By Kevin Frost, General Manager Sales & Marketing, Centrepoint Alliance Lending.
You have a client that you’ve looked after with great care for a long time and you’ve developed a caring, trusting relationship. They need a product or service outside your expertise and you want them looked after. If you refer them to someone else, you run the risk they won’t be cared for properly. And what if the person you refer them to tries to sell them the very services you’ve been supplying all these years?
It’s not all about commissions
It’s a dilemma the industry’s been dealing with for many years, and the need for a solution has a long history. It used to be that when a financial adviser retired and sold their business, the major asset was trailing commissions from mortgages and products sold years before. Today, the major asset is seen to be the customer base. Yes, the trailing commissions will defray costs, but the real gold from the buyer’s point of view comes in the ability to contact old clients to sell new products.
In this way, clients of non-institutionally owned financial planners or brokers can find themselves unwittingly drawn into an institutional world they may previously have chosen to avoid. And the same could happen if a financial planner who chooses not to include credit capability in their practice refers a valued client outside their usual list of services.
So we at Centrepoint Alliance have decided to keep it all the family. Or the community, as we like to call it. We’ve created a fast and efficient referral system. Now if you need to refer a client, it can be to someone in the Centrepoint group, someone who will have the same high standards of care and professional as you. And someone who will abide by service level agreements and codes of conduct. They will look after your client (and you’ll know about it) and they won’t try to sell your client products you already deal with.
A system of protection
It’s a system that protects all our people and importantly, their customers. Ours is a business of relationships. You might not know everyone in the community, but you know the system and values the organisation lives by. It’s an added bonus to have technology that keeps track of everything.
It takes the risk out of referrals and turns them into an effortless business builder. We think it’s a win-win-win. For the referrer, the referee and for the client.
