Funnel Anatomy: The Nine Questions That Qualify a Mortgage Lead

Most mortgage websites end in a contact form, and every contact form says the same thing to a borrower: give us your phone number and something will happen to you. The funnel Nova built for Niche Mortgages replaces that dead end with a nine-question pre-qualification flow that gives the visitor a real answer (which tier of lender fits their file) before anyone calls, and hands the brokerage a scored, triaged lead instead of a name and a number. It is the highest-leverage page on the site, and its design principles transfer to any brokerage. Here is the anatomy, question by question and decision by decision.

The problem the funnel exists to solve

Before the rebuild, Niche Mortgages had the industry-standard setup: a WordPress site ending in a contact form. Every enquiry arrived as a name and a phone number with no signal about the file behind it, so the brokers spent their days qualifying instead of placing: dialing strangers to ask the same nine questions a web page could have asked politely at 11pm. Pointing paid traffic at that form would have bought more of the same. The insight that shaped the rebuild: the borrower WANTS to answer qualifying questions if the answers buy them something: a verdict, tonight, without a sales call. The funnel is simply that trade made explicit.

Why nine questions (the calibration problem)

• Too few questions and the lead is noise: a name and email tells the broker nothing about urgency, file strength or fit. The call still starts from zero.
• Too many and completion collapses: every added field taxes the finish rate, and a 25-field application is a contact form with extra steps: the visitor bails and calls a bank.
• Nine is the working answer for this trade: enough to cover the qualifying skeleton (purpose, timeline, income shape, down payment or equity, credit self-assessment, the property), few enough that a motivated borrower finishes on a phone in a couple of minutes. The exact number matters less than the principle: ask exactly what changes the verdict, nothing that doesn't.
• Order matters as much as count: start with easy, engaging choices (what are you trying to do?), hold contact details for the END, after value is visible. Asking for the phone number first is the old contact form wearing a quiz costume.

The result screen: where the trade pays off

The funnel's defining feature is that it answers. The visitor's inputs run through a shared scoring engine (the same logic the site and the server both use) and the result screen tells them something true and useful: which tier of lender fits a file like theirs. Not a rate quote, not a guarantee: a verdict with honest framing, educational voice, the same compliance posture as everything else ('on approved credit', individual advice needs a licensed conversation). That answer is why completion holds up: the ninth question is worth answering because the tenth screen is worth seeing. A funnel whose final screen says 'thanks, we'll be in touch' has broken its own promise.

What the brokerage receives: scored, triaged, callable

• Every lead arrives pre-interviewed: the brokers open a file knowing the purpose, timeline, income shape and self-assessed credit before the first hello. The first call starts at question ten, not question one.
• Scoring sorts the day's work: strong-file, ready-now leads surface first; long-timeline leads route to nurture instead of burning call slots. That triage is the difference between a lead list and a pipeline.
• Consent is structured at submission: contact permission captured properly at the point of submission (CASL-clean), which makes every downstream touch legitimate.
• The ecosystem feeds it: the daily content engine (per the case study: 0 to 30+ articles a month, the library up 70% from 46 to 78+ posts) ends its articles at the funnel; the affordability calculator and nine service pages built from the brokerage's own lending criteria point the same direction; and the Google and Meta campaigns launched in September 2026 land on it and are judged on applications, not raw lead count. One destination, every channel.

Design principles any brokerage can steal

• Give the verdict before asking for the phone number. The exchange rate of modern lead capture: value first, contact second.
• One question per screen, phone-first layout: borrowers do this from the couch; friction anywhere is abandonment somewhere.
• Write questions in borrower language, not underwriting language: 'How do you earn?' with human options beats 'Employment type (select NOC category)'.
• Keep the scoring honest and shared: one engine, used by the public site and the server alike, so the verdict the visitor sees matches the triage the broker trusts. Two scoring systems drift into two truths.
• Route by what the funnel learned: hot files to a fast callback promise, future files to the nurture list. A funnel that treats every completion identically wasted its own questions.
• Let it stay educational: no guaranteed approvals, no rates in the flow, tiers framed as 'files like yours typically fit'. The compliant voice is also the trustworthy one, and trust is what the whole machine converts.

What to measure (and what success looked like)

A funnel is judged on four numbers: start rate (visitors who begin), completion rate (the nine-question tax actually paid), contact rate (verdict-seers who leave details), and downstream quality (how scored leads convert to applications and funded files: the metric the NM campaigns are explicitly judged on). Ad performance figures for the Niche Mortgages build get published once a full reporting period exists: the case study's standing rule: but the structural win is already visible in the design: every marketing dollar now lands somewhere that qualifies it. The full build is on the case study page, and this funnel-plus-engine architecture is the program Nova builds for brokerages end to end.