Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Melissa Intezar
Steve Wershing: Steve Wershing: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Steve Wershing: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Melissa Intezar: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Melissa Intezar: Julie Littlechild:
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. Having a referral marketing system will help make sure you receive a consistent stream of new introductions, but most advisors don’t approach it systematically. And this episode will cover one great approach. Melissa Intezar is Vice President and Manager of Enterprise Consulting at AssetMark. She manages the design and delivery of consulting content to producer groups, hybrid firms, and ensemble RIAs. She has 15 years experience in practice management leadership positions at AssetMark, National Planning Holdings, Curian Capital and Raymond James, and she runs the Leadership Advantage Program for larger ensemble advisory firms.
In this episode, we discuss what motivates clients and centers of influence to refer, how to develop strategic alliances with centers of influence, what processes and materials you need to implement the system, and what kind of conversations you can have to keep things moving forward. The episode is packed with great ideas to formalize your referral marketing system. Here now is our conversation with Melissa Intezar.
Melissa Intezar, thank you for joining us on Becoming Referable. We’re so happy to have you.
Thank you for having me. This is a wonderful opportunity, grateful to be here.
Well, so you have a lot of really interesting stuff that you talk with advisors about, and we’d like to dig into a bunch of that stuff, but just to give folks some background, you work at AssetMark and can you tell us a little bit about what you do there?
Yeah. So my title at AssetMark is Vice President and Manager of their Enterprise Consulting Offering, which means that I primarily work with really large enterprise ensemble firm owners, as well as their advisors. And at AssetMark I lead an initiative called Leadership Advantage, which is a business consulting and kind of a practice management program really specifically targeted on growth for the ensemble firm and their advisors. And part of that offering is also geared towards helping advisors develop their referral management strategy, along with also strengthening relationships with COIs and clients to help really drive those referrals.
Great. And so how do you help advisors with those referral management plans? Tell us a little more about that.
Yeah. So part of the program that we work through, we look to help advisors develop what we call a referral management system. And as part of that referral management system, there’s a three-step process, which is more client facing. So when those clients are sending in referrals, and then there’s a five-step version, which is for strategic alliances. So when you have that CPA or estate planner, kind of those professionals, sending in referrals, what exactly does your process look like? And there’s a three-step and a five-step process around that.
Okay. So before we get into the processes themselves, let’s focus on those centers of influence for just a minute, the ones that you have that five step process around. What is a strategic partner looking for, do you think, when they consider making a referral to a financial advisor?
Yeah, so I believe that a COI is really looking for that reliable kind of positive experience that’s also transferable when they consider making a referral, which also helps to balance the risks of making a referral. If I’m standing behind a referral, I’m putting my testimony to it and to their services, as a COI I most likely want to ensure that I’m comfortable with this advisor or professional before really I give their information out to family or friends. I think about, there’s a specialist that I work with in the medical industry that I’ve seen for many years, and I’ve referred multiple times. However, I didn’t refer that specialist until after seeing them more than once. It took many appointments, a really great experience that was always consistent and overall a positive outcome and environment before I would start to refer that professional. So you have to have those levels of comfort and you also have to know about their services and be able to kind of put your name behind that.
That’s such an interesting point because we did some research with COIs a few years ago and they were saying exactly what you’re saying. It takes time, it’s a long-term process to build trust. And yet some of the advisors were a little surprised. “Well, of course I deliver great service, of course.” But we just got to understand that just because what we know is true does not mean everybody else knows that.
Right.
What we believe to be true, anyway.
What we believe to be true, yeah, for sure.
And I’d like to pick up, Melissa, on something that you said there too, that you sort of slipped into the comments, balancing the risks of making a referral. So if a client refers somebody over, there’s some risk involved in that. But tell me a little bit about the risks involved if a strategic partner refers someone over to us.
Yeah. So, a strategic partner, let’s say I’m a CPA, and I have a client that needs financial advice or some sort of service. I don’t want to risk that relationship for myself. I don’t necessarily want my client to have a bad experience and then that kind of come back to me. And so I know there’s even an attorney that I had interviewed once about strategic relationships and they had said, “If I’m going to send a client over to a financial advisor, I’m putting risk out there with my client relationships. So I have to strongly be invested in that advisor and know about their services before I’m going to send someone over to them.”
And so I think there’s that kind of professional risk. There’s the credibility risk around it. If my client doesn’t get along with that advisor, are they going to think poorly of me? Does my credibility go down? Does my professional level go down? So there’s always that consideration as part of a risk.
