Video Client referrals: strategies to grow your business

(00:00:03): Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for joining. I don't have to explain to you why this is an interesting session, why we are interested in referrals. When you look out there, there's a lot of advice, a lot of tips and tricks on how to get referrals. But typically, the way this is being positioned is as though referrals are something that you are sort of, you know, chasing like a product. And far less thought has been given to the question of how to think about referrals as part of a comprehensive process. Something that you are thinking about, you know, systematically strategically and methodologically. And that's what we are trying to do today in this session, which comes out of Aegon's Behavioural Research Centre, Centre for Behavioural Research, the full name that's a small team here at Aegon comprised of psychologists and behavioural scientists.

(00:01:01): And really what we do is we look into the question of how we can help people make better, long-term decisions. That's something that humans find really hard to do. And of course, that is something that advisers are helping with typically by building long-term financial plans, increasingly also by building long-term financial plans that consider deeper intrinsic motivations and quality of life and wellbeing oriented goals. And it is Mauro Renna the behavioural scientist in my team who is presenting today. He has done the research Mauro studied behavioural science in Stirling until two years ago when he joined the team. Before that he lived in his native Italy and moved over to study behavioural science in Stirling from Perugia. And it is in not far away from Perugia that a fellow country man of Mauro lived and made a rather big impact a long time ago.

(00:02:00): And that fellow country man said something that I think really rather nicely captures the sentiment of Mauro's main recommendation, which is this one here. It's the, the quote is, it is in giving that we receive, and it was St. Francis of Assisi who said it, <laugh>. So before we start, before I hand over to Mauro just three bits of housekeeping very quick. If you have questions along the way, I'll do my best to answer them. But we have a bit of discussion time for discussion towards the end. So we will keep the discussions of the questions that can perhaps stimulate a bit of debate towards the end. We have a lot of advisers on the call today, so we may not be able to address all the questions, hopefully all of them, or many of them at least. Lastly, as was mentioned in the chat before as well this is of course, a CPD able session. The CPD certificate will become downloadable towards the end of the session. That's it from me and I hand over to Mauro.

(00:03:09): Yeah. Thank you so much for the introduction, Tom, and hello. Hello, everyone. I guess I could say that Saint Francis of Assisi was a fellow behavioural scientist knowing really well, the concept of reciprocity <laugh> at this point. Yeah. right. So thank you everyone for signing up and coming up to this webinar. I say that the response to this content, to this piece of content has been really overwhelming in a way we developed this piece of content or referral because really a lot of you were asking us about it. And and yeah, and we can see how this, the response has been so big either now in, at the webinar, but also at previous presentation they've been doing since January with some of the firms that we work with.

(00:04:03): Clearly there is something in, there is a pain point for adviser here in the title. You can get a flavour of where we are going with this beyond the ask. When when I first I was approaching this topic, I realised that often there is an assumption on the, on the modality, a focus on the moment, the adviser asking their clients to provide some names, names of people that could be interested in your services, of course. And yet it's it's also a moment that can feel uncomfortable, uncomfortable for you, the adviser, and sometimes even the clients, depending on how it's done. Of course. Now, there is nothing wrong in trying to improve how we ask for referrals. In fact, we should do it. We should try to optimise as much as possible. And some of you might have fantastic tactics that have been tested by experience through the years that work every time. But it's also a matter of trying different ways, right? To see which work best in different cases and, and for each different adviser effectively.

(00:05:15): One of the question that we should be asking though is, is there more to it? And if there is, what is it? Right? And that's what lies behind the title, beyond the ask. So that is exactly what we're exploring today, the intention I had when I started researching this topic was to find out what are the elements that influence referrals one way or another - positive or negative. And importantly, I wanted to make it as much as possible as relevant to use adviser and provide also practical approach that you can put in place in your practice. So let's get to it after an introduction. So what we'll cover today, first, we'll look at the topic of referrals to understand it in a systematic way. Why do people refer? Why not? We'll zoom out to have a wider view of the context of referral and how they happen. In the second part, reframe and strategise is in answer to the question, "And so, what, what do we do," right? How do we interpret everything that we have learned so far? And finally, in the third part, we ask the question, how do I do it? So here, we'll see what are some practical aspects that you can put in place in your, in your practice?

(00:06:40): As a brief note on what I've done in terms of research the insights that you will see in this presentation come from literature review research paper books or referral, and most of the time in the field of financial advisers. So very relevant literature. Importantly, I also run a research survey with our Aegon panel having 700 respondents. These were our adviser, those normal people, and of these 55%, and also experience with financial adviser. So all the specific questions that we asked out there on their behaviour, on their referral behaviour were addressed specifically to them.

