Ep #288: End of Year Referral Reflections

Stacey Brown Randall: Year end. Definitely time for reflecting. And in this episode, I want to dive into what I see when it comes to referrals. Some things, a continuation. Other things, good news. Let’s get to it.

Hey there and welcome to episode 288 of the Roadmap to Referrals podcast, a show about helping you build a referable business. I’m your host, Stacey Brown Randall. My journey from a business failure to a successful business now 10 years in, I know generating referrals naturally and consistently has made all the difference. Working with clients around the world, we leverage the science of referrals, protect relationships above all else, and help you build a referral business.

So at the end of every year, I like to do a little reflecting on referrals. Now, in fairness, this episode is being recorded prior to the two days I will be spending with the members of my coaching program, Building a Referable Business, or BRB for short.

So I am sure more light bulb moments will happen for me. More reflecting will happen for me. Gathering of more data and statistics and patterns will happen as well, when I spend those two days in December, well, at the time of this recording, those two days in December, which you guys are now listening to this towards the end of December, but I will have had time to spend with my members and we will really be diving into all the things that happened from a referral perspective in their business.

Of course, I talk to them almost weekly as we go through the coaching program that they are in with me so it’s not like I don’t know what’s happening. I definitely know what’s happening. I’ve got some really cool things to share with you guys in this episode.

But I know I’m going to have more results that are going to come out of the fact that we’re just in person for two whole days together, eating meals together, working together, like all the things happening for two days.

They come to Charlotte, and they spend two days with me. And they come from all over the United States and this year even the Bahamas. So I know that I’ll have more to share. And I want to give myself time after that retreat to reflect on what I hear them sharing and what I hear them talking about and what kind of questions are coming up.

So I’ll have more to share in the new year. So don’t worry, there’ll be more of this in the new year. But what I wanted to do, because of how we do the batching of this podcast, I needed to record this episode prior to actually having that retreat.

And I still wanted to have you guys have an episode that you listen to where it is reflecting on my thoughts and opinions of what I see when it comes to referrals over this past year. So again, keep in mind, there will be things that will probably be updated and added, maybe even tweaked after I have that retreat. But for right now, let’s kind of dive into some of the things I’m seeing when it comes to referrals.

Here we go, closing out another year. Remember, this is my 10th year, so I have been watching businesses and the marketplace and my clients and prospects and the people who follow me on social media or you longtime listeners of this podcast, shout out to you. And I hear from you when you guys email me or direct message me on LinkedIn or Instagram.

I am constantly having referral conversations. You’re probably not. You’re probably not spending all your days talking to people about referrals and the science behind it and the referral ecosystem you have within your business. Right?

You’re doing your thing. You’re spending all day in your zone of genius helping your clients. I happen to spend all day long in my zone of genius when it comes to referrals helping my clients. So I have a unique vantage point to talk about referrals and to talk about what I see.

And I wanted to share just a couple of them with you. And then, of course, I’ve got some really cool positive stuff that I want to share, too, that I’m seeing, that I plan with my clients to only leverage and do more of next year in 2024. So I’ve got four of these to go over with you guys.

Okay, so here’s the first one. Like I mentioned, I spend a lot of time talking to people about referrals and them wanting more referrals and what that could look like. And of course, I go deeper into that with my clients.

But I have lots of conversations, whether I’m attending a conference, whether I am on somebody else’s podcast, whether I am in just my direct messages, hearing from people on Instagram and LinkedIn, whether I’m in the comments, commenting to people, because they’re asking questions or they’re commenting about referrals. And I’m chiming in sometimes, you know, uninvited, because I do that.

But my thoughts around referrals come from seeing this day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out. And it’s not just this year. But this first one I want to talk about is because it seems to continue. And there’s a couple of these that are like this. And it seems to continue.

And so this first one is that most business owners that I’m having conversations with, or that I overhear conversations like at a conference and I hear people talking about business development and stuff, right?

Most people are only scratching the surface with referrals in their business. They are only scratching the surface of what referrals could really look like in their business. And that, of course, is heartbreaking for me.

Sometimes I will hear from folks, and they’ll be like, I’m doing this to get referrals. It’s not working. And I get to, oh, I don’t say get to, because I don’t really feel like I get to. It’s more like I have to be the bearer of bad news. And a lot of times I have to say, okay, well, this is why that doesn’t work.