Yeah, for sure. So I’d love to get back to the referral management system that you were talking about, Melissa. And so you said there’s a three-step and a five-step. Can you talk us through the components of each of those?
Yeah. So I’ll start first with the three-step, which is really the client side. So the three step, the first step being to make sure that you contact a referral source and say thank you for the referral that they’ve sent. So many times this step is missed. The advisor gets a referral and they’re so focused on calling that referral back that they fail to actually contact the referral source to say thank you. A handwritten note is always great. A phone call. We even encourage a little token of gratitude, some sort of little gift that you could also give, just to say thank you. A great example is Shari’s Berries or cookies or something like that even, just to say thank you.
The second step is really enhancing the referral source relationship by contacting your client to provide the referral source status. So if I’m a client and I made a referral, whether that referral comes on or not, it’s good to let that referral source know kind of what the status is. And we don’t want to overshare, especially with a client, but it’s more about, “Hey, thanks for sending Mary Jo over. It was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it.” If it went well, you might ask for additional information, “How did my name come up? Kind of what was that conversation?” And if things don’t progress with Mary, you could just let that client know, “I did meet with Mary and maybe things weren’t kind of aligned or the services she was looking for I actually know a CPA that was a great contact for her.” Or maybe you weren’t even able to get in touch with that referral. So just letting them know.
And then that third step is following up with the referral source. So let that referral source know about the outcome, the good, the bad, the ugly. We don’t want to overshare, but just making sure to kind of close the loop with them.
I’d like to ask your opinion about something, because in there you talked about certainly sending a thank you note to the referral source and you also talked about a gift. So we’ve talked about this a couple of different ways on the program and that, I’m more in the camp of don’t give a specific gift for a specific referral because it runs the risk of making it more transactional and less relational. Can you give us your perspective on that?
That’s a good point. And I have seen some businesses where they’ve said, if you make a referral, we’ll give you a $25 gift card to the grocery store, whatever it is.
Buying a referral.
Exactly.
Good deal.
Right. I will say I lean more towards gifts like cookies, or like the Shari’s Berries where it’s a little bit less like you’re buying the referral and more of kind of a token of gratitude. And also there’s a difference between marketing that gift. Businesses that market and say, “I’ll give you a $25 dollar referral card,” is different than them just being surprised when a Shari’s Berries bouquet comes in. So I lean towards the latter of it being kind of a nice surprise versus putting it out there in your marketing to say, “Hey, we’ll give you a $25 gift card for every referral that you send over.” I’ve seen both, but I definitely lean towards the token of gratitude where they’re not going to be aware that it’s coming.
Yeah.
And also, what I do like about that is that there’s no clear economic value associated.
Yeah.
Right?
Right.
It’s not the $5 gift card. It’s not the $25. It feels a bit more thoughtful. It’s an acknowledgement.
Absolutely.
Yeah. That’s a good point. So your strategy incorporates those strategic alliances, the referrals that you’re working on stimulating from strategic partners. What’s the value proposition to that strategic partner? So obviously the advisor has a value proposition for clients. What’s the proposition for the partner?
Yeah. So when it comes to that proposition and really the kind of relationship and what that would kind of look like, you should really have a well-defined strategy. And like you just mentioned, you have a value proposition that’s client facing, you’ll also want one that’s COI facing. Why should they work with you? And that’s really what a value proposition is about. It’s the why. Why they should care, why they should want to partner with you. And outside of that, we also talk about having a defined strategy as well when looking to establish that strategic alliance. So things like a first step, and we go through a kind of a three-step type of process, an active pursuit, relationship development, and then relationship management. But as part of even that value proposition, letting your COIs know that there’s certain aspects to this relationship that are different than others.
So for example, maybe there’s opportunities for joint projects. So I want to partner with you as part of our value proposition to enhance our client education and also be able to provide information on your space. Let’s say I’m looking to target an estate planner and I’m looking to enhance my family preparedness planning strategy, multi-generational services. That’s a great value proposition if that’s going to be your target COI. Because not only is it what you can bring to the table, but it’s what can they get out of that partnership and coming together, and it’s the joint work opportunity. There’s one example, there’s an office that I worked with and they came to me and they had said, “We really want to work on our COI strategy. And we really want a strategy around developing relationships with estate planners. We don’t have estate planners yet. We have a few CPAs, a few other COIs, but this year we’re really going to work on multi-generational planning and we’re going to enhance our service model.”
