Ep #338: Q4 Referral Plan (Step 3)

Stacey Brown Randall: Hey there, and welcome to episode 338 of the Roadmap to Referrals podcast, a show that proves you can generate referrals without asking or manipulation.

I’m your host, Stacey Brown Randall. My journey from a business failure to a successful business, now 11 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 referable business.

Okay, so it’s the first episode of December, and we are continuing our three-step, quarter four referral plan of action. So in episodes 329 and 334, we started with the first two parts of this 90-day plan.

So the October episode, which was episode 329, was all about walking you through what to prep, like just pull these things together for me.

And then the November episode, episode 334, was explaining what actions I needed you to take from all of that prep you did the month prior.

For this episode, we’re gonna build on what you did in November, but really focus on how we use this moving into next year.

So I’m gonna make a huge assumption that you did the to-dos from episodes 329 and 334, so I’m not going to explain them. You’ll wanna go back and listen to those episodes if you’re a new listener or you didn’t listen to those episodes or you listened to them but didn’t do the work.

So you’re going to want to go back and do that work because I’m not going to explain them. I’m just going to build on them. And so you can understand exactly what we want to do as we move forward.

Alright. Now I’ve condensed these down, so it’s not a full six this time. We actually have five of them because a couple of them we could combine, and they could work together. So here we go.

So one of the first things I asked you to do was, as you know, to figure out who your referral sources are, right? I walked you through the process of reverse engineering, figuring out who your referral sources are from the last couple of years.

And then in November, I asked you to do one outreach to your referral sources. And that could have been something, what I said was just do something showing gratitude and you could certainly decide what you were going to do.

So you know who your referral sources are and you did one outreach in November showing them gratitude for the fact that they refer to you.

So here’s my question for you as you move into next year. What will you do throughout the year, next year? You need a touchpoint plan of five to seven outreaches in a calendar year. So what will you do?

Now, if you’ve read my book, Generating Business Referrals Without Asking, you know in there we talk about four to eight. But what I have found over the last decade of doing this work with clients is the sweet spot in that first year is really five to seven.

You don’t usually need eight, and four is not usually enough. So six is really like a happy place for me when people are new and they’re putting in a touchpoint plan of how they’re going to cultivate and deepen the relationship with their existing referral sources.

So here’s what you need to do. You need to put some pen to paper now and map it out. And then once you’ve mapped out what your five to seven outreaches will be, I then need you to add it to your calendar or your project management software so it will actually happen on time.

If you’re going to actually generate referrals throughout a year, you actually have to be willing to do a little bit of work throughout that year. And a great place to start is have a plan in place for how you’re going to take care of your referral sources, your existing referral sources, the ones you can identify because they have referred you before.

And you’re going to want to make sure that you have a touchpoint plan, an outreach plan in place. Map it out now. Don’t assume you’ll get to it every month or every quarter or whatever it is you think you’re going to do. Map it out now.

That’s what I do with my clients at our yearly retreat when they’re a coaching client in my coaching program, BRB, Building a Referable Business, or they’re a VIP client. We come together once a year in Charlotte, and they actually map out the entire next year plan.

Do not leave this to chance that you’ll just get to it throughout the year. So map out those touch points.

Okay, number two. So prior, you went through for me, and you cleaned up your database. So you have sources of where your clients and prospects came from. Now sources meaning more than just referral sources. This is any source of where a prospect or a client came from.

So you went through and you cleaned all that up, and you’ve tightened up your intake process. That means moving forward, you actually have the information on where people came from, so you don’t have to go back and do another cleanup. See how that works together?

Alright, so here’s my question for you as we move into next year. In my opinion, a cleaned-up process feels amazing in the beginning. But if humans are involved in maintaining that cleaned up process, well, we have a tendency to sometimes fall off the wagon of maintaining it and keeping it going.

So it needs to be reviewed every month or at least every other month. Now, at a minimum, I would say it probably needs to be reviewed every quarter, like at a very, very minimum. If you’re going to push it out at any point, no more than a quarter, every three months.