And number two, do you know there are so many other ways to generate referrals in your business you don’t even have to do that one? Like, you shouldn’t be doing that one, but you don’t even need to be doing that one because there are so many other ways to be able to build what we call that referable business.

It doesn’t just mean, when I talk about people building a referable business, I don’t mean you’re building a business that can be referred. I mean, you’re building a business that, yes, it can be referred because you have built it to be amazing, but that you’re actually also getting all the referrals. It’s both. Right?

And so when I talk to these business owners, it’s like they’re just scratching the surface. They’re just like, okay, well, I do this one thing to try to get referrals. And I email a newsletter out to my list, and it has this one mention every month or every week or twice a month about like, hey, give me referrals. Right? Like, that’s what I’m doing and it’s not working.

Or I like send emails out to people about, you know, I’m always available for their referrals or I’ve got it in my email signature line that the greatest compliment they can give me is a referral and I’m not getting referrals.

And I’m always like, oh my gosh, first of all, stop doing those things. But second of all, that’s only scratching the surface in terms of what you should be doing, and the strategies, and the processes, and the action plans that you should have going on in your business. That is only scratching the surface. We are missing so many opportunities.

And by the way, those tactics, like putting something in your email signature, or mentioning it in your newsletter, or blasting out an email to your entire database, or what have you, those are bad, by the way. In case you didn’t know that. Let me just go ahead and say that for my newbies, maybe that are here listening for the first time that have just found me, right?

But this is something that I see all the time. I have conversations with clients before they join my programs, or I have conversations with prospects as they’re making the decision to join my programs, or just conversations out and about in the world with what I do with business.

And I’m like, what are you doing right now to generate referrals? Actually, it is a question on my application to come into some of the programs where you can work with me, whether it’s my coaching program or my VIP option.

There is a question on there that says, what are you doing to actively generate referrals? And nine times out of 10, that’s not fair, eight times out of 10, I will see nothing. Like literally, they will write the word nothing. Like I’m not doing anything, right?

And then every once in a while, I’ll see people say, well, I do this, but it doesn’t work. Or I’ve been told to do this, and I don’t like it, because we’re just scratching the surface.

Guys, if you want referrals to look different in 2024, and to continue on in 2025 and until 2027 and on and on and on, you have got to go deeper than the surface.

You’ve got to realize that there are strategies and procedures and language and situational moments you need to know what to say when something’s happening so that you are constantly building up, like this whole idea of like, this is how I operate. This is how I work. This is how I speak. This is how I do business. And you’ve got to be putting that out there. And you’ve got to go deeper than just the surface.

Now, some people that work with me can get away with one or two things, and they get what they need from that, and they don’t have to try to let it permeate every inch of their business. That’s cool. That’s awesome. Great.

But others, we try to build our entire business around this idea, which means we got to go deeper than just the surface to be able to generate referrals. We have to be looking at this from our buyer’s journey perspective, our client experience perspective, what we’re putting out there in social media.

What does it look like when we’re doing events and promotions? We’ve got to look at this for what are we doing to the people who refer us now or the people that we want to refer us? There are so many facets to this. You’ve got to go deeper. You can’t just scratch the surface.

And that’s the number one thing I consistently see people do. They want referrals, but they have no idea like what to do, and they have no idea that what they think they’re supposed to be doing, A, isn’t gonna work, and B, is barely scratching the surface of the potential. Oh, my goodness, my friends, the potential.

I really, let me just say a side note really fast. I really wish you guys could see me right now because I am talking like a crazy human with my hands. Like I am, I don’t know if you guys can hear this, if it’s coming through into your ear waves, right? And like, you can hear me like getting all like excited and stuff. I’m literally like shaking my arms and talking with my hands and like trying really hard not to hit the microphone as I talk really big with my hands.

And it’s funny because there’s been some push for me from some other people in my world that are like, you need a video podcast. I’m like, I would look like an idiot. I’m just gonna go out there and say it if I did a video-based podcast, because then you guys would actually see me get all riled up, and how I like act out my riled-upness, and you would be like, oh my gosh, she looks like an idiot. I’m just saying, I’m just putting it out there.