So what we did as part of the first step to this process, which is active pursue, is define your strategy and also figure out who your targets are. We figured out who their targets are. Whether it’s through networking, we also asked their top clients, “Do you work with an estate planner? Would you be comfortable making an introduction?” And then we targeted about 10 to 15 estate planners to reach out to with a certain strategy. And as part of that, not only the value proposition and other things that we shared with them, but the opportunity for joint projects, and the joint project, we actually outlined for them, to say, “Every quarter, we want to provide a virtual seminar. We’re going to invite 10 of our top clients and we’d love for you to invite 10 of your top clients. And we’re going to have it as a bring a friend event. So that way, they’re also going to bring either a family member or friend along to this meeting.”
And I will tell you with this office, in the first two meetings, they had generated 46 new clients.
Wow.
Yeah, it was pretty phenomenal to see the outcome. And of course the estate planner was happy, the financial advisors were happy, and they created this strong connection for the COI. So that is just a great example of kind of walking through this process.
And then the third step is all about relationship maintenance. So you want to have a plan when it comes to maintaining that strong relationship you just built. So for example, with the estate planners, they said, “At least once a month, we just want to do a quick coffee catch-up. It can be virtually, but we just want to see how things are going on your side. Let’s talk about the best suited clients for our type of relationship. Let’s talk about our next educational event.” Make sure that you have that ongoing relationship maintenance and communication plan.
And it doesn’t need to just be professional. Once you can also get on a personal level with COIs and get to know them too, that’s another big part about relationship maintenance, that kind of strengthens that.
So what’s interesting about it is you’re describing this strategic alliance. It’s more formal. It sounds more formal. It feels like there’s a commitment on both sides. Is that fair?
That’s very fair. Yes.
And so I guess then, not everybody’s right for that. Right?
Yeah.
Which I think is kind of an important point, that not every COI is going to be willing or able to step in and partner with you. So, we’ve got to be willing to say no and really be selective, I imagine, about who you actually approach.
100%, yeah. So even in this example of this office that I worked with, they did have multiple COIs that they had reached out to, but to your point, Julie, some of them may not want that full kind of engagement. And so you have to kind of figure out who’s going to be the best person and best relationship for that engagement especially if you’re wanting someone where it’s a strong engagement versus someone where you don’t really hear from each other and it’s just kind of nice when you get a referral here and there. They definitely did not want that. They wanted that strong relationship. And granted, many offices kind of have a mix of that from a few COIs that send in one or two clients, to those really strong relationships where you’re saying, “How can we kind of partner together?”
It sort of reminds me of some conversations I’ve had with advisors on COIs where they’ve been sharing that they’re targeting a bunch of COIs and I kept trying to flip it around and say, “You’re interviewing them.” Right?
Yeah.
You’re not asking for the sale here. You’re trying to find out if they’re right. Do you talk to advisors about, I mean, if they have a client who does business, that’s a form of due diligence, I guess.
Sure.
But how do you figure out who’s right for you?
Oh, that’s a good one. And that’s definitely part of this process, the first step, which is active pursuit, figuring out who’s going to be that right COI. And this is part of, I love that you mentioned an interview process, because I completely get on board with that. Have an outline of what you’re going to talk to a COI about. And I also encourage an outline of expectations. So we talk about, “Hey, when you call my office, I just want to let you know as part of our COI relationship you’re going to get a call back within 24 hours. Same thing if you email me.” Kind of managing those expectations, managing expectations around for COIs. We want to at least be able to touch base once a quarter, things like that to make sure you’re getting the right relationship. So I encourage as a first step having that interview process and outlining those expectations to make sure that you’re getting the right COI relationship for you.
Well, and I really like the idea of that because one of the things that I hear from advisors a lot is, “Well, we’ve sent five clients over there and they haven’t sent anyone back.” And so naturally I would ask, “Well, did you talk about it?” And they don’t. So I really like the idea that you’re going to those folks and you’re having a conversation where, as you say, you’re setting those expectations. And also I think what you’re sort of implying there too, is that not only do you want to interview people and choose the right ones to pursue, but that you can acknowledge up too that not everyone is going to get on board with it just because you suggest it. You might find five or six firms that you’ve interviewed and you think are good and they may not respond to this. Right?
Right. Absolutely. Yep. And that gives you the indication of if it’s going to work out or not.
