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Roadmap to Referrals
Ep #360: “I want to reach out but…” (The Scenario Series)
00:24:41
In this episode of our scenario series, I tackle a question from a financial advisor who is unsure how to connect with a potential referral source without risking their relationship. We explore the science behind referrals and why asking for them...
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Stacy Brown Randall
Foreign. 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, Stacy Brown Randall. I'm a card carrying member of the Business Failure Club, have taught my Referrals Without Asking methodology and strategy to clients in more than 14 countries around the world. And my mission is to help you unleash a referral explosion by leveraging the science of referrals and respecting your relationships. All right, welcome to this episode. I'm excited to dive in. We are continuing with our scenario series, which means I am bringing to you a scenario that somebody has asked me whether that is an email or, or they have direct Message me on LinkedIn or Instagram or it was a question that was asked in a training or a presentation that I had done and I am letting you know the different ways to consider responding in that scenario. So we did this with the last episode, episode 359. We're going to continue it with this one. We've got one more coming up. And if this is popular, if you guys like this, if you like me doing more of these breaking down questions that I'm asked that are scenario based, like, how do I do this? And I want to reach out, but what do I do? Right. If you like this, let me know and I will do some more of these because at the end of the day, I show up every single Tuesday for you guys. So as long as you're enjoying these episodes, I will keep them coming. Okay? So this scenario, if we talk about different things in terms of the situations where people find themselves and they're like, I want to do something, but I've been listening and learning and I'm a client, or maybe not even a client, but just listening and learning to Stacy. And I'm not quite sure what I should do. Now. That is a reality. I know. So I want to walk through one that is very, very common. And if you saw the title of this episode, if you saw the title of this video, I want to reach out, but Right. You know, it probably has something to do with somebody who's in a situation where they want to reach out to someone, maybe a referral source and make a question, ask, but they also know that that probably isn't the right way to do it. So then what do you do? Like, what's the solution? So let's talk about that. Let's div. Dig into what happens when you want to reach out to someone, but you don't want to Ask. So what do you do? Are you left with being able to do nothing? All right, I like to refer to this kind of scenario as a doozy because I think it's the one that most people find themselves in more often than not. Now, for the purpose of this scenario, what I am not going to do is tell you who it is. Sometimes I give like first names or if I it's a client and I have permission, I may even use a full name or whatever. I'm not going to talk about where they are or what they do or anything like that. What I will talk about. Well, I'm going to talk about what they do. I am going to put it in context of what they do because I think that's important. But how I got the question and who it is is irrelevant to this scenario. So I'm just going to leave that out of this conversation. Okay, so. So this is a question I received from a financial advisor. And when this person reached out to me, he said, I'm curious how you might approach something. All right, so here's the question. And I have changed. So there are names in this scenario and I have completely changed them. So it wouldn't even make sense. So the names are changed. Like everything's changed. And I'm also not giving you the name of the person who sent me the question. Okay, so these are made up names. Real scenario, made up names. Okay. I've been following Mary for a while on LinkedIn. We're connected. She's on a team with my client, Paul and I have a bunch of clients at the firm where both Paul and Mary work. I would normally ask Paul for an intro to Mary. I would normally say something like, paul, I've been following Mary and it seems like she's a rising star and could probably benefit from an intro to me. Would you be able to make that intro? I would normally say something like that. But if you were me, how would you handle this? And then some additional context that was given. It says, as an FYI, I approached Paul in a similar way three years ago. Okay, so let me break this down for you. I have a couple of different ways I want you to consider this. And I didn't get all the context that I needed. So I did go back to this person. And I was like, hey, when you asked Paul for an introduction three years ago, which is, you're not really asking for an introduction, you're actually asking for a referral. I know that there are people out there who will teach you that you're not Asking for them to refer you, you're just asking for an introduction. But if you're asking to be connected to someone for the benefit of pitching them your services or trying to get them to become a client at that point, introduction, referrals, that's just semantics. Like you were asking for someone to put their reputation on the line for somebody else to hire you and money is involved. Maybe not the referral sources money, but that prospect's money and meaning giving it to you. So I understand that there are people out there who teach, like, oh, just get an introduction. You just want to be introduced to them. But everybody knows there's an objective to just about everything we do in life. So the objective there is, is that I may be being introduced to you, but I actually want you to refer me because I'm going to ask this person to become a client, right? So, like, I understand the semantics of the language, but it's really important that you understand the objective behind what the language is because people will use different language to like, soften the blow or make it look good for them or make it easier for them to say or make easier, like, I'm not asking for a referral, I'm asking for an introduction. In this case, it's the same darn thing. So you're basically asking for a referral because you're the, the context here is you are asking Paul to connect you and make the connection to Mary, to refer you to Mary. So what I asked is, is like when you reached out to Paul