So here’s the thing. You have this great database. You’ve just spent time cleaning it up, tightening it up, putting in the source information. Now you understand the intake process so that you are making sure you’re gathering the source of where your clients and prospects come from.

But it doesn’t work perfectly. So there’s going to have to be some type of human involvement. They’re going to have to go behind the scenes and request the information when you didn’t get it or follow up with people who didn’t give it to you the first time that you requested it or didn’t fill it out on your form when they first scheduled a meeting with you or whatever.

But you need to make sure that you’re spot-checking it at a minimum, right? So if you always know where your prospects are coming from, that means you’ll always know where your clients came from.

Because every client is a prospect first. First, they’re a prospect. First, they show interest. First, they’re considering working with you. Then, they say yes or no. If they say no, they stay a prospect, right? If they say yes, they become a client.

If at the very beginning of that, at the prospect stage, you’re gathering their where they came from source, then you’ll always have that information as they move to a client as well. But here’s the thing, sometimes people don’t give you that information and so you need to be able to go back and make sure you have a process in place where you’re re-asking for that information.

Oh, how did you hear about us, right? You’re re-asking for that information, and you have a process in place for that. and that you’re spot checking it, at least I think at the end of every month.

If you were to run all the prospects that came into your business at the end of every month, and then check the source of where they came from, you’d quickly see any holes that would alert you like, hey, we have three prospects that came in this month.

We don’t know where they came from. Let’s figure that out. Let me make sure I’m asking, or I’m finding out, or I’m just updating the data because maybe you have it. It just didn’t get into the system.

So when you have this cleaned-up process of your database of the sources of where your clients and prospects came from, and you’re capturing that information in the intake, it’s gonna be amazing, but it’s gonna have to be maintained.

So make sure you have some process on the calendar that you go in at the end of every month, at the end of every two months, or at the end of every quarter, and you check the prospects that came into the business. Where did they come from, so that you know exactly what’s working and what’s not working.

And then of course, it all feeds into your bigger picture. If those prospects are referred to you, you’re capturing the referral source name and that feeds into the bigger picture, which is even better. Okay, just got a couple more to go.

Stacey Brown Randall: Hey there, pardon the interruption. If you’re a longtime listener of this podcast, then you’ve heard me mention my Building a Referable Business 12-month coaching program. But there are actually a couple other ways to work with me as well.

You can dip your toe in and get started with my starter course called Your Next Five Referrals. Or if you have a small team and want me to build your strategy for you, then my VIP Referrals in a Day experience is right for you.

Links to all three ways of how to work with me, Your Next Five Referrals online course, the Building a Referable Business 12-month coaching program, and the VIP Referrals in a Day experience are in the show notes page for this episode. Now, let’s get you back to the episode.

Stacey Brown Randall: Alright, number three. So I also asked you to come up with your list of prospects who had been referred to you, and then you were supposed to reach out to them.

So you cultivated that list of prospects that had been referred to you throughout the year. These are the ones that didn’t say yes, didn’t become a client, and then you reached out to them, right? Yes, I know you did it.

Okay, here’s my question for you. What follow-up will you be doing moving forward into next year? Depending on how your outreach went, which hopefully you did when you reached out to them last month, depending on how your outreach went, you need to make sure you have a follow-up plan in place if those people didn’t say yes last month when you reached back out to them.

So if they didn’t become a client last month when you reached out, you need to know, OK, so am I going to follow up again in December? Am I going to follow up again in January? Maybe I’m going to have a reason to follow up in February.

Maybe when I followed up with them in November, they said to me, hey, you know what? This is definitely something I want to do quarter one. Let’s do it. And so I need to make sure I have a plan in place to follow up with them quarter one.

Some people maybe told you when they would be interested in moving forward. I’m going to guess, though, some people did not. So you need to create a follow-up plan for those that you don’t have direction from then on when they may want to consider putting this back on their radar and hiring you and moving forward.

So you just need a follow-up plan and how often you’re going to follow up and what you’re going to say when you follow up and the delivery mechanism of how you’re going to follow up, right?

It just can’t all be done in email, folks. Come on now. You just really need to know what that looks like. You got to map this out for next year. Very, very important.

