How to Get More Referrals | A Proven Method

So I was having lunch with a CPA friend here in town in Columbia, South Carolina last week. We're sitting in a local, uh, bar restaurant, kind of like a sports bar, having lunch, and we're talking about my competition, our competition, the ADPs, the Paychecks of the world, and how frequently they're coming by his office and they're dropping off swag and they're bringing cookies and they're chatting up the receptionist and they're hounding out all the CPAs. And, you know, he proceeds to tell me that none of that stuff matters. We still think about you guys first and foremost. We prefer to partner with a local provider. We prefer to work with someone who's benefiting the community, and we love how you guys have served our clients in the past. But I come to realize that there are still people at his firm referring to ADP and Paychex.. And one of the primary reasons why is just because they are top of mind, right? I thought about it after I had coffee, uh, went to a coffee meetup last week. I referred two people to Connect because I had just seen one of them that morning and the other one, one that was looking for somebody who did what that person did. And so I just, they were top of mind. So I made the connection. And so that's why ADP and Paychex have CPA-centric reps. They're calling on CPAs. 100% of the time because it's valuable to be top of mind. So today I'm going to share some tips for how you can compete with these CPA-centric reps, what you can do to get more referrals, and how you can build out a referral program over time and make sure you're staying top of mind with your referral partners. So I'm going to go ahead and dive in. I got some notes here from some of our internal sales trainings. I got some, uh, anecdotes I'll pop in throughout the way, but Let's start with why are referrals so important? Well, I used to do this presentation back when I was with one of the large national providers on, I called it 1 1 3. So if I can go out and I can earn the trust and, you know, work closely with a partner, whether that be a CPA firm, a healthcare broker, or whoever, then they might refer me 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 30, 50 accounts over the lifetime of that relationship. Which is much better time spent rather than going out and trying to pound on one door at a time to sell a small business or a mid-sized business on our products and services. So 1 1 3. Why would I not invest my time and energy, especially if I'm a smaller firm, which I know a lot of the firms listening are a little bit smaller, maybe just getting started. So if you can only focus your time and energy on one sales channel, outbound, that is, focus on referral partnerships. Too often people get caught up in the thought that you can't influence referrals coming in and you can't forecast that. That's just not true. You can, but you have to be very intentional about it. And first, you just have to identify who are the possible people that can refer you. When I got started here, those were the, some of the first calls I made and some of the best relationships I have today were, were straight up CPAs that I cold called and said, hey, look, here's what we do. Here's how we differentiate. I would just like to get to know you better, see how we can better serve each other as we move forward and, and continue to grow our and try to help you grow your book of business? Because ultimately, them growing your book of business does them no good unless you, you know, reiterate what are some of the reasons why it is beneficial to them, which we'll get to in a little while, for them to refer clients to you. How do we make their life easier by partnering with us? So let's focus on that first. Who can refer us into clients? So there's a host of different people that can refer you into clients. But, you know, the traditional folks are the CPAs, the healthcare brokers, the P&C agents, workers' comp agents. If you do some pay-by-pay and you can partner with them, always a great avenue to take. For me, it's start with the CPAs. Get as many CPAs on your side as you can. Um, healthcare brokers, much more mixed levels of success there, especially if you ever have any interest in offering healthcare, you might want to push that one aside just because you, you know, you're going to be viewed obviously as a competitor. Whereas some of you, if you're doing, if you're already an accounting firm that spun off a payroll model or payroll business outside of that, you've got to be able to address the concern if you're going to go to other accounting firms and ask them for referrals. Well, what, you know, am I letting the wolf into the henhouse here if I let, if I bring you guys in on a payroll deal? How are you going to address that? Are you going to have some sort of non-compete on those deals when they bring you stuff. And I know some of you out there are much better versed in this. Some of our, the folks listening, I know have done a great job of spinning off a payroll business outside of an accounting firm. And so love to hear your feedback in the comments on how you guys have done a good job of making sure that you're not threatening CPA firms. But if you are a CPA firm by trade, and then you've spun off a payroll business, this might be a tougher road to hoe. You might just want to focus on the benefits agencies, including workers' comp insurance to, to try to kind of put your fork in the ground or put your foot in the ground there and get things up and rolling. So identify some possible targets. You can simply find those. You know, one of the things I've got sitting right here on my desk is a book of lists that our city creates, or who— I don't know, some economic development offers it. And I'm literally looking at right now a list of employee benefits brokers in the city, the largest ones. I've checked off the ones that we don't work with as possible referral partners. So get together a list, do the cold outreach, look for an introduction would be much easier, right? So if you can find an introduction to get in front of these folks and then start to nurture that relationship over time, but start with the mentality of give first. What do you offer them that's going to