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Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about, I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we speak with Michelle Donovan, partner in Productivity Uncorked. A coaching firm, specializing in productivity coaching, referral coaching and business management for financial advisors. Michelle used to be the owner of a referral coaching business, and gradually migrated to exclusively serving financial advisors. Along the way she co-authored books including, The 29% Solution and A Woman’s Way, empowering female financial advisors to authentically lead and flourish in a man’s world.

In this episode we talk about A Woman’s Way, what’s unique about it, and how men actually have more to learn from it than female financial advisors. She describes active and passive strategies for attracting referrals. We then get into a new concept, the referral SWOT. You may recognize SWOT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from the corporate world. Michelle has adapted this specific kind of analysis to identify what’s keeping advisors from attracting more referrals, and what they can better leverage to attract more. Here now is our conversation with Michelle Donovan.

Michelle Donovan, welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast. So nice to have you.

Michelle Donovan:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. So you and your partner, Patty coach advisors on productivity and referrals, and you have a number of interesting things that we want to touch on and talk about today, including a book that you wrote together called, A Woman’s Way. How did the two of you come to offer this particular combination of things?

Michelle Donovan:
Well, Patty and I have known each other for a long time as business colleagues and so forth. Patty has had her own coaching practice for probably about 15 or so years, that was before this, before we kind of combined our purpose. And she’s a certified professional organizer and a productivity coach, so she worked with businesses doing that. And I had my own, I owned a franchise for a long time, let’s see, probably about 12 years, I owned a franchise called Referral Institute.

I would find that, so often when I was coaching, not only business owners at the time, but particularly advisers, I would find that many times they were really kind of either overwhelmed in some areas, or distracted, or not focused, just kind of, they had too much stuff in their head, and I would refer them. I would refer them to Patty over and over, to kind of get a little bit more together or un-overwhelmed, that’s not really what I’m trying to say [crosstalk 00:03:06]. Exactly they get themselves together a little bit. And then she would just refer them back to me when they were kind of put back together. So we did that for a while, and finally we said, we should really think about combining ourselves. And that’s what we did. And then we really narrowed the niche and really focused, exclusively on working in the wealth management world.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. And how did you go that… Because I was surprised when you were giving your backgrounds, it didn’t sound like either of you had a background in financial services.

Michelle Donovan:
Right. Right. We do not.

Steve Wershing:
So how did you find your way over to financial advisors?

Michelle Donovan:
Well, it kind of found us. As a coach and as a trainer in my earlier days, I started to not only attract more advisors, but I started realizing just how much I enjoyed working with those particular individuals. And there was a lot of synergy in the sense of, a lot of what the two of us do for our advisors is, we really focus on helping them to make more money and help them to have the kind of life that they want and that they want to be able to enjoy. And they’re trying to do the very same thing for their clients. They’re trying to help their clients to have the kind of life that they want, maintain the money that they need to have, to be able to retire comfortably and so forth. And we just found a real synergy with that industry. And it just took off from there.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting. Now your most recent book, as I mentioned is, A Woman’s Way. Tell us what’s different about women financial advisors, that you encourage them to embrace?

Michelle Donovan:
Well, I love this question because there are quite a few things that are different about women in particular. In our practice, we certainly coach both men and women, but we have an affinity towards women. And probably at any time our practices, I’d say, 70, 30 towards the women side, of how many women we’re coaching, and what we find a lot about the female advisors… One thing that is different about them is purely the fact that they’re women, and so scientifically there’s estrogen involved, and the estrogen that women have, really helps them to have a larger drive towards taking care of others and protecting their relationships. And so, because, the whole wealth management industry is really focused on relationships, it gives them a little bit of an edge right there. But another one is, and we find this huge, and we heard this overwhelmingly from the women that we interviewed when we were preparing for the book, women’s intuition, and what I’ve come to find out from doing some research is that women could pick up six facial cues. Whereas, men pick up one in a similar situation.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard clients tell us stories about, like the female advisor and a male advisor being in a room together, talking to a couple, for example. One woman in particular, she told us a story about, they were just having their meeting, like they normally would have a meeting, and the couple, particularly the woman in the couple was a little bit more quiet than she normally would be. And the man’s just going, going, going, going the advisor was just going, going, going with the content. And all of a sudden the female advisor just kind of says, wait, wait, let’s just stop for a second because I think we need to take a minute here and I need to ask you a question. And she just looked at the couple and she said, is everything okay? And they pretty much started to break down. And they had had a pretty traumatic family situation occur, that the woman’s intuition was picking up on it, and the man was clueless about it.

