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RECORDING COMMENCES:

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 talk with Sam Richter, the foremost expert on sales intelligence and digital reputation management and the creator of the Know More System, that’s K-N-O-W More. I love talking with Sam. I’ve seen his presentation so many times and he’s one of the few people who, when I go to one of his presentations, I cannot write fast enough to keep up with all of the good ideas coming out of that. He tells us how to use research to develop connections and rapport with people, whether it be the first time that we meet them or whether it be an existing client, to open up new kinds of conversations and get introduced to new people.

In this episode, he’ll tell us how to use social media to boost your new client acquisition without needing compliance approval. We’ll talk about how to use the internet research to ask better questions. We’ll learn how leveraging LinkedIn can get us better introductions and we’ll talk about what Web 3.0 means for you and your social media interactions. We had a lot of fun with this conversation, I hope that you enjoy listening to it too. And now, Sam Richter.

Sam, welcome to Becoming Referable, we’re very excited to have you here today.

Sam Richter:
I’m just really honored. I’m a big fan of both of yours and the great work that you do and I’m just thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with you guys today.

Steve Wershing:
I love the stuff that you do and that’s why I’m so excited to have you. Let’s jump into that, you are the foremost expert on sales intelligence. You’re one of the few people whose program I can remember going to and I could not write fast enough to keep up with all of the ideas that were coming out of it. For the people who don’t know you yet, what is sales intelligence and how can and advisor use it to grow their business?

Sam Richter:
Sales intelligence is really learning about the other person. When you think about an advisor — let’s go back before Google, 20 years ago when an advisor would meet with a prospect. That prospect might give the advisor an hour or two-hour lunch. Why? Because 20 years ago there was no such thing as Google and if you were a prospect you really needed to meet that advisor. You needed to build a relationship, but you also didn’t even know what that advisor did for a living. Well, fast forward to today, our prospects, especially our high net worth individuals that might be a little bit more sophisticated if you will. The likelihood that they’ve, for lack of a better term, Googled that advisor prior to a meeting is pretty darn close to 100%. So, our buyers today have buyer’s intelligence. They’re pretty smart about us. They’ve gone in, they’ve obviously looked at our company website, they might have even looked at some of the FPA websites and things like that and learned about the advisor.

Yet as advisors, often times when we go into a prospect meeting, we don’t know very much about that prospect. Maybe we’ve looked at their LinkedIn profile. Maybe it was a referral. But we really don’t know too much about them. The problem there is, when we as advisors go in and start talking about asset allocation models, clients don’t care. Prospects don’t care. What prospects really care about is themselves. They’re massively passionate about themselves, their own goals, their family. What we need to do as advisors when we go in and speak with a prospect, we need to make sure the first words out of our mouth are about them and what do they care about.

Sales intelligence is really nothing more than using the internet, but using it in ways that 99% of the planet have no clue how to do. Using it to quickly, and that’s the operative word, quickly find information about the other person so in a meeting the first words out of our mouth are about what they care about.

Steve Wershing:
That’s brilliant. What are some of the ways, if it’s not jumping into detail too fast, what are some of the ways that people can — so you get referred to somebody and they give you a call and you arrange for a time to meet. You’re going to get to face-to-face with this person for the first time, what are some of the things that advisors should be doing to prepare for that meeting.

Sam Richter:
We talked about one, LinkedIn is for sure. We’re getting close to 500 million people with LinkedIn profiles. What’s a LinkedIn profile? It’s somebody’s resume. Why does somebody have a LinkedIn profile? Well, quite simply, they want you to find them. So, just going in and doing a LinkedIn search — and the easy way to do that is, one of the things that’s important to know is called Boolean logic, a fancy term for how to search better. When you’re in LinkedIn, and I’m looking for you Steve and you’ve got an interesting, not an interesting, but a unique —

Steve Wershing:
We’re not going to call it interesting, oh okay.

Sam Richter:
If I go into Google and type in Stephen Wershing, I’m going to get your LinkedIn profile. But, if you’re name was Steven Smith, there’s probably 400 Steven Smiths in LinkedIn. So, the first thing to do, is to make sure that you type somebody’s name within quotation marks and then put a plus sign or AND in all upper case in LinkedIn and then part of their company name or maybe where they live or something like that. Again, if I’m looking for Steven Smith, I pull up the right Steven Smith.