make their life easier? Is it the simple, you know, we just picked up a deal this past week where the, uh, the business owner, dental practice, they were just encouraged and excited by the fact that their CPA was going to be able to reach out to us directly whenever they had any questions. They kept— they had spent months and months and months just trying to get their CPA added to their account at ADP, only to later, you know, still not be able to get their questions answered. Even after they did get access, the access level wasn't right. You know, the proverbial eye roll of all the red tape that exists there for good reason, but goes completely away when you've got two local partners that know each other and have permission to speak to one another and don't have to go through all all the, uh, internal red tape of a Fortune 500 company. So tremendous amount of value there in just one respect, and we'll talk more to that in just a bit. So identify the folks that can refer you, put together a list, try to get some introductions to them if you're not already. And think about it like this: so if you go to the bank for the first time, you can't just walk in and say, give me some money. When you go to the bank, you have to make deposits first., and then you can withdraw money. So referral relationships are exactly like this. I can't just go to somebody and say, hey, who do you know that would like to, or that I could call on to do business with me? I have to make some deposits, which means I have to provide some real value to them. And I'm going to give some tips on some things we've done in the past that have provided real value to our CPA partners, uh, that have increased our relationship, increased the lead flow coming from them, and help us to stay top of mind. So I've got some, some very practical things you can do here in just a moment. All right. So make sure you're making deposits before you try to take a withdrawal. And this goes for everything. I think we talked about it in the content marketing episode as well. Don't just go around saying, we're the best, come do business with us. We're the best, come do business with us. Provide value first, and then more things will come your way. So what are some things when we talk about being easy to refer? So one of the biggest mistakes I see, I see this with CPA firms, particularly that start to get into the payroll space is that when I ask them who their target client is, oh, anybody and everybody. Oh, we'll just do, you know, whether it's a restaurant, a dental practice, a tech firm, a construction company, they just, they're wide open for business. 2 employees, 200 employees, we'll do anything. You know, we're just here to do a great job. Well, to me, it's kind of funny because I was looking for a CPA firm to refer a client to last week, and immediately I started categorizing, well, this company's really good with, dental practices and this type of firm. This one is really good with more of the tech companies because they know those tax credits. This one is really good. And I just remember categorically skipping over one in my mind because they were one of these we do anybody and everybody firms. And to me, that means you do nobody, as far as I can tell. I want to know that I'm sending my clients to somebody who's a specialist and that they're going to know their unique business challenges. And that's the way that CPAs want to think about you or your referral partners want to think about you is that you're a specialist in these industries, whether that's Hey, we only work with folks with 25 employees or less. We only work with fuck folks in this geography. Hopefully I don't get canceled there. I guess I kind of accidentally cussed there, but you've got to have some sort of target addressable market that you can come to folks say, we work with professional services companies, typically with between 10 and 49 employees, mostly headquartered here in Columbia, South Carolina. This includes dental practices. Legal practices, financial service companies, tech companies, and IT companies. And that's, that's our real sweet spot. Our real bread and butter tends to be they're coming off of a national provider. They've been jaded with the service and they're looking for something more local where they can get more hands-on service. Now that gives them a clean snapshot of opportunities that might fit us. I didn't say anybody and everybody, you know, and then they'll start to ask, well, what about this? Yeah, we'll, we'll work with it, but they might not be the best fit for what we do. So for example, we don't want to take on a lot of restaurants, a lot of construction companies. I mean, we're trying to mitigate risk as it relates to NSFs and as it relates to just the quality of life for our internal employees and the support interactions that they have. So we don't go out and promote that. But conversely, if I did, it'd be the first thing I talked about so that I made myself easier to refer. Alright, so make yourself easy to refer, give them a clear snapshot of what your target client accounts look like. And if you don't know what they look like, go back to your client base right now. Look through your client base, say, hey, who are the folks that are the most fun to serve? If we could replicate this client 25 times over, we'd be ecstatic. They're profitable, they're fun to serve, they're easy. There's an old acronym, easy, lucrative, and fun. The ELF acronym. So is this client easy to serve? Is it a lucrative business? And is it fun for us? And so make sure, you know, you're not— if you just cast this wide open net and you just start getting referrals in every different industry, you're only hurting yourself in the long run because you're just going to get more clients that you don't actually enjoy serving. So don't do that to yourself. All right. So make yourself easy to refer, give them a clear target. And now let's talk about staying top of mind. So we went back early on here. We talked about the, you know, the ADP reps coming by every 4 days. If I'm a CPA-centric rep, I mean, I'm trying to see these folks every week, every other week, all the CPAs in my territory. I'm trying to stay top of mind. I got the cookies, I got the small talk, all that