And so I think that women’s intuition is so valuable, that women have that they can’t underestimate that as an advisor, how much that comes into play.

Julie Littlechild:
And so, just to clarify, are you saying that you have an affinity towards women, so therefore you tend to work with more women? Or do you think what you deliver is different because they’re women? I’m just sort of interested in how that plays into the work that you do.

Michelle Donovan:
Yeah. We do attract a lot of women to us. A lot of female advisors come to us, and interesting thing to notice, when we’re working with a male advisor, most of the male advisors that we work with, tend to possess some of these qualities as well, that women have. Because men can be just as good at these things too, if they put focus on them, but women, a lot of this stuff comes natural to them. And majority of the men that we work with, do have a more nurturing side about them, typically, not all of them, but typically. And they typically tend to be a little bit younger too. They’re more of the next generation advisor, not the millennial advisor, but- [crosstalk 00:09:04].

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. A question came up as you were describing that, that it sounds like, if it’s more natural to women, it seems almost like A Woman’s Way is the book that should be read by male advisors.

Michelle Donovan:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Steve Wershing:
To learn more of that. But apart from the natural differences, are there things that you say in A Woman’s Way, that you try to help female advisors embrace or develop that… That they should develop as opposed to what they have naturally?

Michelle Donovan:
Yeah. Some of the things that we really focus in on is helping women to get past sabotaging thoughts and sabotaging behaviors. And women tend to hold on to things a long time, and if something gets in their head, it can become a very, very strong limiting belief and it can get in their way. And the other big piece of that is really helping women to learn to trust. Not only trust their relationships, their relationships being their clients, for example, but also how to leverage their network at large, which includes not only clients and COIs, but their entire network. And so it’s almost to helping them take blinders off, see things very differently, get to the real core of beliefs or actions that are getting in their way.

And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from women who have read this book that, men have to read this book too. And we’ve had women buy it for men and so forth. But yeah, so it is information that can easily be brought to men as well, they have to be open to it.

Julie Littlechild:
Well, maybe that’s a sort of a good segue, because I wanted to ask you about referrals and you mentioned networks and COIs and whatnot. Can you talk to us just sort of generally about your approach to referrals?

Michelle Donovan:
Sure. I have the approach that I do want to help financial advisors to really shift their thinking when it comes to referrals. Because I would say every advisor that comes to me struggles with… And Steve, you have the book, Stop Asking for Referrals. They come to me with that pain point of, they all say, I’m no good at it, I can’t ask for referrals, I don’t ask for referrals. There’s always that stigma in their mind of, asking for referrals is hard, and it’s uncomfortable and everything around that, that you both know.

And so I helped them to kind of shift their thinking away from the actual asking and more towards focusing them on education. Because I believe that there’s the gap, I believe that they have a lot of people in their life, clients included who genuinely want to refer them, but there’s a gap with those individuals, not necessarily knowing or understanding exactly who they want or what they want, and that gap can be filled with education. So my two main, probably, I guess I would say thrusts are one, teaching my clients how to further educate their clients on how to refer them, if they’re so interested. And then, helping people to really leverage, lead and their networks for that purpose.

Julie Littlechild:
And can you talk a bit more about, what that would look like educating advisors on, helping clients to refer?

Michelle Donovan:
Sure. The main thing that I do is I’ll help that individual, that advisor, we kind of, co-create a tool for them to be able to share through a referral conversation. So I don’t want them to think so much as to the ask, but more in the line of, I want you to have a conversation with clients or conversation with people in your network, a conversation with COIs. And so we work to put together a very specific tool that basically turns out to be a one page sheet, that focuses them on helping the client to understand very clearly who they’re trying to attract, who they want to serve and bring their value to. So very clear description of who that is. So everybody understands, and it’s a unified message. I also focus them to really start thinking about, what do other people need to listen for on behalf of them?