(00:07:25): So the first set of insight that refers to behaviours and attitudes is that we asked, we asked in the survey, how did you find your financial adviser? And we see, you can see right there, the top number one, about 40% of the respondent found their adviser through their network of peers, family, friends, and colleagues. Then we ask them, have you ever referred someone? And here you will see that 66% of those have never referred, right? They have an adviser, 66% never refers. We've also asked specifically that 66% never refer if they would refer if they had an opportunity. And about 50% of those say yes, they would. So I guess you can see where this is pointing at. I think all of this is showing how referrals are important. And of course, you know that to find an adviser, people trust their peers. Or maybe even just for convenience. They just ask their friends and family if they know a financial adviser? But yet, two third of them do not refer. But there is a big potential because as half of those would do a referral. So that means that potentially could even double the percentage of those doing a referral.

(00:08:56): So we have there, there is some level of untapped potential. That's what we get from here. And of course, we want to know what we can do about it. So we need to dive a little bit deeper in a systematic way and understand better how a referral happen. So when we talk about referrals, what we think about a couple of scenarios, an adviser could be way forward and asked directly in the office for name of context that they might call, right? There are also several books about this. Another scenario is could be more a word of mouth situation where your clients brings up your name in a social context, a dinner, the pub, or a coffee like in this photo, for example. Although these two young women are having way too much fun to be talking about national advising, I would say.

(00:09:51): Anyway, jokes apart. In our survey we asked the respondent, "since you have done the referral, what were the circumstances when you did it?" And the overall majority say that they refer because they were either asked directly or because they spotted their peer could benefit from an adviser. 96% say this, they'll leave us with 4%, maybe doing a referral because they were asked by an adviser. That would not be correct. In fact, 3%, they remember less than 1% say they, they refer because they were asked by their adviser. Now, not, I don't want to diminish the role of an adviser in this process. In fact, we will see that is very important. But I just want to point out that referrals really happen in a social context, and it's a social phenomenon by nature. Okay, so let's zoom out. Let's zoom in in fact. These key moments that I've called transmission, and the first things we want to look at is the barriers to referrals. The bottlenecks.

(00:11:03): The first one that we see is lack of opportunity. 32% say that they didn't refer because they haven't come across someone who asked me for a financial adviser. And so this is about the most direct case, right? When someone asks their peer if they know an adviser, and we know that being asked directly, it is the main reason to make a referral is very important. The second one is adviser is not on top of mind. So the clients could also be a little bit more proactive if you think about it and suggest their peer friend and family that an adviser could help them out. But realistically, people are not thinking about adviser all the time, is knowing their goal. And also, client would need to have some sort of trigger, recognise a need, and then decide if mentioned adviser or not. Yeah, we do see in our data that this happens.

(00:12:07): So we also want to figure it out what is the best way to optimise these aspects. The third one we have is ambiguity. So this is stemming from what clients know about you in the sense that the client doesn't really know who to refer or what kind of clients that you're looking for the clients that you can help, and they don't know all your services but quite likely they just know what you do for them specifically. So what we know though is from be, from behavioural science is that when the reason big, we are less likely to do something. So ambiguity is something that we would like to address in some way. Then we have etiquette and confidentiality. This is quite straightforward. It's another barrier that where people just want to keep their things private. They don't want to talk about their finances with with their peers.

(00:13:07): And finally, we have a lack of ask of referrals. So the adviser, not bringing it up. The topic of referral. We see that 26 of respondent who didn't refer actually say this. They were not asked by their adviser. Somehow also related to ambiguity. It is not clear if you think about to your clients that you have capacity to help other people, to help their friends. If you don't ask, or if you don't bring up the topic they, they need to know your client, need to know that you have capacity to help more. For example, did you tell them that you have space to help more people? So maybe you have not expressed at all that you're looking for new clients, or maybe there is a feeling that you feel too salesy as an adviser, right?

(00:14:01): But you can feel too pushy bringing up the topic, almost like asking for a favour. And also, how did you talk about it? Did your client actually register that you are open to new clients? You might have mentioned it maybe the moment it was too casual. For example, just when a client is about to leave your office after an hour meeting you know, a five second mention of yes, if you know anyone who needs a financial adviser keep us in mind. But when it's done too casually, the client really doesn't register in their mind as a goal of something that you're looking for. They will just forget that. So these are some barriers, but there is also another important elements to consider in the same phase of transmission.

(00:14:58): Another possible bottleneck. So your client has now mentioned you to their friends, to their family. The question is, what is your client saying? How they describing you? How they describing their experience with you, the client. Your client is not your sales agent, doesn't know all your services, and also the client has a narrow window of experience recall. They just remember a keep in mind, only a short timeframe, right? They don't focus on the entire experience since the beginning. Yet in this situation, they are effectively acting as a sales agent from, from your point of view, right? They're selling you. So the unknown for you here is - how are they conveying the value that you brought to them? And that's important so that the peer that they're talking to can see this value, get interested, and then start to think if an adviser, you hopefully could be an option for them.

