As you know, if clients appreciate you, they are more likely to come back and use your services again and significantly more likely to refer you to their friends.
Having good client relationships is essential, however there are a huge number of professional business relationships that will be crucial to your success.
There are numerous stories of professionals in the finance/mortgage broking industry (and indeed others) who get 80% or more of their referral business from one or two referrers. In deference to the Paretto Principle – 80% of their business comes from 20% of their referral base. The catch is, you never know when you are going to meet the person who could send you 80% of your business!
There’s of course the list of “usual suspects” for our industry:
- Accountant
- Solicitor/Lawyer
- Real Estate Agent
- Property Developer
- Investment Adviser
- Quantity Surveyor
- Insurance Broker
- Conveyancer
- Financial Planner
- Lender
- Clients, friends, Family & Associates
There are also great examples of “thinking outside the square”, here’s one of our favourite stories…
Paul and Sarah decided to sell their home. Prior to putting the home on the market they decided to get their own building and pest inspection conducted as they didn’t want to get any surprises when it came to the final sale price negotiations. They used True Local (www.truelocal.com.au) to find a few building and pest inspection companies servicing their local area and, after ringing around, appointed a company to come and do the work.
Arriving home that evening, Paul found the invoice for the inspection, the report and the business card of a local real estate agent. What Paul found interesting about this was the question of why the Building & Pest inspector didn’t leave his own card, but rather, the card of a real estate agent.
What would motivate that person to leave the card of another professional?
Here’s a great example of the power of professional relationships. The Building & Pest Inspector no doubt took a guess that the owners of the property were considering selling and may or may not have an agent.
It is unknown in this example, whether or not there was any commission paid to the Building & Pest Inspector, however the power of building solid business relationships is very evident in this example.
As a professional, if you can have other people selling for you it is a cost-effective and efficient manner of generating leads for you and/or your business.
Take a few moments now to review your current network of key relationships, specifically those which help you to generate business.
Make a list of them and place them into various categories that make sense to you and your business.
Now consider if you can see any gaps, if you don’t then you’re not looking hard enough, you can always improve your network…even if it’s to simply strengthen an existing relationship.
The final step is to now make a plan of action – who do you need to contact & when – do you need to identify new contacts within a particular area.
And remember, think outside the square just like in our example as you never know where you’ll find the next person that could help you to grow your business with a flow of new leads!
Sections of this article are extracted from Intellitrain’s Diploma of Finance and Mortgage Broking Management Upgrade program.