So, Julie, you had done some research around, why clients don’t refer and that sort of thing. And, one of the things that really is very much out there is that, clients are not necessarily able to recognize an opportunity for an advisor. And so some of that can be addressed by helping my client to teach their clients and their network at large. What do they have to listen for on behalf of them? What triggers are they listening for? Statements, complaints, pain points, that sort of thing. What might they see or observe or notice that if somebody sees this, it’s getting them in the top of their mind, is making them think of the advisor.

And then one of the big things is, how do they bring them up in conversation? How would a client, or how would a friend or your brother or your sister, how would they bring that advisor up in a conversation if they hear this or if they see this? And then also helping them to come up with good questions that somebody else can ask on your behalf, that kind of helps to move that referral along. Those things, when you put it together into a bit of a process, that’s what closes that gap.

Steve Wershing:
That’s so important. And I really want to emphasize something you just said about, helping clients recognize those opportunities, because yeah, I mean that education is a really important part of it. That if you can coach your clients, with something like, listen, if you ever hear one of your friends say this, or if you ever hear them express that, we can really be of help to the people who are struggling with that.

Michelle Donovan:
Right. It becomes very freeing to the advisor. They absolutely love it because I don’t give them the language. I coach them to pull that language out of them. So it feels like it’s their own personal process. And every advisor I work with is different, and so, even though it’s a similar process, the content of what they develop and what they pull from themselves feels good to them. It feels comfortable to them. Because, they’re not reading it from a book or they’re not taking it from a course kind of thing. They’re creating it themselves.

Steve Wershing:
Right. Right. They’re not reading a script.

Michelle Donovan:
Right.

Steve Wershing:
And that sort of also goes to addressing or catering to a client’s motivation to refer. What are your thoughts about, what motivates clients to make a referral to an advisor?

Michelle Donovan:
Yeah. I think that, and I see it all the time, I think that advisors, really, really good advisors, they have fantastic relationships with their clients. They have raving fans, they have people who treat them or kind of think of them as part of the family. They have people that bring them cookies at the holidays. And, they walk in the door and all they want to do is to give a big hug. They have these people who absolutely adore them. And so the motivation is there, simply because those clients are invested from the relationship perspective, from the personal perspective. And so from my perspective, what the advisor needs to do, is to learn how to leverage that motivation and learn how to activate those people, to be engaged in their referral process. To the point of where, they’re not necessarily doing it on behalf of the advisor, they’re doing it because they want their closest family, friends, et cetera. They want the people they care about to have that same experience and to have that same relationship with an advisor. And that’s the true motivation.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Okay.

Julie Littlechild:
Right. So, in a way you’re saying the true motivation then isn’t so much to help, the advisor if I’m hearing that correctly, but it needs to be there as a starting point obviously?

Michelle Donovan:
Yeah, I think it needs to be there. I think there are clients who do have that motivation that, they feel so connected to the advisor. They want to help them succeed. And they may have even already announced the fact, they may have said to the advisor, sure, I’d be happy to refer you. Anytime, anytime I’d be happy to refer you. They’re giving that advisor the validation that they’ve got strong relationships and now they need to move those relationships forward to really engage that client in the process.

Julie Littlechild:
One of the things I’d love to talk more about is sort of getting down to some of the specifics and tactics. I know one of the things you recommend, and I believe you’re sharing a tool in the show notes. It’s about really helping an advisor think about their business to set themselves up for success, excuse me, like a SWOT analysis. Can you talk a little bit about the approach and what you think advisors need to be thinking about specifically in order to drive more referrals?

