Stacey Brown Randall (0:04)

Hey there and welcome to the Roadmap to Referrals podcast, a show that proves you can generate referrals without asking or manipulation. I'm your host, Stacey Brown Randall. I'm a card carrying member of the Business Failure Club, have taught my Referrals Without Asking methodology and strategies to clients and more than 14 countries. And my mission is to help you unleash a referral explosion by leveraging the science of referrals and respecting your relationships. Well, welcome to February. I know that it is cliche to say this is supposed to be the month of love, all because of the made up holiday or the commercialized holiday of Valentine's Day. And I know that for some folks that's awesome to hear and for others, not so much. But this month, for the podcast at least, I want us to focus on love, but specifically love of referrals. And for some of you, that means falling back in love with the idea that referrals can be a reality inside your business. You just need to know what you need to know. So I'm going to dedicate the episodes in this month to making sure you understand what I call the must knows. These are just the things that you gotta know. You gotta understand about referrals before you can truly, well, fall back in love, or fall in love with referrals. Before you can truly understand how to go about generating referrals, before you can understand the what to do, the what to say, the cadence, the when to do it, the groups of people to do it for, the different strategies, right before you can understand all of the tactical, practical, like boots on the ground, let's do the strategies. They're just things you have to understand. There are just things you have to know about referrals that you need to understand if you want to be able to generate them with consistency. There's nothing like receiving a referral. You know when it drops into your inbox or maybe over a group text thread and you're connected to someone and you're like, yes, oh my gosh, I just got handed a new client and I didn't have to do that much work for it. Like it's the best feeling in the world. But what's not a great feeling is when those referrals show up like that and they're just very sporadic and they feel like you have, like you have no idea how it happened, why it happened, and you have absolutely no clue as to how to make it happen. More like consistently, as in on an ongoing basis, monthly, quarter, quarterly, throughout the entire year. So While everybody, I believe, loves the idea of referrals, it's the usually the best type of client, right? Usually it's the best type of prospect that you can receive is when they've been referred to you. They are easier to close, quicker to close, less price sensitive, and they show up already trusting you because they're borrowing the trust from the person who referred them to you. We all understand that. That is why we love referrals. But there's so many more things you have to know and understand if you want to have referrals arrive consistently. I believe every business out there can get a referral at least a couple of times a year without trying. And it just kind of randomly happened. It's sporadic. Absolutely. Every single business can have that experience happen to them. But that's not sustainable. That's not a repeatable process. That's not something you can count on. And there is nothing about that that is consistent. So if you want to move from sporadically, randomly receiving referrals, and you want to start receiving those referrals with some consistency because you know what you're supposed to do on the back end to make them happen, well, that's what I want to dedicate this entire month to, is the first piece of that equation as to what you need to understand, what you need to know. So we're going to break down all of the must knows about referrals. Okay, wait, I just said all, which is an extremely definitive statement or word. And let's just say, okay, most, because I do have this sneaky suspicion that I'm probably going to forget something or that by the time I get to the end of this series, it's not all going to fit in the couple of episodes I have dedicated for this. So I am going to hesitate to say all, because, yes, I probably will miss some, but this is going to be the things that I wish you understood, that I wish you knew before you decided that referrals weren't for you. These are the things you just need to understand so you can make an educated decision on do I want to go after referrals? So let's talk about it. All right, we're going to break these down into a couple of parts. This is our first part. A couple of things I want you to understand is, first and foremost, if you're a longtime listener of this podcast, you've heard this before, if you have watched a webinar with me or maybe even listened to a podcast episode I did on somebody else's show, you've probably also heard this before, but it is exactly 1000% where I need to start. And that, my friends, is with the definition of an actual referral. I have people all the time tell me that they think they're getting referrals and it turns out it's just a repeat client. You cannot refer. Your clients cannot refer themselves. They can refer other people, but they don't refer themselves. That is just a repeat client. Or I'll have people tell me that they got a testimonial and that was their referral. I'm like, oh, a testimonial in an online review is not a referral. But people use those terms interchangeably even still today, in 2025. So let's make sure you understand the true definition of a referral. A referral is a referral when it has these two components. These two parts are true. Number one, that there is a personal connection. That means there is a personal connection between the referral source and the prospect and you. Which means your referral source is going to connect you to the prospect. Now, typically this is going to happen over email. At least in the industries that I work in, this is more than likely going to happen over email or it's going to happen over a group text thread. Now, that doesn't mean it can't happen in other ways. That's just typically how it's going to happen because that's how the connection is made. Someone telling you I told someone about you and I gave them your contact information is not a referral. That is word of mouth buzz, because it doesn't have the connection. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Right? That's great that people are telling other people how amazing you are, but if they're never connecting that person to you, you can't do anything about it. You're not in the driver's seat. Right? You can't actually turn that prospect into a paying client. So it's really important to understand that, number one, it's personal connection. Okay, so the referral source is going to personally connect you to the prospect. Number two, the prospect knows they're the prospect, meaning the need has been identified in the prospect. The there is a reason they need to talk to you. If you're a business attorney, there's a reason they need to talk to you. Right? They're not being referred to you and they. What they really need is a divorce attorney. Right? So there's this, there's this understanding that people are like, I'll talk to anybody. Well, maybe, but I'd rather talk to people who actually want to solve their referral problems. I, that's who I want to be referred to. And so when you think about the fact that having a need in your prospect is they need to be aware that they have a problem. Now, that doesn't mean they knew they had the problem prior to talking to the referral source that you have. Right. They could be having a conversation with their friend who also happens to be your referral source. And the referral source helps them uncover that they have a problem. Right. I see this happen a lot. When you've got folks who are selling upstream from you. If you have people talking with clients before you're talking to them and they're uncovering these problems that, that, that them themselves can't solve because they're solving other things, they can send that referral downstream to you and say, hey, by the way, you also have this issue. I need to connect you with this person because they can help you solve that problem. So the need identified is really clear. It's something you just have to understand that just because you think about it this way, okay, if I am going to die in the home that I'm in now. Right. This is a terrible example. Maybe it's a great example. I don't know. But if I'm gonna die in the house that I'm in now, which case. But if I'm going to. This is my forever home, let me just say it that way. It actually sounds a little bit better. This is my forever home. Then I never need to be referred to the best real estate agent you possibly know, because I don't need one until I do. And so it's really important that you understand that when you're being referred to someone, it's because there's been an acknowledgement that there is a problem and they are interested in solving it. That doesn't mean they're going to 100% hire you. There's probably a higher likelihood they're going to hire you. Right. There's that 70% chance. And when you think about referrals, right. That people ultimately want to be referred and are more likely to go with the service provider that has been referred to them. But ultimately what you're, what you're seeing is this idea that the prospect wants to talk to you. And for me to want to talk to you and potentially hire you, I've got to have a problem you can solve and I have to know it first and then I can be refer to you. So personal connection, need identified. In the prospect. That's our definition of a referral. Okay. Here's a couple other ones that I want to make sure you guys understand as we're kind of starting this baseline. Right. Of understanding and making sure that you have the must knows in place. So there's a couple more things I want to talk about and it's the strategies that I know you've been told that you need to do that are terrible and there's a few that drive me insane and there's one that breaks my heart. So I want to go through those and then I want to talk about where these terrible strategies actually come from. Okay? Hey there. Pardon the interruption. I would love the opportunity to show you exactly how I can help take you from where you are in your business with referrals and show you exactly how we can double, triple or quadruple your referrals. We do that every single week inside the building a referable business coaching program. It is a 12 month coaching program where you get to take a measured approach, go at your pace, customized based on what you need to be implementing at the right time, in the right order, and have weekly access to me as well. I would love for you to consider completing an application and letting me review it to see if I can help you double, triple or quadruple your referrals this year. To complete an application and learn more about the building a referable business coaching program, please go to Stacy brownrandall.com referable that's staceybrownrandall.com referral referable. Now back to the episode. All right, so here are a few strategies that drive me insane, right? These literally drive me batty. They make me want to pull my hair out. And they are the ones you guys hear me talk about all the time. I call them the old school, right? Or those super, super like traditional old school been around forever and now we've all been taught and beaten over the heads that this is the only way to generate referrals. And you know what they are that you're told that if you want referrals, you have to ask for them. If you want referrals, you're going to have to incentivize or pay for them. If you want referrals, you're going to have to be gimmicky or overly promotional. Or if you want referrals, you're going to have to be networking all the time so you can be seen all the time. That way you cannot be forgotten. And then of course, manipulating a client when they feel good about Working with you. Oh, my gosh, these strategies drive me nuts. And they've been around for decades and decades and generations, probably longer than you and I have been alive. They have just been permeating the entire landscape of referrals. You guys know this, right? You can go to Google yourself and you can say how to get referrals and you're going to get hit with an onslaught of articles about. Here are the seven ways to get referrals by asking. Right? Or here's three ways to get more referrals by asking. Or my personal favorite, 25 Ways to Ask for referrals without looking desperate. Yeah, that's a true article. That's out there. 