Every salesperson has wrestled with the age-old question, “What’s the best way to get referrals?” Depending on how you’ve been trained, you might have a few different ways to answer. Many say “ask” or “ask the right way" or “make sure you’re planting referral seeds along the way to make it easier for someone to provide them to you” but I beg to differ. I have always found that the best way to get referrals is to be referrable. To me, there is only one way to be referrable in our industry: by creating a superior client experience that fosters stark raving fans.

Consider just how much trust someone needs to have in their financial advisor to give them continuous access to, and nearly complete control of, their life’s savings, their retirement income, and their future security and dreams. That degree of trust ranks right up there with entrusting your life to a surgeon, your children’s wellbeing to a nanny, and your heart to your spouse.

Trust like that isn’t simply granted to a financial advisor because of a single phone call.

For financial advisors, referrals are—and will probably always be—the primary method of generating new business. It seems like every business blogger out there has the best, top, greatest, or most unique ideas for generating referrals. Personally, my favorite book title proclaiming its best ways to get referrals is this one: Endless Referrals, Third Edition.

I guess the previous editions didn’t result in endless referrals as promised.

To capitalize on the referral market, there are only two aspects of your business that are worth focusing on: delivering an exceptional client experience and continuously developing relationships with clients and spheres of influence.

Here are five steps you can take to effectively leverage the relationships you have with your strategic alliances.

Demonstrate your value by telling stories of client success.

Work is frequent fodder for conversation between friends and family alike. When the topic comes up in your social circle, how do you describe the work you do? When you describe your practice to friends and family, be mindful of the fact that the words you choose may actually align with the art of gaining referrals. Friends and family are great prospects, and even if they are not likely to become customers in the near future, you can still gain referrals from them.

When it comes to referrals, focus on quality instead of quantity

Whether you've asked for a referral or one has been volunteered, what do you usually do with it? Do you just say, "Thanks, I'll let you know what happens." Or do you linger a little longer to learn more about your new prospect? I always advocate quality over quantity. Coming away from a meeting with 12 referrals all at once doesn’t usually yield the kind of results you’d like, because the quality of the referral is usually not very good.

It's possible to get referrals from clients and prospects without even asking. Here are 5 different ways to plant powerful referral seeds with prospects and clients:

When should you a ask a prospect for referrals—on the first appointment, on the second or a year into the relationship? It depends. When determining the right time to ask for referrals, consider that value must be provided and recognized by both the prospects and clients. You also must consider the personality of the referral-giving candidate.

In this era of harder-to-reach prospects, especially the affluent and the wealthy, social prospecting has become the business-building model of choice for many successful agents. Social prospecting is the use of social environments to identify, meet, and grow relationships with qualified prospects.