You’ve had the coffee, they said they’d keep you in mind, and months later not one introduction has come your way.
Do they not rate you? How do you be the person who gets the referral That’s what this episode is all about.
When an introducer spots an opportunity, they don’t sit down and weigh up everyone they know who could help. They make a snap decision, based on the box they’ve already put you in. If you describe yourself in the same words as everyone else in your marketplace, that box is the same as everyone else’s, and the introduction goes to someone they can place more easily. Sorting that out is your job, not theirs. Your partners want to see a Referral Network that sends you work, and that starts with your introducers knowing exactly what to send you.
I’m Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner & Still Have a Life. I’m the leading global expert in what it takes to move from senior fee earner to partner. Here are 5 ways to work with me.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
- How to decide the box you want introducers to put you in, so their snap decision goes your way
- How to turn the claims everyone makes into something an introducer can repeat about you
- Where to find introducers who’d be glad to pass you the work you want
- What you can do to repay an introducer’s trust, even when you don’t set your firm’s service levels
If you find this episode useful, don’t forget to like it and then subscribe so you don’t miss another episode.
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
You’ve had the coffee.
They were warm. They nodded in all the right places. At the end they said, “I’ll definitely keep you in mind.”
Three months later. Six months later. Nothing.
Not one referral or decent introduction.
The chances are they’ve come across someone they could have sent your way in that time. But did they think of you? Or did someone else have more credibility? Or perhaps their relationship was stronger with someone else?
So what’s going wrong? Do they not rate you? Or are you one of the many people who do what you do, and nobody has given them a reason to pick you?
This episode is about how you get reluctant introducers to introduce you, particularly when the marketplace is full of people who look just like you. It comes from a group coaching call I ran with a group of accounting firm owners. Whilst the conversation was with firm owners, much of what we talked about is relevant to you as you build up your own business and portfolio of clients.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend. The author of Poised for Partnership, and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. In this podcast, I will be highlighting some of the great stuff in our Progress To Partner Academy. New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss a new episode.
Right. Let’s talk about what box your introducers put you in.
At the start of the call, I asked everyone what their challenges were with reluctant introducers. A large challenge was referrals came in randomly, and that they hadn’t really defined who they wanted their introducers to send them.
This is a massive red flag. If you don’t know who you want as a client, at a granular level, how are you giving out the right message to the people who could introduce you? You’re asking them to guess. And when it comes to referrals, people don’t want to guess. After all their reputation is on the line. They want a trusted referral where they know that you can help the other person.
Think about the moment an introducer spots an opportunity. Perhaps one of their clients mentions over lunch that they’re struggling with something you could help with. Your introducer probably knows four or five people who could help. They’re not going to sit down and weigh you all up against each other. They’re going to make a snap decision.
And they make that snap decision based on the box they’ve put you in.
One of my clients has no problems with reluctant introducers at all. Her introducers knew exactly what box she was in. Small businesses that the bigger firms won’t touch, often ones that have got themselves into a bit of a mess, who need someone to keep them on the straight and narrow. Someone who’ll be direct, won’t fluff around it, and will tell them exactly what they need to do. So when her introducer meets someone who fits that description, it’s easy to recommend my client.
But are you making it that easy?
And did you note that this client of mine wasn’t sector specific? We often think that to be easy to refer we need to be sector specific. Not always. But we do need to think through at a granular level about who is our ideal client and why they would want to work with us.
Now compare that with what most of us say when someone asks what we do. When I asked the others on the call what box they’d want to be put in, the answers were things like personal service, responsive, accurate figures, friendly to deal with.
I was deliberately challenging on the call, and I’m going to be here too. Every person in that room would say the same about themselves. So would every other firm in the marketplace. Personal service, responsiveness and accuracy are table stakes. They’re what your introducer assumes they’ll get from anyone they send work to, so none of them gives your introducer a reason to think of you first.
If you sit in the same box as everyone else, your introducer goes with whoever they’ve known the longest, or whoever they saw most recently. You’re left waiting for introductions that may never come. And when the time comes to show your partners a Referral Network that sends you work, you’ll have very little to put in front of them. Is that the conversation you want to be having with your Sponsoring Partner?
So how do you get out of the generic box?
The first is to get specific about who you want to work with. One of the firm owners described their ideal clients by turnover, and as owners with a growth mindset who respect what they do. I suggested making that much easier for an introducer to recognise: big enough to be VAT registered, likely to have at least one team member, and wanting a personal relationship with their accountant. An introducer can spot all of that in a conversation, whereas a growth mindset is much harder to identify.
The second is to codify what you mean. If you say you’re responsive, so does everyone else. That same firm owner then told us that every client gets a dedicated contact, and that they aim to respond to every call and email within four working hours. That is gold dust. It gives an introducer something they can repeat, and it tells them which of their contacts you’d suit: the ones who need a lot of hand-holding and get frustrated when they speak to a different person every time they ring up. Another firm on the call also described themselves as responsive, but the clients they wanted were growing businesses that needed to get back in control of their growth, and needed the right figures to take a decision when they needed to. They used the same word as the first firm, yet an introducer would put them in a completely different box.
