Don’t Make These 4 Mistakes When Building Referral Alliance Partnerships

Hey there guys,

Steve Salvia here from blackwing.com.au

And as part of this month’s theme around Alliance Partners and Referrals…

Today I wanted to talk to you about building Profit Partnerships and 4 Big Mistakes that I see financial planners make all the time when it comes to joint ventures and partnerships with potential alliances.

It’s not just advisers that do this… Almost every business that tries to build relationships with someone, screws up at least one of these 4 things.

I’m going to show what to look for… and what to look out for… when you start to play a bigger game around referrals. And more importantly – around endorsement.

Got heaps to share today.

I can’t wait.

Let’s dive in to this Blackwing Boost Your Business tip.

Now I just want to put a bit of a caveat on this before I start…

Today I’m going to be talking fairly heavily about Affiliate Relationships.

You know, I’ve talked a lot in the past about just getting the odd sporadic referral here and there…

And about having a business friend or a business acquaintance that sends a referral through every now and then…

And that’s perfectly fine & necessary and most of the time, that’s exactly how financial planner referral relationships work.

But when you start to get more serious and you start to play a bigger JV game…  and your alliance relationship gets more structured and a bit more serious…

Then what you find is that often it’s going to be about money as well as getting people looked after.

So specifically, in the context of today’s training, we’re going to be talking about people who have lists and want to promote you to those lists in return for some money – or commission – or whatever you decide when you bring on a new client of their – or vice versa.–

So with that said, here’s 4 Big Mistakes when it comes to creating those bigger picture partnerships and endorsement relationships.

Oh and by the way,

If you look at what the top 5 – 10% of financial planners do around this…

You’ll find that most of them – not all – but most of them have a structured alliance partnership process for referrals that’s more than just handing over a business card or the odd email sent

Anyway, 4 big mistakes.

And the first one is a bit ironic…

The first mistake I see is being Too Attached to Money!

It’s kind of funny isn’t it?

You build these alliance relationships for a few reasons don’t you…?

You want to build your list – sure.

You want to get referrals and make sales.

But when you are too focused on the money – strange things happen.

Alliance partners run away, instead of coming towards you….

You get the opportunity to run a workshop or do a seminar or maybe some VIP Private client training that your alliance has organised for their clients…

But when your partner isn’t 100% on-board – because you are still haggling about a few percent commission… you often find the events are of lesser quality and they don’t convert as well.

When you are too attached to the money, pretty much nothing good happens.

So if you can imagine…

The hand that’s holding the money – being the same hand that’s going to receive the money – IT CAN’T! Because it’s closed.

It’s tight and it’s in a fist!

So what you want to be doing instead is that you are going to make a ton of money out of the process…

But to do that you’ve got to let go of the attachment to the cash.

Does that make sense?

Now we’re going to be very smart and very strategic in how we play this…

You are in business! And you want to make money and a profit right…?

But your job here is to build a relationship and you need people to know that you are there to Love People and Use Money.

If your alliances think that you are there to Use People and Love Money – its not going to work.

Seriously – I hear financial planners squabble all the time about whether to share 10 or 15 or 20% of any income or commission from a qualified referral…

Dude – I know I’d rather have 70% of something consistently…

Than 100% of nothing, any day of the week!

So we’ve you are get smart and we need to let go of the attachment to the money in your referral relationships – ok?

Give people an incentive to have you in their world and expose you to their lists.

Number 2. The second mistake we make with alliances is Not Giving Credit!

If someone refers you a client, you want to acknowledge the assist!

You want to thanks them for the referral!

Coach John Wooden – great American basketball coach was trying to get his players to be more of a team and build moral and be less like ‘hogs’.

He was the guy who invented the statistic for Assists.

Before that, people would pass the ball,

Somebody else would score and they’d get all the glory and that’d be pretty much it.

But John Wooden invented 2 things:

1. The Assist – where if I pass you the ball and you score – I get an assist because I helped you out
2. And the second thing he invented was creating a real, tangible Culture of Acknowledgment in the team.

Where if I pass you the ball and you score,

You look at me and you point!

Or you high 5 me…,

And we share in the celebration of that ‘mini win’!

It’s called Acknowledging the Assist.