I was going to say, sometimes just asking the question, “Can you tell me about your service level agreement or something?” It becomes pretty clear, if they don’t have one, this may not be the target firm for you.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Exactly.
Hey, it’s Steve, we’ll get back to the show in just a minute, but first I’d like to make you an offer. Every week I send out a tip or an idea to help you become more referable. It might be something I’ve picked up during an advisory board meeting. It might be an idea from one of our amazing guests. Every other week I announce a new interview on the podcast so never miss an episode, or maybe it’s something I’ve picked up from a new research report, and I deliver it right to your inbox. Would you like to become a little more referable each week? Then send an email to steve@theclientdrivenpractice.com and I’ll even throw in my latest alert, Five Reasons You Need to Listen to Your Clients Now Before Someone Else Does. Just put five reasons in the subject line. That’s steve@theclientdrivenpractice.com and put five reasons in the subject line. And I’ll send you your free guide right away, and then a little tip about how to become more referable every week. Now, back to the show.
You’ve also talked about creating specific marketing pieces to promote referrals. Can you tell us a little bit about what you would put in one of those or what you would cover in those kinds of marketing pieces?
Yeah. So when it comes to marketing, I think about this one office I worked with. She’s a million dollar producer, and this year she really wanted to focus on getting the right COIs. When we went through her list, she had about eight to 10, and generally they would send in one or two, her best one was a CPA and the other best one was a current client, but she really didn’t have that strong relationship. And so one of the big things that we worked on was creating the formal marketing pieces around a COI relationship. And so what we did, and what I suggest to have as kind of foundational pieces, is starting first with kind of an overview deck, like a PDF or not PDF, a PowerPoint. We did turn it into a PDF to actually have kind of a brochure deliverable, but make sure it outlines a little bit about your firm, your service model like Julie just mentioned. If they can’t talk about their service model for me, that’s definitely a red flag. Same thing with the value proposition. Share your value proposition. A client experience. What is your client experience? Because this goes back to when we first started the conversation. If I’m a COI, I need to know what a client experience looks like for me to feel comfortable.
And then also for a COI share that referral management process that we were talking about beforehand. Let that COI know, “Hey, when you send someone into me, here’s the five steps I’m going to go through. And by the way, the very first step is me calling you to let you know this referral reached out.” So it’s building up that comfort level. And these types of pieces, they not only seek to build that professionalism, but they also help a COI understand your business and what your referral process looks like, which is going to establish that confidence.
Sure. And so you recommend also having material for clients, is that right? How does that differ?
Yeah. So when it comes to clients, I think it’s really important to have deliverable pieces that make it easy for your clients to send in referrals. I recently interviewed a client advisory board for a $2 million producer, and I got to interview their top five clients. And we went over what would help the referral conversation? And some of the things that they had mentioned from a marketing perspective is that service model. So we actually went through the advisor service model and they said, “Oh, if we could have a piece like this that we could send to family and friends, it would make it so much easier to refer you.”
They also mentioned not only the value proposition, but here at AssetMark, we have this client vision piece and it goes through, when you’re working with a client, what was the client vision? What are the things that you’re currently working on? And all five of their top clients said, “This would be a great piece for next generation planning. I would be very comfortable giving this to my son or my daughter and giving them examples of how I’m working with a financial advisor without having to tell them what my net worth is or what the accounts are.” It’s more of kind of that work that they’re doing together.
And another thing that I thought was really interesting when interviewing this board was so many advisors do education events. This advisor specifically did two webinars a month. One was market facing and one was educational facing, and all the clients love these educational events. And they said, “If you created a marketing piece that made it really easy for me to send these links to my family and friends so I could share the webinars that I thought were really interesting, that would really be helpful for sending you direct referrals.”
And so part of the marketing that we did was we created a whole page on the advisor’s website where clients could send referrals and clients could also copy the links and send them out to any family or friends where they think it might be applicable for them.
You know what?
So.
Go ahead.
So, as you described that, Melissa, is that piece different than a marketing brochure for the firm, and if it is how, because I’m not clear on that.
Yeah. I wouldn’t say it’s much different than a marketing brochure for the firm. I think it’s more about the client awareness that these pieces exist and making it easy for a client to be able to send that information out to others. And it was interesting to get their feedback and when it comes to clients and having pieces that make it easy for them to refer. In preparation for our conversation, I was going through, I love research reports, and Julie always has great ones out there too, but the Capital Group, they have a new report out there on pathways to growth. And one of their stats in there was sources of new clients at 69% client and professional referrals. And so this goes back to, for me, making sure that you have the pieces that make it easy to send those referrals in, is so important.
