The Referability Project

The Relationship File Process
The proven way to add Ideal Clients fast.
Back when I work for a Wall Street based firm, in order to grow my business, meet my production goals and make bonuses, my company required me to make hundreds of cold calls every day to potential clients followed up by prepared scripts which were first approved by the compliance department and then provided to me by my office managers.
I hated it!
My goal was to find a natural way to meet, qualify and then acquire Ideal Clients faster but without any sales approach. No pitch, no angle or pre-conceived sales objective.
I’ve had to find a way to add clients faster by simply meeting a lot of people, being a nice person and building your reputation as a person who was competent and worthy of trust. It took me a while but I did figure out and I want to share it with you right now.
What if you could eliminate using traditional sales process and replace it with two simple repeatable strategies that would allow you to grow your business just as faster and faster but do it in a way that clients and potential clients prefer.
What if you were to become skilled at a non-manipulative, natural, casual way to inspire enough of your clients to instinctively want to introduce you to the people that they know and love and care about so that your calendar is full of Initial Client Interviews resulting from spontaneous, unsolicited client referrals?
We maybe thinking, that would be great, but what if I don’t have enough clients or potential clients to make the strategy work?
The beauty of this system is that no matter how many current clients you have it’s going to work no matter how few potential clients you have on your list this system will work.
Simply put the primary strategy is to focus on your clients by exceeding their expectations. Mastering this strategy is the key to ultimately creating a business that grows and sustains itself.
The second strategy is a momentum based method of being engaged in your community in activities that you enjoy effortlessly meeting lots of people. Some of whom will be a perfect fit and many who won’t.
Together these two strategies provide a system for generating spontaneous unsolicited client referrals while at the same time meeting with many potential clients to generate the revenue you require to run your business and live your life.
Let’s talk about the fastest way to add Ideal Clients. Let me tell you a little bit about my story.
After starting in the business in 1981, by 1999 I had been the top producer at my nationwide broker dealer for more than 5 years but I hated it. I won’t go into the whole story here and if you’re interested you can go look on this site for Mark’s story, but the bottom line is that having learned everything they could teach me I decided I had to reinvent my business from the ground up.
I had too many unprofitable Non-Ideal Clients sucking up my time and not enough Ideal Clients who appreciated and valued what I did. Who were willing to pay significant fees for the value that I delivered and who would be willing to refer me to others just like them, so I changed the game.
I gradually disengaged from believed or not 1,225 Non-Ideal Clients that I have accumulated over the past 12 years but I retained the 17 clients who I considered to be my Ideal Clients and by serving them extraordinarily well I was able to add 83 new Ideal Clients by referral only in less than 3 years.
By the way, you don’t have to disengage like this from clients but that was the choice that I made at the time so that I could immediately free up more time to work on my new way of doing things.
Just know that your results may be proportional to how much you make this a priority and block time for it. Of course those referrals didn’t just roll in overnight. I had to reinvent everything I did to become client focused and stop doing all the things my best clients really disliked even outright hated and I hand a different process instead of sales because I hated the traditional sales process and I was really uncomfortable doing it.
My potential clients hated it too. It was not delivering the right results for me. It was enabling me to add more Non-Ideal Clients but that was like throwing a boat anchor to a drowning man.
In the very early days I needed to address several challenges. For example: To relieve the stress and anxiety of meeting with new people because frankly, I’m an introvert. I came from a Wall Street based firm that required me to make hundreds of cold calls every day but the reason I refused to do it ever again is because I hated it and I knew there was a better way.
Also, I had to find a way to motivate me to get out of the office to engage with potential clients since it was simply easier not to leave the office and I needed an accelerated way to deepen relationships with new people since I don’t enjoy idle chitchat or long drawn out small talk but I do enjoy what I considered to be meaningful conversation about worthwhile interesting or inspiring topics.
I also needed a way to meet lots of people without forgetting their names and the details of their lives and without mixing them up and looking like a fool and I needed a way to meet more of the right people; potential Ideal Clients who would meet my Ideal Client profile and I wanted to integrate everything into one seamless strategy that I could actually do every week without fail that was easily repeatable and scalable.
