UWM’s Marketing Success ft. Sarah DeCiantis | Coffeez for Closers ft. Joe Shalaby Ep. 37

0:03What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Coffees for closers. Today we're sitting down with one of the most brilliant minds in all of marketing. She's a catalyst to the success of United Wholesale Mortgage becoming a household brand. She was named Housing Wires Woman of the Year and Inman News Woman of Vision. She's one of the most brilliant people you will ever speak to and a true inspiration to millions around the world. Please welcome the Chief Marketing Officer of United Wholesale Mortgage, Mrs. Sarah DeSantis. Thank you, Sarah. You bet. Thank you. All right. I'm incredibly blessed and honored to be sitting down with you today.

0:46Obviously, I've been following you for years and years now. You're just such a tremendous and influential figure in the mortgage space and really someone who's really been able to push the mortgage marketing front to a whole new sphere. And your work has inspired thousands of people. So thank you for this opportunity to sit with you. Thank you for this opportunity to learn from you. Now, whenever I sit with someone who I feel blessed to be around and someone who's inspired me to get better, to learn, to push my own marketing vision to another level, I like to ask them questions that help everybody progress.

1:28So the first question that I think helps everybody is how someone starts their day. So, so what's your morning routine? How do you start your day every single day? So I usually get up around five 30 and I have two little kids. So I get myself ready first. Um, and then I check my email. That's always, I always like open my phone, check my email, make sure there's nothing that like, you know, blew up between midnight and five 30 AM. Um, and then I get ready and then I get my two kids ready. So I have two little boys. They're going to be 11 and 8 in June. And oftentimes I have the privilege and the opportunity to take them to the bus because their bus actually leaves quite early in the morning.

2:08So I get them ready, get their breakfast, get them started off to a great day, make sure they have their snacks in their backpack and their water bottles are full and all those good things. And then get them off the bus. And then and then I come into work. Nice. Yeah, it sounds a lot like my schedule. I just fit in some some stretching and some. Yeah, some. I need to do more of that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a little bit, possibly a workout. So I noticed something you said, though. You said midnight and 5.30. So that's it? That's all the sleep you get? I mean, it depends on the day. I try to be asleep by 11, but that doesn't always work out.

2:40Now, you've been with United Wholesale Mortgage for the last 10 years, correct? Correct. And then what did you do when you started at UWM? So I was VP of marketing when I started. So I've always been in marketing. I was VP for about three years and then been the CMO for the last seven. That's awesome. So how did you get started in marketing? I went to school for it. I went to school for marketing and advertising. And my kind of dream or the vision was that I was going to work in an ad agency. Like that was the pinnacle, right? If you were in marketing and advertising, that's who you're going to school for.

3:12That's where you wanted to be, right? That was the cool brands were there and all the fun stuff. And I did that. I did that for about 10 years. And I kind of did my agency tour in the Detroit metro market. I learned a ton. I got to work on some very well-known, prominent brands, fun brands. But it was a lot of hours, a lot of hours. And so I ended up making a switch from ad agency to sports entertainment, thinking that that was going to give me a little bit more structure. Like, you know, concerts don't pop up, you know, NBA games don't pop up. You can plan and schedule for that. But I was on the side of the business that was partnerships.

3:51trips. And so I was at the games. I was at the concerts. I was doing all these things. So a lot of times, you know, it would be, you know, four, sometimes five nights a week. I wasn't getting home until 11 o 'clock. And so when I had my first son, I realized if I wanted to be a working mom, which I knew I wanted to be, it was not going to work for me to be at work until 11 o 'clock consistently, you know, five days a week and miss all the things, miss the games, miss the, you know, the crawling and the walking and all the things I was going to end up missing anyway. But did I want to be home for dinner by six o 'clock, six thirty or was I going to miss all of that, too?

4:29So I really wanted to stay in marketing. And I started looking for a job in marketing that would just simply have work life balance. That was really my my sole focus. And I was introduced to UWM and I was introduced to Matt Ishbia and sat down with him. and I you know it was an inspiring interview when I sat with him one it was kind of he just kind of opened the floor to say what do you want to do what do you think you can do and at that time UWM was known but not like we are now we were maybe ranked in like the top 10 at that point in time you know we still kind of had a identity crisis a little bit and so there was a lot of opportunity to kind of create a brand that was as modern as we are internally and showcase that externally because we were doing all the same things from a you know a partnership standpoint and client experience standpoint and focus on focus on our clients and all those things were already happening we weren't just we weren't doing a great job of shouting that from the rooftop externally so thought I would you know help them do that for a couple of years and then would be on to whatever the next thing would be and fell in love with it here.

