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Guest Comment: The Art Of Successful Cross-Referral - It's Not As Simple As It Looks
Caroline Garnham
Family Bhive
4 September 2012
Editor's note: This is the third of a series of articles written
for this publication by Caroline Garnham, founder of the Family Bhive
the online marketing platform for wealth advisors and their clients, and
a former head of private client with Simmons & Simmons. Her views
are her own, but this publication is pleased to share these insights and
welcomes reader responses. To view the previous article in this series, click here. One of my best clients while I was at Simmons &
Simmons was a wealthy family which had built a successful business in retail
distribution. They were considering selling their company and were
being advised by a partner in the corporate department. When making the
referral he said to me: “I don't know what you do, but you may be able to
assist my clients.” I did assist them for many years, advising on tax and
trusts, setting up their family office and succession issues. Simmons &
Simmons benefitted from this almost ad
hoc referral. How odd, I thought, that a partner had such scant
understanding of the legal services I offered. A year later, I was acting for a very wealthy Middle
Eastern family which had several trusts. The trustee was a professional trustee
based in Jersey. We were selling a hotel for
them and I was having difficulty getting any information from the trustee. Eventually it became clear that the trustee had been
bought by a bank, which when it acquired the trustee business, put in a
suspicious transaction report about my clients to the Attorney General, who had
frozen the trust assets. My client needed some litigation support and swiftly. I checked
my firm’s website under “Dispute Resolution” as I wanted to know who had
experience in unfreezing assets, and possibly some background information about
who would be best to approach. The website confirmed that the company was excellent
across the globe, had won awards and the areas of its particular expertise. I
wasn’t able to find whether the firm had expertise in this area and who to go
to. I therefore picked up the phone to the head of
litigation, Philip Vaughan, and asked him who I should approach. It turned out
that the firm had considerable expertise in this area and proved to be superb
in acting for my, now our, client. But the episode highlighted the gap in
knowledge of professionals’ areas of expertise and experience, and how to find
this knowledge. LinkedIn? Is LinkedIn the solution? It clearly points out
expertise, a few personal details and stretches across a vast diffuse network
of connections. Although used by businesses to good effect to increase
connections and promote the expertise of those connected with the relationship
managers, it is also designed for and used by headhunters. Private clients want to have a long-term relationship
with their advisor. If their advisor is headhunted and moves on, this damages
the relationship and business is likely to be lost. LinkedIn is about the employee, not the employer. I want
our wealth advisory corporate partners to be a key element. Cross-referral of business is an issue with which many
wealth advisors struggle. One solution being used by a large bank is to monitor
the activity of their relationship managers on their website. I have incorporated this into Family Bhive. By “following”
the relationship managers in your firm who have clients in your target market
they join your network or “hive”. Their content and your content are then seen
by a larger group of existing or target prospects thus increasing the quality
of service you can give existing clients and be better placed to acquire new
clients. Which brings me onto what your hive, and in particular
prospective client, wants to see on a regular basis. Have you ever attended a seminar, and been bored out of
your brain because the speaker tells you how brilliant he or she is, and not
addressing your issues and concerns? Biographies, case
studies This is why case studies and short biographies are so
important. When I was looking for a lawyer to unfreeze the assets of my client,
I needed to know whether there was someone in the firm who had experience of
dealing with these issues, and the details of that colleague, including key
personal details that “humanise” that individual. If I am to refer a colleague
to a client, they want to know whether they have anything in common other than
work. Cross-referral of work across organisations should be
easy because the client is already familiar with the company, key staff, areas
of expertise and, equally important, its values. Yet it is one of the hardest
marketing methods to get right, resulting in wasted opportunities to win
valuable high net worth clients. I want to make cross-referral of business as easy as
keeping up to date with the news and views of your network. It is cost-effective,
time efficient and you can measure how successful are your marketing efforts in
winning new business.