I needed a way to meet lots of people that was enjoyable to me and not manipulative or presumptuous or rude or overwhelming for the Potential Client.
In this course, I’m going to explain exactly how I overcame all these challenges and more and successfully met more than 1,344 new people every year starting in year 1 without annoying them or me having to hate the process.
I’m here to tell you that there is better way, a non-manipulative way to meet large numbers of potential Ideal Clients and anyone can do this with a little discipline in planning.
If you’re truly committed to growing your business in an ethical and straightforward manner while serving your community and building a reputation as a really nice person who is skilled, competent and worthy of trust; you’ve come to the right place.
Welcome to the relationship filed process. The proven way to add Ideal Clients fast.
How to generate abundant referrals from your Ideal Clients and comfortably meet more potential clients than you could possibly serve without the need for a traditional sales process?
As far as we know and I’ve looked extensively over my 30 years in this business. This is the only replicatable method by which any Financial Advisor has ever consistently added more than 2 Ideal Clients per month over a continuous period and I’m calling that any period more than 2 years.
In the next section, I’d like to share some of the challenges I encountered and how they inspired the design of this extraordinary new system for adding Ideal Clients.
Let me start with the big challenges.
What I wanted to change in my business and why?
One of the questions I had foremost on my mind way back when was, “Won’t I add new Ideal Clients faster by spending my time prospecting and selling using traditional selling methods?”
Here’s some of the challenges that I encountered while I hated cold calling and the sales process that I’ve been forced in to my last two firms. The fact was the sales process was extremely effective and I had successfully used it to acquire new clients and make lots of money. Another challenge was that I hated scripts, but I also hated aimless small talk and meaningless conversation with strangers.
I did enjoy meeting interesting people and hearing about what was important to them and what drove them to do interesting things. What I needed was to find a way to meet new people and then find out what was most interesting about them as quickly as possible.
The traditional sales process can be effective and profitable. No question about it. The sales process is how many Financial Advisors have grown their business for decades.
If that process is working for you then you should continue to use it but if it’s not, you might consider instead how differentiating yourself from the PACT by developing relationship first and then proposing business only if it make sense later after the relationship is advanced might work better for you and be more comfortable to your potential clients, but what I really wanted was to implement an alternative, less personally distasteful process and that process had to be as effective and fast at helping me acquire new clients and generate business revenue.
Another challenge I had was I use to receive occasional client referrals but not enough to grow my business or meet my goals so I was trained that if my business was to grow I needed to get out there and promote myself to potential clients and sell myself.
My limiting belief was that my clients could never introduce me to enough people to allow me to meet my goals. That limiting belief was patently false. I know that each of my Ideal Clients knows at least 150 people. This is based on Dunbar’s Number.
Dunbar was a British anthropologist who calculated how many social relationship the average person could regularly sustained base on the size of a human brain. He determined that the number was about a 150.
I had 17 Ideal Clients if each of them had good relationships with 150 people that means that there were 2550 people in my directs fear that I did not know who were potential referrals.
There’s some new research by Tian Zheng at Columbia determining that the average Americans knows about 600 people.
Using this number, the math is even more exciting. That means my 17 Ideal Clients could potentially introduced me up to 10,200 people not to mention most of my Ideal Clients are in fact two clients, two spouses so now they are even more contacts.
This limiting belief was killing my growth potential and causing me to waste my time on low leverage client acquisition activities. A big part of the problem was, I had never put myself in a Potential Client’s shoes. I never stop to think. How would I prefer to meet a high-end professional who I’m willing to pay a lot of money on an on-going basis tell me to stay on-track to something important to me?
I never stop to think that I would much prefer to hear about that professional from someone that I trust who recommends them because they’ve had a consistently great experience with them.
Once I realized that potential clients prefer a referral rather than myself promotion I shifted back to wondering whether my existing clients were able or willing to introduce me to enough people.
Thinking like a client is a simple concept but the reality is that the vast majority of Financial Advisors do not think like the client and don’t behave in ways that appeal to clients especially in the beginning of the relationship.
