Are You Getting The Most Out Of Your Advocates?

Today's Business & Life Tip, I want to talk to you about Advocates, and by advocates I mean, those people that are in your sphere of influence, your past customer database if you will, that are truly advocates of you. And, do you know who they even are?

I remember back in the day, I started running reports out of my database at the end of the year to determine where I got my business from and I was pretty shocked to find out that I was getting a tremendous amount of business from a wide variety of sources that I wasn’t even giving consideration to, past customers, accountants, people like that. When I was spending all of my time pursuing in all of my monitoring marketing efforts pursuing real estate agents, there was a pretty sizeable chunk of my business that was coming from alternative sources that I was spending a little to no time with and I started really paying attention to this advocate group.

These people that had shown a propensity to refer business to me...

And by the propensity of what I want you to really get, its really a personality-style. I mean, there are certain people out there in the world that the way that they operate is that they are master in that workers and they are people of influence. The social circles that they hang out in or with people that respect their opinion and they’re very very good at voicing they’re opinion and referring and connecting people, and you surely have a substantial group of these people in your database whether you know it or not.

In fact, what I would also offer is that often times its the person that you didn’t talk to during the loan transaction that is the person of influence in that relationship, that being the spouse. Generally speaking there’s one partner in the relationship that will take the lead on the financial endeavors and there’s fully 50% you know behind the curtains so to speak, that your not interacting with in many cases that might actually be the person of influence in a relationship – the person who has more of a social outgoing personality. Really looping them in during the loan process, calling them and seeing if they have any questions, taking an extra moment to make that extra phone call. Call the spouse and just say, “I wanted to introduce myself and see if there’s anything that I might be able to answer for you?.” Maybe sending a handwritten note card to that person as well.

We're not talking about a lot of time or a lot of money...

To make that extra connection that you might be passing up on right now. But from there, it's about running, reporting, and really getting where the business is coming from year over year. Now when you run those reports and you see that you’ve got a past client to your database, maybe that referred one or two people to you last year. Reaching out to them and thanking them and saying, “I just really want you to know how much I appreciated in fact, that you trusted me enough to connect me with someone in your circle of influence, and I’m really interested in working with more people like you. My team and I really enjoyed working with you and I just wanted to let you know that if you ever come across anybody else that might be in need of my services, that I’d love to have the opportunity to work with them." And, you can go an extra step further if you want even beyond that, which is you know a very truthful script which is, “You know what, you’ve shown an ability to refer business to me, you referred two people to me last year and I’m curious as to what it is that you’ve been looking for in an effort to refer business to me, and what it is that you say to those people because one of the things that I would like to do is learn from you and be able to relay that information to some of my other clients, so maybe they can be looking for the right people for me and referring me in the same way that you do.” That’s going to be an incredibly flattering conversation to the person that your asking of.

They’re going to be more than happy to share with you their script if you will, is that how they go about referring you.

And we shouldn’t fall prey to the trap of thinking that just because they have realtors, CPA on their business card means that they’re the best referral source.

In fact, we have people in the Leadership 360 program Mike Roberts, John Weller, and a few others that come to mind that are really starting to build significant marketing plans to those advocates in their database. Segmenting amount, really understanding who they are and staying in touch with them on a much more intimate basis to ensure that they are top of mind because those people have shown an ability to refer.

I hope that you find this business and life tip to be helpful to you, to your success and we’ll be back at you with another one really soon.