- Build a relationship as their Trusted Advisor
“Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising.” – Milton Hershey
Getting referrals, like everything else in what Mortgage Brokers do, is about trust. You need to earn their trust before they will trust you with their reputation by vouching for you.
Everything I have discussed already about moving your client from a transactional relationship to a Trusted Advisor relationship is going to pay off here in the level and quality of referrals you get from your clients. If you can genuinely become their Trusted Advisor, getting consistent referrals will be far easier.
You want your clients to feel they are doing a disservice to their friends if they don’t push them your way. You are the best chance their client has of being looked after properly.
- Provide a great outcome in the eyes of your clients
This is the obvious one, but without it you are probably not going to get very far. If your clients find out later that there were better loans they could have gotten this will undermine any chance at referrals. What complicates this is that it is isn’t good enough just to get them the best loan you can, but they need to believe that is what you have done. If they think you have cut corners and just done what was easy or best for you, you are out of luck.
“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.” – Roy H. Williams
This leads back to what I’ve already discussed, managing their expectations and seeing the process and outcome through their eyes. Many Brokers work very hard for their clients, but because of matters beyond our control, the client isn’t happy with the outcome. If they don’t think they got a good loan, then as far as your chance of referrals go, they didn’t.
Bear in mind too, a great outcome may not be a loan at all, or may be additional to the loan. It may be other things that you have helped them with and how fast and easy you made it for them. But the point is, whatever they think is a great outcome is what you need to create.
- Have a system for asking for referrals that is easy for your clients
You want to make it obvious to them that you want them to tell their friends about you, that doing so is the expected behaviour. Having said this, most people are generally aware that small businesses want to be recommended and most Brokers will leave a meeting with a ‘tell your friends about me!’ statement of some kind.
What is missing in most situations is making it easy, if not required, for them to do so.
I’ve spoken about it a couple of times already in this book, that our process is giving a few copies of The 7 Easy Steps to Mortgage Freedom (personalised to the Broker who is giving it to them) to our clients and asking them to pass them onto their friends.
The benefit in giving them a substantial educational item that is ‘too good to throw away’ is that it is almost easier for people to pass our book onto their friends than over-ride their natural objection to putting it in the bin, as happens with most marketing materials. It also plays into the first part of getting referrals — positioning yourself as an Authority to make them more likely to talk about you and how clever they are that they have a person of your calibre working for them.
Suffice it to say, I don’t think it is good enough to just ask them to please tell their friends about you. Sure, they might, but just as many will forget unless they are prompted by their friends asking who they got their loan with, if they even know they recently got one. We want our client to start the conversation with them about us rather than be reactive.