(00:16:06): So the transmission phase is key, but barriers can go beyond that phase of transmission. See here we are zooming out much more. So we want to think systematically, where could we find other barriers? By simply identifying four phases. We have relationship transmission that we have seen. Contemplation and combination. Relationship is everything that happens with your current client at the moment. Transmission, we have seen it. Contemplation is after your client talks about you to their peer then their peer might think about it, research, look at competitors, look at reviews, your website, and so on. And then finally we get to connection. And this is where the magic happens, right? Is when the peer of your clients get connected to you somehow. So what are the barriers that might face in the human face? Also in the optimise the conversion from a prospect to a client.

(00:17:12): I also want to highlight what you see at the bottom of this slide this drops. What I'm trying to convey here is that effectively you might have an ideal a hundred percent potential of referral all your client base. But what we see from research is really that only a third gets to the phase of transmission. We have seen previously in our survey as well, and less than one in 10 get to the connection. So there is a drop in potential as we go along this journey, along these phase. So while coming to this webinar maybe your question might have been how to increase referrals. Here I give you also the reverse of that question. As an adviser, you might wanna ask yourself, how can I also reduce the drop in potential that I have along this journey? Where is there leakage in all this pipeline? So the solution space that you want, you want to look into could be expanded to the entire journey effectively, not just in the phase of transmission.

(00:18:26): So let's quickly look at the phases of contemplation and connection, just to get a better idea of those in contemplation. We say their peers, prospects are gathering information about you, see if you are a good fit and exploring their options. So some of the barriers that could, bottlenecks that could affect this phase is not finding a narrative that is relevant to them, to the reader, right? So not understanding how the adviser can help me out as a client specifically to me with my profile. Some people might have clearer goals on what they want from an adviser. Others not really. They might know. They might just want to move in Spain or Italy, better <laugh> in their, in their retirement, but didn't even think yet that an adviser could help them out planning this goal, right?

(00:19:23): Getting to them. Then we have a point about reviews. Reviews that you find on Google Maps on other platform. And it's not just about the number of stars that you see there, but what helps really is reading descriptive reviews on how you value to other clients. Maybe how you help them plan to move to Italy, in fact, right? On how reassured they were by, by talking to you. So the description in these reviews is really important. How clients word them out and having those reviews. Because reviews are effectively social proof. And so these reviews should be leveraged at best, including on your website as well, understanding how it works. By looking at the website, this could be a bottleneck where clients are looking at your website that really not really understanding how does it work with an adviser?

(00:20:23): They likely they never had one. So they don't understand the fees or maybe have assumption they need to have a large enough asset to go to an adviser or maybe even the language is too hard to understand. So really a focus on what kind of information, what practical information is given on the website to make it really concrete in their, in their eyes, how the relationship work, the information doesn't resonate with them. So this is more about having a gut feeling. That connection, that emotional connection by looking at reviews by looking at the website and understanding is the right adviser for me. Are they there to help me at a human level as well? Ultimately, finances are a mean to goals and wellbeing, right? A lot of clients are not strictly thinking about the technical aspects, but about their goals, what they want from, from the life in the future comparison with comparison with competitors.

(00:21:31): They might check also other websites and depending on how what they read on the other websites, they might feel a better connection with others. So it's important also to look at competition to see what's happening out there. And also the perception the perception of value effectively. Do they understand from what the reads, what is the value concretely that they're going to get from advising in the connection phase, even before getting to the connection phase? There could be a delay if they don't understand. Well, if if the situations will be ambiguous clients might delay procrastinate not feeling motivated enough. And this can also go into abandonment of the task at all. So this speaks to, again, to what we put out there on the website, but also what is the onboarding journey that that you have for your client.

(00:22:38): Generally, the connection phase is about making that human connection. Once you start to talk with them, you want to demonstrate your value and also following up at the right time with them, probably your client. Yes, emotional connection. Yes. Let's let's go to the next slide. Let's go back now to the relationship. Because before anything else, before anything of those phases, before any of those barriers be before you worry about any of those barriers, really the relationship with your current client is is fundamental. And there it's all about satisfaction. So how can I increase satisfaction for my clients? How can I improve the perception of the value that my clients get? And also in terms of measurement, do I even measure satisfaction? How do I measure it?

(00:23:46): It's clear there will not be any referral without a high satisfaction level. So satisfaction measuring and understanding as best as possible is is fundamental, but also how your clients perceive the value is an important component. In fact, we're gonna look at the value right next. So the value is present effectively in every phase. You just go through all of them during the relationship, you may think that you as an adviser, you create value for your client for a fee. With you recommending the right products, saving the client's money on taxes and so on. But also saving clients time, right? Giving a sense of reassurance keeping them informed, caring for them, all those soft aspects, everything makes value. You can almost write down objectively line by line, what are all the elements that you do to bring value to your clients?

