One of the topics that I hear the most from insurance agents is "How do I drive more referral business?" Internet leads are not what they used to be. Referrals are obviously the holy grail, but a lot of agents are uncomfortable asking for them, so they dabble with it, but they don't learn how to do it well. So I'm going to share with you five things that you need to know about getting referrals for your insurance business.

1) Build a Referral Culture

The first thing you need to do is to build a culture that says "around here we get referrals." It must be a commitment that your agency makes to itself. A culture that says getting referrals is part of our business model, a core function of what we do, and it can't be something that you try once in awhile. If you do not make getting referrals a part of your company culture, you'll never get good at it. 

2) Provide an Excellent Experience 

The second thing you need to do is to make sure that you're providing an experience that is going to make somebody want to give you a referral even if you don't ask them. Think about the places that you frequent where you would tell other people about, unsolicited. What does that experience look like? You need to think about what happens when somebody gets out of their car in your parking lot and put their feet on the ground until the time they get back in their car? So you need to be able to make sure that that experience is airtight.

3) Provide Value

During your meeting with your client, you want to make sure that you're providing a lot of value. Make sure you're not just selling your client a product, but rather that you are empowering them and educating them. As they are walking out of your office, you want them to be thinking, "wow, that agent understands me, knows the industry and understands what is best for my situation."

4) Focus on Introductions, Not Referrals

The most critical thing you've got to focus on is getting introductions not just referrals. An introduction is different than a referral. An introduction is a warm hand-off, whereas in many cases a referral is just a name and a phone number. You call to follow-up with the referral, and often they're not quite sure why you're calling, and it feels awkward, right? Instead, you want to go after a high-quality introduction where you're ideally meeting in-person with your customer and with their referral, having that warm hand-off.

5) Do a Lessons Learned After Every Meeting 

Finally, you've got to commit that after every single client engagement, you're going to sit down and do a 'lessons learned' and ask, how did I perform? Did I ask for a referral? How did I ask for it? What was the customer's reaction? Do I feel confident that I sounded like I knew what I was doing? What was the quality of the referral that I got? Do I have a meeting set up for an introduction or did I get a name on a piece of paper? Every time you do that, you're going to tune it and tweak approach and come up with goals for the next time.

If you follow this formula for a year, you are going to be amazing at getting referrals. If you dabble in referrals, a year from now you're still going to be calling Internet leads and wishing you had referral business. There's a link below to a video called How to Grow your Agency. In that video, we cover more information about getting referrals for your business along with a number of other topics that are key differentiators for very successful insurance agencies.