Would a client rather be persuaded to buy something or wowed by a Financial Advisors reputation for competence and trust?
Do people in general prefer a sales pitch or do they prefer hearing about impressive people from others who rave about their powerful reputations?
Clients prefer to learn about Financial Advisors from people they know who can’t say enough good things about them. When someone is saying good things about you whether they are well-served client or someone you impressed in other ways your reputation for helping in a volunteer organization or charity for example. It drives referrals ether way this is the way potential clients prefer to meet professionals they might want to work with. Your reputation will indeed precede you.
I had discomfort around contacting someone even people referred by clients who were not expecting my call and did not understand why I was calling.
On the other hand, reaching out to potential clients who were expecting my call because one of my Ideal Clients told them that I could help them or receiving unexpected calls from potential clients because they had been referred to me. That was effortless.
It was much more comfortable if one of my clients had already spelled out my value to them and why they felt I might be able to help this person. Those calls were easy.
Another challenge was I knew the traditional sales process was effective but I was uncomfortable because it felt unnatural to me. I knew I had to master the ability to articulate my value to clients in a concise and compelling way. I felt that opening the conversation with a new acquaintance by trying to articulate my value was both presumptuous and unnatural. I needed to find a way to quickly develop relationships in a natural and non-manipulative way that would allow me to first see if there’s a potential for a personal relationship and then after establishing a trusted personal relationship evaluating whether there might be potential for a professional relationship to develop.
In the 200,000 years since humans began walking the earth and over the past 6,000 years of recorded civilization across most cultures there’s one normal and natural way in which people developed trusting relationships and that’s thru one on one interaction’s over a period of time we meet someone.
If we liked the experience we meet with them again. If we really get along we begin interacting more often.
Trust develops as we get to know the person. We also decide whether the person is interesting to us base on our common interest or not. The traditional sales process is designed differently.
First, we target and then qualify a person based on their profit potential rather than how interesting they are then we deploy our skills to either persuade or match the person with the products and services from which we stand to gain financially. We identify and monetized people rather than develop and deepen relationships.
Traditional selling focuses on transactions over relationships even high-end sales of sophisticated financial services and as I say traditional selling works but it’s not natural, not in the way we recommend you should build your reputation.
What if it were possible to acquire clients faster simply by developing relationships in a normal, natural human way?
Let’s talk about how I conceived the solution. The traditional sales process is effective but many Advisors and clients feel uncomfortable with it. I had no way of getting to know people well enough to establish whether an individual was likely a good fit before proposing a business relationship.
The traditional sales process consists of learning about client needs and then making promises. What’s missing is trust.
Potential clients often don’t know you. If they don’t know you how could they possibly trust you with all of their money?
I realized my challenge, I needed a way of first building a relationship of trust before presuming any kind of business relationship might be possible. This would be a reversal of the process that I was actually taught in corporate sales training. Trust needs to be the foundation of this process.
My goal was to find a way to build trust enough to allow one of three natural results from every new interaction.
1) Become friends and then a personal relationship will then develop.
2) See a fit for a business relationship and propose The Initial Client Interview™.
3. Determine neither is going to happen and quickly move on to meet a new person. Lather, rinse, repeat.
How is trust built?
In our process, trust comes from exceeding client expectations for your existing clients or adding value as a member of a team in the community.
By being visible in the community adding value for your team and always being a nice kind person causes trust to grow. From this foundation of trust and your growing reputation as competent professional new business relationships will take root and begin to flourish naturally.
What replaces the traditional sales process?
I knew I had potential Ideal Clients among my current Non-Ideal Clients but I didn’t have enough of them to sustain my business. I needed two processes.
1) One process design to strengthen relationships inside the business with existing Ideal Clients that I hope would generate referrals. I call this process “Internal Referrability”.
2) The other process is designed to build strong trusting relationships outside the business in the community. I call this process “External Referrability”
I did this by reaching out to my community to find out where my potential Ideal Clients were hanging out and then find a way to get involved and earn a place on their radar screen.
Both paths of activity had to be immediately actionable completely within my control and had to be proven to work better than traditional methods. These strong trusting relationships will be the foundation for the rapid growth of your business.