What I’m looking for in someone’s LinkedIn profile is something in common. It’s really something where I can ask a better question. Most good advisors have gone through some form of sales training before and ever sales training course out there will tell you the need to ask great questions. Everybody nods their head, “Yeah, yeah I’ve got to ask great questions.” But nobody tells you how to ask great questions. The way to ask a great question is to find something in common. Here’s the language I use, it’s kind of corny, but it works really well and it might be something like this: “Hey, Steven before I meet with people I like to do a little bit of homework. You’re a busy guy and I don’t want to waste your time. Guess what I found? I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and I see you’re a professional speaker. That’s really interesting because I do that for a living as well. Tell me a little bit about your business.” I immediately get you talking about you and I can guarantee you that you’re going to share with me information as long as I keep my mouth shut and listen, you’re going to share with me so much more information than doing it the old-fashioned way of, “Hi Steven, I know we only have an hour together. My boss gave me this list of 73 questions I need to ask you, so let’s just get started. How much money do you make?”

Steve Wershing:
I’d like to pull something specific out of that because it’s one of my favorite things that you say that I can’t even tell you how often I’ve used this. The particular construction of “I did a little homework. I wanted to make sure that this meeting was valuable for both us, so I did a little bit of homework about you and guess what I found?”

Sam Richter:
Yeah.

Steve Wershing:
That question is brilliant.

Sam Richter:
Well thank you. Again, it’s sounds a little bit corny, but I have to tell you it really works because the first part of that “Hey before I meet with people I like to do a little bit of homework.” Right there you’ve just differentiated yourself from pretty much every advisor, every accountant, every lawyer, every salesperson this person’s ever met with. And then, “Guess what I found?” The reason that’s important is, we’ve all done this before, right. Julie sets up a meeting with me and I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll meet with you Tuesday at the coffee shop.” And then Julie you’re an advisor and I show up and I look at my calendar and go, “Oh, God I have a meeting with a financial advisor, I don’t have time to do this, I’ve got to get my dog to the vet. Oh fine, it’s an 8:00 o’clock meeting, I better go.” So, I go and you start talking asset allocation models and where’s my mind? My brain’s thinking dog to the vet. When can I get out of here? I’ve got a Board meeting today. But the second you say to somebody, “I did a little homework on you and guess what I found?” When you say that phrase, “And guess what I found?” You have the other person’s full attention. “What’d you find?” Right?

“Well, I was looking at your LinkedIn profile” which is okay, you’re not a stalker. “I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and Steven I see that you are on the Board of Directors of the Hochstein School of Music & Dance. That’s really interesting, do you have a family member involved in dance? How did you get into that?” And, I bet you’ve got a great story there.

Steve Wershing:
Sure, and because it’s my gig, I’m thrilled to talk about it.

Julie Littlechild:
I’m interested when you’re talking about finding information on people you’ve identified. Are some of these same tactics used to actually find the people that you want to meet with if you know what I mean. There’s sort of two parts of it.

Sam Richter:
Absolutely. Julie, in my presentations I actually site your study. A study from Absolute Engagement’s Investors Research program where I believe there was an interview of almost 30,000 clients of advisors and the question asked of those clients was, would you give somebody a referral if the advisor asked for the referral by name? What does that mean? We’ve all been in a situation where someone says, “Julie, we’ve been working together for five years, I hope you’re really happy with me. Hey, do you know anybody else that might be happy with me?” I’m uncomfortable. You’re uncomfortable. It’s going to be, fine, ok, I’ve got a cousin on my mother’s side, I hate his guts anyhow, so I’ll give you his number.

What the study showed, if you ask for a referral by name, so instead of saying do you know somebody who knows somebody, you say, “Hey, I see that you know Spenser Segal. How well do you know Spenser?” “Oh, gosh Spenser’s awesome, we’ve known each other for years.” “Customer service is, hopefully you’ve experienced, is really important to us at our firm. We don’t want to get too big, but obviously like any business, we want to grow, but it’s got to be the right fit. I was doing a little research on Spenser and he just seems like a great guy and a perfect fit for our firm, what do you think?” “Oh, Spenser would be awesome.” “If I sent you a note do you think you could forward that? Oh, forget that, you know what? I’ll take you both out to lunch.”