25 Ways to Ask for referrals without looking desperate. I mean, come on, people, we all know if you need 25 ways to do something because you're trying to avoid being desperate, it's because in your heart of heart, gut of gut, you know, deep down in your toes, it's because you look desperate and you don't want to do it and you shouldn't have to. But the drumbeat has been for years, decades, generations, that if you want referrals, you have to ask, you have to pay, you have to be gimmicky or over promotional, you have to network all the time so you can't be forgotten. And you need to manipulate reciprocity right when your client feels the best about you. Oh, my goodness, those are terrible. Okay, so these are the strategies that drive me insane. I don't really think they need a whole explanation because I could just say the words and you know exactly what I'm talking about. But I do want to touch on gimmicky for a minute. So there's some that I see, particularly in certain industries that are really, the pendulum swings really far to one side with the gimmicky and the overly promotional. For example, like in the real estate industry, I will see people do things like sending out a bag of goldfish and a little tag on it that says, I'm fishing for your referrals, or sending out a pack of extra gum. And that'll say I'm going, I'll go the extra mile for your referrals. These very, very gimmicky things. And then though, I will see the pendulum swing back the other side and it permeates across all industries. And that gimmicky is putting in your email signature the greatest compliment you can give me as a referral? Or oh, by the way, don't keep me a secret. I love your Referrals or whatever that type of language is that's going in your email signatures. Do me a favor. If that's you, raise your hand. Nobody can see you. I can't see you. Nobody can see you right now. Right. So raise your hand if that's you. If you have that in your email signature, will you please do me a favor and go remove it? I promise you that it's not generating referrals the way you think it is. It's not. There's. If you're getting referrals and you have that in your email signature, I can guarantee you that's not doing it. So you can take it out. And if you're like, oh, no, Stacy, I can't. Okay, fine. Right. I mean, I'm not sitting there next to you, like, telling you, you absolutely have to. But the idea here is, is that there is all of these tactics and strategies that are terrible that we've been told to do, that we just don't need to do, and those are the ones that drive me insane. But there's one strategy that breaks my heart. And the thing that people are told, hey, you're not willing to ask, you're not willing to pay. You're not willing to be gimmicky and overly promotional. You're not willing to network all the time. You're not willing to manipulate your clients, reciprocity that they feel for you. Well, if you're not willing to do those things, here it comes. This is the strategy that breaks my heart. Well, then you are just gonna have to hope you receive some referrals. What is that? That is crazy. We all know, first of all, that hope is a wonderful, beautiful thing, but it is not a business strategy. But the fact that people tell people, hey, if you want referrals and you're not willing to do all these terrible, uncomfortable, icky, awful ways that make you feel bad about yourself and what you're doing to other people, well, then you don't get any. That's effectively what they're saying, hey, if you won't ask, then you won't get any referrals. If you don't want to feel desperate, then you don't get any referrals. That is hogwash. This whole idea that you cannot have referrals just breaks my heart when people are like, well, then if you won't do these terrible things and hope you get some, that's not true either. Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about for this particular episode. Remember, we have a couple of these that I'm going to break down the must knows over the month of February. There's a couple of other ones that we need to dig into as well. But I can't leave this episode without making sure you understand where those terrible strategies actually come from. And that is understanding how sales has been taught since probably the beginning of time. So if you ask any sales trainer or you read up on any articles or books about sales, typically they're gonna be sales activities within your overarching sales strategy are going to be broken down into two categories or two halves. And that is one, you've got the prospecting activities that you do and on the other side you have the marketing activities that you do. And under prospecting, right, that's that short term mentality, I'm gonna go to a bunch of networking events and hopefully to meet a prospect that wants to have a conversation with me and become a client, right? Or I'm gonna do 7 million cups of coffee or I'm gonna cold call, I'm gonna cold email, right? There's a lot of different activities that you can do. Kind of like standalone, singular activities that you can do. Join leads, groups, that kind of stuff, networking, coffee meeting after coffee meeting after coffee meeting. And I'm not saying anything's wrong with any of those. Even when I'm talking to some of my clients, there are pieces of that that we will use, right, From a referral perspective. But we are much, much, much more strategic when and how we do it and what we're doing while we're doing it. But it's this overarching idea that networking is about or excuse me, prospecting is about short term mentality, hey, I'm going to go to this thing, I'm going to make this phone call, I'm going to send this cold email, I'm going to outreach this person through a direct message on social media, right? And I'm going to pitch them and I'm going to see if they want, if they