Estate Planning
Referral Appointments
Want to 2x your professional referrals?
Depending on your starting number, doubling or even tripling the number of referrals you receive from financial advisors, local lawyers, and other professionals is an achievable goal.
But it requires some planning and an organized approach. Here is how we go about it for the lawyers we help.
How We Help Attorneys Build Better Referral Relationships
Set goals and plan program
- After learning about your current referral efforts and results, we establish target expansion numbers for 6 and 12 months.
- We list the custom enhancements and additions we will make, and calendar their implementation
Add new referral sources
- We build a contact list of 50 local lawyers and other professionals who serve your prospective clients but are not competitive.
- After share the list with you, we ask for your additions or deletions
- We begin calling each contact to ask if they are interested in discussing a referral relationship. We average two hours of calling for each scheduled appointment, and set two appointments/month the first three months.
- We provide suggested questions to ask during your phone calls.
Cultivate those new relationships
- For each call that goes well, we send a welcome package.
- For each referral received, we postally mail a handwritten thank you card.
- To each new source that is productive, we send periodic gifts and a handwritten annual reflection card.
Strengthen existing relationships
- We mail handwritten thank you cards for each referral received.
- We send periodic gifts and a handwritten annual reflection card to your productive referral sources.
- For your very best existing and new referral sources, we calendar annual calls and nudge you to hold them.
- To keep you top of mind, we post weekly for you on LinkedIn.
Pursue past-client referrals
- For the past clients who are VIP referrers, we make regular check-in calls to keep you top of mind.
- To all your past clients we send an engaging and entertaining monthly newsletter so they don’t forget you.
- To express your gratitude, we send handwritten thank you cards each time a referral is received.
Advice and accountability
- Once a month we Zoom with you 1:1 to track new referrals received, report on the work we are doing, and compare our progress to the referral-expansion goals we set.
Extensive experience
Since 2018 we have been introducing lawyers to prospective referral partners.
As of this writing we have calendared for lawyers over 1,000 phone calls with local lawyers and allied professionals who have expressed interest in discussing a referral relationship.
We begin by creating a contact list of business transaction and business litigation attorneys, CPAs, financial advisors, and insurance brokers.
How far you extend your geographic reach is also a personal decision. Obviously, the more populous your location, the closer the area you can begin with. But given how prevalent remote meetings have become, proximity is less a restriction than it used to be.
Additional support
We also provided scripts in advance of each call to guide the lawyers who were new to building new referral relationships, along with recommendations on how to strengthen those relationships.
With most of the lawyers we were helping, two outcomes occurred. Either they followed through, worked to create strong referral relationships with their new partners, and received referrals from some of their new referral partners, or they didn’t work at strengthening the new relationships, and nothing came of the calls.
Unfortunately, many lawyers fell into the second category.
We learned the hard way that simply setting phone appointments and providing scripts was insufficient assistance for many. So now we guide lawyers through every step needed to double their referrals and also:
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Provide welcome materials to new sources.
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Regularly send cards, gifts, and personal notes to both new and existing referral sources.
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Help track referrals received and promptly send handwritten thank you’s for each one.
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Coach you monthly 1:1 on how we can together double your referrals