and you asked for that referral, right, that introduction three years ago, did he give it and then what was the outcome if he did? Meaning, did Paul connect you three years ago to that person? Did that person then schedule a meeting with you? Did they attend the meeting or did they ghost you and did you close them into a client or maybe were they not the right fit? That context is really, really relevant to me. Being able to give some really solid advice in terms of how you should handle this and how you should move forward. And so in this case, I don't have that context. So I'm going to break this down for you in a couple of different ways of how you could actually respond. Right. The truth is it doesn't actually matter which one of these scenarios happened or didn't happen. That's actually kind of irrelevant because you're going to find yourself probably in this scenario maybe in the future and maybe with different opportunities here or different options here. So we're going to, I'm going to talk about this. Let me just get one off the table. The one that I would say that I would just get off the table is I think it's important if you do have the context, if knowing that Paul, if you had reached out to Paul, you had asked Paul to make a referral, right, to connect you to somebody else on Paul's team, and Paul did that, and if that went well and that person became a client, that's context to use in an outreach to Paul, because that shows that it all went well. The truth is those are very, very rare. Do they happen? Of course they do. But are they more rare than not? Yes. And I don't know if this person didn't get back to me because the context they would be giving me was like, no, Paul never did it or did it and it went nowhere and it then became awkward. I don't know that I'm not making that assumption for anybody, but I do think that you can take a different tactic. If Paul connected you, you met with the prospect, the prospect wanted to work with you and then did work with you. And what I mean in that is that's just context for how you would approach Paul, because this has gone well before. The reality of it is, is for most of you, you're going to find yourself in a situation where this did not work in the past. Maybe you've requested somebody to refer you and they did and it went nowhere. Maybe you've requested somebody to, or you've asked somebody to and they didn't do it. They said they would, they didn't do it, and they just kind of ignored it and hoped you would forget about it and not ask them about it again, which is typically more likely, this scenario. So let's talk about what this looks like. If you're going to reach out to Paul and ask Paul to make a connection to you, to make a referral to Mary, you need to understand how this violates the science of referrals. Now, there are some people who will teach you if you're uncomfortable to make the ask, you need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and just make the ask and do it. But what we know about science, and if you've been paying attention to this podcast for any length of time, you know, we talk about the science of referrals and we'll link to this in the show notes. If you want to go back and listen to the episode specifically on the science of referrals. And I actually have a video, it's like a really short, like less than 10 minute video that you can access for free on my website. Just go to the homepage of my website, stacybrownrandall.com scroll to the bottom, put in your name and your email, and we will email you the link to a video that talks about the science of referrals. And like, I don't know, it's less than 10 minutes. So I talk about this a lot. And the science piece that you need to understand about referrals is that when a referral happens and the ability to make it happen more often, to make it come more of something that someone's a referral source of yours or someone you know is on the lookout for, is that ability to make sure that you are fostering in the happiness trifecta in someone's brain. And the happiness trifecta in someone's brain is the chemicals that are released in your brain that are the feel good chemicals and the chemicals that you're like, oh, that felt good, like serotonin, like, oh, the dopamine effect of doing something over and over again, serotonin, oh, that felt good, right? And there are these different chemicals that are released in the happiness trifecta in your brain when you do something that feels good. When somebody refers someone to you to help the other person, not to help you grow your business, that feels good. And it releases the chemicals in the happiness trifecta. And so when you're thinking about that happiness trifecta, that releasing of those chemicals cannot be manufactured. And in fact, when you ask somebody, hey, Paul, will you go to Mary and will you tell Mary that she should meet with me and that you're going to refer her to me, or will you send an email to Mary and say, hey, I've been working with this person, my financial advisor, you need to be working with him as well. When you put Paul in that situation, it shuts down the happiness trifecta because you've just created work for Paul to do and Paul may or may not want to do it. Now, here's the thing. If Paul does want to do it, maybe Paul's done it in the past. Maybe that's somebody that you know will respond positively to you, asking them to make connections to other people on his team. That's rare. Unfortunate, but rare. And so what you need to understand is how, okay, in this situation, when I cannot or don't want to or shouldn't directly ask Paul to connect me to someone on his team that you so clearly knows would probably benefit from working with you, what do you do? Right? So the first thing the Reason why I'm not going to give the advice and I don't teach the advice, and I've never taught the advice that you need to just ask someone directly to refer you is because I know it shuts down the happiness trifecta in that referral source's brain. And when we don't have the happiness trifecta, the feel good of doing something that was their idea, it means we're not going to build a habit that's going to trigger that action to continue that habit to continue to happen. And that's the risk. So, yes, you can certainly ask somebody to refer you. And I know one of the risks in that situation is to make them feel uncomfortable and stuff, right? Like, oh, I don't want to do this. That's one big, huge risk. The other risk is, is that it'll. You'll try to manufacture what doesn't exist, right? You'll try to artificially create