5:42Love it. Well, you know, you caught something caught my attention here. It's like you started in a marketing agent, you know, marketing for something more fun, you know, like in the sports space. And then you went to mortgage. What was that transition like to go from sports to mortgage? Oh, trust me. I thought many times, are you crazy? Are you crazy? You're leaving sports entertainment to go into the mortgage business. But, you know, honestly, I never thought that this would be a space that I would enjoy and feel as much fulfillment as I did working on, you know, Progressive Insurance or Six Flags, you know, amusement parks or, you know, Cadillac or like all these like big, well-known brand names that, you know, you just you say and everyone knows who they are right um but there's a different opportunity that exists in the marketing space that we or the marketing opportunity that we have we really from a uwm standpoint i'm fortunate enough that although we're one company there's actually four brands that we have and that we manage that really has their own identity and their own tone and um so you know it's we have uwm which is obviously our our client our main client facing brand and then we have uwm careers which is all of We are hyper-local from a recruiting standpoint.

6:59Everyone comes to campus every day. So if you live more than an hour away from here, you probably aren't going to work here. So we're hyper-local with that. And we have some sports sponsorships that we have as part of that branding and that partnership. And then we have Mortgage Matchup, which is our B2C brand. And how do we educate consumers and real estate agents that a broker is the best place to go? And then we have Be a Mortgage Broker. How do we get more clients into the space? and how do we get people to switch over from retail to wholesale and understand the value there. So while it is one company, there's actually a lot of different hats that not only myself, but my team get to put on and off, which makes it exciting too.

7:37Because, you know, you don't, it's not just all the B2B side. We have B2C, kind of two brands are B2B and two brands are B2C. You know, one thing I want to ask you, and I think a lot of people are listening that are marketing things that are proclaimed boring, is like how do you make something boring fun? Yeah. What are some of the strategies that you implement? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's really tapping into, like with anything, is at the end of the day, what is the end value or the end benefit that's going to get that client, consumer, whoever it is, excited or get them to pay attention, right?

8:09Because, you know, mortgages aren't necessarily exciting, but to our direct clients, you know, our mortgage brokers, they need to know the information that we have. We just have to position it in a way that catches their attention. From a consumer standpoint, they don't know a lot, right? And so a lot of our focus in the B2C space is making something that seems intimidating, that seems unattainable, easier and more friendly. So when we did the rebrand earlier this year from findamortgagebroker.com to Mortgage Matchup, that was really the focus is who is that next generation of homebuyers that we can really tap into with this rebrand that's going to make it seem friendly, humanize it, not make it seem so intimidating or scary or unattainable.

8:59And so really at the end of the day, no matter what it is that you're marketing, no matter what brand you're really focused on, how do you grab the attention of your end consumer? And that's what makes it fun. And that's what makes it challenging sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Because be a mortgage broker just sounds boring right right yeah but mortgage matchup sounds more fun so how do you get that inspiration to like make it more fun like because that and then when did you realize you needed to make that shift with find a mortgage broker well find a mortgage broker.com I'll tell you a little story about that one it was stood up over about a three-day period roughly eight years ago it was the very first time that Matt was going on national TV.

9:40He was going on CNBC and he called and he said, where am I directing people? What am I telling them? Because no one cares who UWM is. And if a consumer who's watching CNBC goes to UWM.com, we don't have anything for them because that's our broker site. And we were like, oh, great, great question. So we stood up this site over a weekend, essentially, and called it find a mortgage broker.com. It was the URL that was available. Didn't think it was going to be something that, you know, stuck for as long as it did, but it did. And then it's just really about figuring out what's the right time to make that switch.

10:18And, you know, sometimes things take priority and things take precedent. So we'd known for, you know, quite a few years that findamortgagebroker.com was not exactly the most appealing B2C brand name. I mean, first of all, most people don't know what a mortgage broker is. And so that was a hurdle in and of itself. The game was clunky. It was long. It was, you know, it still had the stigma at the time, too. Yes, exactly. So making the switch was something we knew we wanted to do. And so we did a lot of research. We interviewed a lot of consumers at a lot of different stages in life, people who have purchased a home before, people who have not, you know, are they you know, what are they looking for?