fun stuff. That's great. And that definitely works. But I'm guessing most of the people on this call or listening in here don't have the bandwidth to have a CPA-centric your crap. So even if you've got reps in turf, awesome. If you can kind of spill them loose into referral partners first and foremost, which I highly suggest. But also, even if you're just a solo owner and you're trying to develop more business, you need to work this into your schedule. You need to find a way to stay top of mind and provide value at the same time. But so let's talk about an in-person interaction. First and foremost, we have an internal acronym. It's called Value Rapport Ask. And so if I were a, um, CPA-centric rep, we've got a little— I'm pulling it up over here, sorry for the staggering— but we, we've got a Value Rapport Ask method. So what are you going to do to provide value to the firm and to its clients? How are you helping their business? So some examples might be providing industry insight in the form of guides, templates, best practices. We've got assets, you know, some of them are inside of our systems and sort of inside of our, you know, marketing folders. We just kind of keep an assets folder ready. Some of the things that we've done is, you know, hiring guides, onboarding guides, the, you know, HR compliance updates, anything that I can either email drop-off that is actually, you know, and I don't want to just minimize it and say, oh hey, here's this hiring guy, but I really just want to swing by and say hello. I want to explain to them the value of the piece of content that I'm providing and why some of their clients might get use out of it and some industries or client sizes that would find it useful. Because what we're trying to do here is make the CPA the hero. They don't want to turn around and be like, oh hey, you know, Matt from Guru stopped by and he had some really great information that I thought you'd like. They want to be the hero. So if you want to take this a step forward or a step further when it comes to creating content for your referral partners, ask them if they'd like you to brand it to their firm. I've had great success with this where we just take our branding off it altogether because I don't really care if the end client knows that it came from us. I just want the referral partner to be happy. And to remember us in a positive way and to know that we provided value to their firm. What's more valuable to their firm? Their logo on the stuff that they give to their clients or our logo? Too often we get hung up in the fact of, oh man, but what if that end client saw our logo? They might go to our website. That's great. Once again, we're focused on 1 1 3. That's 1 1 2 thinking right there. You need to cut that out. Focus on pleasing your referral partner first and foremost. So the VAR method— going off on a little tangent there— VAR, VRA method, excuse me, value, rapport, ask. So I'm going to establish value. I'm not just going to come in with the old nonsense of, you know, hey, nice fish. I'm going to establish value first, then I'm going to work on the rapport. You should work on developing rapport with anybody and everybody in this office if you're going over personally. Go wide. You know, talking to the front desk person, getting to know them, asking questions, writing that into a CRM so you don't ask the same question 6 times. So when you come back and they told you their cat had surgery the week before, you can actually, you know, speak to that. If you're— if we're going back to doing this virtually, don't just send stuff over on a blank boilerplate template. Send it over with some questions, with some personal rapport in there. You can develop rapport online. You can develop over the phone too, believe it or not. Those work. You can pick it up and actually pick up the phone and call them before you send an email. Say, hey, I'm getting ready to send you over the latest onboarding and termination guide for remote employees. Would you like me to brand this to your firm so that you can send it to your clients? It's got our logo on it today, but I figure that's not real valuable to you. And, and just start to establish that, that rapport. Who's their favorite sports team? How many kids do they have? You know, figure those things out, but also understand that like that's, that's not what moves the needle at the end of the day. Make sure you put that information into your CRM. Make sure you've got notes that you can refer back to because there's nothing worse than somebody asking you the same questions over and over again. So rapport is important, but it's not the sole purpose of these, uh, conversations or interactions. So I'm establishing value, I'm establishing rapport. Now the next big thing, and the biggest piece that people miss out on, is once you've made enough deposits, it's okay to ask. You'll never get any referrals if you don't ask. Don't just ask general questions, ask specific questions. So, hey Tony, we work with a lot of dental offices. We help them to focus on patient care by removing the administrative burden associated with HR. Do you have any dental practices as clients that you could introduce me to? This is hyper-specific. And if you're worried about it being too specific, guess what? You'll get another chance to ask later if you want. So if you establish a good relationship, you can say, hey Tony, The next month, we have just signed 3 new software companies. Here's the value we provide to software companies. Do you have any that come top to my— top of mind that you think would value from a conversation with me where I can share our— that hiring guide that we gave you last week and talk to them about their hiring projections and some best practices? So value, rapport, ask can be done digitally, can be done over the phone, can be done in person. It's a very simple framework that you can follow to get more referrals, but you have to interact at each step here and you have to have the framework to do it. So one of the things in our CRM, we can tag people, uh, use tags, or we can use different lists in there. Each different CRM has the kind of the same but different way of handling this. So we always want to have a prospect list. That's kind of