Okay, moving on. Let’s talk about number two. Oh, this is one that gets me. This one gets me fired up too. I don’t know, maybe seeing my facial expressions would be a good thing for you guys. Maybe it would just give you a good laugh. Particularly if you could see my face right now with this one.

This is another thing that I keep seeing that keeps happening, and it is old school, traditional advice, still dominates. Like, oh, heavens, no. But it’s true, right? And when I say old school, traditional advice still dominates, I mean that when people think about generating referrals for their business, their minds still go to, oh, I’m going to have to ask for them, or oh, I’m going to have to have a referral program where I pay for them.

Like, I see this commentary all the time. I see it in comments. I see it in messaging. I see it when people approach me and they’re like, oh, I’ve been told I have to ask. And I’m like, I know, because that old school traditional advice, which is wrong and bad, still dominates. today.

I mean, part of me is like, oh my God, I’ve been doing this for 10 years. Have I not made a bigger impression out there in the world of the marketplace? Right? I mean, is it not bigger than this from what I’m doing? But I know every day I help somebody new and that’s all that really matters. And that’s where I’m focused.

But there are, I have those moments where I’m like, why is it not out there like in a more, like permeating more of the marketplace and for business owners, right, and particularly the ones that I help in their industries, right? Like, why isn’t this breath of fresh air, this new information pushing its way to the surface more? Okay, anyways, or pushing its, I guess, past, right, past the surface. Why is it still buried?

But it is, it’s true. Old school, traditional advice, that stuff still dominates. I mean, people believe that if they want referrals, they’re gonna have to ask for them, which breaks my heart because you know what they do when they don’t wanna ask? They do nothing. And that means they don’t get the referrals they deserve. And that is so sad. It’s just so unbelievably sad.

So I want to share with you guys a little experiment that one of my coaching members inside Building a Referable Business, one of my coaching members did. Now, here’s the thing. I did not know this experiment was happening. Super smart that I was not told because I would have gone bananas. I’d have been like, you’re doing what?

But he did an experiment. And he did an experiment where he was putting in practice the strategies that I teach and doing that for his existing referral sources, his potential referral sources. They’ve had some amazing results. I’ll talk about that in a minute.

And then he had this little side piece that he was doing for a different group, where he was asking for referrals. You can imagine, I tell people when you come to work with me, you got to stop the asking stuff.

Stop the page on your website where people can click a link because they’re special, because they’re referring you, and you’ll get special attention to the people they refer. You better be giving great attention to everybody who comes into your business.

I’m just saying, like, I see these tactics all the time. They’re like, oh, there’s a page on my website, and you can go there to refer someone to me. I don’t want to do that. If I’m going to refer someone to you, I’m just going to come to you, right? Anyway, don’t get me started.

But, well I don’t know, maybe you should get me started because maybe that would help. But like this whole idea that you should have a page on your website that’s for like your VIP referrals, how you can refer people to me, right?

Or you have like this four-email thread or chain or drip or sequence that goes out and you’re in four emails asking people to refer you and then telling them what to say to other people when they’re going to refer you.

Okay. So here’s the thing, he had this one small group he was doing that with, and I did not know about it. Smart, again, as I said, that he kept it from me, because I would have gone bananas. And then he had what he was doing with me and the different groups that he was applying the tactics he was learning from me.

And in, I think it’s like the first 10 or 11 months of the year at the time of this recording, 67 referrals received. Now this is a company that got less than 20 last year and then wasn’t doing anything really more so than I’m guessing this asking strategy, right? But on a larger scale.

So maybe 20 referrals last year, right? The idea was, okay, you guys know this. If you listen to this podcast, my goal is like, okay, that’s what you average. I want to try to double it or triple it or quadruple it. So doubling it, right, would have made, I got them to 40. And tripling it, I mean, I would have got him to 60. And that was our goal. Like, I want to triple.

I mean, I always want to double. But if I can triple or quadruple, that’s what I’m aiming for. So we’re talking about 67 referrals received. And the year’s not up yet. So he’ll probably hit 70, maybe hit 75, which means I get really close to quadrupling it. But right now, let’s just say we tripled his referrals from last year to this year. And he’s applying my tactics.

But he’s got this one group that’s still being asked for referrals. And so he kind of came clean, and he was like, um, I’m just curious, should I keep this going? And I was like, what is happening? I didn’t even know what was happening. And so I asked him, and he knew it was coming. Because when you work with me, I pull no punches. He knew it was coming.

