Participants:
Julie Littlechild
Steve Wershing
George Hartman
Julie Littlechild: I’ve had the pleasure of knowing George for many years and was excited to ask him about his thoughts about how the referral process is changing and what that means for advisors. We talk about the way referrals are made today, and both the pitfalls and the opportunities that these changes create. We focus in on what prospects do when they’re referred to you, the information they find, and the impact that has on the potential that you’ll ever meet. With that, let’s get to the conversation. George, welcome to the show, so glad to have you here. Steve Wershing: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: Today, what’s more likely to happen is that Julie would say, “You know, George, you should go and check out Steve.” And then I’d go on line and I’d look at his LinkedIn profile, his websites and hopefully find all kinds of information that would encourage me to make a connection with Steve. I think to a certain extent, there’s a disintermediation that’s occurred between the referrer and the person to whom they are referring. I think that’s probably the biggest change. Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: But certainly, when I get to a certain point, I want to be able to gather enough information, and the typical starting point is a simple email address. The email address then goes into your CRM system, and then there’s some sort of an auto-respond mechanism within the CRM system that fires a message back and says, hey Steve, thanks for downloading our eBook and I thought you might be interested in this. And, it leads us then to the next commitment and the next higher level of trust. Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: I just came out of a meeting this morning, for example, with a client that we’re coaching who deals with the ultra-high net worth insurance market. So, we were talking about his web strategy and he’s not going to go on and talk about the difference between term and whole life, that’s not the message that people who are referred to him through family offices, attorneys and accountants, for example, are going to expect to find. What they want to find is how do I mitigate this tax? How do I distribute the assets in my estate in the most appropriate manner? How do I deal with recalcitrant children? And, so on. The message has to be geared toward to the target market, I guess is the bottom line. Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Many of the traditional ways of hand-to-hand, face-to-face communications still work very, very well, and will continue to work well forever, I think. But if you’re going to have a variety of marketing activities on the go, which I believe every advisor should have two, three, or four of them on the go all the time, this is a relatively easy and inexpensive one that has a wide reach, and has a pretty good impact. In terms of extending the audience for it, make it easy for people to share. Make it easy for them to pass along. Make it easy for them to reference. Give them language, terminology they can use. I just read this great article, came out from Julie. They don’t necessarily have to regurgitate the article, but if they capture the essence of it and can describe it succinctly to somebody else, then that might expand your audience. Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: George Hartman: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: George Hartman: Steve Wershing:
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and on this week’s show, Steve and I are speaking with George Hartman. George brings a really unique perspective because he’s been an advisor, an educator, as well as an industry executive. He’s written four best-selling books for financial advisors, and his latest, which is called EXIT is NOT a Four Letter Word – How to Transition Your Practice Profitability and Proudly, came out last year. Today, George is a consultant, a speaker and a coach, with his firm Market Logics, which he describes as being focused on helping both financial organizations and advisors realize the true potential of their business.
Welcome, George.
Hey, this is a real pleasure and an honor, of course.
Well, the honor’s all ours. We’ve got a lot we wanted to talk to you about today. I know one of the things that we’ve talked about over the years, is just how the whole process of referrals has changed. I’d love to talk to you, and maybe start there, and just ask you, what do you think are some of the most important ways that referrals are changing or being impacted going forward? Start with a big question.
Yeah, how much time do we have here?
No more than four hours, I promise.
I think the major influence is clearly technology. In particular, access to information that prospective clients have, and even the people who are going make referrals have. In the old days, if the three of us were connected in some way and Julie decided that she should refer me, for example, to Steve, she might call up Steve and say, “Hey, I’m going to send this guy over to you” or “You should call him.” Or, she might say to me, “You should connect with Steve.” In an ideal world, she’d say, “Let’s the three of us go to lunch.” That’s kind of the old referral process.
That presumably is a risk and an opportunity, if you think about it. I mean, there’s this big gaping hole now between here’s the referral and it ever actually happening. If that’s the case, you mentioned technology, where do you see clients going at that point. I’ve heard that this person is maybe worth chatting to, what happens? Where do I go and what do I find when I get there?
Yeah, it preconditions us of course, and pre-informs us. The other thing that it does, and Steve has talked about this eloquently many times I know, is it removes some of the risk from the whole equation. One of the fears that people have in making a referral, of course, is that somehow they’re going to impinge on a personal relationship they have with the person whom they’re making the referral. By simply saying, go and check them out, you’re really transferring that risk to the person being referred. They can make their own choices to whether or not they continue on to make contact.
