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.