Managing Referrals

Overview

Firms often need a place to keep track of the essential connections they've made across their client book, especially regarding referrals for new business. Practifi has made it easier to track new entity referrals and those contacts who have extended the information to your team by using our Relationships feature. This article outlines the steps for managing referrals throughout your business. For additional information about best practices for managing relationships, please consult our Managing Members and Other Relationships article.

• Building a Referral Relationship
  
  • Adding a New Referral Relationship
  • Removing a Referral Relationship
• Confirming Influence Types
• Tracking Influence

Building a Referral Relationship

Adding a New Referral Relationship

When beginning to build a referral relationship, a user must make a few decisions. You will need to find the records you want to relate before moving on to how the relationship will be communicated in the system. To build a referral relationship, please complete the following:

1. Navigate to the People & Relationships menu on a relevant entity within your organization.
   
   Please Note: When capturing a referral relationship, a user must either build the relationship
   record from the referrer contact, individual or entity or from the referred party being added.
   
   
2. Select the New Relationship button.
3. Choose an option What type of relationship is this? drop-down menu. The selections include the following choices:
   • 'A relationship with' will define this Entity as part of the referred party.
   • 'Relationship with someone' will define this Entity as part of the referrer party.
     
     
4. Click the record type that you would like to connect to this particular entity. Your choices include Contacts, Individuals, Households and Organizations.
   
5. A new slate of questions will then populate, and users can choose the Referrer relationship in the Role field.
   
   
   
   
6. Enter the relevant Referrer or Referred party record into the empty search field.
   
   Please Note: The placement and field name shown to users will change dependent on the choices selected in Step 3 and Step 4.
   
   
7. Select the Next button. Users will now find the Referral relationship connected to both the Referral party and the Referred party on the People & Relationships menu in the Relationships tab.
   
   
   

Removing a Referral Relationship

If a user needs to remove a referral relationship record, they will need to select the caret button to the right of the record from the People & Relationships menu and then click Delete.

Confirming Influence Types

Once referrals exist in your instance, segmentation of referrers can help to define the quality and strength of the referrals your teams' contacts have made.

To build these definitions, users will start with the following:

1. Select the Actions menu in the record side panel of the entity, and click Add Influencer Segment.
2. Choose an appropriate Influencer Segment for this entity.
   
   
   Please Note: Practifi offers three preloaded Influencer Segment tiers to differentiate referral amounts or quality, including Standard, Important and Critical.
   
   
3. Click Finish. The selected Influencer Segment will now display in the entity's Definitions section.
   
   

Users will be able to change or remove Influencer segments by clicking the Change Influencer Segment or Remove Influencer Segment buttons from the Actions menu in the record side panel.

Tracking Influence

Influence can be hard to define without being able to clearly review the full scope of the connections made on behalf of a referral to your firm. To provide teams with quick access to a dynamic list of referrals, Practifi has built the Influence menu on each Entity where a referral has been captured and includes helpful information like the referred party's Client Segment, AUM or Annual Revenue (if any). Additions to this list occur automatically as new referral relationships are added to their People & Relationships menu.

To find this section on an Influencer entity, select the Influence menu button in the record side panel.