The Practice Doctor is IN

Al Depman, CLU, ChFC, CMFC, BH

Referral Care and the Feeding of Advisors

This month’s column speaks directly to your wonderful marketing and administrative support team members. As a leader, you have empowered them in many ways to be proactive and take an ownership stake in the success of your practice. One aspect of this empowerment is to ensure you have a constant flow of high quality, new prospects. This new blood is important to not only expand your practice, but also to upgrade the quality of clientele by replacing “C” clients with “A” prospects.

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Hello, practice team members! 

Take a quick inventory of your myriad tasks and duties. Is prospecting for new clients in the mix?  “That’s the advisor’s job!” you might say. While that’s true, there are a number of ways you can hold him accountable to gathering new names. Truth be told, most advisors tell me that they could be much better at getting referrals. For a variety of reasons, they “forget to ask,” “feel uncomfortable asking,” or “don’t get quality names” when they do ask.

That’s where you come in. You can help your advisor over these hurdles. How? By coaching. Ultimately, of course, it is up to the advisor to ask for and receive the referrals or introductions. However, you can prepare the way by providing the advisor with a list of prompting names, also known as a “feeder list”––a list of names for the advisor to bounce off the client or center-of-influence. The fact is that people are more receptive to sharing if they can react to something. If the advisor simply asks, “Who do you know…” the client or COI will have to think about who they know––this is often too much trouble, and so they respond with, “Let me think about that and get back to you” and then never do.

Conversely, the advisor can say, “Here is a list of people I’m considering calling. They’re cold calls at this point. Is there anyone on this list that you know and would feel comfortable providing me an introduction to?” This allows the client or COI to react, and possibly think of other names as well.

You can coach the advisor by providing these feeder lists and monitoring the results. Where can you find feeder lists? Lots of places. Here are some of the more popular ones:

• LinkedIn. The advisor needs to have joined (it’s free), and created a profile.  Once that’s done, he needs to invite top clients and COIs to link up. Once that link is established, the advisor has access to the other person’s network of contacts. Now that network is open for you to copy the names and give them to your advisor to “feed” when meeting with the client or COI.
• Existing client file. What names have been collected by the advisor in the past?  Executors of a will, trustees, beneficiaries, family members, co-workers, business partners, other professionals the client works with––these are all fair game for “feeding back” to the client during a review.
• Web sites. If a client or COI are part of a web site (business, personal, or service), there should be other people mentioned on the site who participate in the same endeavor. Dig into the “about us” link that’s part of most web pages. 
• Targeted, purchased lists. If your advisor purchases a list of high-net-worth people in a certain zip code, this could be used in her meetings with clients and COIs to prompt an introduction or two. This is true of lists of business owners and executives that can be bought commercially.
• Yellow pages. Let’s say your advisor has a COI who is familiar with the architecture world in your area. Copying the names of all the architecture-related firms in the phone book would make a good professional feeder list.
• Reverse directories. A residential listing for a top client can be fed into different web sites to produce a list of neighbors in the vicinity.
• Business office building directories. Does your advisor have a client in a business park or office building? Find out who else is in that park or building. The client might be able to introduce him to another tenant.
• News clippings of people who recently received promotions, honors, or positive publicity. Many advisors would like to improve the quality of clients they have.  Keep your eyes peeled for people listed in the paper or other media who have recently been in the news for growth opportunities. These are people that your advisor can feed for introductions “upward.”

Remember, your goal is to provide specific prospect names the advisor can bring up during a client meeting.

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I’m sure there are other sources. If you and your team have additional ideas for referral-gathering, send them in and we’ll feature them in a future column.

Until then, the doctor is OUT!

Al Depman, CLU, ChFC, CMFC, BH, a.k.a. “The Practice Doctor”, is MitchAnthony.com’s Business Practice Consultant. He is the creator of “The Practice Management Assessment” tool and materials and has authored numerous articles in professional publications on practice management, and author of the book, How to Build Your Financial Advisory Business and Sell It at a Profit, now available from McGraw Hill. Al combined his Liberal Arts studies with 10 years of management experience with McDonald’s Corporation to enter the financial services world 25 years ago. Since then, Al has evolved from an MDRT-level sales rep into a full-time consultant specializing in helping others engineer their business practices to the next level. Contact him at al@mitchanthony.com.

© 2009 Al Depman