are potential prospect that can become a client. It's prospecting in nature. Well, for the longest time, people believed that referrals fit under prospecting. And if you believe that referrals fit under prospecting, then your, the tactics that you would then teach come from a prospecting mentality. Short term, quickest way to get to the prospect. And so it makes sense that if it's a short term mentality, quickest way to get to the prospect, a little bit brute for a horse, then it would make sense that the advice that you received under the prospecting area for referrals would be, well, then just go ask for them or just go pay for them, or just go network and be seen all the time so you're never forgotten. It makes perfect sense that that's where those three terrible strategies would come from, because someone was applying their men, their thought process to referrals like they were prospecting in nature. And so if you slam referrals, if you try to shove referrals into the prospecting side of the equation of your sales strategy, that's where you get that type of advice. That's where the asking or paying for or networking every night of the week comes from. On the other side of the sales strategy, you have the marketing side and the marketing side, you know, all good things for marketing, right? You have a website, maybe do thought leadership. You're posting on social media, maybe you're writing articles and blogs, maybe you've got. Maybe you do a podcast like I do, right? Maybe you have earned pr. You're working with a PR person to get you some earned publicity, or you're trying to get it yourself, right? Maybe you're doing sponsorships of events. There's other things, right, that you can do that are considered marketing in nature. And here's the thing, I'm not going to say one is better than the other. Prospecting versus marketing. I think you need a blend of both, particularly when you're starting a business. But there will always be that need for a blend of both. I don't know many businesses that can just get started today and have a lot of success without, like, having a website, for example. So I'm not saying anything's wrong with prospecting or marketing, but for the other people who believe, well, referrals fit into marketing, right? That's where you hear the term referral marketing. And it drives me insane because that's not a thing. It is not a thing. It drives me bonkers. It's really funny. I'm endorsed for referral marketing on my LinkedIn profile, and I cannot make it go away and I cannot change it to referrals. LinkedIn's like, Nope, but it's not a thing. And I want to be endorsed for referral marketing. But it's this idea, right, that if you believe referrals fit into marketing, that's where you get the whole, like, let's be gimmicky, let's be right? Like, let's put it into our newsletter every month. Let's put into our newsletter that, hey, here's how we're Going to treat the referrals you send to me or that's like a strategy when it comes to being gimmicky and promotional under the umbrella of marketing is in your email newsletter. Let's make sure that we are pushing our referrals and our email signature. Let's make sure that we are pushing referrals and this whole concept of being gimmicky and promotional. And so that's where it comes from. So that's where these strategies come from. It comes from people who believe sales strategy is two legs of a stool. It is prospecting and it is marketing. And so if I have referrals, I have to figure out within those two legs where I'm gonna shove the referrals. And so if I'm gonna push it into prospecting, then that's where we get some of those terrible strategies. The asking, incentivizing, networking all the time. But if I'm gonna push it into marketing, referrals into marketing. That's where we get the gimmicky and be overly promotional type of strategies. But that's the. Here's the thing. Your sales strategy is not a two legged stool. It has evolved to a three legged stool. You have prospecting, you have marketing and you have referrals. And referrals are separate from prospecting and marketing because everything about them is different. In prospecting and marketing, your activities that you're doing, the goal is to talk to the prospect to get the prospect's attention. In referrals, you don't know who the prospect is. You're trying to get the attention of your referral source who knows who the prospect is. So if the messaging to the who is totally different. With referrals, again, prospecting and marketing, you're trying to get the attention of the prospect. With referrals, you're about building the relationship with the referral source who knows the prospect because you don't know who the prospect is. So as you can imagine, if you're building a relationship with your referral sources, the people who know the prospects and can refer them to you, obviously everything from the tactics and the strategies and the what you do and the how you do it and the when you do it and the language, everything is different because of the who is different and the whole are the people who can refer or are referring. So you really need to understand your sales strategy is a three legged stool, not a two legged stool. Okay, that's good. I think that's a, that's a good amount of stuff. That's four solid things that I think are must knows that you need to understand about referrals. Very, very important. All right. The show notes page for this episode can be found@stacybrownrandall.com 3. Excuse me, that's for 347. Stacybrownrandall.com 347 and don't forget, Stacey has an E. Okay? Of course, we have more of these must knows of referrals coming up. I'm going to break this down over a series of episodes in this month, the February month, the month of love. But our love is falling back in love or starting for the first time to love the idea that you can generate referrals, you can be successful with it. You can do it in a way that works for you and you can enjoy it. All right. We're back with another great episode next week created with you and your needs in mind. Until then, you know what to do, my friend. Take control of your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.