It’s not a chatbot bolted onto a CRM—it’s a fully integrated AI-enabled solution, utilizing data, embedding within workflow orchestration, and playing nice with application logic because it has the necessary context to work within your lending ecosystem.

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For example, when mortgage rates dropped for a few weeks in September 2024, our customer intelligence capabilities identified nearly $2 billion in immediate refinance opportunities. But no team of loan officers could scale quickly enough to reach every qualified lead. That’s where AI tools prove invaluable—automating first-touch outreach at scale, surfacing the best opportunities, and empowering human teams to scale up execution to drive retention and growth.

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The types of AI-enabled solutions we are talking about can’t function effectively in isolation. Without access to timely and accurate customer data, and invoked within a specific workflow process, it can’t personalize interactions, anticipate needs, or drive conversions at the right time.

Picture an AI assistant offering a refinance to a customer, only to stall when asked for more details. If it doesn’t know the customer’s current rate or financial profile, the experience feels hollow. That’s not just ineffective—it damages trust.

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Generalist AI offerings can be a gamble that increase costs—and time to value

Implementing AI that’s not purpose-built for financial services introduces two major risks:

1. Usability failure: Your team must spend months customizing and configuring a generalist AI tool to make it work for your specific needs—if it will ever work at all. For example, imagine you’re a loan officer and one of your referral partners introduces you to a borrower. Now, you have to choose the best way to approach the first conversation with this borrower. There are countless permutations of questions and answers which all require deep personalization, compliance awareness, and consistent representation of the sales processes and brand tone of the lender. Generalist AIs will quickly reach their limitations in these complex use cases.

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2. Compliance risk: Without built-in industry guardrails, you’re gambling with regulatory violations and brand safety.  As we know, the compliance landscape for financial services is broad and evolving at the federal and state level.  Look for AI offerings that are regulatory aware and enable you to configure them based on your organization’s risk tolerance and interpretations.

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Ask these questions before you commit to an AI offering  

To maximize the probability of success, here’s a quick checklist for vetting solutions:

  • Can it solve a real, high-value business problem, and how? Review specific examples and ask to speak with other organizations that have implemented the tool.
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  • Can it be deeply integrated into your core system(s), workflow orchestration, and data?
  • Does it include financial industry compliance and brand guardrails?
  • Can it scale without sacrificing quality or regulatory integrity?

Building the future with purpose-built AI

Total Expert has always designed technology with financial services in mind, and our approach to utilizing AI is no different. We’re not chasing hype. We’re solving problems.

Our focus on AI isn’t simply building standalone features—it’s about embedded, intelligent, and deeply integrated AI solutions. It’s helping lenders scale smarter, engage more meaningfully, and turn data into action. Our AI Sales Assistant is just the beginning—an example of how purpose-built, AI-enabled solutions can solve real problems and deliver tangible value. We are already testing and exploring other AI-enabled solutions and I could not be more excited about the current and potential value our clients and our market will achieve.

Because when AI works, it’s not just impressive—it’s indispensable.

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