(00:24:52): But when we move to perception, how the client perceives that is a little bit fuzzier, right? Your client has, of course, a general feeling about you because they, they experience you, but to be fair, they don't, they don't even know all the work behind all of you do. And effectively, they have this, as I said earlier, this narrow view. They don't consider the entire picture and how they change since the beginning. So the perception might be slightly different, or even there could be a big gap of what you actually do to bring value. And that's, this perception is important because the perception is what gets them transmitted to their peers in the transmission phase. So making sure that this perception is accurate is important for the next phase of, of transmission. Then the value also has a role in the contemplation phase because that's what they're looking for when reading the website and getting information.

(00:25:53): So how is the value communicated on all this platform? And then again, in the connection, how are you talking about what the prospect values effectively from the relation, right? What do they even value in the first place? So how are you communicating value? How are clients perceiving value? And how are prospects also perceiving value? So those, those are question that I believe we should always keep in the back of our mind when we thinking about the communication and the activities that we, that we put in place.

(00:26:41): All right, so we have talked about enough barriers, blockers, and bottlenecks. Let's now look at what are drivers ofreferrals as well. This is coming all from my research that I've done. And in the survey we ask different question about referral behaviours and their intention, and, but also about the relationship with advisers. What I've used here is a statistical regression to look at how all these factors really affect the probability of having done the referral. And from all the analysis that I've done, three components really stood out. First of all, satisfaction, obviously, no surprise here. What we see is that with each extra level of satisfaction, let's say on a scale from one to five really increased the probability of referral at each increase of the scale. So moving the needle from four star to five star for a client literally can pay off.

(00:27:49): The second one is being proactive with check-ins. It makes sense, right? Calling clients even for five, 10 minutes to catch up, provide updates, asking how they're doing. It's first of all, it's a sign, it's a signal to your client that you want to help, that you care about them, but it's also a reminder that you exist. Remember when we say they're not on top of mind, right? It's a reminder of your present to them. And we see a very strong association between the frequency of these check-ins and the probability of having done the referral. What we see is that a check-in every quarter as the stronger association with having done the referral. So what I recommend by looking at the data, is to aim at least for twice a year. And of course, just then depending on the clients, how they feel and how respond to your check-ins. The third one is being clear about referrals. So we have talked about these as a barriers in the transmission phase. When I say the asking for referrals it's not just about the actual act of asking for a referral. This can be generalised to the idea of really being intentional in talking about referrals. So not being casual, right? It's about making sure that the clients really register in the mind the fact that you have capacity to help their peers.

(00:29:28): That's the rocket a little bit late. <Laugh>. So before we get to the second part of this presentation, let's summarise a little bit. We looked at barriers to referrals and they can produce attrition in all these four phases that we look at. We also looked at some drivers of referral as they give the energy. The propellant for referrals. What I want to make clear here is that referral is really a function of both. Yes, we want to increase the fuel, right? Even optimise how we ask for referrals, but we also, we we want to remove the barriers, move them out as much as possible to make sure that the path to referral works at best. And we are not stopping all the effort that we put. So we want to look at both things, smooth out the referral, smooth out the barriers, and increase the energy the drivers of referral themselves.

(00:30:33): So with this with all this insight in mind, now, let's get to the, so what question, right? But I realised there was already a lot of info and hopefully was useful to understand a little bit better how we are looking here at referral. What I want to do here is put all that we have learned into a sort of a framework to interpret and gather oriented on how to go about this. And becoming referable is the, the title of this part. I've not coined this expression I found in some literature, but it really fits well with this, with this approach by removing the barriers and increasing satisfaction and value, right? What you're doing is becoming more referrable. You're not pushing, you're not asking for favour, but it's a pull strategy. You're attracting referrals or introductions.

(00:31:25): So the first it's all about helping, not really asking for referrals. This is the first statement I make. We asked, we asked to those one, they have done the referral in our survey, what was their main motivation to have done the referral? And also here, the big majority say that it was mainly to help their family, their friends and colleagues, not really to help the adviser - that was not selected much. And I think it just makes sense. Yet, adviser can feel sales-y when they're asking for a favour. So what I'm trying to do here is reframing the referrals, because that's what is happening in the real world. Clients are just looking to help their clients not to do a favour to the adviser. So the first shift in mindset is to move away from this idea of asking for a favour and realise that this is all about helping, really internalising this, and this can be done at three levels. Attitude, behaviour, and language.

(00:32:45): Attitude. Your role is to facilitate this chain of helping. So not asking for a favour by offering help, you are helping your clients to help their friends or family. The second one is behaviour. Now you personally want to act in line also with this idea of helping. So offer help to clients whenever possible. Silly example, your clients bought in your house. You know, you might refer to the kitchen store that you used for your house. You might already do this because you have a strong connection with your clients. But I would like to put an accent on this. Try to use every occasion to provide help, either relevant to the financial advising or even outside of it, if possible, if you think it's relevant, of course. But also talking about helping internally in your firms, share with your colleagues, how you help the clients or the other clients and what you did, and how that worked to create internally, this culture of of helping.