Michelle Donovan:
Well, the SWOT analysis it’s a tool. It’s a specific assessment. Think of it as an assessment tool, that advisors can… They purchase it, it comes to them, and it has a series of questions. It has about 36 questions if I’m not mistaken, but it breaks down along the line of SWOT, which is, it focuses on specific referral strengths, referral weaknesses, referral opportunities, and referral threats. And so there’s nine questions related to each one of those categories. And once they take that assessment and they send it back to me, then I offer them a 30 minute coaching consultation and give them a one page analysis around it, kind of helping them to say, okay, let’s look at all the things that you have identified. And let’s really fine tune areas that need to be addressed right now. Some are needed to be addressed immediately. Some can be put off and so forth, but really kind of looking at how does your whole referral process as an advisor break down into these four categories and open up their eyes to see the complexity of a real referral process when you have it all into place.

Julie Littlechild:
And can you… Sorry. So just a quick question- [crosstalk 00:22:14].

Steve Wershing:
Go ahead. No. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Julie Littlechild:
Give maybe just a specific example of say a threat to referrals that you find advisors need to work [inaudible 00:22:24].

Steve Wershing:
Or maybe even an example of each of those, because I think it would be really interesting to hear one of each.

Michelle Donovan:
Sure. Okay. So for example, one of the questions with respect to referrals, strengths. Strengths are really focusing more on internal positive attributes of their referral process. What’s working? What’s doing well? So some of the questions here might be, what networking activities do you engage in currently to support your referral efforts? Helping them to look at that. Another one might be, how clear are you and your team with being able to describe your preferred client? And then even another one might be, just plain asking them, what do they think their referral strengths are for them at the moment? What do they think they’re really, really good at?

So if I look at the weaknesses, these would be, looking at weak zones or gaps, preventing them from really maximizing their referral results. So one question here could be for example, what technology or equipment is needed to better support their comprehensive referral strategy? Unbelievably, I can’t tell you how many times I talk to advisors who don’t track their referrals in any way. Whether it’s on Excel spreadsheet or anyway, they’re not doing it. And so there’re tremendous areas for improvement there, if they’re not doing that. Another one is what referrals skills are lacking in you or your team as a weakness?

Julie Littlechild:
And what would be some examples of those maybe that somebody could say, okay, if this is a weakness, this is what I need to do?

Michelle Donovan:
Well, it could be, you mean from the skills perspective?

Julie Littlechild:
Sure.

Michelle Donovan:
Yeah. Well, they could identify that they feel that they really stink at networking. That could be an example. Maybe they’ve never had any formalized training or coaching around networking. They could also identify… They could come back and probably say something like, I don’t feel that I’m any good at asking for referrals. They would see that as a skill that they lack. That could be a couple of examples there.

Julie Littlechild:
And so if I said, say, networking’s my real weakness, how might you guide me to enhance that?

Michelle Donovan:
Well, I would certainly dive into that as a much deeper conversation with them, if that was the one thing that they identified that we wanted to really talk about during the coaching segment, I would dive into that conversation with them and talk to them about, what are they doing now? Where are they networking? Where do they see that they want to network? What kind of results are they getting from networking? But also, what do they want to get out of it? And how are they perceiving, networking from the very beginning? So I would dive into that conversation and really be able to pull them into.. From that conversation, I need to find out where their true weakness is, because networking, there’s a lot that can be covered in networking. And so it’s a matter of, are they networking in the right places? With the right people? Are they spending time in the wrong places with the wrong people? Do they have inhibitions? There’s a lot to really go into it.

Steve Wershing:
So I’d like to pick up on something that Julie asked a bit ago, because I’m interested in this. So in the traditional SWOT analysis, in the corporate setting, strengths and weaknesses are internal and opportunities and threats are external. So I’m really interested in, what would an example of a threat be?

Michelle Donovan:
A threat? Okay. So perhaps a threat could be that, one question might be, is your target market shrinking? For example.

Steve Wershing:
Oh, sure. Okay, that makes sense.

Michelle Donovan:
Yeah. So, are they aware of it? It’s kind of like, there’s a lot of times people aren’t even aware of it. That might be an example, thinking about what predicted industry trends could affect your ability to acquire referrals. And just looking at COVID for example, how nobody could have predicted something like this, and this is going to produce some new trends in the industry that… Are they considering how these new trends may affect their ability to get referrals? Another one could be something like, are there businesses that are not currently direct competitors, but could be in the future? So looking around their community to see what their community businesses are doing.

