The Referral You’re Not Getting Back Nearly every advisor has heard the advice to build relationships with centers of influence, the CPAs, attorneys, and other professionals who serve overlapping clients. Fewer advisors have a COI relationship that actually produces referrals back to them. The gap between the advice and the result usually comes down to one thing: the relationship was started but never actually built.
Why the CPA and attorney relationship usually stalls
The typical pattern looks like this: an advisor meets an attorney at an event or through a client, sends over a referral or two in good faith, and then waits. Nothing comes back. It’s easy to conclude the relationship isn’t valuable or that the attorney simply doesn’t reciprocate. More often, the truth is simpler: the relationship never developed past the introduction.
A one-time referral doesn’t create continuous momentum. It creates a single transaction that the other party has no particular reason to remember or repeat.
The relationship has to earn the flow, not request it
The advisors who get consistent referrals from CPAs and attorneys almost universally did the same thing first: they served before they asked. That might mean sending a referral without any expectation of one in return, at least initially. It might mean being genuinely useful in a professional sense, offering insight, being available to answer a question, or thinking of that CPA’s clients when a relevant opportunity comes up.
Staying in touch matters just as much as the initial gesture. Treating a COI relationship the way you’d treat a client relationship, regular contact, genuine interest in what’s happening in their practice, showing up consistently rather than only when a referral is needed, is what separates advisors with working referral momentum from advisors with a business card in a drawer.
The ROI is real, but it’s earned slowly
Kitces research found that for every dollar advisors invest in cultivating a COI relationship, they generate approximately three dollars in return. That statistic gets cited often, but it describes an outcome, not a starting point. The advisors who see that return spent real time getting there: showing up to lunches, understanding the attorney’s or CPA’s own client base and pain points, and finding non-financial ways to add value, sitting in on a client meeting when relevant, offering a resource, making an introduction that has nothing to do with a referral.
A starting approach for advisors who don’t know where to begin
For advisors who feel unsure how to even open this kind of relationship, a few principles help:
Lead with a specific reason for reaching out. Ask a genuine question you’d like their professional opinion on. Offer something before asking for anything. Stay in contact on a regular cadence. None of this requires charisma or a natural gift for networking. It requires consistency and a genuine interest in the other professional’s world, the same ingredients that make any client relationship work.
If you want help building a repeatable COI strategy, from the first outreach to a system that keeps referrals flowing both ways, book a free 30-minute clarity call: https://go.clearstorycoaching.com/book
Where to go from here
If this is the pattern you keep running into, here are three ways to do something about it, none of them commits you to anything.
- Take the 2-Minute Clarity ScorecardEight questions about how your practice actually runs, and a straight answer about where it is strongest and where it is costing you.
- Explore Classes & WorkshopsWork on one specific thing, with other advisors, without committing to anything ongoing.
- Book a Free 30-Minute Clarity SessionThirty minutes on your actual situation, by Zoom, Teams or phone, whichever suits you.