10:56What was for those that bought a home previously, what was intimidating about the process? What didn't they like about the process? How could we make it more friendly? You know, and then we showed them a variety of different brand names, a variety of different iconography and colors and all of all the things that goes into, you know, researching a new brand to make sure you can make it as impactful as possible. And that ultimately is how we landed on mortgage matchup. I love that. Now you come up with so many cool ideas for UWM. I mean, a lot of the inspiration that UWM has and a lot of the vision and everything that the, uh, the, the mortgage broker sees a lot of the, you know, the front end, uh, social, uh, media imagery is all derived from your vision.

11:41What do you think invokes that vision? Um, just to be human. I mean, I, I really, I will often tell the team, we just need to humanize things. We just need to make it feel like people are having a one-to-one conversation with the content that we're putting out there. Like at the end of the day, that is really what you're trying to do in so many different spaces is really have that one-to-one connection, that one-to-one conversation. And how do you really take something that sometimes is complicated, right? Like, I mean, you know this, like the mortgage business can be complicated. Even some of the products that we roll out.

12:16It's like, how do we find that one hook or that one positioning statement that makes somebody look at a story on Instagram and go, I get it. I know what this is, even if maybe it's a little bit more complicated on the back end. But I think it's really keeping in the forefront, you know, the human factor and just the conversational factor. Like don't overcomplicate it. Don't make it too challenging. Don't try to squeeze every single thing you want to say into, you know, this tiny little space. Like what's the hook? What do I, what is, what is the end consumer, whoever they are, what do they care about and what do they need to know?

12:50And that a lot of times is what, what drives what we put out there. You know, I noticed one thing when I'm, when I'm walking through here, Sarah, it's like, you're such a grinder. You're, you're running around, you work so hard and you got two kids, household to manage. You're doing so much, you know, like being the CMO of this massive company, where do you think all that passion that drive comes from for you you know I I love what I do I love I mean everything I love I love being a mom I love you know I'm you know my husband is wonderful and helps to support so much of what I do and if I didn't have that relationship it would be a lot harder to do what what I do but you know I have a great relationship you know a great marriage I have a great relationship with my kids and I love what I do at work and I have a great I have great relationships with people I work with, not just from an executive level standpoint.

13:43Like, yes, we are we all have great relationships. We all get along very well. We're for the most part, really like minded, which makes things gel very well from a vision standpoint and how we execute. But I have a great team. I mean, I really there's, you know, not not a lot of people, I think, that are are fortunate enough to have a team like we have. Like we're not we're not that big. I mean, we're we have about 55 people on the marketing team, you know, for a company of, you know, over 7000 and serving, you know, 40 ,000 brokers every day and all these consumers every day. We're we're not a huge team, but we are all very focused on what needs to get done.

14:23And we all grind. It's not it's not just me. I might maybe set the tone. but you know ultimately I think we all just enjoy what we do and we all love working together and focus on the things and we all just we do it together like it's it's not we're in the weeds together we we focus on things together and I also am fortunate enough that my leadership team has all been with me for quite a long time and even team members that are part of the team today like some of them have been here longer than I have. And we're fortunate that we just all gel really well together and we all can focus on the same things.

15:01And, you know, it's not, I think, often that, you know, you have an opportunity to work with a team of people that are all really rowing in the same direction, really understand the overarching vision. oftentimes you know that you know you get some kind of you know maybe there's negative pots or a little like spaces on the team and frankly we really we really don't we don't have that and it really makes everyone stay focused on what it is we gotta we have to do and as you know from walking around here like we have a very very very positive culture and that is I think what drives a lot of how we're able to achieve as much as we're able to achieve as quickly as we achieve it.

15:43Um, because as you know, we move very, very fast. Um, and if you're not all in it together, it's hard. And if I'm not doing what I do, and if I'm not grinding, like I grind, then I can't really expect that of the team. And so when, you know, you set the tone as, as a leader, that this is what we're going to do and this is how we're going to do it. And we're going to get it done together and it's going to be great. And it might not be perfect, but it's going to be great. Um, and you just do it together. You know, it makes things work a lot better. um you you hit a lot of things that I want to ask you about in that the first thing is like who mentor do you have a mentor or how have you become the way you are you know do you have people that mentored you do you have people that you really look to be like like how did you become this way you know there are so many people that have influenced where I have gotten um at this point you know I mean a lot of them you know from here I mean Matt is a huge mentor Melinda I know you've interviewed a huge mentor, you know, Desmond, like there's so many people that just even that I am fortunate enough to interact with on a daily basis that I look to and admire.

