“You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day-by-day.” – Jeffrey Gitomer
As much as we would all like to meet a referrer and have them immediately agree to work with us, the reality is they don’t know us well enough to risk their clients with us. And a risk is exactly how they see it. If you do a poor job or don’t present well, that reflects directly on them.Your job is to make them look good to any clients they send you.
They also need to know that you are going to be around for the long haul, that you are an experienced and professional Broker, not a fly by night operator who isn’t committed to their industry. Regular contact pays because we don’t know when the opening will occur where they will identify the need to work with a Broker. Just like with our clients we need to have a process for staying in touch with them.
This is where a printed client contact newsletter comes in handy, beyond its obvious use with your existing clients. Adding potential referral partners to your newsletter is the easy way to remind them about you and all the ways you can help their clients. By doing it as a print version it will be more impactful than an email newsletter and more likely to be noticed. You can certainly keep in touch by email as well and put them on your email autoresponder system.
- AFG’s Haven Newsletter
All AFG Brokers can get their own quarterly personalised print or email newsletter through AFG’s SMART post-sales marketing system. As a SMART member, you can sign up to AFG’s quarterly lifestyle newsletter for your customers and contacts. Haven is available as an email or in print, giving it a greater shelf life and use as a referral tool. You are able to individually select which contacts receive an email version and which receive a print version in the post.
Haven is a high-quality newsletter designed to hold something of interest for every member of the household. The lead articles are finance related and are supplemented with other regular lifestyle focused sections. These include interior design tips and tricks, recipes, gardening tips, health and fitness articles, book reviews, competitions and new products for the home.
You should also of course be taking every opportunity to drop in on them — perhaps dropping off your latest newsletter as a reason.You should develop a plan for seeing them several times. The more they see and hear from you the more familiar and trusted you will become and you will be miles ahead of the Brokers that knock on their doors asking for business without putting in the time to build relationships.
A referral relationship that is built in this way is a lot more resilient and effective. It will be worth the effort because you are trying to shortcut the normal process you go into with your clients by leveraging off the trust the referrer has themselves built with the client. This requires putting the time and effort into creating ability trust and personal trust with the referrer so they can genuinely recommend you to their clients. The trust the client has in the referrer is, at least in part, passed onto you by their recommendations.
I’m not stating that clients particularly trust the real estate agent they have engaged to sell their home, but they have chosen them over other agents so there is a certain level of credibility that the agent has. With accountants and financial planners there is a much higher level of trust, so winning their recommendations is worth it.