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Do your research and win the client

by Lee Wade10 minute read
Do your research and win the client

When you’re meeting a prospective loan client for the first time, wouldn’t it be handy if you knew a little bit more about them in advance? Knowing that extra snippet of information could help you to steer clear of certain topics or to raise others where you share a common interest.

In our social media-crazed world you can, of course, look up your prospect on common social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You log in to your own social media accounts, then go searching.  Of course you get distracted. You do a status update, you check out a few friends, and watch that funny cat video. Your five minutes of pre-meeting research ends up taking you 20 to 30 minutes to complete. For a time-poor broker, it may be just as easy to try doing the same piece of research with an innovate app I’ve discovered called Yatedo.

I’ve only recently been introduced to Yatedo. It’s basically a search engine for researching people. I’ve found it to be a time-saving tool when I need to quickly research a person prior to a first meeting. Yatedo aggregates all sorts of internet content and attempts to link it to a person.

Think of Yatedo as LinkedIn, blended with Google, blended with web.archive.org.

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You’ve probably heard the expression, ‘be careful what you post, the internet never forgets’. Well, this tool proves the adage. Yatedo’s strength is not displaying what you posted last week on Facebook. Instead, its power comes from displaying older content about the person from years past.  The stuff they’ve probably forgotten about themselves.

Once you find the right person you can usually dig into their history quite quickly. The app’s fly-out menu (top left hand corner of the screen) activates a list of filters relevant to the person you’re researching.  Videos, web links, news stories, old documents they’ve written, books they may have published, movies/TV shows made and even awards they’ve won.

For the majority of people you research, it is likely they have not made any movies recently. However, links to old news articles and documents can provide great insights into a person.

Yatedo positions itself as a tool enabling you to “manage your online reputation”.  It claims to have vacuumed-up all your internet content to make it available in the one location so that you may easily manage your online reputation. I can’t say I believe that last part. I’m sure as a user you can log in and edit your Yatedo profile. I find it hard to believe, though, that they are then going to reach out to other internet sites and correct your profile there too.

Yatedo certainly is a time-saving quick reference tool that delivers real insight. You can always take the time to look up social media sites yourself. But if you’re short on time and looking for a speedy way to delve a little deeper to get to know your prospects, then try Yatedo – it may be the tool that helps you to gain the insight you were looking for.

And for those of us with pasts we’d rather forget, as I said before, “the internet never forgets”.


 

leew

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