16:48And we all have kind of different approaches or different ways of looking at things or, you know, just our different lanes of expertise. And, you know, so a lot of it, I'm very fortunate enough to get to, you know, interact with and spend time with and learn from my mentors on a daily basis. But I also, you know, have, you know, I have, I have friends that aren't even in this space at all that I look to and admire that, you know, maybe they're, you know, a stay-at-home mom and the things that they're able to do and accomplish and achieve, like I inspire me. You know, I have, I have friends that, you know, have gotten to places in their, their careers that, that I really, really admire.

17:27I have, you know, family members, my parents, like siblings, like there's just so many people I can't I really like to draw from a lot of different individuals because I don't think that there's any one perfect or right way to do anything and the more I think you can draw from different experiences and different opportunities and kind of just make it your own and how you want to take what you really like about somebody and you're never going to replicate it 100%, but how do you just take those bits and pieces and kind of weave it into what you do? I really can't say that there's just one person that just was the pivotal factor.

18:10It's really a combination of a lot of different people. Combination of several people. Yeah, I love that. You learn from everybody. You do. Yeah. And I want to also talk about the culture because it's such an incredible culture here. Just like you said earlier, it's like 7 ,500 smiling faces and I go I get lost I'm like walking out of the bathroom and get out of the other door and I you know I'm like where am I it's like the people I go you know just turn around here and like they're just like these are the nicest people on the planet yeah good how do you create such a great culture and I know you're a pivotal part of that because you have to relay that message of of culture yeah I mean I think it like anything it starts at the top right I mean and it doesn't not necessarily talking about myself, but, you know, Matt, Matt's dad, like Matt's dad still walks around here.

18:56He's here in our Monday morning meetings and he's just as kind and as genuine, you know, and as caring as, you know, what you see here. And so I think when the tone gets set, you have to keep repeating the tone every single day, right? You have to reinforce it. You have to keep people focused on the positive. You have to keep people focused on, we hold doors for people. when you see a client or anybody you see somebody that's lost you know maybe they're just a new team member like ask them you know are you lost can I help you like is there anything I can do like you know buy somebody coffee at Starbucks if they're waiting in line behind you like just the little things that help solidify the culture that we have I I believe comes more naturally to majority of us than it does feel like oh god I gotta do this um it's just who we are.

19:45It's just who we are as people outside of UWM, but also who we are inside of UWM. And a lot of, you know, the things that even I've learned here, I use in my personal life. Like, you know, just, you know, even with my kids, like, you know, the easiest thing for them to kind of wrap their heads around a lot of times is, you know, obviously being positive, but also like taking accountability. Like, you know, they're going to be 11 and 8. They're getting to an age now where, you know, you can't just, nothing in life is ever somebody else's fault, right? Like you have ultimate control. And so our whole saying of, you know, be a, you know, a thumb pointer, not a finger pointer.

20:23I use that all the time. I use that all the time. And I use it even my own head. Like sometimes when I like, I'm like, oh, something happened or whatever. And it's like my first reaction 10 years ago wouldn't have been, what could I have done differently to change that outcome? It would have been so-and-so did this and so-and-so do that. And that's how we got here, right? But 10 years later, your whole mindset shifts and there's this different focus and there's a different collaborative focus because things are going to go wrong. It will happen. And if you can keep focused on like, sure, there's always going to be two or four or maybe 10 things that impacted the end result.

21:10But there's also two or four or 10 things to learn from that can change the result for the next time. And when you can be focused on, you know, OK, let's fix it and solve it and then we'll regroup and figure out how it doesn't happen again versus the finger pointing. It just kind of changes the way that you focus on things. And I think that's a big part of our culture, too. Like we don't walk around saying things were somebody else's fault. What could you have done to change the outcome of that? And chances are 99.99 % of the time there was something you, that was in your control that you could have done differently.

21:43Maybe it was just a small communication piece. Maybe it was just a small conversation or a follow-up or who knows what it was. But there's always something that was in your control that could have changed the outcome too. That actually leads me in my next question, because everything you just said ties into this question. It's how are you guys continuing to foster such great talent? We do a lot of training. A lot of training happens around here. And not just, you know, mortgage training. We have leadership development trainers. We have people. I mean, we all as even executive leaders like Matt included, we all meet with leadership coaches.

22:18We all go to trainings every, you know, sometimes it's every month and every quarter, like depending on what the cadence is. but we learn and we grow and and we get better and we focus on it I mean if you just say this is what our culture is going to be but nobody ever focuses on it or nobody ever emulates it no one ever shows you what we expect it's not going to go anywhere but when you have all of these leaders that are rowing in the same direction those team members are going to row in the same direction and then their team members are going to row in the same direction um and you just you just create this environment that it's all it's all one team and and really we're going to figure out how to get to the best solution as one team nice nice i love that now one thing that is on a lot of people's minds is artificial intelligence lately and how do you think ai is going to impact marketing, especially at UWM, in the next couple of years?