I guess part of the potential risk is, if I make a referral, and I think that this is the ideal referral, I’m passionate that you should go and check out Steve, but you get there, wherever “there” is, and maybe we need to talk about that, whether it’s his LinkedIn profile or what have you. The messaging I suppose now digitally maybe becomes so much more important, is that a fair comment?
Absolutely. It’s not going to be sufficient simply to go and say, “Oh yes, I found out they do have a LinkedIn profile, they do have a website.” What we need to find, or what the person being referred needs to find when they Google you, so to speak, is something that is relevant to them. Something that is meaningful and timely at that particular point in their lives when they’re perhaps contemplating needing some advice like this. In an ideal world, yes, they’d find a compelling profile, a story, some value add, an invitation to download the latest version of your eBook, something like that, that’s going to no only set the referree apart, but also to provide some value even before we connect.
George, is there anything that an advisor can do to sort of set the stage for that? So, knowing that the client is likely to not just give out the advisor’s phone number, but to refer them to their website and whatnot, does that change how the advisor sets up the referral with the client in the first place?
Well, I think there’s a whole range of potential there. That could go all the way from logging on to an online calendar for example, I use one. I have advisors who seek me out for various reasons, either through referral or direct contact, or through some search. They can go on and they can initiate a meeting with me, either by telephone, video conference, or even in person. I invite them to do that. That might be one extreme. Alternatively, I want to make sure when someone does provide a referral or an introduction, or even just a broad-based reference to me, that I’m ready to receive it. That I have confidence that when people go onto my site, that they’re going to find easy access. Again, as I said, they’ll find information that’s of value and there’s some call to action that makes it just dead slick easy for them to get in touch with me.
It’s interesting, we talk, or end up talking, I guess, a lot about ideal client or niche or target client or some version of this. But, it strikes me as you’re talking that that becomes increasingly important. Would you agree with that? If now, I’m going to be out there looking for information and I need information that’s relevant for me, how else am I going to find that unless that advisor’s actually targeting their communications and positioning to my specific needs?
I think that’s a great lesson for all advisors in there. The information that I find when I go and look for you online, as I said, has to be relevant. So, if I have a reasonably well-defined target market, all of my messaging should be directed to that target market. Yes, there will be people who come and look and say, well there’s nothing here for me. At the end of the day, that may not be a bad outcome, because if there’s a disconnect or at least a distance between the type of people that you want to attract with your message online, and those who find it attractive, then I think you’re probably, to some extent, not making the best use of each other’s time.
Do you think there’s any kind of, I don’t know, hierarchy, or perhaps it’s different from every advisor, in terms of what they need to think about then digitally? I could think about my LinkedIn profile, I could think about Twitter, I could think about Facebook, about my website. Would you recommend that advisors take stock in a particular order, or does it depend on who they’re trying to attract?
If you’re talking about the various access points, is that your–
Yeah.
At the core of any digital marketing strategy is the website. That’s the kind of base and foundation for everything. Everything else should lead back to that. Whether it’s my LinkedIn profile, whether it’s my blog, even my Twitter or Facebook postings, whatever it might be, they should all lead back to, in my view, to the website. That’s the best opportunity, it’s the most fulsome opportunity to tag on all kinds of things and hang stuff off the site and provide additional information, insight, tools, calculators, whatever it might be that’s appropriate for the market I’m interested it. Everything should lead back to that.
You mentioned lead magnets. Have you seen some good examples of those? Maybe it’s worth talking in a little more detail about how that works.
Yeah, I didn’t use the words lead magnet, you did. But that’s okay.
Really? I thought for sure you said that. Isn’t that funny, that’s what I heard.
That’s good, because that’s exactly what we work on.
I read your mind.
I think it’s absolutely essential that there be some attraction. I think I used the words “call to action”, but essentially yeah, there should be some sort of an invitation. It’s kind of a graduated process. The first invitation is a low effort, low risk type of thing, click here for this. The next higher level up might be, click here, give us your email and then download our eBook, or this checklist or whatever it might be. With a greater sense of confidence on the part of the person searching, we’re building trust. As we build trust, then we become deeper and deeper engaged and we can continue to evolve the expression of our value proposition to a higher level each time. So, the lead magnet, if we use that terminology, should be that free offer. That quick and easy download, do this, go here, read this, whatever it might be.