I was like, what were your results? Like, at the end of the day, you did my strategy, and you did this little, tiny asking piece of a strategy to this other little group, and you got 67 referrals. How many of those 67 referrals actually came from asking for them? Or if they weren’t a part of that 67 that were separated, right?

And so he’s okay, right? 67 referrals, right? Working my strategy, working Stacey’s process. He got 12 referrals from asking. So some of you are thinking, oh, well, look, Stacey, asking does work. No, no, no, hang on, I’m not done yet, okay?

So he gets these 12 referrals from asking, right? Again, doing it without me knowing. And by the way, in case you’re wondering, he has stopped now. I proved my point, it’s coming, here we go. He got 12 referrals from asking, and then my email back to him was, great! How many of them did you close into a paying client?

Because I know with the 67 referrals he got through my way, he closed like 30% of them. And that resulted in over six figures in revenue. So I know what my way looked like. I know he got 67 referrals. I know he had a 30% closing ratio. And I know that that resulted in over six figures in revenue to his bottom line that he was not expecting or anticipating.

So I said, okay, you got 12 referrals, so I’m asking, great, how many did you close? And he comes back, and I could almost see him laughing as he’s typing his answer, and he sends back to me an email, and he was like, yeah, that’s a big fat zero. Not one of them closed.

And I was like, and I bet some of them weren’t quality either to begin with, so how could they have ever closed? Because when you ask somebody to refer you and they feel this obligation to do it, which by the way is the worst mentality you want somebody in when they’re doing something for you.

When I have to do something for you out of obligation, I typically don’t do it joyfully. Right? I don’t do it like, oh, look, I’m going to do this. And I’m so excited to do this. I do this like, oh, there’s more when I do something out of obligation, it’s like, okay, great, I got to do this for you. And I got other things to do. And I don’t want to be bothered.

But now that you’ve asked me to do this, now I feel like I have to do this. Right? And so people just, they just throw out potential people that they don’t even know if they need you. And this is why when you ask for referrals, maybe you’ll get some. But you probably won’t close them into clients.

Because usually the people they’re referring to you is out of obligation. So they’re just trying to give you some names and get you to move on and get you to stop asking. Make that email sequence stop, please. Right? Make the asking stop, please. So here’s some names. But they know you won’t close them. And then you get to find out you won’t close them either.

Okay. So when I say old school traditional advice still dominates, it still dominates. It’s a hard one for people to let go. Even when they know, as my client knows, it doesn’t work. It does not work.

Now, of course, he’s got six figures in revenue and a 30% closing ratio and 67 referrals that he can be like, it doesn’t matter that the old way doesn’t work. Stacey’s way does. So here I go off until our next year, right?

So the reality there is that this is what it looks like, guys. When I say old school traditional advice still dominates, it makes me sad. It breaks my heart. Because I know not only are you probably not willing to do it, which means then you’re doing nothing for referrals, I also know if you do get up the courage to do it, you’re not going to have the results you want, which is just going to sour you on referrals altogether.

So I wanted to share that experiment with you. I thought you guys would appreciate that. I certainly loved pulling that information together to share it with you guys as well. I still laugh when I think about it.

Okay, here’s the third one. Major misinformation abounds, still with referrals. If you guys are like, Stacey, these are all negative referral reflections. There’s some positives coming. Hang tight.

Major misinformation abounds. What people think is a referral is not a referral. What people think they need to do to generate referrals is not what they should be doing. What people think should be happening when they receive a referral is completely off base as to what they need to be doing to make that referred prospect, that referral, become a paying client. So much misinformation still dominates, and it’s still prevalent. And it’s pretty major.

I mean, I will have people come up to me, and they’ll be like, okay, so I’m not asking for referrals. And then they’ll describe a situation to me where they’re not talking about referrals at all. And they’ll say, but then they’re getting to the point where they’re like, but I didn’t ask them.

I’m like, what do you mean you didn’t ask them? That’s not a referral. That’s a prospect that came to you from a different way, and you never asked for the business. You didn’t ask for the close.

So this misinformation permeates itself in kind of different, not great ways, obviously, but in a lot of different ways. People hear me say don’t ask, and they apply that to everything. Like, oh, I don’t ask for referrals. Great, but I also don’t ask for reviews and testimonials.