(00:33:53): And we prospect as well. When you start to talk to prospect clients, giving a sense that really what you want to do is to help them out, maybe even if you're not the right fit for the need, right? You might refer them to, to someone else. They can help them out with the problem, but given the sense that you really, that you really are there to help people. How reassuring is that from a client point of view, right? Hearing an adviser saying something like that. The third level is language. So language is very important, as we all know. Each word comes with its own positive and negative connotation. And when we talk about referral, usually we say getting referrals, right? But in this perspective, you're not really taking as we, as you've seen, but you are giving, you're giving help.

(00:34:46): So moving from language of getting referrals to helping people, and even the same word referrals could be transformed into introductions, because effectively introductions, at least from my point of view, is what you're looking for. It's also your goal because you're probably not likely to get names and then doing cold calls to prospect, right? But also we know that giving a business card, or when your client just tell their peer to go see the website, is not really the most effective way, the most effective way for a referral to happen and for that connection to happen is a mutual introduction from your client. So this could be an important focus and a goal for you as an adviser. So in all this talk about helping, I think another thing that emerges is that also you as an adviser should be confident about yourself, about the value that you're bringing to clients because they're happy with you. You, your client's values. What you give, what you're giving them. You just want to help you want to smooth out this chain of helping to go down the line to their friends and family. So that was the first change in the mindset about thinking about referral. The second switch in mindset. It, that really is about becoming referrable, right? And I think it could be summarised that it's not really about one point in time. And I hope that this is becoming clear from everything that we are saying.

(00:36:34): It's about becoming a referrable. It's about the entire journey. So satisfaction, what you would focus on becoming more referrable is satisfaction. First of all, you want to increase satisfaction as much as possible for your client to just increase the probability of making an introduction and evaluate that as well. So you might use some surveys, maybe even NPS score or some more informal questions. But are you also talking about satisfaction face-to-face? And that is something that you might want to think about because giving the opportunity to clients to express verbally how they're feeling about you and the services, negatives and positives can give you, first of all, a more nuanced view on how clients are reacted to you, but also really puts more strength in the connection between your client, because they do feel listened when you ask them about it. They see that you are open and they see your willingness to improve their satisfaction. The second point is value. So it's about obsessing about the value that you provide to your clients. So, quick check-ins. Yes, I would say that that adds value to the services that you do but also is about trying to make sure that your clients have an accurate perception of the value, as we have seen earlier.

(00:38:04): And finally, is going from tactics to strategic. So again, not just thinking about one point in time, how I ask what is the best wording to ask for referrals, but really considering the entire journey and all the barriers that might be there. So moving to a more practical view on how to strategise on this. This is just a quick overview, and then we are going to look at all of these stages one by one. What I have identified in term of strategy that could be helpful is three, three stages. Prepare. So define your goals and process, right? Prepare yourself by defining your goals and process all the collateral delivered across the touch points from even understanding your clients, your segments. And then planning all the touch points. We also want to be ready to track effectively referrals.

(00:39:05): So if you use a CRM or even Excel, you want to include those fields that about who has referred who, right? How that happened but also tracking how you do the check-ins, what comes out from the conversation with your clients. The second stage is delivering, and this is about making sure that you follow through everything that you planned in the prepared phase and you deliver to your clients on the website and to your clients directly. But delivery is also about how you interact with your clients in that moment of referrals, of talking about referrals or introduction. So we are gonna see those aspects as well. And then closing is all about strengthening the relationship with the, with the prospect so they can become a client. They can be converted to a client. And this is about creating every step in detail in the part of the journey so that the prospect feels confident and reassured in choosing you and the value that you bring. 

(00:40:24): So, implementing a strategy a way to approach strategic, this is a practical this part. And I want to start with this slide about starting at the end. What I mean by this is thinking of the final outcomes and all the steps in between. Map them out, around around those phases, right? Ask yourself, what are your desired ideal status. Doing this, we really help you define your goals and what you want to focus on in your, in your strategy. For example, instead of we go, instead of focusing on the, on the referral moment, let's go step forward forward and look at the contemplation, right? You want, effectively the peers to consider you as an adviser

(00:41:26): For that to happen. The peer needs to be convinced somehow, right? So if they want to consider, they need to be convinced by your clients that you could be an option for them. That could mean that your client has done a good job, effectively in the transmission phase in describing their experience, the value that you, that you bring them. So in the transmission phase the desired outcome that we want is the client to be able to describe the value, because this is going to affect how the peers consider the adviser.

