Business cards are universal. They’re a way to give details to others about ourselves, and to a lesser extent, our services. So should you use them to prospect for referrals, and generate word-of-mouth and more client referrals?

The short answer is yes. Your business card should give accurate information about your location and services in an eye-catching format, as well as state that you welcome referrals.

Your business card has limited space so every word matters. Considering that you want people to know what you do, where you are, and that you are ready to offer your services to potential clients, what’s the best way to add your referral message?

Use the A-S-I format

• Add a line that you welcome referrals makes clients feel free to spread the word about your services.
• State that you welcome referrals will also make potential clients who have not spoken to you yet feel more comfortable to contact you the first time.
• Include this simple statement on your business card lets people know you are approachable, and you want introductions.

Keep a stack in your reception room, office, car and wallet. After all, when you ask for someone’s business card and they are unable to offer it, don’t you speculate whether they are serious about wanting to do business?

I remember a business colleague once telling me, “I don’t carry business cards. I tell people I forgot mine, let me have one of yours and I’ll send you mine.”

Rather clever. But I never liked that underhanded remark.

One question I’m asked a lot is…

“How do I host my own Continuing Ed Workshops–award CPE credits–and get CPAs, or others to attend?”

Very good question, and it’s easier than you might think with the right direction.

I talk about this in depth in my new CPE Workshop Guidebook.

Let me give you some suggestions from the context of building referrals from other centers-of-influence, such as CPAs, Insurance Agents, or Attorneys.

After all, these are the professionals most apt to be interested in attending a CPE workshops to earn continuing ed credits so they can maintain their licensing or accrediation.

Here’s are a few pointers, say… if you’re after CPAs (accountants) as potential referral sources, for example.

1. Pick a relevant, timely topic for CPAs.  It might be:
   “Tax Considerations for 60+ Year Old Retirees.” Again, keep it timely and relevant
2. Decide on your presentation format. Powerpoint? Roundtable? Classroom style? Group interaction? What? There’s a number of choices to make.
3. Pick a comfortable venue. This could be your office, but I prefer more neutral territory such as  a country club meeting room, for example.
4. Invite qualified CPAs to attend. CPAs specialize in certain areas: tax prep, financial planning, audit, etc. Invite those whose expertise fits with your topic.
5. Create activities that allow for networking and group interaction. This is especially important for you, the host of the event. You want to encourage group-speak, rather than you’re own personal lecture.
6. Decide who the teacher of you CPE Worshop will be. Will it be you? Someone else in your firm? Someone outside your company that you hire as a faciliator?

At a minimum, when you learn how to host your own CPE workshops, you instantly postition yourself, as:

• A leading expert in your city/town, offering a Workshop format no one else is doing.
• An authority who cares about CPAs and presenting professional advice to them.

This translates into relationships. And relationships translate into new business opportunities and referrals.

Use CPE workshops in your marketing aresenal. They are incredibly powerful.

I was asked to give referral marketing advice to financial advisors– many whom have been kicked in the teeth by the financial markets and their clients. 

And regardless of your industry, there are many good nuggets of referral advice in this article that you can apply to your own biz.

Read the entire article below.

These days many advisors rightfully worry about portfolio losses—not only for the damage done to clients’ hopes and dreams, but for the psychological wedge those losses create between them and their clients. Advisors fear that their clients will never again be willing to introduce them to their friends or family. Their previous confidence about receiving referrals seems long gone.

The good news is twofold. First off, clients absolutely can reclaim their financial confidence and edge with your help. If they’re unhappy about the way things have been going, they don’t have to stay unhappy.

And second, market performance is never a good predictor of referral success in the first place. Don’t believe it? I hate to burst your bubble, but even in the bull markets of the mid-2000s, I rarely met anyone, not a colleague nor a family member, who gave much conscious thought to referring their financial advisor. Even when they believed their advisor was doing a fairly good job of managing their investments, they just weren’t tuned in to making introductions.

This may be hard to accept, but the truth is that people don’t brag about you in their day-to-day lives. They don’t spontaneously jump up and down on their friends’ couches gushing about your financial wizardry. It just doesn’t happen, at least not consistently. So regardless of market performance, it’s not likely that someone will spontaneously volunteer your name with a gasp of excitement when asked about who manages their portfolio.