the happiness trifecta, which doesn't exist. And then that means it never gets released or remembered as something that was a positive emotion towards doing something for you. Because when people refer to other people, they want it to be their idea, not your idea, to tell them to do it. And I know that sounds hard because you're like, that means that I don't control when someone does it. You're right. You don't control the minute that Paul, in this case, would refer Mary to the person who asked me this question. You're right. You don't control that. But there are so many other things you can do in the background that help put that situation right there for you. So let's talk about what those look like. All right, so from this perspective, as we're thinking through and we are looking at, we're not going to reach out and make the request. We don't want to violate the science right now. Again, I think it's important to recognize this from the perspective of understanding that not having the context, I'm just going to walk this through how I would do it, and then I'm going to back into some different additional scenarios. So the first thing that I want you to understand is I just don't. You guys can probably tell. I'm like, okay, Stacy, like, spit it out. Like, what is the point? I'm trying to create this in a way that you will take what I mean the way that I intend it versus parsing apart different pieces and being like, oh, this is what she meant. So I'm trying to be very, very, very clear as to What I think that this person should do in this scenario, and I think that they should do it without actually going to Paul and having to make a request of Paul to refer. Having to make an ask of Paul to refer to Mary. So here's some scenarios that you can actually consider. If you have Paul's permission, the number one thing you should consider doing is maybe just making a direct outreach to Mary. Now, I know some people are like, oh, no, because what if Mary says no? Well, Mary was probably going to say no if it came through Paul too, if Mary's answer was no all along. But you can do that in a way where if you have Paul's permission to use Paul's name, you can say, hey, Mary, we're connected on LinkedIn. We don't know each other personally. Like, can we just acknowledge the reality of the situation? Right, hey, we're connected on LinkedIn. We don't know each other personally, but I work with Paul on your team and a few other people on your team. You can use their names if you have permission or not be like, I work with them in this capacity. I noticed, I saw some things that you had posted on LinkedIn and I wondered if it would be valuable for you for us to have a conversation. This is asking for the business very, very different than asking Paul for a referral. Just go direct to Mary and if you have permission to use Paul's name or anybody else on Paul's team that is also a client, because that's what this person told me, then use their names and just say that to Mary. So it's not a referral, but it definitely is. Looking at it from the perspective of, hey, like, I'm a trusted human and I work with three or four other people on your team in this capacity, is that something that you want to have a conversation about? And then I would also say because, and I don't know this, I don't know a thing about Mary, but the person who sent me this said a rising star. Like that was the language they used. So I'm going to make the assumption of maybe this person's a little bit on the younger side. I don't know that for a fact. I don't know if they're 33 or 23 or if a rising star could be 53. I don't know in this scenario, but I'm going to make the assumption here that this person's probably younger. So when you explain like, hey, Mary, we're connected on LinkedIn, but I know we don't know each other. I do know a few people on your team, Paul. And so. And so and so and so are clients of mine. I do do XYZ for them. I don't know if that's something you think you need or if it's ever even been explained to you. I'm happy to walk you through what this is and why someone would need it so that you can decide for yourself. Okay, that's not exactly the language how I would say it, but something to that effect, right? This idea that if this person's a raising star, maybe they don't have all the knowledge as to why they need a financial advisor, maybe why they need to mitigate their risk, maybe why they need to start focusing on their retirement. Right. So the idea there is is the offer to explain it in context of also the fact that these people that you know are also clients of yours. Because then Mary can go to Paul or whoever and be like, hey, do you work with this person? Like is this a good person? Should I meet with him? Or Mary can be like, I got that covered. Right. My brother in law, my sister in law does that and I got it covered. Something that this person would never know by the looks of LinkedIn. So it's, I just think in this case you might as well just go direct to the source and ask for the business. And if you have permission to use Paul's name or any of your other clients names, that is the social proof. You don't need Paul to actually make that referral connection for you. So this is a great scenario to shortcut all of that from that perspective. Right. So I think it's just thinking about opportunities and looking at them a little bit differently. Now here's the thing. Will this person have to be comfortable with going direct to Mary and making their request for the business? And does that mean there could. There's a 50% chance you'll get a no and a 50% chance you'll get a yes. It was the same thing when you asked Paul if Paul would refer you. But if history shows Paul's referred you before and it went nowhere, that's more than likely probably where this one's going to go. And you don't know or understand the damage that you're risking to your relationship with Paul. Now how do you solve something like this in the future? Well, you can't solve it perfectly, right? We can't rewind and be like we're going to do something that's going to specifically put Paul in the position of referring Mary to me, because Paul's going to be on the lookout for this. But what this person, the person who asked me the question, what they should be doing all along is they should have a plan in place to take care of the people who have referred them in the past. Whether they've referred them people who became clients or people became prospects and did not become clients, you should have a plan in place of how you are nurturing those relationships