No, if you want reviews and testimonials, you need to ask for them. People don’t usually give that stuff willingly, even though they mean to. But asking for an online review or a testimonial is not the same thing as a referral. They’re not in the same category.

So I hear people say, oh, well, but I don’t ask for that. I’m like, but sometimes it’s something you should be asking for, as long as it’s not a referral. Right? Like you want feedback, you want an online review, you want a testimonial, you’re probably going to have to ask for that.

When you get somebody into your buyer’s journey and they’re making the decision to do business with you or not, you’re going to probably have to ask for the close. Or at least get them to the point where they make a decision to say yes or no. And sometimes that means you’re going to have to ask for the business. Like that’s just, that’s sales.

So when I say misinformation abounds, not only like bad information that doesn’t work, but also people taking what I teach and then applying it to things that, I never said that. What I say is don’t ask for referrals. I’ve never said don’t ask for a review or a testimonial.

Now in my Testimonial Made Easy program, I certainly have a better way I think that you should do that and a way that you can plant referral seeds while doing it. But I still teach my people that if you want a review or a testimonial, you better ask for it. But we’re not asking for a referral to somebody else who may become a client of ours and may pay us money. Totally different.

Okay. I know. Those are three kind of like, negative referral reflections. Let’s talk about some positives.

So here’s the thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a little bit of economic uncertainty out there in the world today. And if you’re in the United States, we’re also coming upon an election year. And we also have super high interest rates and there’s all kinds of things happening.

And so that just kind of makes people slightly nervous, right? Not all, but some, right? And so when you kind of look out there in the world, the question is usually, what’s going to happen to referrals during a recession?

Well, you know, we experienced this with the global pandemic. I got the same question. What happened with referrals in 2020? And the truth is, in some industries, this isn’t indicative of their referrals. This is indicative of their business or their industry in general. Business went down.

If you were a real estate agent in 2021 and 2022, at least the first half, maybe all of 2022, but definitely 2021 and 2022. You basically could just stand on the street and be like, I’m a real estate agent and have business.

Okay, I’m totally being facetious. That’s not true completely. There are some real estate agents that struggled. But a lot of agents who had established practices and established relationships, when the market was going bananas, people were like, sell my house. Let’s see what I can get for it. And there were people selling houses and people buying houses. And it was like this whole thing was happening. And then interest rates went crazy high.

Now, I know I’ve got international listeners. I don’t know what it looks like maybe potentially in your country, but I’m just talking about it from the United States perspective. And so then interest rates went bananas and inventory, I don’t, everybody lives, inventory may be a different issue, right? I mean, in Charlotte, inventory is always an issue. And that’s Charlotte, North Carolina, that’s where I am.

You’ve got, inventory is low. You’ve got interest rates are crazy high. You’ve got prices at an all-time high. Like I could sell our, Norm and I could sell our house right now and make stupid amount of money on it. I’m not quite sure it’s worth what we could technically sell it for at the height of the market like a year ago, right? Maybe a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, something like that.

But we couldn’t go buy anything else because everything else was priced that way, right? I mean, that was a common issue. Then you got interest rates, you got all kinds of things happening. And so a lot of real estate agents experienced a slowdown, not necessarily just in referrals, but in business across the board. Opportunities dropped, which meant referrals usually go with it.

Now, what I did find is that the clients of mine that had been working on their first year, usually their second year, their third year, their fourth year, they typically weathered that storm a little bit stronger because they have all these relationships. And they had people who are used to referring them.

And during an economic downturn or any kind of economic uncertainty, people usually want someone to tell them who I should hire because money is more precious during an economic downturn, usually. And so we are more reliant on referrals, actually, in an economic uncertainty than we are when everything is great.

And so we’ll take sometimes bigger risks with who we hire when the market is great. When the market is not great, when the economy is not great, we’re not taking risky decisions on who we give our money to and who we hire as people to help us within our business or help us personally. We want someone to vouch for people.  So referrals actually matter more in economic uncertainty.

And that definitely was something that I noticed for people. There was a consistency to referrals, maybe not a huge trajectory of growth, but there was a consistency to referrals that continued even as the economy and the economic uncertainty kind of ramped up throughout this year.

