Too many advisors and agents rely on only referrals to grow their business. I get it, referrals are awesome. They have the highest close rate and don’t cost a fortune for the leads. We even have a few campaigns designed to help generate more referrals.
However, I believe it’s a bad business model to rely on only client referrals. That’s because the growth rate is slow.
Our firm has eight sources of leads. With all these leads coming in, we get a lot of client referrals and bring in a lot of new clients every year. The best way to amplify the number of referrals is to bring in clients through other avenues.
We didn’t get to eight sources overnight. We built out each source of leads one at a time. We didn’t move onto another source of leads until we perfected the process of the one we were working on. If you try to do too much at once, it probably won’t work.
These are our lead sources:
Referrals
We have multiple campaigns that we regularly implement to get more referrals from our clients.
Dinner Seminars
Our presentation works well. We get 50 people in a room (about 23 households) and walk out with 18-20 meetings.
CPAs/Centers of Influence
We have multiple CPAs. We do not count each CPA as a lead source; it’s a category for us. We discuss in more details in our Master Course Series how to develop CPA relationships.
Virtual Summits
We discuss how to do these events in our Master Course Series.
Webinars
Similar to dinner seminars, our presentation works well. Learn how to do it with our Advisors Master Course.
Company Marketing
Since our headquarters is in southern California, we market to companies such as Boeing, Edison, and Raytheon.
Facebook/LinkedIn Paid Advertising
We run ads offering free e-books, add them to drip campaigns, and push them towards our webinars and events.
Podcast/Networking Campaigns
We discuss in more detail in our Advisors Master Course, but in a nutshell, we have a podcast that we use for networking.
This is what works for us. Others I know have TV shows, radio shows, four-week courses they teach at a community college, direct mail campaigns, and many more. With each of our lead sources, we have several campaigns and processes behind it. They took time for us to build out.
Many of you may only have one or two sources of leads. I invite you to extend that one at a time. What lead sources can you add? What are the campaigns and processes behind that to get the leads?
We can help.
We consult with all our advisors/agents and build out campaigns and processes to help them grow their book of business.
Now, I know 2020 is an outlier, but a lot of advisors struggled during the pandemic, we lost dinner seminars. But our business did not suffer because we had multiple sources. If we lose a CPA relationship, it’s not a big deal since we have many more CPAs sending us leads. If, down the road, people get burnt out with webinars, that’s fine with us.
Advisors tell their clients to be diversified in their investments. I tell advisors to be diversified in their lead sources.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Don’t rely only on referrals to grow your business. There are many ways to expand your lead sources and bring in clients through different avenues.