In survey after survey of financial professionals such as investment advisors, private bankers and insurance agents, we find that their number one concern is sourcing new clients. It's not just about more bodies. What all these rofessionals are looking for is a constant flow of high-quality clients. High quality can most often be translated as high net worth, and the higher the net worth, the higher the quality.

Whether it's investment management or life insurance, for instance, all providers are replaceable. There are providers that are clearly superior to their peers. But just as the brightest high school minds gravitate to top-notch schools, only to rediscover themselves as merely average, the best advisors gravitate to the upper echelon of the market and find themselves replaceable. For this reason, and many others, the lynchpin of success is very dependent on who finds the prospect-preferably a wealthy prospect-and converts him or her into a client. This dynamic is accelerated by the fact that, in many respects, clients are unable to accurately judge the performance of these advisors.

Sourcing New Clients
There are a lot of ways to bring in new clients. What's so amazing is that all of them can work. We know a few investment advisors, for instance, who employ direct mail with good results. We're even seeing advisors getting new clients through social network marketing.

While most any strategy can produce new clients once in a while, a few approaches enable advisors to garner new clients on a much more consistent basis. Our research with advisors as well as an array of professionals over the last quarter century has consistently identified two approaches as better than all others. Referrals, either from clients or from professionals such as accountants and attorneys working with the wealthy, are unquestionably the most effective ways to build a high-net-worth practice.

In workshops and presentations, we often ask the audience which of the two referral approaches yields better results. The answer we usually get is client referrals. Almost all advisors have received a solid number of referrals from their satisfied clients. But, only a relatively small percentage of advisors have been successful getting referrals from non-competing professionals (who we'll refer to as "influencers".)

This could lead one to believe that client referrals are the best way to grow a business. But when you dig a little deeper, this proves not to be the case. When we ask where their most profitable clients came from, advisors commonly say influencers. Based on our research and our experience, we've drawn two conclusions: One is that the best new clients come from influencers. The second is that most advisors have a limited understanding of how to influence influencers.

Influencers can provide a steady stream of terrific introductions to wealthy individuals motivated to work with you. Client referrals can help grow a practice but they pale in comparison to referrals from influencers. Of course, much depends on whether an advisor is adept at creating strategic relationships with select influencers.

Building a relationship with an influencer is a multifaceted process. We have identified three critical steps to building a strategic partnership:

1. Rapport: It's critical that the two professionals have business chemistry. Can they work together? Do they have mutual trust? Is there bilateral faith in each other's technical competency and personal integrity?

2. Potential: Does the influencer have clients you would like to have as clients of your own? Also, does he or she have a willingness and ability to refer?

3. Economic glue: You must bind the partnership by looking through the lens of the influencer's problems and goals and delivering value to him or her.

While we have addressed this process in books and workshops, here we want to point out that this three-step process alone is not enough to obtain quality referrals. More times than we can count, an advisor has successfully run the course on all three of these criteria, lit a cigar to mark his success, waited for the flood of referrals to flow and not received a single call.

Why? Simply stated, the onus to refer is on the influencer if the advisor stops here. Once you have built a partnership, you need to go one step further and establish a system to generate referrals from the influencer. What follows are some of the various approaches for harvesting the referrals you seek and reaping your just reward.

The Influencer Referral Spectrum
We've identified five strategies to get an influencer to direct new clients to an advisor. While these strategies run the spectrum from low to high sophistication and from low to high efficacy, they're all applicable. You will need to determine which one will work best with a particular influencer.

1. Client Requested Referral: This is when clients approach an influencer on their own and ask to be referred to an advisor. This does indeed happen. In fact, it's the "approach" the vast  majority of advisors rely on.
Having an influencer respond to client requests takes relatively little effort. However, it's the least effective means of garnering new business. Why? It tends to happen only a few times a year. Once some form of relationship is in place between you and the influencer, it's a no-effort, low-yield strategy. If your goal is new wealthy clients, it's an unproductive strategy to rely on after all of the effort to build your partnership.

2. Harvesting Client Complaints: Whenever an advisor asks for a referral from an influencer, the influencer often says his client already has an advisor. The simple truth is wealthy clients often do have a complete set of professionals and advisors serving them, at least on paper. However, time marches on, relationships sour, policies, estate plans and investment allocations deteriorate, and so do the relationships. In reality, the professional set serving the client is something of an apparition. So how can an influencer turn this reality to your benefit? By simply harvesting complaints.