(00:42:08): So then the question is, what can we do to help the clients have an accurate perception of the value? And then be able to describe it. One option of doing this is to go through a guided conversation with your clients, where your clients, you help your clients rehearse how, and describe how you help them out, and the value they've received through the relationship that you have with them. So here, what I'm trying to do is mapping out the outcomes, the ideal state, and show you they are interconnected. So you want to go forward and backwards to understand what are the anti of an outcome that you want to focus on. In a a second example where I say, okay we as an outcome, you want the peer to be introduced by a client because we say the introduction or the best way for to do our referrals. So the question is, what can we do about this? Because simply instruct your clients to do so by telling them that this is the best way to do it. So giving this instruction and talking about what is the best way of the introduction can increase the likelihood that they actually do an introduction in the way that you want. Again, just an example, but effectively here I put down a list of different outcomes based on the content of this presentation, but really it's about you personalising based on your individual case.

(00:43:46): So let's look specifically at each stage, and let's look at some of the important points. Let's start with the Prepare stage. The first things that you might want to look at is having an idea of who are your ideal clients? What are their profiles? So, define who are your clients as much as possible. This is based on assets and the type of services that you can offer, or even what you enjoy what you enjoy helping most, right? What gives you a sense of purpose in helping your clients? And this is beneficial in different ways. First of all, to optimise your efforts in communication. Because once you know who are your clients that you want to help then it can help you make more targeted communication on websites and the other platforms. It can also help you with referrals because you can now, if you have clear idea what clients you have, now, you are able to even describe to your clients who are the clients that you're best to serve, but they can also help you select it in, select who to begin with when implementing your referral strategy.

(00:45:04): For example, you can start talking about referrals to those, the, to those current clients that feed those, those profiles that you identified is they could bring similar people because of their network planned a touch point this is quite straightforward. Every time you are in some form of contact with clients, right? You're providing a piece of value. Every sort of communication webinar that you present is a touch point, so you want to plan them as carefully as possible because they, this also remind your clients that you exist. So it's important to have all these touchpoints in, in your strategy.

(00:45:51): Prepare the material thinking again about all the materials that you need based on your touchpoint. And again, this could be targeted website, but even creating a procedure for your firm on how to ask for reviews or testimonials that then you want to include on your website, or how you want to ask your clients how to leave a review on Google Maps, or VouchedFor for example. So plan all these stages, then make it intentional. And this is we have seen the importance of asking for referrals. We say that it is important. So in some ways, you want, you want to make this moment intentional and planned. So trying to think of when is a good time for me to talk about introduction with my clients? So decide when, and also decide who to begin with.

(00:46:47): You might know what to start, maybe all your clients, but you want to experiment with a small segment first. So decide based on the profile you identified who to begin with, track relevant info, that's I mentioned this already. Plan how you're gonna track all the information that you collect along the way and all the relationship. And finally, this a little bit extra - sharing. Encourage the sharing of communication, thinking about if you have a newsletter, for example, or a blog that is content that you put effort into, and you put out there in the public. So the idea here is try to leverage that as much as possible. So encourage the sharing. You might just want to add a newsletter, a banner, to encourage your client to share with with their friends and family, because that's information they can help them out.

(00:47:42): So thinking also about how can I leverage all the comms, the effort they put out there to be shared and increase the word of mouth in terms of delivery. This is as we say, it is about delivering the elements that you applied to your clients, but here we're going to focus on the specific aspect of asking for introductions, for referrals. So the first thing that I mentioned earlier is about helping your client create a value narrative. This is an important point that I would like to discuss a little bit farther. So this is about a moment where you can lead your client to talk through the story with you. This is what I mean by creating the narrative. The idea is to reflect on what was the start point when the first came in, why did it come in? How were they feeling?

(00:48:37): What were the emotions? And then going through the action and progress made until today. And this is also when having good notes can help you tremendously in helping your clients building this narrative, some questions that you can use could be along the lines of what problems or concern do we work on? What do we do to address those concern? And what do you feel were the greatest impact on you and your family? Not the exact question, but to give you an idea that you want to start from the beginning and ending up with the impact that they had today from all the work. And I put a note here on, remember, the client is the hero. I want to highlight this in the sense what I mean by that is that you want to keep in mind that all this process is about your client and not you, the adviser.

(00:49:26): So it's not value telling when you just tell your clients the value that you have provided. Here is the client and you are the ally. So you just helping the client to see what quest you were on together what did you overcome, what challenges did you deal with and, and so on. You are prompting to reflect important part of the life with you. To organise all of that in a coherent story, asking for feedback, as I mentioned earlier, it's important to have this face-to-face feedback gathering not just by a survey, but just by talking with your client. And two simple questions that you can use are, is there anything that we are not doing right now that you will find helpful or valuable? So a little bit about the negative something. Is there something missing that we can do more for you? And then the positive. What are the top three more valuable things to you that, that we do to discuss? And again, help build the narrative and help them perceive the value because they're reflecting on it.