In the affiliate relationship world, there’s no point me sending you bunch of leads – a bunch of assists… –

You converting them into clients…

And I don’t get any acknowledgement or reward for it!

It’s wrong.

It’s bogus and it’s not cool! OK

So if someone goes to the effort of referring you to their guys, you must:

1. Acknowledge the assist
2. Keep good affiliate stats
3. Pay them well and pay them regularly! Cool?

It’s common sense but it’s not commonly practiced.

This one’s not about money but it’s about Time!

If you want ME to promote you….

And this happened to me twice just before I started the Blackwing business….

It was like “hey Steve, we’d love you to run a workshop for us”…

And I’d had a couple of chats – some preliminary discussions with them to run a workshop for their clients…

And everything seemed good….

But then, just before the workshop, they sent me an email saying,

“hey, I know this is short notice but we’ve got this event coming up next week. Could you send out some emails to your clients for us…?”

And I’m like – NO!

Your crisis can’t become my crisis.

Really, to market an event like this properly, you need to be sending emails and getting interest for about 3, maybe 4 weeks out minimum.

Maybe a bit more if it’s a bigger event.

But generally 3 to 4 weeks is good.

So that means you need to have about 6 weeks notice to start to prepare for a joint even and get on the same page….

If you don’t, you are really making it hard for them and your robbing yourself of opportunities as well!

So the third point is around lead-time and a lack of preparation for an event.

And number four. The fourth mistake is Not Making It Easy!

Coupled with not giving people enough time, this is a big problem…

If you say, “hey, I’d love you to be my alliance partner…”

And you agree to do some workshops or seminars or whatever…

And then you make them do all the work…

You make them schedule everything…

And you make them write their own promotional emails…

And set up the venues and you know…

Fact is that you are NOT their number 1 priority!

You want to make it as easy as you possible to work with you.

Do everything for them – you know…

Tuck them in at night…

Give them a glass of milk…

And make them as comfortable as possible.

Do everything for them so that they don’t have to think!

And if you do that for them, they’ll want you to do it again, and again and again…

And you’ll become valuable to them!

And that’s when you become important to them and their business.

You can’t possibly make things too easy for them.

And there’s heaps of different ways to do that…

So there’s our 4 Profit Partnership Mistakes!

If you sum it all up, we’re either being Greedy in the first two…

And Thoughtless in the second two…

Greedy or Thoughtless (or both).

That’s not how you want to be at all.

But its certainly not how you want to be if you want to build affiliate partners and people to promote you and promote your business.

So that’s this weeks Boost Your Business tip.

If you think it might help, I’ve got an entire Alliance Partner Workshop or Seminar Sequence template that’s got all the emails and the sequences and the follow ups for you to be able to put on a great quality workshop for your alliance partners.

You’ll be able to impress them with the quality of the tools that you have to run a workshop for them, and also take the work off them….

They are already pre-done, so all they have to do is hit send to their list and they will be adding value to their list

And get you exposed to their clients – which is what we want.

I’ll be happy to send the Attraction Sequence part of the template out for you if you’d like a copy.

There’ll be a link in here somewhere that you can hit and we’ll send it out to your email and you can download it from there…

Referral relationships are such a big part of your business…

You really need to put in the effort to get it right.

If you want, either type in here or reach out to me privately with your biggest question about making referral partnerships work?

Go ahead and put a bit of thought into this and make your question as specific as you can…

And then type that question to me when you are done.

What do you want to know?

What’s been hard for you in the past?

What specifically would you like to see or know (and don’t just say “I want to know how to get more referrals….”)

Be as specific as you can.

If you think about something that’s already come up for you in the past about failed referral relationships…

Or something that didn’t work with previous relationships you’ve had…,

What’s your number 1 question around that?

Leave me a COMMENT BELOW.

And I’ll be happy to help you out.

(I’ve probably got something in the VAULT that’ll be helpful for you so I’ll share that with you to help you get more referrals.…)

Anyway, that’s it for now.

Have a great week ahead.

Hit the Like button.

Ask me a question in the Comments box…

Or Share this in your LinkedIn or Facebook page if you think it might help some other financial planners that also want to play a bigger game with referrals. are good.

Let me know if you want a copy of the Workshop Sequence templates…

That’s it from me.

Take really good care.

Steve Salvia – thanks for watching.