The Impact Of HEMs On Best Fit Client Referrals

The Basics

What Is A HEM?

The abbreviation of HEM is a high emotional moment. Great, so what is it, and why is it so important?

Why Is It So Important For Getting Referrals?

I just need to come back a bit and help you understand why HEMs are so important… to how people feel when they're asked to refer you to other people.

And for that we need to look at referrals historically, literally back thousands of years.

Back in cave person days giving great advice was extremely important. A saber tooth tiger hiding in the bush, where berries grow at this time of year, where to get water from in a drought were all vital to survival.

Giving someone wrong advice that results in something bad happening to the tribe could lead to you being cast out of the tribe for good.

So giving advice, recommending someone, was potentially a life-threatening decision. If something happened where the tribe was affected, there'd most likely be consequences.

Quite literally in more extreme cases, if you got thrown out of the protection and security of the tribe, the chances of your survival would go down massively.

Why We Freeze

The Psychology Of Referrals

In evolutionary terms, we're not long out of the caves. Life has obviously changed enormously since then. We're far more comfortable.

Subconsciously below our radar, meaning before we can rationally think, our subconscious mind when asked to refer someone often triggers a fear pattern… like a fight or flight type stress response inside us.

This is our subconscious warning us that this "might not be safe".

Our subconscious mind's job is to keep us safe, and with thousands of years of evolution behind it, it's very good at its job.

So when it senses a threat, it gets all of your body and mind ready to run, fight, or freeze.

A Comparison

Your subconscious processes around 11 million bits of information per second, compared with 40–50 bits consciously — somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 times faster, depending on what research you read.

What This Means For Referrals

Ultimately when people are asked to refer someone, they have a smaller or greater version of this fear response going on, because like being back in the tribe millions of years ago, it doesn't feel safe.

We've all seen it, where we ask for a referral (in the wrong way) and the client recoils like you've just asked them to marry you!

If You Ask For A Referral At The Wrong Time…

If you ask to be referred business at the wrong time, there is an inherent risk to them, that if you get things wrong and do a bad job, this bad feeling bounces back on them. So this triggered response can and often does kick in this same fear response. It's natural.

Unless you're psychopathic, this response is woven into us all.

This is why nearly all referral teachings often fail so badly, and why it often also feels so wrong when we follow the advice of "just ask".

It makes our clients feel bad and it makes us feel bad. It's arrogant and feels pushy.

It's a lose, lose, lose situation.

So you're unlikely to get any decent referrals worth going after.

And if anything, you're more likely to get poor referrals if you follow this old fashioned way of getting referrals.

The Fix

The Strategy To Get Around This

When asking for referrals, we always use PACT.

PACT must be baked into anything to do with asking others to refer you, because it buys into modern day psychology and making people feel safe to refer you.

The Most Powerful, Genuine Referral Opportunities

The best opportunities always come when someone trusts you, and trust is the currency of referrals. When a high emotional moment, a HEM, happens naturally, it is a form of gratitude.

For getting referrals, this is gold.

Even though I've got no stats to back this up, my experience is that when people have this HEM in place and you can nurture that—not just try and trip them up into asking for a referral, but nurture it… they are way, way, way more likely to refer you to the important people in their lives that they know, like, trust and love.

The MOST important thing in all this, is they want to refer you, which is the most important thing for getting a conveyor belt of referred clients coming to you.

And the HEM is the opening to that.

Depending on how that felt to you, this to a smaller or greater extent is how people feel when you ask them to refer you to others, almost always. You can see it in their facial expressions, in their body language, and how they almost seem to contract inside. It's a form of subconscious protection.

And now notice that when you feel grateful, which is actually much more of a 'loving type' feeling, you don't feel fear.

There's a truism which states: "You cannot feel gratitude and fear at the same time"

And in my experience this is very, very true.

The Opening

The Reason The HEM Is So, So Important…

… is it gets past the barriers, it gets past the fear and allows people to feel in a more grateful, loving place about what you've done.

It's subtle and nearly always overlooked, but it's often the single most powerful and easy opening to a natural conversation about being referred. In fact, in my own businesses, I've often had people telling me they want to refer me, after a HEM.

This is the reason why spotting a HEM is so important and why, if you can have the conversation or open people up to feeling that gratitude they have for the work you've done, it converts to more clients and money.

With this added trust, it gets people to want to refer you.

This Is The Reason Why We Measure HEMs Inside The Referral Guy App

Because if you nurture that high emotional moment, the HEM, even if people don't refer you straight away, they're much, much more likely to refer you further down the line.

It's a natural human-to-human moment without being pushy.

So you now know what a HEM is.

Now let's help identify a HEM.

A HEM Is More About The 'Feeling'

People want to refer because you make them feel good, and they secretly hope that you're going to make who they refer feel good too, and safe.

So imagine somebody says something to you like just a small thing like "great work".

Close your eyes for the moment and cast your mind back, to someone saying to you "Great work".

How does it look like they feel? In fact, how does it make you feel?

Nearly always they look more relaxed, might be smiling, most likely are. The body language is open and you can see they feel good.

So now imagine you're there and you nurture that a little, you coach them.

You might say, "oh, thank you very much. What did you think was great about it?"

Depending on which trade or profession you're in they might say something like:

"I just love the extra care you've taken on this aspect of our property" if you're a home remodeler/developer, or "I just love the way the lights create a calming mood in the lounge" if you're an electrical contractor, whatever it is for you.

Acknowledge it, something like, "thank you, I love that".

When you've made people feel good without realizing it, next time they see you, they're going to relax up because you've made them feel good. It's authentic. It's real.

So now they no longer feel worried about the impact of referring to family, friends, colleagues, loved ones.

Now when the time is right and you come to ask for a referral, the fear is not there, they're not being triggered. So the potential for a yes is way, way higher.

And when they do refer you, they're doing it because they want to refer you.

Inside The App

That's Why The Referral Guy App Measures HEMs

Where referrals are concerned, a HEM, quite literally, is one of the most important things to watch out for in your business.

Again, this is why we score HEMs and this is why we score you in the app, because it quite literally can turn you from a Referral Rookie into a Referral Pro and then on to a Referral Expert for very little effort. Watching out for HEMs simply changes outcomes.

It turns referrals from feeling like they're forced, and you don't want to and are worried about it, to natural and people wanting to refer you.

This is a country mile from the old way of getting referrals, and that is what a Referral Expert does naturally, even if they've never been taught it.

They manage to authentically and genuinely make people feel good, and then they manage to leverage in a real and kind way that trust, that gratitude… to create a great outcome that makes the person referring you feel good.

The referral source, the prospect and you feel great.

This is the win-win-win.

This Is The Subtle Power Of HEMs In Action

My advice would be: Act on your HEMs. Notice the difference in body language and their demeanour, it's powerful. With patience, this alone will easily 10x your referral potential and also the quality of the referrals you get.

This is how you get the higher value referrals that are normally hard to get, that never normally are opened up to others other than inside other people's networks.

So look out for a HEM, and when you see it, go to the app and use the HEM to reconnect with the client — it's literally just copy and paste.

The Takeaway

In Conclusion

A HEM increases trust, which is the essential ingredient that moves people away from fear of referring you, to willingly referring you.

A HEM is a high emotional moment, ideally of gratitude. It's a golden moment that turns people from saying "no" to referring you, to a resounding "yes".

This alone will dramatically increase the quality and quantity of best fit clients in your business.

In the Million Dollar Referral Scripts, we give you advanced ways to "coach for this HEM", so you can ask for referrals with confidence, in a way both you and your clients like.