Yeah, I think that it is. And we’ve been talking a lot as well about just the little tweaks you can make to content because we expect a lot of clients. They have to like something and then capture the link and then send it to a client and then hopefully do it in a way that’s really compelling. But I mean there’s technology, pretty simple technology, to just click here and share it with a friend. Then you can actually control the narrative that’s going. And I think just there’s all these little things that make it easier for people to share.
Right.
So, yeah. I like having a page you can send them to. I think that that’s a really effective way to go.
Yeah. And so would that page have like a link, for example, you could just copy on there and forward to someone or how would that page work?
Yeah. So that’s one of the things that we’ve talked about was could you just make it easy enough to click the link, either copy it or have a link on there where says, “Click here to send out.” And then all of a sudden, an email pops up and it’s already auto-filled. They just have to fill in the email and hit send.
Interesting.
We’ve done that lately and people use it. And when we talk about controlling the narrative, that’s where I think it becomes important because now you’re writing that message. Right?
Yeah.
Right.
That comes with caution. Write it well. But, yeah, I mean that just makes everything easier.
Yeah. And, I’ll reinforce that, Julie. I think anytime you have the opportunity to create the narrative that goes out to the referred person, because most clients, when they refer someone, it’s, “Well, you should call Julie. We’ve worked with her for a long time and she’s terrific. And our portfolio is doing okay.” And that’s not necessarily the text that you want to have go out.
Deep, meaningful, value proposition.
Exactly. Exactly. Melissa, you showed me one of those pieces in preparation for this. And one of the things I was fascinated about was that the sample piece that you showed me broke down the value of advice. It actually had numbers associated with the value of different functions, the advisor carries those out. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how can you calculate those numbers?
Yeah, that’s a great question. And we’ve had so many advisors try to articulate this. Try to articulate in hard numbers the value of an advisor and why you should be working with one. So, Steve, to your point, we actually built that into a marketing piece for COIs around, again, why you should work with an advisor. And we actually leveraged Russell Investments. They came out with a Value of an Advisor study back in 2019, and they explained the formula that’s behind it. So they developed a formula to help you really understand that value of working with an advisor and hiring one. And their formula, there are five components to it.
The first one, which stands for A, is annual rebalancing of investment portfolios. B is the behavioral mistakes individual investors typically make and how advisors are helping you kind of mitigate that. C is for the cost of basic investment-only management. And then P is for planning costs and ancillary services. And then the last one, T being tax smart planning and investing. So what they did was they took the value of each of these areas to kind of come up with that value of a financial advisor and why you should work with them, because many investors, they consider working with an advisor, but they always, or not always, but probably are wondering, “What do I get for that fee that I’m paying?” After all the S&P is up and we all know that wealth management information is at our fingertips. We can hire a robo advisor. So what we really getting by working with an individual?
And so that’s what Russell Investments kind of outlined as their formula for the value that an advisor brings.
Well, I think, one of the things you’re reminding me of is, and Steve and I have talked about this on other episodes around having a system.. Just knowing what you’re going to send to people, knowing when you’re going to send it, and not having to reinvent the wheel all of the time. So I love the idea of having the three step and the five step management system. If someone was thinking about that and not starting from square one, but just trying to get started, how would they do that? And how long do you think it would take before maybe it started to net some results?
Yeah. Well, if you’re thinking about that and kind of the first step of being, how do I even go about building out this kind of system? Here at AssetMark we actually have the full process built out in a workflow. And if you’re really looking at kind of the entrepreneurial side of kind of doing it yourself, the first step I would suggest is really outlining the process in either an Excel type document or Word to begin crafting out kind of that workflow.
So step one, when a referral contacts you, what do you do? Send that thank you. And then go through your different steps. And if you do have staff members, I also suggest including them in that workflow development to get their feedback. And once you have it outlined, whether you’re going to leverage a resource from AssetMark or you want to develop your own process, once you have it established, those procedures, leverage a CRM system. A CRM system being client relationship management system, like a Redtail or a Workflow, or not Workflow, Redtail or Salesforce to build in that workflow to make it easy for yourself and your staff members.
