Referral Events that Produce Great Referrals

A few days ago, I received a call from one of our Referral Boot Camp graduates, Greg, who was experimenting with Referral Events and not having the success he’d hoped for. Although many clients attended his events, they didn’t always bring a guest for him to meet — even though it was requested on the invitation. Greg didn’t feel that he could turn down his clients’ desire to attend his events, even though they didn’t have a guest to bring.

There are at least two ways to handle this situation. One way is to make sure that you have a client appreciation event already on the calendar. If a client wants to come to your event but doesn’t have a guest to bring, let them know that “this is a different kind of event” and that they’ll be invited to bring a guest to it.

However, because this might be hard to pull off with some of your clients, a better way is to head off the problem before it comes up by using a “call-mail-call” strategy. Just before you mail the invitations, call the clients who you’ll be inviting (or have your assistant do it). Let them know that you’re hosting an event that’s designed to create a fun environment for your clients to introduce you to people who they think should know about your work.

A couple of weeks after sending the invitations, call the clients again to make sure that they’ve received their invitation and to see who they’re thinking of inviting. This will make your intentions quite clear, in a professional and cordial manner.

If a client says, “I don’t have anyone to bring, but I’d like to attend myself.” You can say “okay” or employ the tactic above. If your client says, “The person I wanted to invite to this event can’t make it” you might be able to turn this into a personal introduction at a lunch or other social event.

By the way, Greg does a neat thing. In addition to his referral events and regular client appreciation events, once a year, he hosts a client appreciation event just for clients who have given him referrals. I think this is a great idea.

I’ve been collecting examples of Referral Events for several years. Here’s an example that’s a tremendous success story. Rob Hoxton of Hoxton Financial, LLC writes:

“I came up with an idea for a referral event last year, have done it once, and have scheduled it again for July. We bill it as the annual ‘Hoxton Financial Client/Guest Golf Tournament.’ We invite our clients to build their own foursome, but we allow only one client per foursome. We’re very clear that this is a referral event.

“What we found in our first tournament is that for about five hours our client has a great time with their best friends — and you can imagine how at some point the non-client guest will want to know more about what I do for our clients. We wrap the day up with simple awards and a nice cookout.

“The event was very reasonable from a cost standpoint and although we didn’t convert all of the guests to clients, we were referred to clients with investment assets in excess of $6 million. We’ve already brought in $3.5 million of that, with more on the way.”

Try it, you’ll like it!