Roadmap to Referrals

Ep #376: The Referral Opportunity You’re Overlooking

Host: Stacey Brown Randall
Date: August 26, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode centers on a highly-missed but massively valuable strategy: generating more referrals from people who have already referred you—what Stacey calls the "Low Hanging Fruit strategy." Stacey discusses how most business owners overlook this foundational approach, why it’s easier and more rewarding, and provides a clear, actionable method to identify and nurture these key referral sources. The episode also features the announcement of Stacey’s upcoming live masterclass focused on implementing this strategy.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Overlooked Referral Opportunity: Existing Referral Sources

• Main theme: Most professionals focus so much on getting new referrals or turning new contacts into referral sources that they neglect their most proven assets—people who’ve already referred them.
  • “It is easier to get an existing referral source to refer you again than it is to turn a contact or a COI or even a client into a referral source. Once someone's referred, everything gets easier.” (02:35–02:59)
• Called the Low Hanging Fruit strategy: It’s “the strategy that most of my clients start with,” and where most quick and reliable results come from.

2. Why This Strategy Works

• Stacey draws an analogy from sales: it’s far easier to get repeat business from an existing customer than to convert a cold prospect.
  • “Have you heard the statistic about it being easier to sell to an existing client than to land a brand-new client? … The same goes for referral sources.” (01:21–01:50)
• The process, outreach, and language are easier, and “the objective shifts to true care and gratitude.”

3. You Likely Don’t Know Who’s Referring You

• Stacey challenges listeners: Most business owners can’t accurately name all their referral sources offhand, often relying on memory and “recency bias” instead of hard data.
  • “Most business owners don't know by name who actually refers to them. Now they think they do… But this is when recency bias runs amok because they don't have data to know with certainty.” (03:34–03:50)
• She stresses the importance of “data diving” to identify these sources.

4. Step-By-Step: How to Identify Your Referral Sources

Step 1: Do It for Your Clients

• [10:38] Pull a list of all clients from the last 12 months (ideally, go back three to four years).
• Create a spreadsheet with:
  • Name of client
  • Date or year they became a client
  • The source (how they found you—referral sources get a first and last name here)
• "A referral is a human, so you got to have a name there." (12:24)

Step 2: Repeat for Your Prospects

• [14:37] Create the same list for prospects: people who considered working with you but didn’t become clients.
• Follow the same three columns as above.

Step 3: Combine Lists and Extract Referral Sources

• [16:11] Merge the two lists.

• Filter for only entries where the “source” is a person’s name—these are your actual referral sources.

  • “That, my friend, is your list of gold. That, my friend, are the humans, the people that make up your low hanging fruit.” (17:24–17:32)

5. The Power of Awareness

• Surprises abound when clients see the final list.
  • “Most of the time when people go through this process, there is a level of surprise. They think they know who's on the list and then they see the list and they're like, wait, some people aren't on it that I thought would be… and there are people on here that I've been neglecting because I didn't realize they were referring to me.” (07:42–08:05)
• Don’t neglect referring sources just because they don’t refer often; nurturing less frequent referral sources can double/triple your yearly referrals.

6. Nurturing Your Referral Sources

• With the list in hand, the next move is creating a plan focused on “gratitude, thankfulness, and planting referral seed language”—language that keeps you top of mind without ever having to ask for referrals.
  • “Everything gets easier within the strategy, within the plan that you’re going to build to take care of them.” (09:48)
• This becomes a repeatable system that can be run year after year to consistently generate referrals.

7. Stacey’s Masterclass Announcement

• Stacey is reviving her Growth by Referrals strategy in a standalone, live format for the first time in years—a hands-on, three-session (plus bonus Q&A) masterclass.
  • “In less than a couple of hours... you’ll start taking action to generate more referrals from those who have referred you before.” (21:03)
• This class is ideal for people who already have referral sources and want to increase their yield.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On knowing your sources:
  “Are you 100% confident you know who your referral sources are? … Can you do that for at least the last year or two, maybe longer?”
  — Stacey Brown Randall (09:57)
• On data reality vs. perception:
  “This is when recency bias runs amok because they don't have data to know with certainty.”
  — Stacey Brown Randall (03:47)
• On the value of infrequent referrers:
  “It's about knowing all the other people who may refer only one or two times to you, because those people are just as valuable…”
  — Stacey Brown Randall (08:48)
• On the process:
  “A referral is a human, so you got to have a name there.”
  — Stacey Brown Randall (12:24)
• On what the process produces:
  “That, my friend, is your list of gold. That, my friend, are the humans, the people that make up your low hanging fruit.”
  — Stacey Brown Randall (17:24)
• On rinsing and repeating the system:
  “There's a rinse and repeat process to this so that you will have this in place for years to come and you will keep generating referrals each and every year.”
  — Stacey Brown Randall (23:41)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Overlooked Opportunity Introduction: 00:58–02:59
• The Problem with Memory and Bias: 03:31–05:15
• Why Knowing Your Referral Sources Matters: 06:12–08:41
• Step-by-Step Identification Method: 10:38–17:24
• Value of Nurturing All Referrers: 08:48–09:41
• Masterclass Announcement and Logistics: 19:28–27:20

Conclusion & Next Steps

Stacey’s actionable roadmap in this episode is clear:

• Identify your existing referral sources with data, not memory
• Recognize the value of even infrequent referrers
• Create a purposeful plan for ongoing, gratitude-fueled outreach
• For those ready to widely implement this, Stacey’s “Growth by Referrals” masterclass offers direct, hands-on guidance

For more details on the masterclass or to revisit the steps, check the show notes at staceybrownrandall.com/376.

Final Takeaway:
If you want “naturally generated, consistent referrals,” start with people who’ve already shown they’re likely to refer—not with strangers. Awareness, gratitude, and a repeatable strategy are your pathway to referral-driven growth.