What's Wrong With Personal Referrals?

In early conversations with my advisors, I always ask, “What’s your strategy for finding new clients right now?” The vast majority point to personal referrals. For seasoned advisors, passive referrals from existing clients can be a good source of new meetings. For new advisors, who are still in the honeymoon phase of their business, asking for personal referrals can bring in an initial wave of clients.

Reality Bites

The reality of personal referrals is they have real limitations. They can be uncomfortable to ask for. The meetings we get are not always with people who are qualified, or ready to buy. Industry source Eyes on Sales says fewer than 15% of people in sales generate enough high-quality referrals to have a significant effect. So what’s the problem with referrals? Here are some things I’ve heard from my advisors.

• You can’t just instantly generate more personal referrals when you need more meetings
• Once you’ve emptied the tank by asking your current clients for referrals, what then?
• Meetings made out of courtesy are often not kept, leaving holes in your calendar
• Referrals may meet with you out of courtesy, but may have no interest in your services
• Even well-meaning people find it hard to “refer up”, so younger advisors may find themselves in a rut, meeting with only younger clients who don’t earn enough yet to build a significant plan
• Asking for referrals is often uncomfortable - for us and the people we’re asking

So Now What?

So, I can hear you asking "Philip, how should I get new prospect meetings?"

What you really want is a steady stream of prospects knocking on your door, rather than the other way around

With the shift to digital and social in our economy over the last 20 years, we have solid alternatives for sourcing prospect leads. A must-use strategy for every advisor is digital marketing. If done right, digital marketing can be a consistent source of prospect meetings. So, rather than draining the referral barrel, hitting bottom, and then thinking, “Now what…?,” your digital marketing program can yield a steady stream of incoming leads on an ongoing basis.

Incoming!!?

That’s right, I said it. Incoming leads. Remember what I said about prospects knocking on your door? That’s called an incoming lead. It’s a concept so foreign that most advisors I speak with don’t even have practices in place to handle incoming leads. That’s a separate problem, and a good one to have, but first, let’s talk about the digital digital client acquisition process that creates them.

There’s no substitute for establishing a relationship with a prospect

The Digital Relationship

The rules for establishing digital relationships are very real, and you have to take them seriously for success. Establishing one is about building trust, positioning yourself as an expert, connecting with your potential clients online, and then asking for the meeting, all when the time is right, all at the much higher volume possible with digital.

If this sounds like a whole new way of looking at your business, you’re on the right track. Don’t stop doing what you’re doing now. Chamber of Commerce events, financial seminars, local sponsorships, just add digital marketing into the mix.

The truth is there are a thousand things you can do in the digital space, but finding out what actually works could take a lot of time and money

Digital Success

Some advisors I speak with are doing some digital marketing with little or limited success.

Frankly, they are using the techniques that were effective ten years ago, but no longer move the needle. And what they tell me is just that: "I post on LinkedIn and my Facebook business page, but I get almost zero interaction and I don't think I've ever gotten a phone call".

We've narrowed our focus to filling seats at educational seminars. We did this for several reasons, but primarily because seminars are a way to generate a volume of new prospect meetings, they are a repeatable lead generation technique, and they are tried-and-true. We use social media as a primary way to attract high quality prospects to advisor's seminars..

If you'd like to find out how we use the power of social media to fill your seminars with highly qualified prospects, book a Marketing Strategy Call with me here: https://MeetWithPhilip.com