Get More Clients Blog

Your client relationships can be broken down into three stages.

Stage II of your client relationships is the “New Client Experience” or “Onboarding Process.”

You can deliver a Welcome Package and/or drip a few items over the first week or two. Either will help you create a “Wow” experience that helps you engage with your new clients on both a “personal level” and “value added level.”

Here are 7 ways I’ve seen a number of businesses use to create great first impressions and even generate referrals without asking for them.

THE CHALLENGE – We know that introductions are better than referrals. But to get introduced, we need the cooperation of the referral source.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION – I was delivering one of my Exponential Growth programs to a firm with 25 reps. When we starting discussing ways of turning a client’s willingness to refer into one or more solid introductions, one of the veteran reps told us what he did.

The Reggie Bump

I’ve affectionately nicknamed this method after the rep who told me about this. You’ll get the “bump” part in a minute…

When you’re on the phone with a prospective client – do you wing it? Do you play it by ear? Or do you have a specific process you know usually works if you follow it?

The 4 bases you want to touch to help you score more high-level clients are:

1. Create Engagement with the Prospect
2. Discover & Quantify Their Gap
3. Provide Value Quickly
4. Tell Your Prospect You Think You’re a Great Fit and Why

Make sure you click the link to this blog post where I go deeper with each of these strategies.

For this moment in time, I’m going to assume you are highly referable. I mean, you are getting referrals and introductions without asking for them – from prospects, clients, and centers of influence – right?

Your referability (or lack thereof) will make or break your ability to get referrals and turn them into introductions.

Since you don’t want to ask too soon or ask too often, how else can you be appropriately proactive? By promoting referrals.

Your prospects think you are there to sell them something.

Even if you are 100 percent committed to doing what’s in their best interest – which could mean you not winning the business – they still think your motive is to get them to do business with you.

So how do you shift this dynamic?

I have two totally different approaches for you to consider. Both can work. And, yes, it’s possible to blend the two. (I’ll show you how.)

And check out the video associated with this blog for some concrete ways professionals put these strategies into action.

Are you a lazy event networker? Could your event networking use a kick in the kiester?

The most successful event networkers take the time to do one thing that most people don’t (that’s why they’re so successful).

They use the powerful strategy or Personalized Event Networking.

It’s simple! It’s easy! It will produce results for you!

If I ran into a good prospect for you and your business, how would I know it and how would you like me to introduce them to you?

That phrase summarizes the topic for this week’s blog post. Last week I provided a checklist of things you can do to create more productive referral relationships.

Let’s drill down a little deeper, shall we?

We don’t want Word of Mouth! We don’t want weak Referrals! We DO want Connections or Introductions! We want prospective clients waiting and wanting to hear from us. We want prospects who are a perfect fit for our business, ready to do business with us.

Wow! Wouldn’t that be nice? So how do we do that?

Hopefully, you have already realized that a great Referral Partner can be worth a lot more to your business then any one client.

My question for you is this… “Do you have a clearly laid out plan – and are you working that plan – to meet great Referral Partners on a regular basis?

It is my belief that hardly a week should go by without some activity to meet new Referral Partners and/or strengthen current Referral Partners.

This blog post provides you with a 10-strategy checklist for referral productive Referral Partnerships.

To get your checklist for productive Referral Partnerships, keep reading…

A quality center of influence can be worth some much more than any one clients. Creating productive relationships with COIs usually take time, so you need to think long term. With that said, sometimes COIs can produce results in short order.

The best way to illustrate this is with an example from my own financial advisors. To protect the guilty, I’ll change his name to Alex.

To discover the simple, 2-step process Alex used to start the flow of referrals, keep reading…

You’ve probably heard the reports. “They” are saying, “You can’t ask for referrals” or “Stop asking for referrals.”

Allow me to quote my high school basketball coach, “Horse Manure Cates!”

Now… I do agree that we should think in terms of introductions and not simply referrals.

But that’s now what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the people who keep reporting Fake Referral News like…

FAKE REFERRAL NEWS #1: “Asking for referrals doesn’t work.”

FAKE REFERRAL NEWS #2: “Your clients aren’t thinking about helping you.”

Why is this fake referral news and what should you be doing about it?