Not only do the statistics show you’re going to give us that referral, the key here is that you are emotionally invested now in making sure that connection happens. The logical question out of that now is how do I find out who my clients know? There is a number of ways to do that. The first one, LinkedIn. A lot of people link with each other on LinkedIn. The old LinkedIn interface you could actually find your client and see everybody who they knew. The new LinkedIn interface does not allow that. But what you can do is you can still build your list—and we can talk about that if you’d like—sing Boolean queries within LinkedIn, build your list of who you’d like to meet. Then when you identify who you’d like to meet, you can find out who do you know that knows that person. Ask for the referral by name.

Another way to do that is with Facebook. Facebook’s search engine is horrible, so I’ve built my own search engine tool. You can go to www.yougotsocial.com that’s Y-O-U G-O-T social.com and you can just follow the instructions and search for people on LinkedIn, search for your clients on LinkedIn. Once you’re in, if you follow the instructions, you can figure out who their friends are. Same type of thing. Other ways. Find out what boards your clients are on. How do you do that? Well, most non-profits will list their Board members in an annual report. You can do a Google search by doing again, let’s say Spenser Segal. Put Spenser Segal within quotation marks in a Google search, plus Board of Directors. Put Board of Directors in quotation marks, or — or being in all uppercase. When you put or in uppercase you’re telling Google I want this or that. Or, BOARD OF ADVISORS, Board of Advisors in all uppercase. File type colon .pdf. File type colon tells Google you’re looking for a specific type of document, in this instance a .pdf file because most annual reports are posted online as .pdf files.

Again, Spenser Segal within quotes, Board of Directors or Board of Advisors, both of those within quotes, file type colon .pdf, I’ll pull up any board that he might serve on. I can look at that list and quite possibly, I’m sure as an advisor, I’ll find someone else on that board that would be a great client of mine and I can then ask Spenser for that referral.

Steve Wershing:
I think this is one of those critical things and Bill Cates talk about it and a lot of people talk about it and that’s the distinction between a referral and an introduction. I think you’re right that that’s really a referral, but I think too many advisors are thinking of referral as a passive thing like, “Oh, you should call Joe.” The key here is that you’re specifically asking for an introduction to a specific person as opposed to just asking them to give you names.

Sam Richter:
My best friend is a professional speaker as well. Ross Bernstein is awesome. What Ross does after his speeches is he will question, “Hey, what kind of speaker are you looking for next year?” If he determines it’s a right fit, he doesn’t make an introduction, he will actual email me, email the client and say, “This is the guy you need to book. Don’t even bother looking at anyone else, this is the guy you need to book.” If they haven’t answered, he will pick up the phone and call them. Ross is actually emotionally invested in making sure I get the business. In fact, we joke, he actually has more fun when I land a program based on his referral and vice versa. I get super excited when he lands business based on a referral. It’s not just a passive introduction like you said. I think Bill’s amazing. It’s being emotionally invested in making sure that connection happens.

By the way, it comes from being genuine and authentic. Listen, if I’ve got a great advisor and he’s helped me and my family achieve our goals and I know that if I get hit by a bus my wife can call him and financially everything is taken care of, why wouldn’t I want to share him with all of my friends? Genuinely want to share him. Now, am I am going to proactively do that? No, I’m not. But if my advisor reached out to me and said, “Hey, how well do you know Julie Littlechild?” I’m going to say, “I know her amazingly well. She’d be a great referral, a great client of yours.” It’s like you said, it’s being from that place of being genuine.

Julie Littlechild:
It feels like, this may sound like an obvious point, but we don’t focus enough, I think, when we talk about referrals on the homework that the advisor needs to do. Right?

Sam Richter:
I think that’s right.

Julie Littlechild:
When we talk about being proactive, it’s not necessarily, “Hey, do you know any rich people?” But, it’s really digging in and finding something that once you find it, feels entirely comfortable and appropriate because it’s meaningful.

Sam Richter:
I would agree. Think about this, let’s say Julie I’m your advisor and we’ve got a great relationship, it’s been wonderful. I owe it to you to do my homework. I’m not going to ask you to do it for me, “Hey Julie do you know anybody else that could use my services?” But here’s the other thing, the value to the advisor that comes out of doing one’s homework, if I like working with you, there’s a demographic profile and there’s a psychographic profile. What do I mean? A demographic profile is somebody’s net worth, how old they are, size of their family, are they a small business owner? Are they retired? Are they a teacher? Those are the demographic characteristics. But I’m also interested in the psychographic characteristics. As an advisor, maybe the psychographic characteristics are things like, this person appreciates advice. This person is willing to listen. This person is willing to make changes. Those are the types of people that I work with.

