In Part 4 of WealthQuotient co-founder David Friedman’s five-part series on the keystone habits real estate agents need to effectively prospect wealthy potential clients, you’ll learn how to identify your key referral sources and work on engaging them. Check in weekly and on Agent Edge for your next strategy-turned-healthy-prospecting habit to add more affluent clients to your database.
Catch up on the series here:
Habit No. 4: Spend an hour a week yourself or with tour team thinking about your key referral sources and how to engage them
Once you have surfaced the key referral sources, you yourself (or if you have a team) should commit to spending an hour or so at the beginning of every week just rolling through these key relationships that you have identified.
If you have an appointment or meeting with them, you should exercise habit No. 3 and be mentally prepared with some prospects or connections, whether you’re prepared to ask them for the introduction or not.
In addition, you can set up Google Alerts on your referral sources. Use this time to review the aggregated news on those individuals as a way to reach out and engage them outside of the transaction.
The key here is to create touch points that are all about engaging them with what’s important to them. Avoid the temptation of the Trojan horse of leading with some content and then quickly slipping in something about the residential real estate market or other seemingly benign content.
You can also set up Google Alerts on the organizations, non-profits and entities in which your referral source are involved. These alerts will keep you apprised of any new board members or activities both from a corporate or philanthropic perspective.
Setting up these type of alerts can serve several purposes:
- Transform an existing relationship into a referral source: By getting information and alerts on an existing relationship, you can use this information to deepen an existing relationship by focusing what’s important to them.
- Deepen an existing referral source: As the same above, you can take someone that is already a referral source and continue to strengthen and deepen that relationship as you think about approaching them with more specific referral requests.
- Offer a catalyst for engaging your referral source about a prospect to which they are connected: These alerts can also often serve to provide new information that can serve as a catalyst for reaching out to your key referral sources such as a company being sold or capital being raised or invested or some other type of liquidity event or migration from one place to another or new board memberships.
- Offer information about a prospect you are seeking to deepen the relationship: You may have done the hard work of getting an introduction to a prospect from a referral source, and now, you are looking for ways to connect not only in the meeting but as a natural way to follow-up. Setting up Google Alerts on the prospects can help you in this case as well.
Baby step activation
Set a calendar meeting for yourself on Monday morning before your day gets kidnapped by e-mails, responding to fires or other activities to review your key referral sources by yourself or as a team activity.
Remember, your inbox is mostly everyone else’s agenda for that day and not your strategic roadmap. Set up Google Alerts on one key referral source, their organizations or boards.
Weekly resolve
Resolve to spend 30 seconds to a minute of each day thinking about your key relationships and visualizing your future clients that will be coming from those introductions.
Add a new referral source or organization of which they are part to Google Alerts each week and commit to reviewing the news generated from the alerts on a weekly basis.
David Friedman is the co-founder of WealthQuotient. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