You may not be able to set a service level for your whole firm, but you can be precise about how you work and who you’re good for.
The third is to tell people. Most of us are very laissez faire about it: if introductions come, that’s lovely. Your introducers can’t put you in the right box unless you’ve told them what that box is. As one of the group said at the end of the call, you’ve got to be really precise with them about exactly what you can offer, so that they put you in the right box.
By the way, if you struggle to work out your point of difference when there are hundreds of people who do what you do, there’s an on-demand course inside our Progress to Partner Academy called How to Become Known as the Go-To Expert. I’ll come back to it at the end.
Now, what about the introducer who won’t refer you?
When an introducer doesn’t refer us, we often take that to mean they don’t rate us. Whereas what’s usually going on is that they can’t place us, or they don’t come across the right people to send. If someone is reluctant to refer you, the first question to ask is why. Then to consider whether they are ever going to be a good introducer. Some people won’t ever be, and that’s fine. It frees up your time for the ones who will.
The ones who will are often above or below you in the food chain. Think about who deals with the work you don’t want. A firm that only takes on the bigger clients needs somewhere to send the smaller ones. A firm that wants nice, easy work needs somewhere to send the messy ones. I firmly believe there’s an accountant for every client, and the same is true of lawyers and consultants. Which means there’s someone in your marketplace who’d be delighted to pass on exactly the work you want, if they knew you wanted it.
Then think about who’s well connected. The lawyers, accountants, consultants, finance people and other people well connected to your client base. Those that are well connected, I call them gate keepers in my book the financial times guide to business networking. They might also know twenty other people who do what you do, which is exactly why you need to be clear about where you fit. I.e. what box they should put you in.
And don’t forget the people inside your own firm. When a partner in another team has a client who needs something in your area, they’re making the same snap decision about which of their colleagues to call.
But before that introduction happens you normally need to have built a relationship. I.e. You’ve got to know each other, and you’ve got to like each other. Although if you are part of the same firm you may find you may not need a strong relationship to get recommended to clients. But your reputation within the firm will do the talking for you.
And lastly
My advice to the firm owners was to over-service their best clients, the ones who refer or are well placed to. And to over-service any client an introducer sends them, so that word gets back to the introducer that it was a great referral to make. Not just good client service, but the red carpet.
I know what you’re maybe thinking. “I can’t decide that a client gets extra meetings they’re not paying for. That’s my partner’s call.” And you may well be right.
But there’s more within your control than you might think. When an introducer sends something your way, you decide how quickly you pick up the phone. You decide whether their first query gets turned round the same day. And you decide whether the introducer hears back from you, with a thank you and a note that it’s going well. You can also tell your partner which clients are the well-connected ones, so that if your firm is going to roll out the red carpet for anyone, it’s for them.
Whilst that won’t guarantee the next introduction, it does at least mean the introducer has no reason to regret trusting you, and a good reason to think of you next time.
If your introducers can’t say in a sentence what you’re the right person for, you’ve put a barrier in your way to being referred. Your job is to make that sentence easy for them to say, by being specific about who you want to work with and what’s different about how you work, and then telling them.
Now, if you’re thinking, “But there are hundreds of people who do exactly what I do. What’s my point of difference?”, that’s exactly what our How to Become Known as the Go-To Expert course is designed for. It will help you define what your thing is, who is your ideal client and then how to get known and referred within your network.
I’ve popped a link to our Progress To Partner Academy, which contains our How to Become Known as the Go-To Expert course, directly in the show notes for this episode. Also in the show notes, you’ll find links to my books The Go-To Expert and The Financial Times Guide to Business Networking, which both go deeper on getting introducers to refer you, as well as Poised for Partnership and How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life, so you can easily find them on Amazon. And as a thank you for listening, there’s also a link for a 10% discount on annual membership for our Progress To Partner Academy using the code PODCAST10.
That’s all for this episode of the How to Make Partner podcast. What’s your action for this week? Write down, in one sentence, the box you want your introducers to put you in: who you’re the right person for, and what’s different about how you work with them. Then use that sentence the next time you speak to one of your introducers.
If you have enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. This helps us get the word out to others who may need this advice too. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode. Thanks for listening!
What help is out there for you
If you’re thinking, ‘But there are hundreds of people who do exactly what I do. What’s my point of difference?’, our Progress To Partner Academy can help you.
That’s precisely why we have the on-demand course ‘How to Become Known as the Go-To Expert’ in the Progress to Partner Academy. It takes you through a simple, step-by-step process to choose your niche, build your profile and referral network, and turn conversations into new clients, so you’re seen as the expert to call.
Links
Poised for Partnership
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life
Progress To Partner Academy (use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership)
The Go-To Expert
The Financial Times Guide to Business Networking
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Books mentioned
Poised for Partnership by Heather Townsend – https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life by Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie – https://amzn.to/4iLxugM
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