So, Julie, if you and I have had a wonderful client/advisor relationship over the years, well I want to meet more people like you. How do I do that? I need to find out where you hang out. What boards you belong to. What golf club you belong to. What sports leagues are your kids — where do you volunteer? Because the reality is Julie, you’re only going to volunteer and work with people, you’re only going to be on the boards and work with people who you like. The people who you like are probably like you, so therefore, by me, as the advisor, doing a little bit of homework on the front end, not only am I showing that I appreciate you, but the likelihood of me having a successful introduction or referral is very high. But, even more important, the success of that relationship, the opportunity is much higher as well because I’m finding people like you.  Again, I, as the advisor, am the one that has to do that homework.

Julie Littlechild:
Do you also recommend — let’s pick up on that example, you’re my client, I’ve discovered you’re on the board of something, there’s somebody on that board who would, I assume, be a good profile. But the reality is, of course, they may not be a great client because they’re on the board and they seem to fit, but they’re really not a nice person or they don’t appreciate. Do you try to put any of that onus on the client by saying, “I’d love to meet this person and by the way, here’s the kind of people that I think I can help” and make sure that that person really fits to the extent that they know?

Sam Richter:
Yes, absolutely. You nailed. Now, some of the language I might use would be something like, again I said this a little bit earlier but I’ll expand on it. “Julie, hopefully you’ve experienced great service from our firm and we like to grow a little bit, but culture fit, values fit are really, really important. For example, the reason I like working with you Julie is not only are you a great person, but you’re willing to listen. You take advice. You push back when you don’t agree with me and that’s what I’m looking for. I see you’re on the board of this art museum and this guy Spenser Segal, his name popped up and he’s someone I’ve always respected and I would love to reach out to him. Before I ask you to maybe make an introduction or a referral, do you think he’d be a good fit for the firm?” Ask you. Because you’re going to probably — you’re not going to “No, that guy’s a jerk. He’d be horrible.” “Oh, okay. Thank you.” Or, “Yeah, gosh. I never thought of it, Sam. He’d be an awesome fit. I’d be happy to get you folks together.”

Julie Littlechild:
Clearly, we’re going to have to put Spenser’s contact details in the show notes so that you can all—

Steve Wershing:
They’re going to have to be in the show notes. Exactly.

Julie Littlechild:
Reach out and try to get his business. I think he’d appreciate that.

Sam Richter:
Yeah. I’m sure he’d just love that.

Julie Littlechild:
Let’s do that.

Sam Richter:
Go into Google. If you’re listening right know, go into Google. Put his name in quotation marks. Spenser Segal plus a phone number or email, and I’m sure his contact information will come up. You just say to him, you were listening to the podcast and Spenser was open to having thousands of advisor relationships.

Steve Wershing:
That’s right, exactly. We should clarify, too, that Spenser spells his name a little funny.

Sam Richter:
I’m not going to tell you how to do it.

Steve Wershing:
That’s right. That’s the challenge. That’s the advisor challenge right there. Yeah, exactly. How can use some of these—these are great ideas that advisors just don’t get behind, and if they did, they would get more clients. How can you use some of these as part of a referral process as well as a client acquisition process? I guess the whole client introduction thing is what we’ve been talking about, right?

Sam Richter:
Yeah. I think when we think about referrals, let’s just go back to the whole concept that we started with, and that is that people are massively passionate about themselves. Again, doing one’s homework, finding a news article. There’s a great site, YouGotTheNews.com. It’s a search engine that looks at all those local newspaper articles, because all of us have appeared in articles. It’s a wedding announcement, a birth announcement. Maybe your company sponsors the 4^th of July parade in your town. Those local newspapers can be a wealth of information. If you can bring up things about the other person that we know that they care about—hey, Fred. I saw that, I was doing a little research before we met, and guess what I found? Gosh, I saw that your daughter scored three goals a couple weeks back to send the high school hockey team into the state tournament finals. Gosh, that’s so awesome. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

My kid plays hockey. Whatever. This is all about relationship business. When I talk on the stage, I talk about that there’s a lot of other speakers like me that talk about, you’ve got to be on LinkedIn. You’ve got to be Tweeting. You’ve got to be on Facebook. You’ve got to be doing radio ads. You’ve got to be doing podcast, brochures, trade shows. Hang out at the rotary. Those are all really important things, but those don’t win you any business. No high net worth individual is sitting there—I don’t want to say no, but it’s highly unlikely that a high new worth individual woke up this morning and said, I’m thinking of finding a new advisor. I’d like to go get a $1 million annuity. I think I’m going to go on Twitter and find somebody. Does that happen?