Now, that’s not to say everybody experiences it the same way. Some people’s businesses do increase during economic uncertainty. It’s just how their business looks. Some people shift the focus of what industry they pay attention to. Because that industry maybe isn’t as impacted by an economic recession or economic uncertainty. And so they lean into a different industry and they keep their business operating at the same level.

There’s lots of things, right? And I’m just touching on the tiny pieces of it. So for some of my clients, I saw referrals stay the same. which was really good, which we’ll take during economic uncertainty. Just maintain what you’ve been maintaining as long as the quality is there, and you have a good closing ratio.

But I also saw others have an increase because they had been focused on relationships and referrals and had strategies and tactics in place, and they had been cultivating those relationships.

For example, I have a realtor in my coaching program who in one quarter got 10 referrals, even as there was a slowdown. Ten referrals, it was worth just under $85,000 in revenue closed in one quarter.

And so when you know things are happening, so I’m using a real estate agent’s example on purpose because I know things are changing in that industry. And so for the agents that are listening to this, I want you to know that it’s not unusual for your business to be impacted depending on what’s going on in the economy.

Some of this is all about how you look at it and how you think about it. And in other cases, it’s a little bit different. And it’s all about what have you been doing before this happened to weather this storm. And this one real estate agent definitely had a great quarter.

Now, on the flip side, we have other people who have like gangbuster referrals this year. But those folks, like I have one book publisher in my coaching program in her first year, and the year’s not over at the time of this recording, 63 referrals. Sixty-three referrals this year. Her goal was 20. That was her goal. She had less than that the year before, right? But like 63 referrals, like she’s on freaking fire. And she’s learning a ton along the way.

But here’s the thing. She didn’t have this like massive increase in referrals, because of what was happening in the economy. Of course not, right? Hers came because she had never done anything like this before.

So she wanted 20 referrals this year. So far, before the year is up, she had 63. Right, that is what, quadrupled referrals there? Tripled? Obviously, you guys know I’m terrible at public math. I can see all of you guys calculating that in your heads and then laughing at me right now because I don’t know what 20 is quadrupled or doubled or tripled. But whatever it is, maybe it’s tripled.

When we’re looking at where she is, right, and what this looks like, it’s because she, for the last year and the year before that and the year before that, she had never done anything like this.

So some people come in and they have that success. Now, I obviously have other people in my program that haven’t had the referral success that they’ve wanted. And we can trace back to exactly why that happened.

I had one person who was moving a little too slow. and needed to ramp up as the economy was starting to have some uncertainty and it was trying to get a little bit louder. I needed them to ramp up and do some different things, right? And we all make different choices and decisions based on our business and based on our capacity and things. And those shifts didn’t happen.

And so some people did have drops in their referrals. But that’s not indicative of what works and what doesn’t work from within the program. That’s indicative of like, what are we applying? What are we doing? What does it look like?

And sometimes, guess what, guys? It doesn’t matter. You can do all the right things, and you can still get less referrals than you anticipated. We’re not talking about robots. This is not an algorithm. Well, you can’t even rely on that.

We’re not talking about like the computer who will always add two plus two and it will always equal four. We’re talking about humans on the other side, right? And we don’t necessarily demand or can predict right down to the exact day that they’re going to refer you.

So that’s why it’s so important to have these processes and procedures in place that continue to work within your business. So those that may have had a down year this year, we can look back at the last couple of years and realize, well, this was kind of anticipated. Not great, but now we have a strategy and a focus for next year so we can rectify the situation, right?

So I just wanted to give an overview of what I was seeing in terms of results, where some were blowing it out of the water, some were maintaining in an economic time where you really didn’t think they should be, but that’s because they’ve been doing the work.

Some had a crazy bonkers year regardless, but that’s because it was really their first year doing anything. And this is probably what they’ve been sitting on for a while. They’ll probably settle into it. And some had a down year. That is how it looks.

Those are four very expected situations when it comes to people that I’m working with, people that I see with their referrals, right?

I’m also seeing a shift in people understanding about this need of how important the language piece is to what I teach. Now, I really see this mostly with my own clients, because most of the time when I talk about planting referral seeds and the language we use and how we communicate, most people are like, I don’t get it. And that’s OK, because you’re not a client of mine. And that is my proprietary information. That is my secret sauce. And that is the thing I don’t share. You’ve got to be a client to get that.