Let me drill into that a little bit. In our last study, Julie and I found out that one of the things that was most highly correlated with getting a lot of referrals, was having a good solid, organized referral marketing system. The way that we’re interpreting that is to include things like, if somebody shows up at your website, make sure that there’s a way to capture their information so that you can then initiate that relationship. Can you go into a little bit more detail? Because you just talked about the different levels of things, can you talk a little bit more about what kinds of objectives like that an advisor needs to have in that strategy of gradually ramping people’s trust up to the point to where they can get a meeting?
Sure. Again, there has to be some sort of background, lead capture, CRM type system in place. Again, it depends on what you feel is the strength of your message and your value proposition. If you’re feeling really good about it, if it is unique and it’s powerful and it’s compelling, or at least you believe it to be, then I don’t know that you need to spend as much time building the trust, if you’ve got credibility. I can use the two of you as an example, because you’re so highly regarded in the industry. If you published something, people, without any hesitation, will click on to it, log on, subscribe to it, whatever it might be. If I find building from the ground up as an advisor, for example, that has not done much digital marketing, I may need to ease people in, I may need to capture their attention a little bit first.
We use things like MailChimp for that kind of thing, so it might be worth throwing in some resources in the show notes of different technologies because they’re not complicated, right? It’s just understanding some of the different categories of technology and how they can be so helpful.
Yeah, absolutely. The technology has not only expanded in terms of choice, but in terms of capability and ease of use.
We’re talking in a way about how to engage perspective clients, which I think obviously is so important. I always think that in the past, prospects were kind of like ghosts, nobody knew they were there floating by a website. This is about almost reaching out and trying to begin that relationship that you were talking about. But what about the kind of information that a prospective client might want to see. So, I’ve been referred, I go to the website, what is it, specifically, that you think the advisor needs to share so that I can determine if I even want to take it to the next step?
Sure. I think that the starting point for that is to have an understanding of what your preferred client’s level of interest in a particular area. So, if I, for example, am an estate planner, that’s my specialty. I want to be able to provide information to people who have estate planning on their minds who are in my market area geographically perhaps, or age wise or some other demographic may be coming into play there. But I want to be able to provide them with information that is not commonly available, but yet is common sense. If I can position myself as a subject matter expert, even at a very low level to begin with. Then, as people engage with me more and more, then I can narrow the focus and kind of elevate the degree of sophistication of my communications.
If you could expand on that a little bit. One of the things that I see advisors do when they start offering these kinds of things, is to offer things that are evergreen, and from my perspective, too basic. Can you talk a little bit about what level of specificity or what level of sophistication things need to be to be effective in getting people to look at you as a credible source for more of that kind of information?
Sure. I think that again goes back to the question of, who is the target market and what do they want? If I’m an advisor, for example, just starting out and I’m relatively young in years and experience, my target market may not be as knowledgeable as, for example, someone who has been around 20 years and has all kinds of accreditation after their name. My information that I put out can, I think to a certain extent, be more evergreen. I can talk, for example, about the inherent value of financial planning or why bond funds go down when interest rates go up, those sorts of things. If I’m dealing with a market with more complicated needs or more comprehensive needs at least, then I want to be sure that my message is targeted at the right level.
One of the things, the objections almost, that I hear from advisors when it comes to digital is, my clients are older and they’re not going online (they’re my prospective clients in this case) to find out information about me. It’s interesting because we did a little research on this and saw that, as you might expect, younger clients were absolutely more likely to be searching for information, looking for that messaging, and older clients were not. And, at first you thought, well that validates that objection. However, you also realize that most of the older clients started their relationships 20 or 30 years ago. When we asked the question, if you were looking for an advisor today, would you go online to find more information? It wasn’t an overwhelming yes, but you could absolutely see how much more important this was. I don’t know what you guys think, but I feel like we need to set aside this demographic argument when it comes to digital.
I would certainly concur with that. I’ve read numerous studies as you have, and you’ve obviously crafted one of your own, that the use of digital access to information among both older people and also higher net worth people, is typically much higher than most of us would anticipate.