our, hey, we're going to email these folks with updates about our products and services in the hopes that they do business with us one day. We're going to try to provide value to them on a regular basis, you know, in the hopes that should they ever need someone that does what we do, we're top of mind for them. We also have a clients list. They're kind of the same thing. We're starting with, if you listen to the marketing plan episode, if not, I highly suggest it. It's awesome. You get a lot about our philosophy of giving first through there. And we approach each of these lists with the same, but, but at a high level, we have a client prospect and partner list. And then we even have further segmentation inside of those lists. So easy way to think about it is clients. We have clients on different services. Sometimes we have to segment those lists. If somebody's not using payroll, as an example, they don't care if, if, you know, their pay date, which should be moved in the upcoming payroll. So, you know, we'll take them off those communications, etc. But with referral partners, we want to have a list of referral partners that are already referring us business so we can speak to them slightly differently than folks that we're considering, that we're trying to court to refer us more business. And so we really want to drive the value for them. And what are some things that are valuable to the referral partner? Well, they want to grow their revenue. And so finding opportunities for them to, you know, you and them to win more deals together because you're bringing a unified solution or because you are, you know, helping them to be stickier by providing complementary services. Increasing client retention, also huge, right? They don't want to refer somebody and get burned and actually lose clients because they gave a bad suggestion. So you need to make sure that you're providing top-notch service. Sometimes you'll have folks, and this, this varies by region, I almost feel like, or certainly practice to practice, but also, also by region. You know, some folks care about getting a kickback in cash, others just won't or can't. Sometimes they have, you know, some CPA firms just cannot, as an internal policy, accept any referral rewards in exchange for referring you business or any, you know, we've tried to do rev shares and most firms deny that and don't want it. So we tend to just do a nice gift card or a nice gift when they refer a client over. And so when I'm trying to provide value to them, I'm trying to think about, you know, How do they think about this whole thing? Putting myself in their shoes, they want to provide valuable resources and be a true trusted advisor to their clients. Their clients came to them for their product and service. One of the most important things in the entire business, dealing with the finance of the business, is trusted to the CPA, and they take a lot of accountability for that, as they should. And so we want to make sure that we're being a great steward and extension of them with anything we provide and not misrepresenting ourselves, their firm, or anything. So, so, you know, when we look at their value statements for their clients, say, hey, I want to help your clients stop worrying about HR payroll tax compliance. I want to help them reduce time and costs related to HR processes, reduce, you know, maintain compliance with state and federal laws, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You guys all have that stuff down. That's the easy part. But now making sure that you're consistent with this is the challenging part. And so what you want to do is carve out some time each week, 30 minutes nurturing referral relationships, or, and this is, that would be for more of you who are the solo owner trying to develop business, or maybe have a couple of only client success folks, and this is going to fall on you. Well, if you don't have any salespeople, guess what? This is going to fall on you to try to drive referrals. And there's just nobody who's going to be able to handle it as well as you until you get somebody more involved in a business development capacity, or a high-level administrative person who understands your business, been with you from the start, maybe even equity holder. So you've got to carve out the time. You've got to be— you've got to work on the most high-return types of activities during that time. So that means focusing on those ones who have referred or are most likely to refer, putting things into their hands that are valuable to them and their clients. I think you'll find if you block 30 to 60 minutes per week, it'll be more than enough time as you start to roll through the month because you can't, can't reach out, email, call everybody every single week. You know, once a month is plenty when it comes to developing these relationships. So over time, if you're just picking up the phone, having great conversations, sharing latest updates, sharing, you know, hey, I had a client call me with this question earlier this week. I think some of your clients may have the same question. Have you ever heard this before? Love to send you some resources, what we sent them to help them navigate the issue. And this is the whole thing, man. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. That is the perfect example of you already answered this question for somebody else. Now just answer it for your referral partner, for them to share with their client base. And once again, make them the hero. Give them the text to send out in an email blast. Give them an article. Give them whatever it takes to help them to achieve their goals and vision and even ask them First and foremost, hey, what is it that you're— is your firm trying to grow? You try to take on more clients? You're trying to retain your existing clients? What can I do to help you? They will almost always say, refer us more business. Absolutely. Which you want to maintain true to. Now that gets complicated if you go and develop relationships with 25 CPAs across town. So I prefer personally for my network to work with a handful of CPAs, a handful of benefits brokers. Once again, where I can easily categorize in my mind. Hey, here are the folks I'm going to send to this group. Here are the folks