Michelle Donovan on Focusing on Women to Drive Referrals

Show Timeline:

05:01 Embracing the gender differences that impact referral growth
09:47 Learning to develop certain skills that don’t come to you naturally
11:18 Teaching your clients how to refer without asking
17:42 Understanding the motivation of clients to refer
20:44 Conducting a ‘Referral SWOT Analysis’ to uncover opportunities
28:37 Examples of passive and active strategies for generating referrals

Links:

Website:           https://www.productivityuncorked.com
LinkedIn:         https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellerdonovan/ 
Referral SWOT Analysis: https://productivityuncorked.com/referral-swot/
FREE 5 Day Referral Challenge (starts Jan. 18): https://productivityuncorked.com/5-day-challenge-2/

Want more?
Stephen Wershing: http://advisorchecklist.com/blog/
Julie Littlechild: http://www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

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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.