Connect with Referral Partners Like A Top Producer (Even If You Aren't One)

Today's Business & Life Tip, many of you are starting to ponder what your business plan will look like in the calendar year of 2019.  I am reminded by the most recent Leadership360 Group 7 retreat in Costa Rica, one of the things that we were talking about in great depth at that retreat was the importance of relationship development being at the top of the list for your business planning needs.

Now, perhaps more than any time in the last decade having deeply rooted, truly connected relationships are critical to your success and that’s because we are in a market that is transitioning.  There are a few less deals out there than there were say 12 months ago, we have some uncertainty as it relates to the interest rates and the housing market with compression happening.

One of the things really important for you to consider is:  How much do you know about the needs of your prospective referral partners? 

You have heard the adage before, “people don’t care how much you know until they know much you care,” and that really applies here.  In this upcoming year is take a little bit of extra time to sit down with your prospective referral partners and truly be a partner to them, to greatly understand their business struggles, to ask intelligent questions about what they are doing in their business planning going forward.

Bill Mervin who is in Leadership 360 Group 6 and is a part of our Master's Program recently, had a half day meeting with one of his referral partner at his home over the weekend and they talked about their collective business plan as partners going into the calendar year of 2019.  This is exactly what you all should be doing with anybody that you have a business relationship with, understanding what their goals are, what their hurdles are, and how you can help them overcome their hurdles.

Some of your referral partners have time management issues, some of them have capacity issues with not having robust enough team, others are just having a difficult time getting the number of bats that they need.

Steve Grossman who is in our Leadership 360 family has been working for about a year and a half now with his referral partners and helping them build a social media marketing strategy. This is all also a very intelligent idea.

The relationship that you have with a realtor, an accountant, a financial planner, an insurance agent will only be as strong as the level of depth that exists within that relationship. That depth comes from you knowing them and them feeling like you have taken the time to get to know them. 

Start to think about a list of questions that you could be asking that are open-ended. When I say open-ended, it is a question that will stimulate a detailed response and a deeper dialogue with someone. A close-ended question might be, do you have a marketing strategy as a real estate agent for the calendar of 2019?  You are going to get a yes or no answer from a question like that.

An open-ended question would be, tell me about the marketing plan that you have in 2019 and some of the challenges that you are facing associated with that?  That question is going stimulate a deeper response, you are going to get to know the person a lot better, and you are going to get a greater understanding as to where you could be of help.

Finally, the other thing that I want to mention is that we need to start thinking a little more out of the box as it relates to our referral partners relationships.  Just because somebody has a realtor title in their business card does not mean that they are great referral partner, that they are loyal, that they know how to refer you and does not even mean that they have a lot of opportunities on a monthly basis to refer you.  When I was in the business many years ago some of my best referral partners did not have any realtor anywhere near their name. They were people that work in their office, who were just very social and had some influence. They were local bankers who would give their turn down loans, they were life insurance agents, accountants, financial planners, divorce attorneys and the like. Start thinking broader, now is the time to start expanding your referral partner network and have a strategy going forward to make sure that you are capitalizing on where you can be of help and understanding the needs of those people and being able to provide a solution.

For those of you who do not know we have a product that I put out about 6 months ago called, “The Referral Partner Success System” it is a terrific program for this. If you need some help and you want to have a kickstart going to 2019, I highly recommend that you test it out. We offer a free trial period for you to use and see if you like it, you can get a full money back if you don’t. Check it out and if it’s not that, something else should be in your arsenal to make sure that 2019 is one of the best years that you have ever had in your career and developing these referral partner relationships is at the backbone of your success.

I hope you find this business and life tip help and I hope you have a great week.