23:18So it will be interesting to see. I mean, we're already using some elements of AI from, you know, a digital marketing standpoint. I think that, you know, a lot of people believe that AI from a marketing standpoint is going to take over everything from a creativity space, right? It's going to take over, you know, photos and it's going to take over writing and it's going take over all these things. I don't believe that's going to happen. I really don't. I think that, you know um you know maybe in an in a future generation you know 100 years from now ai gets smart enough to be able to do some of those things but you can't take the human element out of something that like i was saying earlier that you're trying to humanize right like if you take the human element out of everything it's just going to be robotic it will sound robotic it will be robotic so i think from a creative space standpoint um i am it'll be interesting to see how we're able to leverage some, you know, tools from, you know, maybe video production or how we're able to allow audio production, like those kind of things.

24:15I think really where AI is going to influence a lot of what we do is allowing us to be smarter from, you know, digital placements, allowing us to be smarter from really anything on learning more about the people that are coming to our websites, like, and how do we customize that experience even further? And how do we drive that human, that personalized experience further. I think that's where we're going to see the greatest influence, hopefully from a UWM standpoint too, because I think that it's critically important for us to understand who we're talking to and what they do. Is it somebody who is very heavy on VA loans?

24:58Well, let's make sure that when they land on our website, like we're serving up all that content about VA as we possibly can to help educate them and train them and let them know what we do. And, you know, versus it being more from a creative space standpoint. So extremely enhanced analytics. Yeah. On your demographic. Absolutely. I love that. So what are some other marketing trends that you're seeing right now in the mortgage space that you can share with people listening? I mean, I think AI is really the biggest thing. I think that that is really everyone has has their eyes on AI because it's the newest thing.

25:36I actually was very funny. I saw this thing pop up on Instagram and it was it was a news broadcast from 1994. And they had this whole segment on the Internet and they had this whole segment on how are you supposed to say the at symbol? Because they didn't know. Right. It was like, you know, Channel 7 News, is it around? Is it at? How do you say it? Right? Because it was so new. And it was this new development of, you know, that people hadn't heard of before. They didn't know how to use it. They didn't know what it was going to mean. They didn't know how it was going to impact our daily lives. Granted, that was, you know, a long time ago.

26:16But I think it is us sitting here talking about AI now in, you know, 30 years from now. It's going to be like people in 1994 talking about how do you say the at sign, right? because it's just it's so new right now but it's going to have such a massive impact you know it isn't going to be a trend it's just going to be this ever evolving thing that is going to allow us to be smarter and faster and be able to serve our end consumer the best way possible yeah it's it's funny that we're on like our companies on probably six or seven different AI platforms you know It's like, and we're paying for this AI platform that does this, and then this AI platform does that.

27:01There's so many different derivatives of AI. And then what's going to stick? Yeah. What's going to be ultimately the thing in 10 years from now, or maybe it's five years from now? What's going to be ultimately like something comes together, this culmination of, okay, these are all the best pieces of AI, and someone's going to figure it out. Yeah, one AI platform will just do everything. Why am I paying for nine? Exactly. Yep. Yep. Yep. So right now, like a lot of people want to enter the the marketing space. Is there any specific skill or mindset that one has to have to really win in this sort of environment right now?

27:39You know, I think it just marketing, I think, is one of the main spaces. It is another, but where you can never relax on what you think, you know, because it's always going to change. There is always going to be something new that comes out, a better technology, a better, you know, social media platform. There's always going to be something new. So if you're somebody that likes to be comfortable and kind of do more repetitive things on a daily basis, marketing isn't really for you, nor is the mortgage industry, frankly. But there is a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot goes into how do you keep that mindset of ever evolving, of ever never thinking that this is it, never thinking I got it figured out, because as soon as you think you've got it figured out, it's going to change.

28:35and we don't know what the next change will be. And so reading blogs, staying up on the latest trends, staying up on, you know, not necessarily always jumping ship to what the next thing is, but paying attention and knowing how that is impacting, you know, your clients, knowing how they're utilizing it. How can we be utilizing it? I mean, we didn't even, from a UWM standpoint, we didn't even jump on TikTok for a while because it was like, how exactly can we most effectively utilize this new social media platform versus just being on it to say we're on it. And you're on it for UWM Life. Yep, exactly.