I'm going to send to that group. Here are the folks I'm going to send to that group. Makes it good for both of us. And they know that I'm not all over town whoring myself out to every agency in the city. And conversely, they know that their clients are going to get taken care of very, very well should we be fortunate enough to earn their business. So it's a mutually beneficial relationship. And we also know to each of them what's important. So some of them, it's just important that they have access to our system and can pull reports when they need it. Some of them, they just want to make sure their clients are getting their questions answered in a timely fashion. My goodness, the complaints right now. It's December 6th, 2021. The complaints that we're getting right now from the nationals about wait times for client support. I mean, very simply, even if you're reaching out and saying, hey, did you know our client support time is average is less than 2 hours response time? Hope you guys are doing well. What can we do to help provide value to your clients and try to find some ways that you can work together? Um, and this is a big thing. So a couple things we've done, I promised earlier, sorry, I went off on a little tangent there about the, the national support time. But so some of the things we've done with our partners is first and foremost co-branded webinars. So these work tremendously well if you can get with a firm come up with a topic that's going to be valuable to their client base, work together to co-brand it. You're marketing to your prospect base and client base. They're marketing to their prospect and client base. You get great cross-pollination. This is where you're really providing value to them because you're going to deliver the content, but they're going to get their logo out in front of your clients. And conversely, you're going to get your logo out in front of their clients and help position them as a trusted advisor to their clients. Now, we'll also do these only for their internal firm employees. So some of our larger firms where they have, you know, 50 or more employees, even 25 or more employees, we will offer to do educational webinars or in-person meetings just for their team. So, you know, hot topics in HR, always one that sells. Hey, what's the latest and greatest? What should your clients be looking out for? You know, misclassifications, you know, FLSA exempt versus non-exempt. Think about the questions that the CPAs get regularly from their clients that they're expected to answer, and then try to answer them for them so that they can be equipped to answer them. And if not, pass them over to you if they need further guidance. And always offer yourself up as a free resource to them and their clients. We get questions, multiple questions every week from the CPA firms themselves related to HR, payroll, tax issues, any and all of the above. And that's awesome. We love to answer those questions because we know it creates this feeling of, you know, we're in it together, we're teammates, we want to see each other succeed, and we're happy to provide that guidance to you if it's going to make you the hero for your clients. So webinars, trainings, phone calls, don't forget that. Emails, obviously you can provide a ton of value over email. Develop that list. If you don't have your list and it's tagged somewhere where you can easily send out an email blast to them, whether through your email marketing system, even just in your Outlook or your Gmail, putting those people into a list where you can send them something once a week, once a month, then you need to do that. Get it organized. That's step one. Get your list together of folks that could possibly refer you, that you can provide value to their firm. And then finally, there's also just good old-fashioned lumpy mail. So you're like, well, hey, I don't have time every month to go swing by all these people's offices, Matt. Once again, if I'm blocking 30 to 60 minutes each week, I've got a good list put together. Now I'm adding physical address into that list. I can send some lumpy mail once a quarter. That's, you know, hey, maybe that is that latest hiring guide combined with some tchotchkes, or maybe it's a box full of tchotchkes for a bigger firm that, you know, and a box full of the hiring guide. Send some things over, put physical things in front of them. You don't have to get in the car and drive all over the city to do it. You can do it via the mail. You can even have interns help you with this stuff. It's very simple to deploy. Just takes a little bit of time. And the more you continue to get organized, create that well-oiled machine, the more you're going to see rewards on this. And this falls right into what our whole philosophy is. We talk about it all the time. ABV, always be valuable, always be creating value. That's how we get all of our inbound leads, whether that's online or whether that's from our CPAs, broker partners that we get from referrals. So This is tried and true. This is what we do. This is how we execute. And, you know, it's how we do it with a limited sales team. And quite frankly, it's put us at the place where we've got to have more sales staff because we have so much inbound. So we're not hiring people and saying, oh, hey, we need you to come here and pick up the phone and hammer it and try to create more deals for us because we're just light on deals. No, we've got the opposite problem. We've got so much inbound from the stuff we're creating out there. Going back to that marketing strategy one, you could have listened to the previous episode combined with this referral relationships, and we've created an inbound engine that cannot be beat. So hopefully this was valuable to you. Please leave me a comment, drop me a note, Matt at Guru.co. That's Guru.co. Once again, solo episode. Always wondering how you guys like these. The last couple seem to have gotten higher listens than some of the others. So definitely seems like they're, they're of value. And this topic is one that I know that you're going to be able to go out and leverage straight away with your prospects and clients. So thank you so much for taking some time out of your day with me, and please let me know how I can be of service.