That follow-up, and this is follow-up you would do for prospects really no matter if they’re referred to you or not, but it’s how you do the follow-up. It’s just referred prospects are different. They usually need a little bit of a better touch because they were actually referred to you by someone.

They didn’t just come in cold because they filled out a form on your website after doing a Google search. It’s just an entirely different type of prospect when they’re referred to you.

So how are you going to move forward with your follow-up next year? And that’s what I need you to map out now, so you know what this looks like for next year of how you’re going to follow up to the point where they either say, no, I’m not going to work with you, or yes, I am going to work with you.

I mean, I’ve done some follow-up with folks for over a year. Like, not every day, week, or month. That’s weird. But I’ve done follow-up and just kind of like, hey, staying in touch, just putting myself back out in front of your radar.

And hopefully, if they’re on my email list, they get my weekly email anyway. And so that helps me stay on the radar, too. But that’s not all I do. I don’t rely on that weekly email that I send out, my weekly newsletter that I send out, to be the thing that gets people to be like, oh, yeah, I need to work with her.

Like, I’m doing my own follow-up. And I have kind of like a system in place of how and what that follow-up looks like, just based on how much potential I think that person has to actually become a client.

You should have that in place for prospects moving forward. But I’m also asking you to consider adding these folks to it. Like, how are you going to keep following up with them when it’s the whole next year, right? That’s the point there.

Okay, number four. So the fourth thing I asked you to do was to have a list of new connections made from this year. So you created a list of all the new people you met this year, and your to-do for them is to actually, you were to send them a note that showed that you were thankful that you guys had connected, or if they were someone from your past, that you reconnected.

So, you created a list of all the new connections you made this year, or people you connected with that you hadn’t talked to in a really long time, and you sent them a note. That’s what you did over October and November.

Now, here’s my question moving forward. How will you continue to follow up to nurture this relationship, this newer relationship in the new year? What will that look like throughout the year?

So when we talk about, let me pause here for a second, because when we talk about follow-up, I’ve talked about now three different kinds of different follow-up you need to be doing for different groups of people.

One, what follow-up are you going to be doing? We call it outreach. What outreach, what touch points are you going to be doing for people who have referred you in the past or are referring you?

That’s your touch point plan for your existing referral sources. That was back when we talked about the first thing in this episode, right? That’s number one.

The next round of follow-up I told you to do is that when you have prospects that were referred to you, your follow-up for them as you take them continuing through the buyer’s journey to say yes to being a client.

That’s a different type of follow-up because that’s somebody who’s actually interested in hiring you, which is different from an existing referral source who refers people to you.

Now I’m layering on a third level of or a third layer of follow-up. And this is for the folks that, hey, you met them. If you believe they have potential to one day refer you, you have to keep nurturing that relationship. So what will that look like throughout next year?

You have to kind of keep this in mind, right? What will that look like as you nurture those relationships throughout, not just in the new year, but throughout the entire year?

And the thing to consider here, and I think this is really important, and I think it gets overlooked. easily. But the thing to consider here is what it looks like in terms of, like, over 12 months, not just what am I going to do in the first quarter, like over 12 months, what is that nurturing going to do?

And with my clients, we talk about sometimes the follow up is dictated by how the conversation went, or something that’s popped up in that relationship you’re forming.

And then you also just kind of need in the background, a plan running in place of how you’re going to follow up with folks, even when there isn’t an actual reason to.

So you kind of have to think about this in a couple of different ways, but that’s three different types of follow-up I’m asking you to consider. And you can do all of this because you’re capable. You started a business. You got this. Let’s not stress out, right? Yes, it’s a little extra work and you can do it.

Okay, here’s the last thing we’re going to talk about for this episode. So before I asked you to create your ideal referral source description, this is not like one person, they all do this and they all live here and they all look like this. This is a multitude of who has the potential to refer you.

So usually, you have multiple referral source descriptions or it’s like one description, but it can be different types of people. It’s not 15 types of people, it’s usually like a couple, right?

So you have your ideal referral source description, you know who the best folks are to refer to you. And your goal is to really use this as you look to add new people to refer you next year.

