How do you go beyond basic referrals and ensure you are making connections with the right people? During a Zoom conversation in August 2021, Bill Cates, a financial advisor coach and the author of several books on referrals from Annapolis, Maryland, USA; and Tristan Karl Robert Hartey, a seven-year MDRT member from Chester, England, United Kingdom; shared how refining your process and establishing reciprocity can elevate who you meet and how you meet them.
Bill Cates: There’s a distinction or definition of different terms: referral, introduction and recommendation. So most people, if you took a course in psychology, somewhere along the line, you'll learn about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It starts with food, shelter. But for me, the lowest level would be leads that one produces through however you produce leads. Usually leads vary in quality quite a bit. Some people don't even remember they filled something out, etc. Then the next would be word of mouth. Word of mouth is good. It's important. We should all be getting word of mouth. Word of mouth, when people are talking about us, that's kind of a barometer that we're referrable. Because people are willing to talk about it, but it's not usually enough. It's not always the right type of people that we depend on.
So then the next thing would be the recommendation. Now recommendation is good because people have said, “Talk to George, talk to Tristan, and talk to Laura. It'll be worth the time.” And that's good. The referral to me is what a lot of people call referral leads. It’s kind of, “Call George; use my name.” Well, George doesn't pick up his phone anymore. He doesn't know who you are. “Why is my friend giving my name out to this guy?”
So really we need to think in terms of introductions. So even though we're using the word referrals a lot, when we're with a prospect, a client, a center of influence, we really need to use the word introduction. “Let's talk about how you introduced me to Bob and Laura.” Because we've got to get connected. If we don't get connected, then there's a good chance they'll ignore us. We'll call them, we'll send emails. They don't they don't know who we are. We can get connected, introduced in person. We can get connected and introduced in Zoom. It could be an email introduction. There are a lot of different ways, but we have to make sure we're not done if we haven't gotten introduced in some way.
Tristan, I don't know what you think about that. Or if you have other stories around referrals and introductions, but that's my thing.
Tristan Hartey: I completely agree. Actually, one of the tools that we use, that I created, helped prime our team members, basically took me from being a qualifying member to a Top of the Table member. And it has a lot of this stuff to do with the introductions. I was getting introductions, but they weren't to the right people. So what I did was I created a scorecard. Now, I don't know if people have used scorecards before, but basically, I ranked them on a series of different sectors, which were unique to myself. And then I took all the people who refer the introductions to me and I ranked them, to the people who were doing the referring.
By ranking them according to my series, whatever it might be, they had to achieve a certain sort of number. And that number was 21 out of 30, because there are six different areas. If they hit 21 or above, I would spend more time with the people who are doing those referrals because they are giving me the right types of introductions and they've understood how to give me introductions. If they didn't hit that 21, I basically reduced the amount of time I was spending with them, because I needed to allocate that extra time to spend with the people who were able to give me the really good introductions.
Doing that actually pretty much quadrupled my business. Because all of a sudden, I'm spending more time with the people who I want the introductions from, those who really understand that, but also making them feel special because I'm spending more time with them. This worked well for me, particularly with trying to get referral introductions from say, accountants and solicitors or lawyers in the US, so that I was spending time with those who actually understood our business and so on. But the scorecard was a very simple way of doing it. So I created six different areas, which were marked out 1 to 5. So you get to 30, and that's why you need it to be at that point. I encourage people to do it. The key part is to do it based on your own values and your own targets and goals. Which brings us back to what we were discussing before about making sure that you really know what your right-fit client looks like.
Bill Cates: I'm curious about this; I've never heard this. What are some of the criteria?
Tristan Hartey: Of the ones that I used, the main ones are trust, like and respect. So I'd mark them all 1 to 5 on each of those. Then you then have connections, culture and follow-up. Now the key part about the connections one is, I'm judging them. How well connected are they? The culture one changes depending on what they are, but let's say it's a lawyer. I'm going to be judging, Does their cultural fit match our company cultural fit? Because if I'm going to be passing things between them, they're going to probably want my clients as well. So I need to make sure that they're quite similar. And then the final one was follow-up, which is, do they do what they say they're going to do? So there's no point getting an introduction or giving an introduction from your own side to someone else in the hope that you'll get something back, if they never follow it up. It's only going to make you look bad.
So I added all those together, but the main thing it did was it got rid of 60% of the people who I was spending time with. It was quite sobering, really, because I like some of these people, but they, in a very brutal way, just were not useful because they were not able to give me the introductions that I wanted. So culture could be a different wording, because that that's just how I used it, but it could be changed to something along the lines of understanding. So it's, how much do they understand your business? And you're marking someone else say an accountant on, Do they really understand me? And if you spent a lot of time with them already and they don't, then you probably shouldn't really spend too much more time trying to build that relationship up if you're not going to get anything out of it.
