Ep #340: Referral Q&A

Stacey Brown Randall: Hey there, and welcome to episode 340 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.

Well, it is a 10th episode, being episode 340. And if you’re a longtime listener of this podcast, you know that every 10th episode, we stop from our regularly scheduled programming and do a question-and-answer episode. And this one will be no different.

This question came to me via direct message over Instagram, and it comes from Bre, who is a new real estate agent. So I’m going to go ahead and read her question to you, and then I’m going to break it down.

Alright, so Bre says, I’m a new agent, and I read your book after hearing you on the Ninja Selling Podcast. That is the company that Larry Kendall started. If you are familiar with him, he is a wonderful guy. I’ve known him for a number of years. He’s a great supporter of my business.

He started a real estate company out in Colorado, and then, of course, from there, created this amazing way for real estate agents and others in the real estate industry to do sales. It’s called Ninja Selling, and he’s been a great supporter of my business for many, many years, and I finally got to meet Larry in person.

So they also host a podcast. Folks from his team host that podcast, Ninja Selling, and I was grateful enough when I was out there this summer to actually record an episode live, like sitting next to Larry, which never happens.

So it’s always so fun when you can record episodes with podcast hosts and actually do it live versus, you know, just over Zoom or over virtually. as they’re typically done.

So, alright, back to Bre’s question. Bre said, I’m now listening to your podcast. Thank you so much, Bre. And she says, but I feel overwhelmed and behind since there’s so many episodes.

Bre, I feel your pain, my friend. She goes, I know I can’t afford a cohort or anything right now. That’s totally cool because she’s new, right?

But since I’m just getting started, I want to create a referral plan and system for 2025. Do you have certain episodes or resources you can point me to, to help me get something set up for success next year?

Bre, excellent question, and I applaud you for reaching out to ask your question, and I’m excited to answer it for you.

Alright, so first I just want to say I completely relate to Bre’s question about being overwhelmed when you look at how many episodes I have done. There are almost 350 episodes. Of course, this is 340, so we’re like 10 episodes away from hitting 350.

And this is going all the way back to June 2018. Like, it’s a number of years. I totally get that. That’s a lot to sift through. That’s a lot to figure out what you should be listening to and what’s relevant for where she is.

So this, what I did is I put together a playlist for Bre. And I’m going to, of course, share this playlist for you guys as well. But what I want you to understand is that I looked at which episodes I would recommend for Bre.

It was hard, though, because I had to go back in and force myself to remove some because it was like too many. It was like, oh my gosh, let’s not overwhelm her again, right?

But I put together this playlist for Bre based on being new, right? She’s new in business. She’s a new real estate agent.

Now, if you’re a new interior designer or an attorney, maybe you’ve been practicing attorney for a very long time, but you just started your business, right? The episodes I pulled are very specific for somebody being newer in the business ownership journey.

You may be an expert in what you do, but this is about a playlist when it comes to referrals being new in the business ownership journey.

If you were to send me a message and say, hey, Stacey, I’m five years in, and I’m overwhelmed by all of the podcast episodes you have, which episode should I be listening to? I would present to you a different playlist. But this is what I presented for Bre.

There were three ways that I broke this down that I thought would be very, very helpful for her. So the first, and you guys know this, I think in categories, whether or not I should, like I think in categories, I think in labels, because that’s how I can keep things straight.

So I broke this down from what did I want her to have like a baseline of knowledge on? So I picked three episodes. I forced myself to pick only like three episodes. And then I break my own rule when I get to the next section. I just realized that. But that’s OK. Because Bre wanted, she doesn’t want to just listen to one or two podcasts. She wanted a playlist.

So the first area we’re going to focus on is getting a baseline of just knowledge around referrals. And specifically because I’m different. And I want her to understand that.

The second thing is a focus on what you can control. There’s a lot out there in business ownership land that you can’t control. And I want Bre focused on the things she can control, because that means she can take action.

And any type of action she can take can start forward momentum, and it starts to build on itself. And that’s really powerful. So I wanted to give her some things that she could control, and it doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not she’s getting referrals.

Okay, and then the next section I said is like, I also want her to hear from agents who’ve gone before her, other agents who’ve been in business.

One 30 plus years, another less than 10, just to have, hey, there are other agents who’ve gone before you and no matter where they were in their journey, they still decided they wanted to take control of their referrals. And so I wanted to also make sure she had that information.

Now, sprinkled throughout this are also not just playlists, but other resources that Bre can check out as well. So I did focus on podcast episodes from a playlist perspective, but then I also said, hey, you may want to go check this out too.

Okay. So first things first, I said, first category is to get a knowledge baseline. And there’s three episodes that I would have her focus on to just really get that baseline of knowledge.