I agree with that, too, Julie. I think it’s an interesting insight, that the people who believe that are talking about the clients that they met so long ago, and if those people were to do it today, boomers are just as active users of the Internet as anybody. The platforms may be different. They may look at Google or even Facebook more, and the kids are going to be looking at Instagram and other kinds of things, but I think the Internet is something that everybody shares. That brings up another question, George. How does an advisor figure out which and how many platforms they need to be involved in to facilitate that kind of activity?
Sure. Again, I think that goes back to the target market. If I’ve got a broad based practice that has millennials and their grandparents, then I probably need a wider range. I was communicating with someone on Friday, and I needed an answer for, actually, a meeting I had this morning. I’m firing off emails, and I’m not getting a response. Then, finally I got one earlier this morning. They said, don’t send me emails anymore. Just text me. You old-fashioned guy, you.
The subtext there was quite clear.
Yeah. Again, if I were dealing with, I’m assuming a high-end, older or high net worth, older client, that they’d be more inclined to read an email. I notice a lot of senior executives, that’s how they spend their Sunday morning, is catching up on their email, rather than text. They wouldn’t expect you to text them on their cell phones. I think it very much does depend.
It reminds me of, Julie you’ll appreciate this, one of my wife’s favorite jokes, which is somebody calls somebody else and says, hey, listen. I need to send you a fax. Where can I send it to? They said, I’m sorry, I can’t get a fax where I am. They said, why? Where are you? They said, the 21st century.
Yeah. I love that. It’s so true.
Yeah. There’s research out there, just to emphasize this point, that millennials, if they’re even aware, would prefer not to receive a PDF copy of anything. They want direct access or an ability to download an information piece. Sending off PDFs to younger clients is probably not adding to your credibility.
Right. I wonder if I could not digress, but maybe build on this. We’ve been talking about the kind of information that people will find, whether that’s consistent and hopefully is consistent with your target market. Is there another step to consider in terms of how you take that information and make it more shareable? How do we take that great information and help it drive referrals, if we can?
Again, just about any website that you go to or even on the bottom of most people’s signature on their email now, you find the buttons for Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, where people can share that. To the extent, obviously, that you can create a sharing community that expands your influence. I think encouraging people just to say, if there’s anyone else you know that you think might be interested in this, feel free to pass it along, or provide me with their access information, and I’ll pass it along to them. I think it’s a constant message. I’m of the belief that, and I think it’s important to state in the context of our conversation today, this is not the only way to get referrals, and this is not the only way to market.
I think a lot of it goes back to your earlier comments about targeting, because if I get—it’s like we’re predisposed to just help our friends at some level. If I see a great article or website, or any resource, I will send it to friends. It’s just part of what we do, but your point about making it easy is an interesting one, because I can think just this morning, I was reading a blog, and it’s a blog that I follow regularly. I think the content is great. He’s made a decision to put a lot of the content in the email, and there’s no easy way for me to share the full context, without just forwarding an email, which didn’t seem quite appropriate. There’s some of these little details about making it easy that I think we need to think through.
Sure. A good example is, we all know people that do a great job of listing all of their blogs or their articles or their whitepapers or whatever they are on their website. That’s an easy point of reference, and I don’t have to go back and search through it. I can see, oh, this one’s all about this particular topic, and then this topic, and click on it, and away I go.
Right. That makes sense. You mentioned that this is, of course, only one of the ways. Are there other things that you’re seeing as it relates to referrals or becoming referable, more broadly, that you just think advisors really need to be paying attention to these days?
The differentiation aspect is particularly important. You know more than anyone, Julie, through your work that clients have difficulty telling the difference from one advisor to another unless there is some element of the relationship that stands out. What can we do that stands out? We can become a subject matter expert. We can become the social convener of the client group. There are different things that we can do, just so when they go on, they say, this is different. This person wears bow ties. It doesn’t really matter.
Got to work with that person. Do you think that the challenge that we have in that area is because advisors are doing great work, they’re doing wonderful things for their clients, and they just believe that to be different, or that we just haven’t perhaps thought it through enough in terms of what separates us? It does seem to be a sticking point for a lot.