Which gets us to the main point: if clients are slow to spontaneously refer you in a bull market, what are the odds of a client recommending you now, after a disastrous 12 months? Is it even possible?

Surprisingly enough, yes it is. I believe you probably have just as good a shot of gaining referrals now as you did when the Dow was up 16% back in 2006. And ironically, you could be in a position to attract even more referrals depending on your client communication strategy—because your competition is very likely not stepping up to the plate.

The post-market-crash referral guide
So, how do you bridge your own mental gap between your poor portfolio performance and wanting referrals? It seems counterintuitive, but it’s not.

1. Focus on what matters
The first step in your referral comeback strategy is to revisit your clients’ objectives and goals, and make any necessary adjustments. Call them in for reviews, and reassure them that they still have a plan going forward. Certainly, as wealth has evaporated, goals and objectives may have to be tweaked.

It’s never easy to discuss the loss of wealth, especially when you’re the overseer of that money. It causes feelings of pain and angst for you and your clients. But facing reality is a necessary part of being a professional advisor. Think of physicians who often must communicate bad news to their patients but are trained to focus on the options for recovery available in the present.

Before you can guide someone forward, you need to fully understand where he has been: you should retrieve past intake forms and profiles in your client files. Review his investment policy statements. Go over their risk tolerance and time horizon. Make notes, and follow up with a written letter confirming that clients are either still on track, or in need of a new plan.

2. Reconnect with your value
Despite the rough year, it’s vital to reflect on why clients originally selected you as their advisor and reconfirm that decision. This isn’t an exercise in reaffirming your own peace of mind. It’s designed to reinforce why your clients began the relationship with you in the first place. You provide value separate and apart from market performance. You help clients manage their total financial picture. They needed you for something other than a magical ability to make the markets move in a continually upward direction!

If you’ve been hiding out and ducking clients, it’s time to stop putting off your appointment with reality. It’s time to discover in detail whether or not your clients are still finding value in your professional competencies. Go ahead and ask clients how they’re feeling about the quality of your service and what you can do to serve them better. If a client has threatened to take her wealth elsewhere, try to remain neutral about other financial advisors and their services. Conduct an exit interview with those clients who do leave you.

There is an excellent opportunity right now to survey all your clients to find out what’s on their minds. Find out what they have valued about you in the past, and what they need from you in the future. Find out what’s keeping them awake at night, and you’ll likely tune in to where you can provide the most value in the future.

3. Stay top-of-mind
Once you’ve reconnected with your clients’ goals and rediscovered your value, you need to proactively communicate that value. I like to recommend communicating via entry points and low-cost experience points. Your website is one such experience point. Clients can connect with you through the site, and they can send friends to get a first impression of you there.

One of the simplest but most effective marketing moves you can make is to get your website updated now. More than ever, prospects judge you by your online presence. Your website is an online brochure and is equally important as any hard marketing materials you use or are planning to create. Your website should showcase your core competencies, include case studies, and offer stories that allow prospective clients to get an authentic experience of you and your work from the comfort of their homes.

4. Make referrals easier
Finally, are you making it easy for your clients to recommend you? As we’ve discussed, clients don’t spontaneously refer even in bull markets. Most of the time, the reason clients don’t recommend you is because they do not understand the full scope of what you do. People talk most about your work when they really understand it. But the truth is that the majority of our clients have experienced the benefit of only a few of our skills.

If you’re a fee-only advisor, for instance, your clients may have experienced your money management services, portfolio allocation, financial commentary, and investment review services. But those same clients have probably never experienced what you do when it comes to tax or financial planning assumptions (e.g., tax harvesting, time horizon management) or investment research (e.g., the mutual fund, stock, or bond selection process). They’re not aware of the continuing-education knowledge you garnered at a conference you attended this year. In other words, they never realize the full extent of your technical capabilities and how those skills can improve their lives.

Referrals come faster when clients recognize the extent to which you can and have improved their lives. So they must be able to understand all your services. They must be able to explain to others what you do. Focus on educating them about all areas of your practice, ideally by giving them the direct experience of benefiting from all your expertise—especially in times of crisis.