(00:50:36): Spell it out. I mentioned this already a little bit earlier. This is about be clear and intentional on telling your clients how to best refer introductions. Tell them that you have capacity, but also you might want to put an accent on reassuring about the confidentiality, because we saw that there was a barrier in one of the first slides. So that's something to keep in mind. How can I reassure confidentiality in my clients if they do a referrals? And then also communicate your ideal client client types to, to your clients when you're talking about referrals.

(00:51:17): And finally, this is a a quirky effect that is known as referral contagion. And what the referral contagion tell us is that where we see when a client is being referred by someone else, one of the current client is being referred by someone else, they're actually more open, more likely to refer someone else if you remind them of, of that. So they could be an extra bit of tactic when you're talking to your client to your client mentioning the referral, the initial referral person to help them out getting into their mood effectively. So I take away all in all of this is be intentional, effectively about referrals. Finally closing this relates to that connection phase, right? When the there is a contact, the first thing to consider is that you want to follow up effectively.

(00:52:15): So after the introduction has been made take a lead promptly and start the conversation with the prospect. Set the first meeting expectation, because the first meeting is what you want to get out when you, when you start the conversation. So in the communication that you have, either via email or via telephone, you want to describe what will happen during the meeting, and what are the goals. Put them black and white in the email, just to make it as tangible as possible so they know what to expect. You might also want to reassure again, of the confidentiality as well from the prospect point of view. And focus on, on, on helping transmitting the sense that you are there to help them out. Whatever is the outcome, if they become a client or not. Another important aspect to consider is feeling familiar and validated.

(00:53:16): This is about how the prospect would like to feel, right? So you want them to feel familiar with your face, familiar with who you are. So if you have a profile on the website or even a video introduction, you might want to put a link on the email so they start to get to know you before they get to the meeting. And, and the results are note here about reviews, and place them tactically on the website, thinking in the sense that if you're putting a link on the email to your profile on the website, that's probably the path that they're going to follow to the website. So you might want to place strategically, tactically some reviews on those pages that you link to, because that's where they're going to end up. Social proof is an important validation point for for a prospect, because they understand that they're making the right choice.

(00:54:11): Make the journey as easy as possible. This is thinking about what are other barriers that clients might have on the path to them. We think as an example here brought up the easy scheduling of of of a meeting like they do on, in, in a restaurant, right? Doing back and forth with emails could be complicated. Having a system like that that offers the simplicity and makes it easy is you remove them barrier. You are moving a burden from the client. So all these little step and barriers should be considered and making it as easy as possible for them. And also try to make the first meeting engaging. What I mean by that is when you get to the first meeting, it's not about you talking all the time, really, the first meeting is about them.

(00:55:05): It's about exploring their needs and concerns. It's not about bureaucracy and the paper that they need to fill in. It's not about your goals, it's about the client goals. So try to plan the first meeting to be as engaging as possible and asking about their concerns even prior to the meeting could be a tactic. So they can get to the meeting with an initial idea on what to talk about. And finally, always remembering to thank whoever has done a referral or introduction a a as soon as you can, right? But appreciate the introduction independently. So send, say this thank you card or a phone call independently, if that turned to be a client or not.

(00:55:54): And so this was the final phase. If we had a little more time, I put together a flow of how a conversation could go with the client. So I was thinking that a good time could be in a review meeting because you're already talking about what happened in the past year and, and going through through stuff. So the first two bits here are about building the narrative, and, you know, by asking those questions, so guiding your clients to build this narrative, and we have seen this question already. Again, it's not exactly this question. You need to find your own, but you get the point of going from the beginning to the impact today, and then getting feedback, those questions to get, try to understand is there something that I can do more as an adviser? And also, what are the positive things that you perceive you are getting value from me?

(00:56:46): Effectively, these two bits could be done with any client because you're getting feedback from them, you're getting information, and you're also, by helping them out, build this narrative, they have a better perception of the value that you bring them, that you brought them, and they feel more satisfied about the service that you provide. So it's a really valuable exercise to do with anyone. For those that you want to start to talk about introduction, then you can have even, I try to put here, an intro in a very soft way, right? So, Hey, John, a lot of our clients like to introduce the work we do to other people they care about. And I just thought if the opportunity ever present itself to you that it'd be good for you to know how we handle it. Can we talk about it for a couple minutes?

(00:57:39): So here, you're not asking for referral. You just say, this is something that might happen. I just want to tell you the logistics of it and talk about how we handle all of this. And you're also asking permission for a couple minutes to talk about it. If they're in a rush, they will say no, but likely they would say yes to such a small request. Effectively, it's not threatening as a request. So one of the things you want to do is reassure our confidentiality John, the, the work that we do is completely confidential but the people that you introduce, they're not going to learn anything about your financial situation from me and vice versa. Just, you know, a sentence to reassure and give, put out the way that concern about confidentiality. Then you might want to instruct how to introduce something along the lines of, so John, when you feel that you want to help someone in your life, really the best way is when you make an introduction. If you want, we'll craft the introduction that feels comfortable for you and and for them, how does it sound?

