Every salesperson has wrestled with the age-old question, “What’s the best way to get referrals?” Depending on how you’ve been trained, you might have a few different ways to answer. Many say “ask” or “ask the right way" or “make sure you’re planting referral seeds along the way to make it easier for someone to provide them to you” but I beg to differ. I have always found that the best way to get referrals is to be referrable. To me, there is only one way to be referrable in our industry: by creating a superior client experience that fosters stark raving fans.

How do you convey your message to a client without seeming “needy” in the process? By understanding how clients think!

Clients give referrals for two possible reasons. First, they want to help you grow your business. Second, they want to help friends and loved ones. Of these two reasons which one do you believe is a strong reason to give you a referral? If you said to help friends and loved ones, then you are right!

Consider just how much trust someone needs to have in their financial advisor to give them continuous access to, and nearly complete control of, their life’s savings, their retirement income, and their future security and dreams. That degree of trust ranks right up there with entrusting your life to a surgeon, your children’s wellbeing to a nanny, and your heart to your spouse.

Trust like that isn’t simply granted to a financial advisor because of a single phone call.

For financial advisors, referrals are—and will probably always be—the primary method of generating new business. It seems like every business blogger out there has the best, top, greatest, or most unique ideas for generating referrals. Personally, my favorite book title proclaiming its best ways to get referrals is this one: Endless Referrals, Third Edition.

I guess the previous editions didn’t result in endless referrals as promised.

To capitalize on the referral market, there are only two aspects of your business that are worth focusing on: delivering an exceptional client experience and continuously developing relationships with clients and spheres of influence.