Want introductions? Earn them

Whenever I work with an agent or advisor, I ask them to list their Top 20 clients. They usually ask for clarification: Do I mean the ones that have given them the most business, or the ones they like working with most…or what? 

My response is always the same: Your Top 20 are the ones you’d most want to replicate. These are your A+ clients. If you could fill your practice only with people like them, you’d love all your clients. 

Once they’ve assembled their list (sometimes it’s closer to 10 or 30), I ask them to tell me how many of these top clients have introduced them to friends or family members.

Often, there are one or two who have referred them multiple times, but most of the others have not come through with introductions. 

When clients are fully “engaged”, there is almost a hundred percent chance that you’ll get introductions from them, even if you don’t ask for them. Get client engagement right and you can clone your best clients and double your income in a year.

But what is it and how do you do it? One Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) Top of the Table producer told me, “You’ll know an engaged client when you see one.” But that wasn’t a good enough answer for me, so I began talking with other top producers and researching the concept of client engagement. The research led to two conclusions: 

Clients are engaged when: 

• They’re receiving extraordinary service; and 

• They’re being surprised and delighted by their advisor on a regular basis. 

Both factors need to be present. Let’s break them down: 

Extraordinary service 

I can almost guarantee that when I go through the Top 20 list that I have advisors create, there are things the advisor didn’t do with them or at least discuss.

Maybe they’re overdue to talk about converting a term policy. Maybe they never discussed Long Term Care or disability but should have. Sometimes, an agent will open one case, meaning to get back to the clients to talk about other things, but never do. 

Maybe their clients turned down Long Term Care before living benefits were included in insurance products and now are reluctant to bring the topic up again, even though they believe the clients still need it — confusing serving clients with pleasing them.

Perhaps they sold a life policy to the clients and haven’t sat down with them to review their situation for well over a year.

Whatever it is, their service may have been good, but not extraordinary.

Extraordinary service also includes things we don’t get paid for. If the client needs a lawyer, a realtor, a chiropractor, or some other professional, do you have one to recommend? This helps make your service extraordinary. 

Surprise and delight 

Engagement requires astonishing clients in a way that gets them talking about you. The goal here is to get them to share you with the people in their lives.

“Do you know what my [agent/advisor] did yesterday?” a client will start telling a friend or family member. He or she will then tell them something they were surprised by and delighted with. 

The natural reaction will be, “Your advisor did that? I haven’t even heard from mine in over a year. Tell me more about yours…” 

It’s about client experience. Meaningful gifts – a name tag collar for their beloved pet, a picture frame for photos of a new grandchild, a guidebook of places to see for their upcoming vacation – get them talking about you with their friends and family members.

Picture this:

One of your Top 20 clients, Ray, will be celebrating his birthday next week. You call him to tell him that you’d like to throw a birthday luncheon for him. There’s a place that you’ve gone to with him right up the road from his work.

Ray protests, “You don’t have to do that,” but you insist, and ask him who else at work he’d like you to invite – maybe 4 or 5 people. As it turns out, two of the people he names are already clients, but there are two that you don’t know.

You reserve the space, order a cake and invite his co-workers. And you host his Birthday party. The two guests you don’t know find out that Ray, and the other two, are all your happy clients, and are wondering why they haven’t been introduced to you. 

Ray is beaming, and you’ve already been introduced to two new people who are wondering if they should be working with you, too. 

Meaningful personal gifts and creative client appreciation events, small and large, are all ways to surprise and delight clients. Tickets to a hockey game or to the theater, dinner with them at their favourite restaurant, a beer or wine tasting event, lessons from a golf pro, a summer picnic, throwing a birthday or retirement party, are among the endless ways to create engagement with clients. And, as with Ray’s hypothetical birthday party, for some of these, you can even have them bring potential referrals to join in the fun. 

If you have 50 or more clients, you can’t spend your time providing this level of service and surprising and delighting them all. But that’s why it’s important to segment your database of clients and separate those “A+” “Top 20” clients out. They are the ones who are most likely to introduce you to clients like them. Everyone else can receive service in as automated way as possible to make up for the extra time engaging these top clients is taking up. 

Some of the introductions from these engaged clients will come without a request from you, but if you have an easy, comfortable way of bringing the subject up, you’ll have earned the right to ask. 

Engage clients by giving them extraordinary service and surprising and delighting them, and you’re almost guaranteed at least one great introduction from each of them every year. You’ve earned them.