But when I talk about this whole idea of the what you say matters as much as what you do, I’m starting to see that light bulb go off more and more. Now with my clients, where I’m seeing that light bulb go off is because they’re starting to get the language. They’re starting to say, oh yes, I need to say it this way. And then they come to me and they’re like, is this right? And I’m like, yes, yes, the grasshopper has become the master. You got it. That’s exactly what you need to say.

And so I’m seeing those light bulbs continue to go off with new people year after year. So if I had somebody in my program two years ago, I saw the light bulb for them go off two years ago. But this is a reflection on this year. So I’m just focused on what I’m seeing this year.

But there is this whole focus on this necessary of understanding that when we are cultivating referrals, there’s a strategy behind it. There are things that we do, and there are things that we say, and there’s a cadence to it. And that’s really important.

So I thought what would be great if you guys just took a quick listen to this one-minute clip that I have. It’s from a recent coaching program, one of our weekly Q&A sessions. It’s just a one-minute clip, so we’re going to play that for you guys. But it’s this one-minute clip from my recent question and answer session from my coaching members.

So if you guys know, my coaching program, Building a Referable Business, or BRB, we do weekly Q&As where I answer questions that have come up throughout the week so people can keep moving forward, depending on whatever they’re dealing with.

And I answer all kinds of questions. Sometimes these sessions are 20 minutes long, sometimes they’re over an hour. It’s just me answering whatever questions are there. But this is what I had with my members. And I want you guys to listen to this one-minute clip and listen to what I say when I’m talking about, even to my members, the importance of understanding our language opportunities, planting our referral seeds, and what that looks like. Okay, let’s roll the clip.

Planting referral seeds, the one seed we plant that you guys plant in your touch points, that you plant in your testimonial gathering, that you plant with your running five, not one referral seed that you plant is going to unleash a river of referrals. That’s not how it works. If it did, you guys would each pay me a million dollars, I’d tell you one thing to say and off you’d go. And you’d be billionaires, right? Like that would be amazing. That’s not how it works.

It is a constant planting of those referral seeds so that it makes its way into the subconsciousness of the people that we are communicating with based on an appropriate situation. Which is why sometimes we don’t plant referral seeds like birthday cards and why lots of times we do, and we put them throughout different parts and processes and procedures within our business.

So it’s your ability to notice those referral moments and use the referral seeds, in addition to having your plan that does that as well. That with the outreaches and things where we are purposely knowing we’re planting referral seeds.

All right, hopefully hearing me talk to my coaching members about the importance of language and about the importance of all the places we have to say the language, but not every place. That’s the key, right? Like all the times we say the language, but not every time that we say the language, knowing and understanding that is really key to what I teach actually working for my clients. And I just wanted to share that with you.

So if you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking about what’s one small thing that I can change or I can do different in 2024, other than maybe coming to work with me and becoming a client of mine, if there’s one small thing you can do, just start paying attention to the language and the communication and what you do.

I teach it as referral seeds that I want you to plant, right? But just start paying attention to what that looks like from a referral perspective within your business. And here’s the last thing I want to ask of you.

To make progress with referrals in your business, really, you shouldn’t go it alone. That’s why I have different ways for people to work with me. And the one you heard that clip from, and what you hear me talking about most of these episodes, is my coaching program, Building a Referable Business. If you want the roadmap to double, triple, or quadruple your referrals, like I was talking about with some of my clients who did that this year, then you need to apply for the program. Go to StaceyBrownRandall.com/referable. Check out all the information and complete the application. If you’re accepted with your application, then you’ll have the opportunity to join.

What I want you to know and understand, if you want something to look different with your referrals in 2024, you are going to have to do something different. There’s lots of things you can do. Figure out what is the right one for you, and then get to work, my friend.

And if that means you want to work with me to figure out what to do, I got the roadmap. It’s already built. We’re just waiting on you. Just come join us, and we will absolutely make it happen.

Okay, the resources mentioned in this episode can be found on our show notes page at StaceyBrownRandall.com/288.

And we are back with another great episode next week. It’ll be the final one for this year, but don’t worry, this podcast isn’t going anywhere. We’ve got a whole lineup of 52 episodes for you next year as well. And remember, this podcast is created with you and your needs in mind. So until then, you know what to do, my friend. Take control of your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.