So, that was sort of what I did. The key point was it got rid of a lot of the people that I thought were important for getting referrals and introductions in particular, but they weren't. So then what I did with the scorecard, and this is where it went a little bit bigger, is I got the people who I trusted, who were giving me the good introductions, to do the scorecard themselves. So they could then mirror it and then really see that actually, Oh, we work really well together. So all it did was build that trust level and made introductions incredibly easy between the two of us.
Bill Cates: Wow. I think that's great. I just think I would never do that because I don't have that kind of attention to detail, and that's a little more analytical approach. But for you to do that and say it built your business in that fashion, I just think that's great. Because most of us spend time with people who are nice people, but there's no opportunity there, right? And we have to evaluate that. You don't want to be spending time where there's no return on effort, return on investment, return on relationships that people are saying are ROR. It gets a return on the relationship, and you weren't getting that. So you made the choice to move on.
Sometimes to grow, we have to let go, right? We have to let go of certain relationships or activities or things that we're doing that just worked maybe at the time, but don't work anymore.
Tristan Hartey: Yeah. One of the things that we banned in our office is the term, “Oh, we've always done it that way.” That's banned. If you say that, you have to do a charitable donation. It's because it kills innovation. One of the things I think is difficult in financial services is to do something different that people haven't done before. Which is why I went down that sort of analytical route. But mine was more because I was doing a lot of networking. I was asking for a lot of referrals, but I wasn't getting the right things. So I had to delve deep into it and ask, Why am I not getting the right things?
Bill Cates: That's great.
Tristan Hartey: I think for me, one of the big things is, we're really, really good at asking for referrals and introductions, but it's also important that we send them back to people. Give them back something. So for instance, is there something that you as a person or as a firm can do to pay back to them? So let's say for instance, so you get a client, who's got five coffee shops. Well, buy your coffee for the office from there.
These little touches will make a big difference because generally the more you give, the more you get back, but then it creates that almost symbiosis of them living together. And for me, that's one of the big things to sort of do is make sure that you're giving back. If you have a really good introducer, rather than referrer, someone who introduced loads of clients to you, try and use their services more as well, if you can, because it will make a big difference to their business. Actually, realistically, it's all going to come back to you anyway, because if you're building their business and you're their advisor, it's all going to build and build and build.
Bill Cates: Yeah, I think that's great. If I could piggyback on that, we always want to think in terms of giving referrals, or maybe I should say making introductions. And well, we all know that as you give you get, but beyond that. It puts it into the client advisor relationship. So with your clients, maybe they don't own a business. So you can't send them prospects or buy their product, you still want to introduce them to other products or services. It could be related to financial services. It could be not related. But you want to make the connection that giving of referrals, making of connections, introductions, a part of your client relationship as best you can. You don't want to force it. If they have a certain hobby or certain interest, maybe you have a resource you can introduce them to and make it a good introduction.
You show them the best way to create an introduction. And quite often, that's that culture that we're trying to create with our clients. We're trying to create a culture of introductions with clients. And maybe we have to be the ones that start it. A great phrase by the way, to say to a client, really anyone who owns a business, is, “If I ran into a good prospect for your business, how will I know it? And how would you like me to connect them with you?” So, first of all, you want to learn so you can observe, and then you also are demonstrating you want to make a good connection.
Now look, they may sell helicopter parts and you don't know anybody who buys helicopter parts. It almost doesn't matter because it's the gesture of being in that place and having that attitude to be able to do that. Now, if you can refer them all the better, but just that willingness to do it says a lot. And then quite often, some of those folks will say, “Well, what's the same for you?” And that gets into the conversation as well.
So the whole idea of giving and making connections is huge. It's a culture we develop. Sometimes you give over here and you get over here. You don't know exactly where it's going to come from, but it usually makes a big difference that the folks that I've interviewed over the years, the folks who are successful, usually have an element of giving there. They're making connections. They see themselves as someone who helps others by connecting them to others. And that's a big piece of this puzzle, I believe.
Tristan Hartey: It's definitely about the more you give, generally, and I think this is just a general thing in life. The more you give, the more you get out. But in particular with this sort of side, the more you give, the more you are going to get out. Because people want to work with people, right? It comes back to what we said at the very start, who they trust and they like. Right. And generally people who are giving and nice people and therefore they want to work with you.