Great. Can you take a tiny step forward? Maybe back to where is it. Yeah. All right. Can you look at me, please, so I can see? Yep. Perfect. Okay. When you’re ready.
Okay. Hi, Paul Crane. Welcome to the GAF. I’m going to take you through a really simple framework. It really helps building your referral network. And what I’ve seen a lot of businesses, particularly lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, there’s a real opportunity to collaborate and refer business to each other. The reason often it doesn’t work is when we do meet and we’ve all done this, going to have a breakfast meeting, yeah, that was a really good meeting, you swap cards, you both tell each other you’re good at what you do, and we walk away, and two things generally happen from those meetings. Often, we’ll go into neutral corners, which means they seem like they know this stuff, not 100% sure about them. And then we’ll meet in three months time, and often these meetings can go on and on. Or you’re not 100% sure about them. You may have a client who really needs help or you’re not 100%, you might’ve send them what we call test case.
Now we want to avoid these because generally test cases aren’t always the ideal client and sometimes are hard work. So to avoid that rather than what we generally do at the first meeting is talking about the benefits of how we can help each other. The topic that never gets discussed, which is underlying, which stops a lot of businesses referring, and we’ve all had this experience, is these fears that are often top of mind. So this is a slightly different approach. But if we actually address the fears first before we even decide about referring business, my experience is it’s going to be a lot better, stronger relationship. It’ll last a long, long, long time.
So how do we do this? Well, again, taking you through another framework called the six steps. The language is quite important here. So as we mentioned, the six steps, third-party nonthreatening language is how we open up and have a conversation about fears. So I would generally start and ask a business, have you referred business before, how was that, what worked, what didn’t work, have you referred to an accountant, a lawyer, a financial advisor, whatever you may be, how did that go? What worked, what didn’t work, what really frustrated you. And what you’ll find is they’ll start uncovering some of the frustrations and fears that have stopped them or is holding them back from referring. And then I often go say, “It’d be fair to say, you’ve probably got some of those fears, concerns about me.” And generally, “I guess I do.” And then I’ll be honest and say. “Well, there’s things I need to tick off before I can refer to you.”
So what it does, it puts people at ease that you’re not there to expect getting referrals straight away. We’re going to actually get to know each other, understand our businesses, understand what we do in a bit more detail and be able to tick off the fears before we start referring business.
So just quickly the five common fears. First one is trust. Trust takes time to build, as we all know. It’s like a bank account, it can go up quickly, it will actually takes longer to get up and it can be lost pretty quickly as well. So trust takes time to build its small agreements and making sure they follow through on what they say they’re going to do.
Control is one that’s often not discussed, but I know this is a huge one in particularly the financial service industry. So control is, what are you telling the client that I’ll work with? I want to know that fear losing that relationship and control. So this is a huge one. Sometimes, you may uncover things that they may not have had time to do or you might have different opinions. So it’s really important. We talk about, if we do identify these, we’ll sit down together, agree on the best outcome and then talk to the client so that we’re not… feel like playing each other off in front of the client.
Quality is obviously one quality of the advice, the quality of the service. This links to pricing as well, the value. Consistency that could be will you look after the second, third referrals, whether you did the first or it could be, if you’ve got a number of people in your business, are they going to get a consistent approach whoever they refer to? And the last one is time. So time is, will you deliver things on time, how much time do we need to put into this relationship?
So we’ve got to tick off those. And then next few meetings, rather than do the big show and tell the first meeting, you’d adapt your show. If you like your presentation, make sure you can tick those off. It may be going through some case studies, show them your process, all those sorts of things. And then obviously, the benefits. Again, a lot of people focus on the top two, which are referrals and revenue. For me, it’s always what’s best for the client. I don’t refer and expect a referral back. The ultimate is the client needs their advice. So some referrals, I look at it a part of my best for every team. It’s more I just want the client to be looked after and knocking referrals back.
Loyalty and knowledge and protection are ones that are often overlooked. So loyalty, if my client has a good experience with the person I’ve referred them, so it’s enhanced the law that they have with me. So I really value that. Knowledge is also one that often people don’t probably identify in it. It’s a great one where you can get professional working with HR and actually learning from HR, understanding a bit more about stay planning or some of the wills and estates. And I really value that. And the last one is protection. For me, that’s really important, kind of over takes away the control and they said quality. I’m sending someone I know is going to get looked after. And for me, that’s really important. So my view is if you have these conversations earlier, save yourself a lot of time, seeing your neutral corners, sending each other test cases, and we could be doing some really good business and really helping our clients.