Bottom line
It’s been a tough year for folks in the financial services community. Many advisors feel guilty about client portfolio losses. But the reality is everybody is experiencing loss right now. So losses by themselves shouldn’t affect your ability to earn referrals.

Imagine a conversation one of your clients might have with a friend or family member after you have checked in with them as described here: “You wouldn’t believe what my advisor did. We reviewed all my goals, and we’re only slightly behind where we originally hoped to be. I feel so much better about my situation after our meeting. It’s not as bleak as I thought. You really should go see this guy/gal.”

Hey, it happens! You’ll only know how well if you try it out and see how it works for you.

They’ll quickly tell you whether you will enjoy great success with your referral marketing efforts or… get the same ol’ results in your business that you’ve been experiencing.

The first diagram below is based on the  “80/20 Rule,” called the Pareto Principle.

Basically that universal Rule states that 80 percent of your effects (ex: results in your business) come from 20 percent of your causes (ex: your efforts).

Or, said another way: 80 percent of your income comes from your 20 percent of your clients… or… 80 percent of your success comes from 20 percent of your marketing activities… and, so on.

In my 20 years of experience, the same can be said of building your business by referrals and word-of-mouth.

But let’s relate this to something else, shall we?

THE DOLLARS YOU SPEND

For example, the typical person running their own marketing budget is likely gonna spend 80 percent of their dollars on traditional marketing (advertising, branding, online marketing, public relations, direct mail, etc.)

The remaining 20%, they toss at referral marketing (if they’re lucky).

Note: I’m being over generous when I say 20 percent is spent on referral marketing. Most professionals spend way less than 20 percent of their marketing bucks on referral marketing (if they spend any money at all.)

So visually speaking, our marketing-spend looks like this:

You probably can relate to that diagram in your business, agreed?

Lessons: a) Start viewing your referral marketing activities (the red area above) as a legitimate marketing line item. b) Make a commitment to expand the red area. c) Begin allocating more of your marketing budget towards referral marketing activities.

But before you do that, let’s flip the diagram upside down to see if this makes most business sense for you now, shall we? Let’s re-focus on the green area:

So what just happened here?

First of all, you’ve re-allocated 80 percent of every dollar you spend going foward on the highest possible payback activity, giving you the fastest return on your investment of cash and time: Spending your dollars on your existing clients and your colleagues.

This creates freedom and peace of mind in your life. And it makes things in your business much more enjoyable for you.

I won’t go in to all the reasons for this. I’m sure you understand it already (established credibility, known relationships, proven work, minimal risk, etc.)

Secondly, you can reasonably project an average ROI scenario. And one that is larger, too.

Right now, you pretty much know that for each client or colleague you engage, you’ll have a certain closing ratio and earned-revenue scenario. Maybe it’s 30-50 percent, let’s say. 

You can say with certainty that those ROIs are a much higher percentage because you are marketing to established relationships rather than complete strangers.

Said another way: Would you rather enjoy a 3% success rate on your client acquisition efforts (direct mail/newspaper ads), or a 30, 50, 70, or 90 percent success rate (introductions and referrals).

But something else even more powerful is going on here.

Let’s look at the diagram again now:

What if you took 80 percent of those new referral marketing dollars you are using for acquisition, and split them equally (for arguments sake) into two separate line items (buckets):

Spend 40 percent of your dollars on your current clients; spend 40 percent on your Centers of Influences (COIs) & Strategic Alliances (SAs)?

What could that yield you in terms of ROI? 

Have you ever thought seriously about this?

Have you ever run some numbers that would tell you how much more money you’d be making?

Here’s a free tool that can do just that for you: The Referral Multiplier Tool.

I’ll bet the ROI is a lot more than throwing away 80 percent of your money on the same old traditional marketing and advertising that you’ve been doing.

“So what types of referral marketing activities should I do with 80 percent of my budget reallocated to referral marketing activities?”

That’s a topic for another time. But I will say that you’re only limited by your imagination and some basic organization skills.

