The Immense Value of Client Feedback in Getting Referrals

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

Last Fri­day, advi­sor coach Stephen Wer­sh­ing was inter­viewed by exec­u­tive coach Bruce Peters.

He dis­cussed the how to build a refer­ral mar­ket­ing pro­gram, and the impor­tance and immense value of client feed­back.

Lis­ten to the pod­casts (click the red play buttons):

Part 1

seg­ment 1

Part 2

seg­ment 2

In the first seg­ment Stephen Wer­sh­ing dis­cusses his work with AdvisorImpact’s Julie Lit­tlechild, who con­ducted a sur­vey of thou­sands of clients of advi­sors about their feel­ings con­cern­ing work­ing with a finan­cial advi­sor. Here are a few of the find­ings of that research:

1. Its impor­tant to have con­ver­sa­tions with clients that go beyond the scope of their portfolio
   • Those who had con­ver­sa­tions about finan­cial plan­ning, as opposed to just invest­ment plan­ning were much more satisfied.
   • Clients who were asked for feed­back gen­er­ally felt more impor­tant and felt more sat­is­fac­tion because they played a role in the advi­sor mak­ing changes to the prac­tice, and they felt more engaged, a sig­nif­i­cantly more dra­matic dri­ver of satisfaction.
   • Those were the peo­ple far more likely to refer new clients.
   • Just ask­ing for feed­back, and then doing some­thing about it, it makes them more com­mit­ted to you, and then imple­ment­ing it, that was a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor in how engaged they felt. It enhances the client’s per­spec­tive on the value they received from your pro­fes­sional service.
   • increases refer­ral traf­fic dra­mat­i­cally — mak­ing a client a part of your ‘advi­sory team’ cre­ates an excit­ing pre­text for con­ver­sa­tion with their asso­ciates and friends about how they were engaged
   • Stephen pro­vides more detail about this in the interview.
2. In the sec­ond seg­ment, Stephen dis­cusses the anatomy of the refer­ral, and the idea that there are many ways to attract refer­rals, and that ask­ing for them is the least effec­tive way.
   • When we refer, its a way for us to net­work, we do it for social cur­rency, its a way for us to expand our influ­ence, but the bot­tom line is that  we do it for OUR rea­sons, we don’t do it for their (the advisor’s reason).
   • When we are con­fronted by a friend’s chal­lenge, our instinct is to help them by refer­ring, or if we are asked “Who do you use?” we want to be in a posi­tion to use that to ben­e­fit our­selves by shar­ing our ben­e­fits with our friend.
   • When we are asked by some­one to sell the risk, as opposed to offer­ing the ben­e­fit, we become less will­ing, because the risk is ours - for exam­ple, if you send a friend to your mechanic, and the mechanic screws up, you risk being screwed up by that too.
   • If as an advi­sor, all you do is ask for refer­rals, what you are doing is forc­ing the client to ‘sell’ all the risk by putting the onus on them to per­form a task which risks dimin­ish­ing their per­cep­tion of you, and it puts a focus for them on the risk of send­ing their asso­ciates to you.
   • On the other hand, if you give the client the ben­e­fit of the expe­ri­ence of being engaged in the process, by ask­ing them for their advice, and then work­ing to vis­i­bly or ver­i­fi­ably imple­ment their sug­ges­tions for improve­ments to the way you do things, and you thank them and credit them for it, both pri­vately and in the pres­ence of your client advi­sory board, its their own sense of engage­ment that com­pels them to want to speak freely about their suc­cess with you as their advi­sor. Their enthu­si­asm about their expe­ri­ence with you fuels the drive to expand their influ­ence by refer­ring you.
   • The dis­cus­sion con­tin­ues in more detail dur­ing the interview.

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Tags: 1 Segment, 2 Segment, Advisory Team, Anatomy, Bottom Line, Client Feedback, Conversations With Clients, Executive Coach, Financial Planning, Immense Value, Investment Planning, Julie Littlechild, Last Friday, Marketing Program, Pretext, Professional Service, Referral Marketing, Referral Program, Referral Traffic, Referrals, Service Increases
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