So that way, as soon as the referral comes in, boom, you open up your workflow. Here’s my step one. Here’s my step two. You can check the box and when you completed each of your steps. And when we talk about success, so success in this system is not really necessarily time-bound, but more so based upon really the effort that’s derived from implementation and also marketing. So once you start to make COIs and your clients aware of the referral management system, the hope is that it’s going to increase the confidence of sending in a referral. And we talk about the psychology of this process is that the behavior is what you really want to reinforce and reward. So that way it’s repeated regardless of the outcome, regardless if this person becomes a client or not, what we want to drive home and repeat is that behavior of sending in the referral.
And so let’s talk about that. So let’s say that you get into a conversation with a strategic partner and you have that whole presentation and lay everything out and you both agree let’s go do this, but then you find that you’re following through on things and you may even be sending folks over there, but you’re really not seeing anything back. How do you address that with that partner?
Steve, that’s a great point. It’s one that many advisors bring up. They’ll say, “How many referrals should I be sending and wait until I hear back from them, or if they send me a referral.” If it’s, “I send them one, will they send me one?” And that’s the hard part. And it can really be frustrating when it comes to that lack of referrals from a COI or partner. This brings me back to one office I worked with. This advisor was becoming a CDFA, Certified Divorce Financial Analyst. And his COI pool is going to be divorce attorneys. And I will tell you, attorneys are very difficult COIs to develop a relationship with. And so what we did was we started with our process, identify who’s the target group. And we had about 10 to 15 that we were targeting. And he already had about three that he had been kind of working with. It was kind of mediocre. Sometimes he’d get a referral, sometimes not.
And I had said to him, “Would you be comfortable if we reached out to the attorney that you’re most comfortable with and ask if I can do an interview with him? Just to learn a little bit more about his thoughts around referrals and comfortability and what that kind of looks like.” And so I ended up interviewing this attorney, and one of the first things he had said to me was, “Melissa, do you know how many advisors reach out to me and want me as a COI?” He said, “Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where if someone calls, I don’t even entertain the conversation anymore, because I don’t know anything about their business, oftentimes they don’t have professional materials to share with me.” This goes back to the service model that we talked about beforehand. “And if I don’t feel comfortable with that, then it’s most likely I’m not going to send a referral. And me as an attorney putting my name on that referral, really takes a lot. So the reason why I haven’t been sending in referrals is because the advisor,” let’s call him Joe Jones, “he didn’t have kind of that portfolio of professional materials.”
And so that was one of the things the attorney had mentioned that, “If you really want differentiate yourself, think about the fact that you’re probably going against 10 to 20 other financial advisors from this area that are calling me all the time. What makes you different?” And it’s also, one of the things the attorney also mentioned was, “If I’m going to be part of a COI relationship, I want there to be the ability to meet other professionals. And I would love if we could have something like a COI board where we met once a quarter, and I got to meet with other COIs and professionals of a certain caliber.” And so that was one of the things that we actually implemented for this office. And I will tell you at first I was a little skeptical, because it’s hard enough to even get a client advisory board, but a COI board. I was a little hesitant, but I will tell you, it ended up being amazing.
And there’s a few offices now that I work with where we do have COI boards. We have certain agendas, and we actually talk about calling out how many referrals have been sent and those types of things and having the open conversations. But that was one of the ideas, and that was an office I worked with about 15 years ago. And since having that interview with the attorney, the advisor was able to obviously deepen that relationship by just even asking that attorney what would it take and being able to differentiate himself. So I think that when it comes to those frustrations, if this is really a COI that you feel strongly about, have that conversation, have the coming to Jesus talk around, “Hey, I just want to put everything out there and kind of lay it on the table. And maybe I can just learn from you. You don’t necessarily even have to send me anyone, but I would just love to learn about what it would kind of take?”
Yeah.
Imagine, just ask them. Sometimes they’ll tell you.
How about that?
How about that?
Well, there’s a lot of really good stuff in here, Melissa, and I’d love to talk more about it. We’re kind of at time though. And, of course, this particular topic is just a tiny little bit of what you and AssetMark do, so if anyone who’s listening to this wants to find out more, where can they look you up?
Yeah. So any information that you’re looking for, I would suggest starting with assetmark.com. We have contact information on our website. We also have webinars and certain deliverables that you can download as well. But if you are interested in getting in contact, we do have our information up there.
Awesome. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for joining us on the show. It’s a lot of really good information. We appreciate your sharing it with us.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Julie. I really appreciate this opportunity.
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 at becomingreferable.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.