Here’s just a few that I threw together quickly:

40% Referral Spend – Clients

1. Appreciation Dinners
2. Private Wine-Tasting Event
3. Museum Luncheon Tours
4. Orchestra Recital
5. Appreciation Drawing Twice Yearly – Caribbean Cruises, Broadway Tickets, etc.
6. Spa Day/Tennis Day/Golf Pro Day

40% Referral Spend – Centers of Influence (COI) & SAs (Strategic Alliances)

1. Incentives for Referrals (referral rewards)
2. Spa Day/Tennis Day/Golf Pro Day
3. Joint Event – Speaking, Radio, Television
4. Chef’s Table and Joint Networking Mixer
5. Tour of Facilities and Catered Dinner

Obviously such a radical shift in your marketing spend–from 80 percent of your budget going toward traditional marketing/advertising… cut down to 20 percent–is a serious move. And you have to balance the impact on your cash-flow and operations. I respect that.

You might even have to take a step back for the next 3 to 6 months.

But serious times often call for serious measures. And at a minimum, it will cause you to consider some serious thinking… especially if you want to get to the next level in your business.

As they say, keep doing what you’ve always done, and you’ll always get the same results.

So start thinking 40/40/20, not 80/20!

Again, it might not be something you are able to do immediately; but over the course of the next 6 to 12 to 18 months, it may be quite doable to move yourself and your business in that direction.

The choice is yours.

I say go for it.

The strategy and steps you gotta take still apply.

Plus, it’s somewhat of a universal subject related to referral marketing: There’s always gonna be cyclical times in business.

But how do you turn the current drag you’re seeing into a lot of new introductions for yourself?

Is it possible to even take the downturn and leverage it into new referrals??

Yes. And it’s easier than you think… with some slight focus.

Click the player to hear a 2 minute referral audio lesson I recorded -
“How to Get Referrals Even When Business Is Slow!”

Or check me out here:

http://www.maximumreferrals.com/6fm-audio

100% valuable content, no B.S. or fluff.

Warning: It does take some effort and focus like anything in life. There’s no magic “system.”

Anyone who tells you differently is yanking your chain.

You can absolutely jumpstart your referrals and referral marketing efforts now. In fact, it’s one of the questions I’m getting asked the most, right now.

There’s a 3-step referral marketing approach I want to suggest that you try using. When you do, it’s very powerful in opening up new doors and conversations about introductions and referrals with others.

Let’s start with the three steps.

You could begin with clients, customers, or perhaps a business colleague, for example.

My 3-Steps are as follows – A-L-D:

• Step 1: Ask For Feedback on Yourself.
• Step 2: Listen for Value Statements & Confirm Value-Found.
• Step 3: Discuss/Reframe So Others Can Benefit.

When formally creating your own referral system, notice how step 2 and 3 follow the preceeding step. Study this closely you’ll see it’s a natural progression of conversation.

I suggest you familiarize yourself with this referral marketing approach, especially now, when so many people seem to be looking to others for advice and direction.

Let’s start with Step # 1: Ask For Feedback on Yourself.

(Quick sidebar, click image to hear me explain something related:)

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It truly amazes me how many opportunities we have to ask others for feedback on our skillset in day to day business. But we fail to do it — at least consistently. One way of getting feedback on ourselves is simply to ask the other person (client, customer, colleague):

“John, On a scale of 1 to 10, what score would you give me these past few months? How do I rate? How do you rate my level of advice and service to you?”

Then shut up and listen!

What you will hear will give you crystal clear insight and feedback on yourself. It may also rattle your perception of your product or service-delivered also!

The best way of doing this is conversationally, of course — either in person, or by telephone. Don’t relegate the important grading of yourself and the services you provide to a mailer, or a survey, or an online form people complete (although they can be useful at times.)

You want genuine, honest feedback from people who can refer you currently… or who can be a future referral source to your business.

And you want them to speak this to you… using their MOUTH. No emails. No handwriting.

Sure, it takes cajones to ask that question; but it’s absolutely essential you do it before you ever think about asking the client, customer or collague to help introduce you to other people.

Go get feedback on yourself. And ask for it frequently!

Next time: Step 2: Listen for Value Statements & Confirm Value-Found.