And is there somebody who is either coming in to be a new competitor? Or is there some companies that are potentially going to be adding certain things to their products and services that may be competitors? So really looking at, like you said, external, I do add a little internal component to this as well, because I think internally there could be some threats. For example, one of the questions here also asks about, what resistance beliefs or attitudes exist in the firm that impact your ability to acquire more referrals? So that would be an internal, potentially an internal threat.

Steve Wershing:
Okay.

Julie Littlechild:
All right. So I know one of the things you talk about Michelle is passive and active strategies for generating referrals. I was wondering if you could share maybe a specific passive and a specific active strategy that you’ve seen working really well.

Michelle Donovan:
One is from the passive side. I think that a genuine, complete referral process need to kind of have its tentacles reach out through the firm and get into the marketing components, the general marketing components as well. So one that I’ve seen work incredibly well, an advisor here locally does this. They have a welcome kit for their clients, and they put in their package a one page sheet that talks about their client appreciation event that they have every year. It’s an event called, Friends Helping Friends. And this event they make it a big deal, it’s a big event, it always has a fun theme. It’s wildly popular with their clients. And the only way you can attend the event is by referring to the firm, a new client, and the prospect does become a client.

So, before they started doing this program, they had about 5% of their clients typically refer in any given year. Once they started doing this program, they jumped up to 20%. 20% of their clients refer now. And 20% of that 20% repeats every year. They love the event so much that they don’t want to not be there, kind of thing. And so they will actively talk to people, just so that they can refer a new client to the advisor. Only if that client becomes a new client, will they get invited.

So it’s not necessarily an active strategy because it’s a flyer that’s inside their packet and the people look it over. And so the new client sees that there’s this program that they offer. So that’s an example that has become very successful for that particular family firm. An active strategy that is very, very successful is definitely connected to what we were talking about earlier, with the education referral conversation. That’s taking a very active role, where clients literally sit down over lunch or where the advisor sits down with a client over lunch, coffee, spends quality time with that client talking to them about more of the things that we talked about earlier, how to identify and how to be engaged in that referral process.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting. Well, this is really interesting, and it’s a really interesting approach, especially about the SWOT analysis to sort of analyzing your own business. Because I think this is… We talk a lot about referrals, but we don’t necessarily talk a lot about how to analyze your business, from that perspective of referrals. And I think you have some stuff coming up that you wanted to offer folks, did you want to talk about some of the programs you have coming up, that people, if they want to follow up could potentially take advantage of?

Michelle Donovan:
Sure. Well, we do have some things coming up. We’re putting this together right now. We’re going to have a free five day challenge coming up in January. And the information will probably start to go out right after the holidays, we’ll be blasting that out. But it’s a free five day challenge where people will be engaged for five days quick, just doing certain specific activities just to kind of get them started with what they can do to begin, to get more clients engaged and help them really understand which clients are the best clients to begin to even think about approaching. And so that’s going to be something that we’re very excited about and that’s going to lead into some online courses that we’re putting together to support that. There’s going to be an offer during that five day challenge for people to, if they’re interested and they want more of that, they can consider some coaching opportunities, or they can consider our new classes that are going to be out. And then of course we have the referral SWOT analysis.

Steve Wershing:
Right. Okay. Well, that’s great. So if people want to find out about that five day challenge or the SWOT or the other things you do for folks, Michelle, where can people learn more about what you guys do?

Michelle Donovan:
Well, they can go right to our website. It’s www.productivityuncorked.com. That’s the easiest.

Steve Wershing:
That sounds great. Great. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been really informative and we appreciate sharing your insights with us.

Julie Littlechild:
Absolutely. Thank you.

Michelle Donovan:
Thank you. Thank you again. I’ve really enjoyed it and I wish you both well.

Julie Littlechild:
Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes, it really does help. You can get all the links, show notes and other tidbits from these episodes @becomingreferrable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.