Yeah. I would say that many advisors, I was going to say most, but let’s restrict it to many, assume that the clients are hearing everything that they’re saying, that the advisor is saying. They assume that the client perceives what they’ve said in the same way that the advisor perceives they’ve said it. Often, there is a disconnect. People have their own filters and biases and beliefs that affect how they receive information and interpret it. It’s worthwhile to check every once in a while, and just say, hey, are you enjoying these messages? What do you like about them? What do you dislike about them? Do they have meaning to you? What did you get from that last message I sent? What was the central thing that I was trying to convey? Even on an informal basis.
You’ve just made me think of how similar it is to our personal relationships, because in the same way, I believe my husband hears everything I say, and that is clearly not true. I believe he understands what I’m saying, and that may also be untrue. Maybe we just need a spousal test, and that should help.
It’s a good point. How do you test that, George? How can you identify those things that do connect with the client, and understand how they’re interpreting things so that you can communicate more effectively with people like them?
One, if there’s a call to action and you don’t get any response, then either you’re offering the wrong thing, or it is of no interest to them. But I think you just ask. I think you have to check in periodically, as you would with your spouse, to say, I’ve said this, but you’re behaving as if you didn’t hear me.
Shocking. It’s almost as if you’re not listening.
I honestly think that, in the periodic review, or in some other casual way, when we’re talking on the phone, hey, what did you think of my latest blog? Oh, I don’t read it. Oh, how come? This one, I thought would be particularly interesting to you, because…I don’t know if there’s a formal way. Clearly, you could do formal client surveys periodically and get some feedback that way, but I don’t think that replaces the immediate response.
Just to build on that, George, on the one level, there is a casual or informal conversation, but then there’s also whether or not there’s a formal process. You could have a formal process to make sure you include that with, let’s say your next 20 client meetings, you could put it on your own version of the agenda to make sure you bring that up, and it can still be brought up in a conversational way. The bigger challenge I see a lot of is that the advisors will approach it relatively informally, and that means that sometimes they’ll do it, and sometimes they won’t. The effect of that, of course, is greatly diminished. Can you give us some more examples of what kinds of things they could ask those clients about in terms of the content that they’re creating to try to figure out what will, in fact, connect with those folks?
Sure. Again, I think you’ve touched on something that I believe very strongly, and that is to have a formal agenda and put that on the agenda. Chances are, if it’s there that you’ll at least get to it, and position that as, I’m just checking in to see if I’m communicating with you in a way that has value. For example, do you like my blog? Do you like this? What do you think of it? What topics have been of the most interest to you? I think that’s, again, still the best way. I’ve forgotten the second half of your question.
I think that was the question. I think that was what I was asking.
I know we’re coming up to time here, but maybe—we’ve talked about a number of different things, George, that advisors could be doing. If you were to wrap that up a little, and think about maybe the one or two things that advisors could take away and get started on, where would you direct them?
I would say to put yourself in the shoes of a prospective client and go through the exercise yourself. Google yourself. See what you find, and see if you like it. See if it would, in your mind, attract the type of person that you’re trying to attract. It’s probably the best gauge. You’ll have some personal bias. You’ll think you look better than you do and that sort of stuff. You’ll think you’re more clever and witty that you actually are, but if you can be a little bit objective about it and just say—think about it. A client’s gotten my referral from somebody that obviously respects me. Am I living up to the respect that person has accorded me? When someone comes to see me online, if we’re using that example, am I worthy? Am I presenting the picture that they would be proud?
I think it’s a great idea to Google yourself, and I wonder if we could even extend that experiment a little further. In addition to you Googling yourself and looking to see what comes up, ask your clients to either Google you or to look at your website and ask a few basic questions about that, like is this a good reflection of what we do for you? Are we sufficiently stressing the things you believe are different about us from other advisors? That kind of stuff. That might be a little better way to get some objective feedback on it.
Yeah. I think that’s fabulous. Then, you want the real test, get your spouse to do it.
We’ve already determined they don’t listen.
But they’re willing to share it.
But they are honest, yeah. Fair enough. No better place to end, in that case. Actually, George, just real quickly, if advisors are interested in learning more about what you do, where can they find you?
If someone wants to get in touch with us and learn more about what we do, our website is very simple. It’s marketlogics.ca. The word market followed by logics, L-O-G-I-C-S.ca. Hopefully, they will find something of interest and value.
Wonderful. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today.
Thank you, George.
My pleasure. Thank you again. I am honored and flattered for the opportunity.
Hey, folks. Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. 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. Until next time, so long.