year after year after year. And it's the what you do and the what you say and the cadence in which you do it that allows the planting of referral seeds to take root in the subconscious of someone like Paul. So they're more likely to see potential and opportunities like this. That's what's missing from this whole scenario. If this person had come to me, right, and they had said, paul has referred me before, there's somebody I've identified on his team I'd like for him to refer me to again. And I've been taking care of Paul in all these ways, but Paul hasn't made the connection yet that this person, Mary, is someone that I'd like to be connected with. Guess what then my answer is entirely different. Because you've been doing different things. You've been planting different language, you've been doing different things to nurture that relationship with Paul, and not just because Paul's a client and you are. He's getting your client experience because he's getting a referral source experience layered on top of that client experience. So at this point, we can do different things, and that's awesome. So the answer is entirely different, right? If I knew that there was a plan approach that was happening in the background of how you're taking care of your referral sources. I teach five to seven touch points in a year. So five or six times doing the right things with the right language, with the right cadence. If that were happening, guess what? This answer would look a little bit different. But that is because you had been building up, whether it's six months or three years of taking care of Paul and you can do different things, then you can approach things different ways. But for the purpose of the I want to reach out but scenario, what I want you to understand are two main things here. Number one, in cases like this, sometimes your best opportunity is to go direct to the person you wish were referred to you and use the names of the people you wish had referred you because they're your clients, right, from this scenario, and just go to that person and make the request and see if they want to meet with you, the truth is, if they really want to check you out, they will go talk to Paul and anybody else, and then they can sing your praises, right? And that's even. That's great, too. But it's the best way, the easiest way to protect the relationship with Paul and others. What would be best case scenario is this person reached out to Mary. Mary was like, yeah, I'll take a meeting with you. If Paul and them have talked to you, cool. Then Mary goes and talks to Paul and is like, hey, I'm having a meeting with this person. He says he's. He works with you and some others in the office. Like, is this a good dude? Or is this, like, is this someone I should be meeting with? And then they sing your praises, right? And then Mary has a conversation with you, and it's like, oh, yeah, Paul said great things about you and Sarah down the hallway said great things about you and Sam. I was on a virtual call with him two weeks ago, and he said something great about you. Like, then you can build that. And then you've kind of reminded everybody that, oh, yeah, we could be referring our colleagues to you without having to tell them that it would just happen naturally. So the other thing I want you to understand from this is that if you were doing something different, right? If this person, this financial advisor, had a plan behind the scenes to nurture these relationships and then identified people that they would wish would be referred to them, there is a different process that we can take. It's not much different. We're never going to ask. We're never going to be like, so Paul saw Mary Rising Star, and then just like, pause awkwardly and see if they, like, jump in, like, oh, yeah, do you want me to refer her to you? Like, that's not going to ever happen. So let's not assume that that's the answer. But the truth is, if you're taking care of these people, we can do some things differently because you've been taking care of them. And that's the point. That's the ultimate point. And so that's what I want you to understand from this scenario of I want to reach out. Here's the thing. I know that there are people who are going to just say, oh, well, you're just beating around the bush. And you just need to go direct to Paul and ask him to connect you to Mary and tell him all the great reasons why he should. But guess what? Paul didn't ask for that. And Paul probably doesn't care. Paul cares about you as a human, but doesn't need extra work on his plate. Now, if you're listening to this episode and you're thinking to yourself, I think I would just go direct Paul and ask him to refer me, then that is one way to look at doing it. But the people that I work with, when they listen to this podcast episode, they're like, I want to be referred by Paul to Mary, but I want to do it in a way that protects my relationship with Paul while also hopefully getting me to the end result that I want, which is that connection to Mary. And in this case, because it doesn't really exist, I think you just go direct to Mary and you just say, hey, I'd like to connect. Here's some other people that I work with. Go talk to them. Go check. Go check me out if you need to. This is what I do with them. And I would love to have a conversation to see if this is something that you need. It may not be. That is your best way to protect the relationship with your quasi referral source with Paul. Because I don't know if Paul in this scenario has ever referred before. And to also get the ultimate what you want with Mary is to go direct to Mary. So when I teach don't ask for referrals, people sometimes hear we don't ask for anything. That's not true. You still have to ask for testimonials. You still need to ask for online reviews. You still need to ask for feedback. And sometimes you will always. Not sometimes, but you will always have to be willing in most cases, to ask for the business. But none of that is directed at your referral source. And that's the difference. All right, we've got one more scenario series coming up for you next week, so stay tuned to this one. This one's a little bit different. This is about a conversation I had with a prospect recently about why their team won't do what they want their team to do. We're going to break that down as well. All right, so the resources mentioned in this episode can be found on the show notes page@staceybrownrandall.com 360. That's 360 for episode 360. And don't forget, Stacy has an E. 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.