Which customers should we focus on for referrals?

If you are in the process of trying to grow your credit union branch accounts through referrals, then understanding who to focus on for referrals is the ideal starting place!

Too often, when I speak to people about referrals, they often don’t have a focus, a plan, and an approach, and this includes credit union employees responsible for acquiring new customers and new accounts from existing customers.  In fact, the approach I most often see is the “approach who is nearest”.

This approach is used when a customer comes into the branch to do some business and the CU Employee transitions into a sales conversation.

It’s also the same approach used in networking events by many CU staff members.

However, here’s the approach I think works best, and I would recommend you try.

If we know that 34% of our customers enter our branch, according to a study by The Financial Brand then it seems to me that the customer that are most available to us for building deeper more meaningful relationships are these 34%.  Furthermore, if our goal is to build better relationships with customers, so that they refer us, wouldn’t it seem most ideal to have conversations with people that are more often available to us?

If I was a staff member at a credit union, I would make it a point to have conversations with many of these customers, and start to understand what brings them in, what matters most to them, what their family situation is, so that we could continue the conversation each and every time they enter the branch!

Now that is relationship building, and contact referral management at its core.

This is why I would choose the most frequent customers to focus on for referrals, and it’s also why I believe you should too!