B-SCHOOL COACHING CALL: How to Get More Referrals from Your Clients

Schedule a FREE Strategy Session

Transcript:

One thing that's really easy to implement, and I want to encourage everyone to implement, is some sort of sequence of mailers to your clients - your buyer clients and your seller clients. From the point that they sign a loyalty agreement as buyers, or they sign a listing agreement as sellers. In our business, we manage this in Top Producer.

Letter Sequences and Benefits Cards

When we bring a new buyer client, when they've simply signed a loyalty agreement and they haven't purchased a house yet, a letter goes out to them. We don't send out any kind of raving fan club card but a letter goes out. It just says, "Welcome to the company. Thanks so much for placing your trust in us. Buying a home is a huge step. It's our goal to become an asset and resource. In the spirit of providing them with more, we tell them about benefits of membership. Here's the List of Benefits card."

I've been doing this even when I didn't have physical office space. So you can kind of make up some benefits. A lot of these things everyone can offer. We've had these tweaked over the years, so you can have them say anything you want to say here. They can come in and get free copier use, use of a conference room, special events, referrals, cash flow analysis on investment properties, those sorts of things.

That goes in this first letter, so we literally just sign a buyer and this letter goes out with a benefit card.

One thing we used to do, and we got away from, but I suggest everyone do it because everyone loves it, is that part of your new client sequence should be SendOutCards brownies. You can set up a card in there that's geared toward welcoming them. People love them and they're only about $6 to send out.

You could do that, you could send a benefits card with this letter.

When they go under contract, the letter says, "Congratulations on your accepted contract!" Then we give them more information. We include another List of Benefits card. We're constantly talking to them about the benefits of working with us. Nobody really does this stuff. It's really drilling that in there.

Soliciting Feedback

Then at closing, we send them this survey. It's a Net Promoter Score survey. The Net Promoter Score question is this simple question: "On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to refer your friends and family to The Lars Group?" 1 is very unlikely, and 10 is very likely.

Pure open and honest disclosure, when I first started doing this - it's been over a couple years now - we didn't get response from a lot of the people we were serving. I don't know this definitively, but my gut tells me it was because we weren't providing overwhelmingly awesome service to every client we served. I wish I would have done this sooner and solicited feedback form our clients sooner.

Now, and for the last 2.5 years or so we've been doing this, for the people we don't get them for, we reach out to them and find out why. We would hear from the 1's, the small percentage of clients who didn't get good service and wanted us to burn in Hell. It's not a lot, but you hear from those people. Then you hear from the 9's and 10's, people that for whatever reason - it wasn't systematic at the time - they got a great experience with us.

But I believe there's a lot of 3 through 7's that just weren't responding. They were getting this form that we include a $10 Starbucks card in this form. We used to send it after they gave the review. We found that just switching that one thing doubled the response. Now we give somebody $10 and they're gonna respond to us. At 400 sides, that's $4,000, and it's not a big amount of money to make sure we're giving good service to our clients. Not good service, great service.

The focus here as I've been out of the business is to provide world class service, like going to Disney. Going on a Disney cruise, I'll happily pay twice as much to go on a Disney Cruise because it's a true world class experience.