Julie Littlechild:
So, that doesn’t happen?

Sam Richter:
What I’d like to say is, all of those activities are important, but all those activities just get you in the maybe pile. What’s the maybe pile? The maybe pile is, you’re one of three. Congratulations. Stephen, if you’re looking for an advisor, you’re a high net worth individual. You decided, I’d like to meet an—maybe you stumbled upon a bunch of money. One of the companies you owned was sold for $1 billion. Are you going to look at one person? No. You’re going to get two or three people. Once you’ve narrowed it down to two or three people, in your mind, all three of those advisors basically sell the same stuff at pretty much the same price. Who are you going to do business with? Well, you’re going to do business with somebody who you like. How do you like somebody? It’s all really based on a personal connection. We’ve all met with people who ask great questions, meaningful questions, really engage with you. There’s this energy that comes across. You’re like, wow, I really like that person.

All of us have also met with people that really like to talk about themselves. Thanks so much for meeting, Stephen. Let’s spend the first few minutes talking about me, and then when we’re done, you can ask questions about me. All too often, too many advisors do that. It’s like, I don’t care. I want to talk about me, not you. When you have information about the other person and you’re genuine about it and you ask great questions, that’s how people make their decisions, because in the advisory world, it’s a relationship business. We all know that. Again, all those other things are super important, but that gets you in the maybe pile. What sales intelligence does is, it helps you get out of the maybe pile and get you to be the chosen person. Again, now, this is key, because you genuinely care. You have to genuinely care. You can’t use sales intelligence to manipulate people, but if you genuinely care, the techniques I’m sharing will work for you.

Steve Wershing:
You bring up something interesting, as well, because you started talking about the research that the potential client would do, and that also brings up the whole idea of the digital footprint that you project, or your reputation online. You’ve done some work in that area, too, right?

Sam Richter:
A lot of work. If sales intelligence is how to find information on others, the opposite of that is digital reputation management. Assuming people are searching for information on you, how do you control what they find? There’s the obvious stuff, like don’t do stupid things on Facebook. Don’t Tweet stupid things, but there’s the less obvious things. For example, in the world in which we live today, people are posting a lot of political things online. Some people go over the edge, but some are just, they’re just normal things. Hey, I’m disappointed in what Trump did. Or, hey, I’m disappointed in what the Democrats did. Not vitriolic, not hateful, just normal speech. That’s the law of unintended consequences. Again, you’re in the maybe pile. Clients looking at you and two other advisors. They feel one way.

They look at your Facebook post and they say, the guy is on the far left or the guy is on the far right. He’s a nice guy. I don’t disagree with him politically, but I’ve got two other options. I’ll go with the other two. I’ll go with one of the other two. It’s a lot of things like that, and people forget that it’s not just what you post online. It’s how do you respond to an email? Every day, we seem to see something online where somebody’s become a YouTube sensation because they just didn’t treat the waitress correctly. They weren’t nice to the person at the oil change facility. We forget that there’s a camera filming you there. A lot of it, it is. You have to project that because you are going to be Googled, and we need to make sure that what you want to be known as is what’s showing up.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. That makes sense. An enormous amount of sense. The trends, whether it’s technology or communication, are really changing the playing field, aren’t they? What are you seeing that we need to be more aware of, even as it relates to the different technologies out there?

Sam Richter:
I think first off, a lot of this is getting more personal. I that we’ve gone from Web 1.0, if you will, which was me talking to you. Web 2.0 is that conversation, that digital conversation, social media if you will. I don’t know if anybody’s coined this yet or anything, but I would say Web 3.0 is really more of that not just communication, but relevant and personal communication. Or said another way, I know there’s all this stuff out there. I don’t care about that. I just care about the three things that I need to know. In a weird way, in this crazy technology world in which we live, I think in this business, the advisor business, we all know that there’s robo advisors and those kinds of things. All those things have a really important role. There’s no question about it, but if you were to ask me the trend, I would say the trend is getting back to being more human. We tend to rely so much on email and voicemail and what we’re doing now. Podcasts and Skype and all this.