(00:58:48): Number three, you want to tell them you have capacity. Hey, John, just tell you here, effectively, I do have capacity to help a few more people, and I would be happy if there was someone that you care about and you think might benefit. Again, just simply telling them that you have capacity. Nothing else, not asking for names. And then you might even want to specify who are your ideal clients. So John, the type of people that I feel I can help best are people like you. But I also help people who want to plan inheritance or business owners who want to optimise their taxes. I'm more than happy to talk to anyone you want to help. I listen to them and direct them to the best professional I know I'm here to help. Again, not exactly this, these words, but I'm trying to convey the idea here of giving this sense of who, who is the ideal client, but also conveying the sense that you are just doing this to help their connections.

(00:59:48): And that was it. Tom and I and all of our colleagues, we put a lot of effort in supporting advisers. So we create a lot of content and share with you to help with your work and clients from financial wellbeing and its importance to your work. To the latest report on the second 50 to this presentation, more practical, right? Or referrals, but also on how to build trust with your clients. So we are here to support you and we hope that you appreciate that you find this content useful. Thank you.

(01:00:29): I thank you, Mauro. That's that's great. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. As perhaps questions are coming in, by the way, I will say very quick, the CPD certificate is downloadable from the chat function within this channel here. Perhaps we don't have much time left, but perhaps one quick question if I may, this by the way, isn't a planted question. This is a genuine <laugh> question. You mentioned earlier that number of check-ins correlates with the propensity to provide a referral. And you mentioned there up to, I think you said up to four check-ins per year. Yeah. So for some advisers, that will be quite a large number. So I was just wondering like, what can you say about the quantity and quality of check-ins? They don't have to be like always physical meetings, do they? Or what? What have you got in mind here?

(01:01:27): Yes, the way that we phrase that question was proactive check-ins. So, these are not planned meetings that you have with your clients, but effectively the adviser picking up the phone and having a quick conversation, checking how their clients are doing. It could be very short conversation. We know, maybe not even a real objective, or maybe it's because you want to give an update on the, on the financial market, and then you also ask how they're doing. Effectively is about the connection that you have with with your clients be on top of mind and showing up, showing up effectively, that would be the right, showing up to to any opportunity, right? They could be short even 10 minutes, five minutes. And maybe every quarter could be too much for some adviser, and that's why I would recommend to start even twice a year. Or if you don't do anything at all, even just start with one a year and then increase gradually.

(01:02:31): Perfect. Okay, great. Yeah, fantastic. That's, that's useful. Super. So look, we have a number of folk thanking thanking you for the presentation again, just to say the CPD certificate is is downloadable from within that chat function here. Perhaps, you know what as we as we wind down, this is and feel free to now dial out. But I have a question that I think that, that I'm labouring over. You know, of course what we do a lot of work on is this notion of the wellbeing maximiser. We've done this research a few years ago, three years ago, that contrasts the outlook and well, the traits and outlook of the wellbeing maximiser with the performance maximiser. Well, the performance maximiser a bit of a crude contrast, but the performance maximiser being the sort of classic alpha type adviser.

(01:03:27): It's all about performance of the benchmark portfolio of, sorry, policy portfolio. Benchmark portfolio is about value for money. It's what costs, et cetera. Asset allocation, delivering, all those things. The wellbeing maximiser is someone who's more focused on the human and their life goals seeking to understand their biases and instincts and motivations, habits, et cetera. And one of the things that we saw was that the wellbeing maximiser was much more likely to get referrals than the performance maximiser. And I'm wondering, like with all, you know, that you've learned about referrals, like, you know, does that surprise you or how do you sort of, how do you make sense of that finding that the wellbeing maximiser is more likely to get referrals?

(01:04:06): There could be a lot of different aspects on why that is the case. One that really comes to mind is the connection, but also connecting to this presentation is the connection to through satisfaction to referrals. So having an adviser that is really focused on wellbeing, maximising on the focus on the human aspect, consider the human aspect of their clients increases the sense of satisfaction in their clients and increasing the satisfaction really increases the probability of doing referral. So I think there is a very practical connection there that highlights the importance of focusing on wellbeing maximisation.

(01:04:58): Okay. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I don't see any just one last look. I don't see any last questions having come through lots of positive feedback, which is really nice to see. I hope you were able to download your CPD certificate there. Follow us on LinkedIn that is not just us individually, but the company Aegon or get in touch with your account manager, regional account manager. If you're wanting to hear more about how we at Aegon in general and at Aegon Centre for Behavioural Research can support you and your practice. We stop here. Thank you so much for joining and thank you again Mauro for the session. Thank you.