Give away the thing you think you should be charging for
3 min readA broker I know tells people to stay with their current lender maybe once a month. Runs the numbers properly, works out there’s nothing in it, says so, and gets nothing for the hour.
He reckons it’s his best source of referrals by a distance. I believe him.
The rule, and why it’s so strong
Reciprocity is one of the oldest and most replicated findings there is. Give someone something and they feel a pull to give something back. It works even when the gift was unasked for, even when it was small, and even when the person is aware it’s happening.
The restaurant mint study is the one everybody quotes. A mint with the bill lifts tips. Two mints lifts them more. The waiter pausing, making eye contact and adding a second mint as though it were a personal decision lifts them most of all.
What that last bit tells you is that the size of the gift matters less than whether it felt personal and whether it cost the giver something.
The version our industry uses, and why it’s stopped working
Download our free guide.
I’ve written these. You’ve probably written these. And the honest truth is that most of them are a sales letter with a cover on it, and people can smell them now from the headline.
The problem is that it costs you nothing. One guide, written once, downloaded by anyone. There’s no personal decision in it and no cost to the giver, and both of those are the ingredients that make reciprocity work. So all you’ve bought is an email address and a slight suspicion.
What costs you something
The things that work in this industry have a real price attached, and the price is usually your time:
Running someone’s actual numbers. Not a calculator on your website – you, looking at their real situation and coming back with a real answer. Twenty minutes of your life, and they know it.
Reading a contract they’re confused by. Someone sends you a loan offer from another broker and asks if it’s any good. Tell them honestly. Costs you half an hour and you’ll never be forgotten.
Telling someone not to move. The one I opened with. It’s the strongest trust signal available to anybody in financial services and almost nobody uses it, because it feels like losing.
Answering the question properly in public. Someone asks something in the comments and you give the whole answer rather than ‘great question, send me a DM’. The DM reply is a gate. The whole answer is a gift, and everyone else reading learns what you’re like to deal with.
Why the last one matters most
Giving the whole answer in public feels like you’re handing out the thing people should pay for.
What’s actually happening is that you’re demonstrating competence to everyone watching, at no cost, and the people who were going to do it themselves were never going to pay you anyway. The ones who were going to hire someone have just watched you be generous and correct in front of an audience.
The gate is the thing costing you. Every ‘send me a DM for more info’ is a small signal that you’re rationing what you know.
The part that trips people up
You can’t do this with an invoice in mind. Reciprocity works because the gift was real, and people are very good at sensing when a favour is a transaction wearing a coat.
That’s why this is genuinely hard advice to follow, and why so few people do. You have to be willing to be wrong about some of it. Some of the people you help will never come back and you’ll have given them an hour for nothing.
That’s the cost. It’s also exactly why it works on the ones who do.
The short version
- Giving first creates a real pull to reciprocate, and it works even when people know it’s happening
- The free download has stopped working because it costs you nothing and everyone can tell
- Run the numbers, read the contract, answer the question in full, in public
- Telling someone to stay put is the strongest trust signal in financial services
- If you’re tracking it like a transaction, so will they
Give away the thing you think you should be charging for. The people who were going to pay you still will.