So now you’re like, okay, I have this referral source description and I’m gonna use this as I look for new people to refer me in the new year and next year that they fit this description.

But here’s a really important question you need to ask yourself and this is the last piece of prep, or I guess planning I want you to do for next year.

Do you know how many new people, new referral sources, you need? If you’re going to have an ideal referral source, kind of like overall description of who these people are that are best to refer you, right? And your goal is to use that to actually add new people to start referring you next year. Do you have a target?

Like, do you know how many people we’re going after? Do you have, is it, do you need five new referral sources or 35 new referral sources? And that’s all dictated by how many new people you need referring you, right? It’s how many people you’re going to cultivate to start referring you is based on how many new people you need.

If you have 10 people referring you right now, and they average one referral a year, and that’s 10 referrals, but you need 20 next year, well, then you probably need to add 10 new people to refer you if you can’t get more referrals from the 10 that are already referring you.

See, I’m really big on metrics and goals, and I think people overlook this. And they’re like, let’s just go make it happen. I’m like, make what happen for what purpose, right?

So I really want you to understand, how many new people do you need next year? You need a target. You need a number. You need a goal.

But here’s the thing, when you have met somebody and you’re thinking, oh my gosh, it’d be so great if they started to refer to me, that doesn’t mean they’re going to. And it doesn’t matter, if you do the cultivation or not, it doesn’t necessarily get a guarantee that someone will start referring you.

I tell my clients all the time, you’re gonna kiss a bunch of frogs before you find your prince and your princesses that will actually refer to you. So you’re gonna have to cultivate and meet more new people that will ultimately end up actually referring you.

And so, like, this is, I got a client, I think it was last year, it could have been the year before, needed new referral sources. And in her first, like, four months, I believe it was, she had 15 people that were new that she was trying to cultivate to refer her.

And out of those 15, four actually sent her a referral in those first four months. May have been in the first quarter, I can’t remember, but whatever, three or four months in, she had done outreach to 15 new people, started the cultivation process, and four of them actually referred her.

It was great, right? So it’s not a 100% conversion rate. Like, I just need to set some expectations here. So that’s really important for you to kind of keep in mind.

So I have my clients determine how many new referral sources they need by running some numbers on three different scenarios. So once you determine, hey, I need 10 more people to refer me, the question is, OK, great. So then how many people do you probably need to cultivate to get to those 10 people who will refer to you or be new referring to you, right?

And so we look at this based on a conversion of a low average, medium average, and a high average. That you’ve identified these people, you’re cultivating them.

So let’s just say on a low average, you’re going to cultivate 30 people next year. And a low average, maybe only, five or six of them will actually start referring you. And a middle average, it would be maybe more closer to like 12 to 15% would actually start referring you of those 30. And on a high average, maybe 18 to 20% actually start referring you.

I always tell folks, when you’re setting your conversion numbers, just go with the low. If you are better at it, that’s great. If you end up with a middle or a high average, you actually just get to stop sooner, because you’ll hit your number faster.

But think through this. Take a minute. Re-listen to this section. You’ve determined you need x number of new people referring you next year. Great. Let’s just say it’s 10. You’re not going to meet the first 10 people, and those 10 people are going to refer you. You may have to actually cultivate 20, or 30, or 40, or 50 people to get to those 10.

Keep that in mind, and look at this from a low, medium, and high average of what you’ll actually convert. Because some people will love to refer you, they just can never do it. Some people, no matter how much cultivation you do, they just won’t refer you. And some people will, so just keep that in mind.

Okay, so there you have it. Go back and listen to this episode. Review episodes 329 and 334 to help you as you’re creating all of this in your mind. You’ve done your prep work from 329. You’ve taken some small action in 334. Now you’ve got some planning to do for next year with this episode, episode 338.

And of course, you can find links to those episodes in the show notes page, which is StaceyBrownRandall.com/338. Don’t forget, Stacey has an E.

And remember, if you want the step-by-step roadmap of how to do all of this and you want me to shortcut all of your trial and error and make this easier, then you just need to reach out and let’s consider working together. I can walk you through those options.

Alright, 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.