The result of running these two trust building processes is in parallel is that you develop a reputation in your community as someone who is competent and worthy of trust.
Once that happens you’ll have all the Ideal Clients you’ll need and want. These parallel processes eliminate confusion about what to do and when. Having goals without specific action plans is deadly.
Did the ring kills the time that should be spent time face to face serving clients or meeting potential Ideal Clients?
With these processes there’s no wondering what to do, when to do it or with whom to do it. Each day you’ll know what actions must be taken in by when. You’ll be in motion towards your goals.
In the traditional sales process you go out and try to persuade people to be interested in what you’re offering. In these processes you’re going out to find people who are already a good fit for what you’re offering and that is how these processes are different.Hi! This is Rick Barrera. Mark’s partner on this project. I’ve been coaching and training top producers and senior level Advisors for over 20 years and I’ve been working with Mark and various projects since 2008. I’d like to take a few minutes to explain some critical distinctions that are absolutely essential to your success with this methodology.
Let me start by explaining what a “distinction” is.
A distinction is the difference that makes a difference.
What’s the difference between an orange juice and Mimosa?
It’s champagne.
What’s the difference between a regular coffee and decaf?
The caffeine of course!
These are distinctions. If you’re not a drinker you might have not known that the answer was champagne. If you’re not a coffee drinker you may not have known about the caffeine although the decaf label would’ve given you a big hint.
What makes someone an expert in any field is how many levels of distinctions they can make about a particular thing. The more levels of distinctions they can make the greater their expertise.
What’s the difference between an IRA and a raw IRA?
What’s the difference between taking social security at age 62 or at age 70?
If you’re an expert you know the answers.
We’re going to make some very important distinctions in this course and you will need to pay attention to them because they are the differences that will make a difference in your business outcomes and in your life.
Mark and I will point them out as clearly as we can, but please pay attention to these critical distinctions because they will make or break your success with this system.
Please do your best to implement these ideas exactly as they are presented because that will give you the highest probability of success.
Here are the first few:
1) You must understand how Non-Ideal Clients damage your business and steal your ideal life.
Non-Ideal Clients are really nice people. This concept is not about the people. It’s about their fit for your business.
If you have a lot of small clients who pay you very little in recurring revenue but still take up your time to serve you will never have the time to do the two truly important things we’re about to teach you.
Let me say that again, to grow your business you must have recurring revenue. Revenue that clients have committed to pay you year after year and it must be of significant size to provide you the money you need to be able to serve them at a very high level.
If your business is made up of dozens or hundreds of Non-Ideal Clients like Mark’s was you will drown in request; busy work and paper work while making very little money.
This is exhausting and it prevents you from doing the two mission critical things we are about to teach you. The way out of this trap is to be crystal clear on what your Ideal Client profile looks like and to focus the majority of your efforts on finding and serving these people. We will show you at the end of the course exactly how to create and use your Ideal Client profile but keep in mind throughout this course that your goal is to identify and acquire Ideal Clients.
I’ll say it again, your goal is to identify and acquire Ideal Clients, not just any clients.
To identify Ideal Clients you’ll have to get to know them exceptionally well. You’ll have to invest time into the relationship before there is any pay-off. You will need to be okay with this and embrace this concept.
We will show you how to make sure you’re fishing in the right pond so you can get the right pay off over time, but you must be willing to make the investments in real relationships to make this work.
If you think it’s a waste of time or not efficient enough for you. This may not be the course for you.
Mark has the data to prove that this is far more efficient than any other method but you must believe in the methodology and work it exactly as we described to get the pay off you seek.
I believe you will find your life so rich with new friends and deep, authentic relationships that you will come to believe that the money is secondary. I believe as these relationships developed and you start accomplishing your own financial goals that you will mellow a bit and start to really enjoy life and be less concerned about money.
I know this because I have seen it in the Advisor’s we worked with. They often start out with huge financial goals but are soon tempering them as they start to find their own ideal life unfolding.
