What makes you stand out from the crowd? What makes someone go – “I know just the right person who can help you” when they meet someone who could use your services?
Becoming a specialist in your field is one of the keys to getting more good quality referrals.
By becoming an authority in your area, you gain a reputation for solving a particular type of issue.
People will seek you out with more complex problems. And you can certainly charge far more to solve them.
Here’s a quick story to illustrate the point...
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with a new client, John, who’s a Financial Planner.
We’ve been doing the rounds of potential referral sources. Pressing the flesh with Solicitors, Accountants and Mortgage Brokers.
And while they were pleasant meetings, with lots of coffee, two things rapidly became obvious.
Each potential referral source had lots of other Financial Planners they could refer to – so why would they need another one?
And they didn’t know what would make a good referral.
And then it happened...
We’d been shooting the breeze with an accountant when John casually mentioned he specialised in Financial Planning for the Aged Care sector. i.e. people who needed to move into a retirement village or nursing home. It’s a very complex area
which if you get wrong can have a major negative impact on your Pension, Estate and life style.
The accountant immediately seized on this – he’d spoken to someone just the day before who was looking at exactly this scenario and worried about how they’d arrange their finances.
The result – an immediate referral.
And it’s unlikely to stop there. This accountant now knows that John is a specialist in this particular area, so has a frame of reference when speaking to people who could benefit from John’s specialised services.
Effectively, it sets John apart from all the other Financial Planners out there. It makes it easy for people to refer clients to him as they know exactly what he can help with.
Powerful stuff.
But not enough.
You must provide your referral sources with material they can give to a potential client on your behalf.
And please, not a brochure with the usual “all about how wonderful you are” guff most people write.
At the very least you need to provide a white paper (3-6 pages) which outlines the problems the prospect is likely to be facing, questions they should be asking of a provider and your specific approach to the solution.
The white paper is meant to establish your credibility by highlighting your specific expertise and encourage the prospect to take action and call you.
You should also create additional material like testimonials, interviews (where you’re interviewed as the expert) and case studies.
Next you must train your referral sources to give you the prospect’s name so you can follow them up. This last bit is critical and will make all the difference.
If you do this, I guarantee you will get more referrals.
Now some of you will be going, “I don’t know how to create White Papers, Interviews and Case Studies”, or just don’t have the time.
This is where we can help.
My speciality is creating White Papers, Case Studies and Presentations that effectively get your message across to prospects in a way that raises their interest and gets them to call you.
I’ll be frank. It can seem expensive to create all this material. However, once created, you can use it time and time again, years into the future.
As one of my mentors is fond of saying, “Pay once, cry once, profit forever”.
So give me a call on (02) 9499-7958 and we can discuss how you can use these tools to get more business.
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