What concerns have the clients of the influencer vocalized in the last few days, weeks, months? Inventory the concerns and cross-reference them with your ability to solve them. Deliver the solution to the influencer and ask him to arrange a meeting with the client. If you're an investment professional, does the client complain he can't sleep at night because of the volatility in his portfolio? Prepare solutions and get your meeting. If you're a life insurance producer, does the next-door CPA's client complain that he doesn't trust his new son-in-law? Prepare plans to show how this can be dealt with to his satisfaction. To be successful at this strategy, you need to continually inventory the complaints the particular influencer receives-even train him to harvest them in some cases-and then show that professional how you can solve these issues.

3. Professionally Identified Problems: Advisors build alliances with influencers. However, they tend to snipe at each other almost as prodigiously as teenagers with unlimited texting. They constantly critique each other's work, either silently to themselves or vocally to the clients. You can turn this behavior to your benefit. Adopt the habit of asking influencers about the problems they see with their client's investment portfolio, insurance, taxes, etc. As you did in the earlier strategy, develop solutions, show them to the professional and request a meeting with the client to present it nother variation of this strategy is when advisors bring new ideas and solutions to the influencers they know. By understanding the nature of an influencer's clientele, an advisor can recognize the problems, needs and wants of the people the professional is working with. Subsequently, the advisor can introduce solutions that would resonate well with these people and, hopefully, with the influencer.

4. Talk Clients, Not Concepts: Do not try to sell the influencer on products and service-what we call "talking concepts." Why? Because it puts the onus on the influencer to figure out to whom the idea applies among his clientele. He is an expert in his field, not yours. He may very well not know the details of the idea. He is not paid to find these people. Hence, he is often unmotivated to seek out members of his clientele that even a great idea will apply to.

Take the opposite approach. Talk about clients. Ask the influencers you work with to share information about some of their clients. Have them choose one of their top clients that they know very well, while keeping names confidential to protect privacy. Prepare a set of eight to 12 questions that will help you diagnose the clients' problems and goals. This will put you in a position to prepare a solution and ask for a meeting-after proving to the influencer that you have value to offer to his client.

The benefit of this approach is it quickly allows you to sift through the influencer's clientele, identify issues in their lives that the influencer was not aware of and gain a meeting. It also overcomes a major concern of any influencer-the question of whether there is justification for setting up a meeting between him and his client and a new advisor. Once he sees your ability to identify issues and offer solutions, his confidence solidifies, motivating him to organize the meeting.

5. Strategy Sessions: This is where an advisor sits down with an influencer and looks for opportunities where the advisor can work with his clients. While it's the most complicated strategy to implement, it's also the most effective.

The influencer and the advisor-often with other experts from the advisor's team-should use the sessions to profile the influencer's clients. The advisor should identify key attributes, such as net worth or liquid assets, that he or she is most interested in. Then the advisor should take the lead in profiling the influencer's client. There are a variety of ways this profiling process can occur. In working with advisors, we employ a methodology called the "Whole Client Model," where the client is basically dissected using a Memletics process. The results tend to not only determine the business opportunities for the advisor, but also additional business possibilities for the influencer.

Establishing where the client can be better served is not enough. A critical aspect of the strategy sessions is to produce a client-specific game plan that specifies how the influencer will introduce you to his or her client. What will motivate the client to be interested in meeting with you? How should that meeting be structured?

While strategy sessions tend to be very complicated, they produce the best results. Not only can you create a steady stream of new affluent referrals, but also your closure rate is going to be quite high.

Conclusions
The number one obstacle to expanding success is sourcing new business-in particular, wealthy individuals who can benefit from your expertise. Referrals are the proven optimal way to garner new wealthy clients. Moreover, referrals from professionals such as accountants and attorneys-who we call influencers-are the best way to build a high-net-worth practice.

We've repeatedly seen a great many advisors who work very hard at building relationships with influencers, but fail to see the referrals flow as they were expecting. What's necessary is for advisors to take a proactive and strategic approach to identifying and motivating the influencer to send over business. A spectrum of five strategies was identified. By moving across the spectrum, you will be able to maximize the referrals you receive from the influencers you work with.