They begin to choose lifestyle in free time over money. They start to focus more on their values and their families. They start to really enjoy friends and free time. They start taking better care of themselves and their health. They smile more and they laugh often. They actually relax.
2) You must understand what Mark means when he talks about serving your Ideal Clients at a high level. He does not mean be a good Financial Planner or Investment Advisor. Those are table stakes. If you’re in the top 10 or 20% of Advisor’s in those arenas they’re still table stakes. It’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.
We’re going to show you how to become indispensable to your clients. When you do this referrals will come to you in ways you never believe possible.
Let me give you an example:
We had one Advisor in a small town in Canada who served her clients so well that she had a doctor come into her office and begged to be a client. She had closed her practice to new clients and he came in saying that he had 8 million dollars and she had to take him.
All of his doctor friends were her clients and he had 8 million dollars and she just had to make an exception and let him in. He kept repeating himself until she relented and accepted him as a client.
Would you like to have those kinds of problems?
You can, but you must understand what Mark means by serving clients at a high level.
Advisors come up to me at my speaking engagements and they say things like, “Rick, I completely get what you’re saying. When clients come to my office I have their favourite beverage already sitting in the comfort room table or I have their car wash when they meet with me.”
These are very nice things to do but they are not what Mark and I are talking about. No one is going to turn over millions of dollars to you because you gave them a cup of tea. And no one is going to drag their millionaire friends to you because you paid for a car wash. They have the money to pay for their own car washes.
Your standards are going to have to be much higher. You can start right now repeating one of Mark’s mantras.
If you want more referrals you have to be more referable. In other words, you’re going to have to serve clients in such a way that they cannot stop talking to their friends and colleagues about you and the value you bring to their lives that is a high standard indeed.
When we talk about serving clients at a high level we mean carry more about their money and their financial well-being than they do. We mean carry more about their family than they do. We mean anticipating anything and everything that could possibly wrong in their financial life and fixing it before it goes wrong. We mean knowing more about their lives than you know about your own family and having a documented so you can use it to serve them at levels that they did not even know were possible.
You may think that I’m exaggerating here and I will admit to just a touch of hyperbole but not much. I am talking about exceeding every standards for excellence your clients have and please realize that the clients you want are multimillionaires and they have very high standards and you will exceed their standards if you will listen to Mark.
Mark did things for his clients that simply blew my mind when I heard about them. Remember: I have been training Advisors at the biggest and best firms in the industry for over 20 years.
Mark did things for his clients that I had never heard of before, and they are pure genius and he’s not keeping them a secret. Mark shares everything he knows in his various courses. He holds nothing back. It’s all there for the taking.
But, hear me aloud and clear that if you are not totally and 100% committed to truly serving your clients at the highest possible levels. You will not succeed with this process. If your goal is to police the ship and take the money and run; this course is not for you.
This course is for those of you who want to be true pillars of the community, respected for your expertise and the care and service that you provide your clients while serving your community at the highest possible levels.
If that describes you and you are willing to do the work to get there; you are in the right place.
3) Authenticity is essential.
This is not a scam we’re running on potential clients. We are going to ask you to go out in the community and serve the community as a way of building your reputation.
If you see that process is a chore you must do to find Ideal Clients and you don’t have your heart in it; it won’t work.
People will see right through you. If you seem desperate it won’t work. When you go into the community to serve you must have a servant’s heart. You must really believe that it is your role to serve your community.
You must come from a place of service and love. You must truly care about people and want to do nice things for them. You must be a truly nice man or nice woman. This should not be hard for you.
If you’re the kind of person who is seeking a course like this I believe that you are already a nice person.
Somewhere along the line though you may have been train to be a bit too mercenary in your career.
Someone told you that you had to be different or callus or predatory to be successful. Someone got you focused on transactions and money instead of focusing on humans and relationships which is the only way you can be truly successful in this industry.
If you get up every day with a servants heart you will make more money than you ever thought possible. It’s just that simple.
This is the end of part 1. This audio visual recording and all associated materials are Copyright 2018 by Comprehensive Financial Services, LLC and may not be edited or redistributed in any fashion, in part or in full without express prior written permission from the Copyright holder. All rights are reserved.