What advisors have to remember, in my opinion, at a certain level, you’re not a financial advisor. You’re the family CFO. You’re the family chief financial officer. You’re my advisor. I’m going to call you not only to talk about insurance and to talk about where I should invest my money, but also, hey, should I lease a car or should I buy a car? Hey, I’m thinking of sending—my kid’s going to be going to a college that I can’t really afford. What’s the best way to do that? It’s that advisor role. I think in a weird way, as we advance more in technology, I would encourage advisors to just remember to don’t take the people part out of it, because this is still a people business. That’s why I’m not worried that advisors are going to go away. Yes, there’s going to be a role for robo advisors and everybody doing things themselves. Even Warren Buffet the other day said that people should not use financial advisors. They should just invest in index funds. Yeah, if you want to maximize return with the least amount of expense, maybe that’s good advice. I don’t know. He’s Warren Buffet. Of course, it’s good advice.

In my opinion, that’s not why many people have an advisor. Why do I have an advisor? I have an advisor, I mentioned it earlier. I travel all over the country. I travel all over the world. God forbid something happens to me one day. I don’t want my family to worry about it. I want my family to be able to pick up the phone, make one phone call, and the person they’re talking to, they have a relationship with. That person understands my wife’s goals. They understand my goals, and I’m willing to pay a percentage of my assets under management to have that comfort level and to have that relationship. I think Julie, you were probably asking me, where are the trends going in technology? I can talk about virtual reality and all those kinds of things, but in the advisory business, in my opinion, the trend is going, be more human. Build a relationship on a human level. Leverage technology to build that relationship.

Julie Littlechild:
I was just going to say, it feels like there’s so much, and it can feel daunting. Even when you use the word Boolean commands or something. Some of us get a little anxiety over that. If somebody was listening to this and thought, I just want to dip my toe in and at least start getting better, are there one or two things you think that they could just do quickly and with their existing knowledge level?

Sam Richter:
Yeah. I would say, and this is going to sound so obvious and yet, I go all over the world and speak to financial advisors and very few of them do this. I call it the three by five. Spend three minutes trying to find five pieces of information, or five minutes trying to find three pieces of information prior to every meeting. This doesn’t have to be daunting. I bet you if we could do a survey of everybody listening right now and say, okay, how many of you on your last prospect meeting, five minutes before the meeting, pulled up that prospect’s either Facebook page or LinkedIn profile specifically to find something where you had something in common with the other person, with the goal of asking a good question? That sounds so obvious, and yet 90% of people say, no. I just kind of showed up to the coffee meeting and I was lucky to get there on time. It’s not hard. You just have to embed it into your process.

Now, I know there are advisors out there saying, hey, I don’t have time for this stuff. You’re probably right. Maybe you don’t. This is something that also can be delegated. One of the things that I teach to advisors is, give it to your assistant. Say, here’s the 12 prospect meetings I have next week. Give me a manila folder prior to each meeting, and just give me three, four, five interesting things about that person. Hey, I’m meeting with Sally Jones. Wow, she was an alternate on the ’76 Olympic figure skating team. Boy, I’m meeting with Phil Buffutnik, and he was a teacher at this high school, the same high school—he’s retired now, but it’s the same high school my kids have gone to. Something like that. It’s all you need. Just one or two interesting things about the other person. This doesn’t have to be hard, but it does have to be thoughtful.

Steve Wershing:
Your idea about delegating some of that stuff is really, it’s a great way to address it. In your talks, you’ve also talked about how you can just do it in the five minutes while you’re sitting. If you work with business owners, for example, in the five minutes that you sit in their lobby waiting for them to come out, you can be doing things. Could you recall a story that you’ve told in presentations about getting one of the biggest speaking and consulting things because of a breaking news story you’ve found while you were waiting for the guy to come downstairs from his office?

Sam Richter:
Yeah. I think you led up. There’s a number of them, but I’ll tell that specific story. Honestly, I would say it’s 100% of the reason we’re talking today. I had an opportunity to meet with Allianz. As everybody knows, huge life insurance company. Their U.S. headquarters are located in Minneapolis. I’m sitting in their lobby, and I do the three by five a few minutes before the meeting. I Google Allianz, and of course, I find their web page. Now, of course, I’m going to look at that, but it’s just their marketing brochure. What I do in Google is very similar to YouGotTheNews. I Google Allianz, and then on the results page, they’ll be a tab that says News. I’ll click on the News tab, and I’ll pull up a bunch of articles. Now, as we know, Allianz, huge company, so there’s thousands and thousands of articles. Great. I’ve got two minutes before the meeting. What do I do? On every Google result page, there’s a little button called Tools. Click on that button, and a little dropdown menu will appear. You’ll see a thing on the dropdown menu that says Anytime. Click on that Anytime button, and it allows you to sort your websites, or in this example, our news articles, by date. You can sort, show me articles from the past year, the past month, the past day.

I chose the past hour. I did that. One article appeared. It said, Allianz was just named best places to work by Fortune magazine. My contact comes down the stairs. First words out of his mouth, hey Sam. So nice to meet you. First words out of my mouth, hey, congratulations. He looked at me kind of weird and he said, what do you mean? I said, didn’t you get the news? He said, what news? I said, Allianz was just named best places to work by Fortune magazine. Huge smile comes to his face. Really? When did that happen? Oh, six minutes ago. I did that little Google thing before…but, I just gained permission to ask a great question. Hey, what makes this such a great place to work? For the next 20 minutes, what did my contact talk about? Something he was amazingly passionate about. The company that he helped build. He was able to share with me that his daughter is going to become an intern. She’s in college and she’s going to take an internship at Allianz. What did I just learn? I just learned he has a daughter. That would have been really weird in my first meeting. Hi. I was wondering, do you have a daughter? Okay, but now I know that he has a daughter.

Julie Littlechild:
Excellent creepy voice, Sam.

Sam Richter:
He tells me that he has a son, and his son played college football at the University of Saint John’s. Hey, my roommate after college 30 years prior was an All-American football player at Saint John’s. So, I get another connection. Bottom line, at the end of the day, he says to me, and this is what we’re always looking for in sales. He said, hey Sam, I’ve been spending so much time talking about me. Can you tell me a little bit about you and how you might be able to help us? I’m telling stories now. I’m not selling anything. He’s not asking to see my three-ring binder with 74 color tabs and asset allocation models. He’s saying, tell me about you and how you can help me. That’s what we’re really trying to do here. It was a quote from President Roosevelt. Other people have butchered it, but it’s simple. It goes, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. I think in the advisor business, because again, just the term alone, advisor. That’s what people want. I just want to know that you care. That you care about me, you care about my family, you care about my success. That’s how we’re going to build a relationship. I think you show that you care by doing a little homework on the front end and giving the other person permission to talk about themselves, which again, give you permission to ask great questions.

Steve Wershing:
As much I would love to go on and on with this, because Sam, you have a such a great bunch of ideas to offer, we are a little past our time. I need to wrap this up. I can’t think of a better way to do that, except where can people find you and find this stuff? First, everybody needs to buy How Do You Take the Cold out of Cold Calling? It’s a great book with a lot of these ideas laid out in it, but where else can people find you, Sam?

Sam Richter:
Yeah. If you just go to SamRichter.com, or I just tell people, Google me. If I don’t show up on the first 30 pages of Google search results, don’t listen to anything I say, because I’m not worth anything.

Julie Littlechild:
Something’s wrong.

Sam Richter:
Right, but you can go to SamRichter.com. A cool thing, I’ve got what’s called the Know More University, where I’ve taken—basically, the concept is, someone hires me for an hour and I give them an hour’s worth of amazing stuff, but I’ve got 40 hours of stuff. I break it into one- to two-minute videos. How to do this, how to do that. It’s the type of thing where, it’s basically, you get a PhD in sales intelligence really quickly and learn how to do this stuff. It’s fun and it’s easy, and all that stuff is on my website. So, SamRichter.com

Steve Wershing:
We will put those in the show notes so people can find it along with a link to your book and some of the other things we’ve talked about. Sam, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It’s always a delight to talk with you, and I always appreciate talking with you because you remind me of the ideas of yours that I forgot already, and I need to go back and do.

Sam Richter:
Yeah. Well, thank you very much. I love the work that you guys are doing, and again, good luck everybody out there. The good news is, in my travels, I would come back to conclude what I said earlier. We’re in this technology age. People are, they want a relationship. Yeah, I’ve got 8,000 friends on Facebook, but I want that human relationship. I want that advisor that I can trust, because stuff is so confusing. Just someone know me and who I am and tell me what to do, and I’ll listen to you. There are lots of people out there like that. You’ve just got to find them.

Julie Littlechild:
Well said. Thank you so much for your time.

Steve Wershing:
Thanks, Sam. Hope to talk to you again soon. Take care.

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 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.