The first one is to understand the science behind referrals. And that is episode 311.

Now, I have a seven-minute video that you can find on my website. It’s like almost on every page of the website. You can just put in your name and your email, and we will send you a link to the seven-minute video of where I’m breaking down the science of referrals.

So if you like this in a video format versus maybe an audio format with a podcast, either way this will work. But it’s episode 311. I do go a little deeper in the episode. The video I did that you can get to from the website, of course, it’s just like seven minutes.

But you really need to understand the science of referrals, or you won’t understand the methodology of how I teach without asking, without manipulating, without being gimmicky and promotional, and without having to pay kickbacks.

The second thing is episode 302, and this is just rookie mistakes I see people making with referrals. And so really understanding that there is a right way and a wrong way, and there is a way that people actually sabotage their own referrals. And so looking at that from a rookie mistakes perspective, and that is episode 302.

And then the third one I picked was episode 332, which is this concept of understanding upstream versus downstream referrals. Upstream referrals being the people who swim upstream from you, who have a better chance to refer to you, and downstream being those that aren’t.

Because one of the things Bre’s gonna have to get good at, and we all need to be good at this, but when you’re new, you really have to get good at discerning and identifying who can refer to you.

She’s new. She probably doesn’t have dozens and dozens of referral sources already, people referring her. She’s going to have to learn how to cultivate that. So the Upstream vs. Downstream episode 332, really focuses on you identifying who should be referring you and paying attention to that.

And understanding how to cultivate those folks is going to be a big part of what Bre needs to do, but before she can cultivate, she’s got to figure out who, who the heck are we talking about?

So I’m going to go into further detail of this too in the next section, but these were like the three episodes that I was like, okay, let’s just get you some foundational knowledge.

Now, there are some other pieces of foundational knowledge I would want Bre to have. And those, I mean, I could have gone way far back in some episodes, and I thought, well, let’s try to keep this a little bit more relevant for this piece.

And the other thing is really just understanding the difference between, like, how do we define a referral? What is the definitions of, like, referral sources, right? And then understanding things that aren’t referrals, like word-of-mouth buzz and warm leads and introductions.

All of that, Bre, can be found in my book, Generating Business Referrals Without Asking.

So if you love books but you hate to actually hold a physical copy, there is an e-book and there is the audio version as well. And yours truly, me, reads the book too.

So those would be the four things I put into the playlist for like, let’s just get a knowledge baseline, right? Episode 311, 302, 332, and my book.

Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is, okay, we need to make sure that Bre is taking action on the things that she can control. So let me break this down for you.

Stacey Brown Randall: Hey there, pardon the interruption, but I want to mention something very, very important that you’re going to want to put on your radar.

I want to tell you about a very exciting opportunity I have coming up in February of 2025. I hear from many of you that you’d love to put together your referral plan, your overall referral strategy for 2025 as fast as possible, which is two days in my world. And if you can marry that speed with not having to watch a single video, you’d be oh so happy.

Well, call me Santa Claus, because I’m going to make that wish come true. In February, I’m inviting a small group of business owners to join me in Charlotte, North Carolina for two days to build and implement your referral machine.

It’s called the Referral Accelerator, and it’s a small group in-person workshop where we will design a fully functioning referral system to grow your business with referrals without asking, manipulating, or incentivizing.

This is the most affordable shortcut to getting your referral machine up and running, done in a small group setting. The Referral Accelerator. A hands-on and super-fast way to go from creation to execution.

There will be early bird pricing that will hit just after the new year. And if you want to learn more about it, check your email, as I’ll be emailing out information starting on January 3rd. I do hope you’ll be one of the folks that joins me in Charlotte for the Referral Accelerator, coming up in February 2025. Now back to the episode.

Stacey Brown Randall: Okay. So we talked about the basic knowledge foundation. Now I’m going to break down for you to focus on what you can control. What are the things that I want Bre as a new agent focusing on where she can control them?

So what I mean by that is some of the strategies I teach are based on the fact that you’re receiving referrals. And you kind of have to be a little bit further along in most cases before you start receiving referrals. And so you can’t control that.

So what you can control is starting to generate those referrals, to get those first referrals started. And so I broke this down into three things that I know that Bre will be able to control, no matter if she’s never received a single referral.

And the first one is her client experience. The second one is cultivating new people to refer her, her potential referral sources. And third is making sure she nails her thank you card. So, let me break down the playlist for these three areas of which Bre can ultimately control.

Okay, first up, let’s talk about getting people to start referring to Bre. One of the things she’s going to need to do is cultivate new people referring to her. And this is a classic one that I think most people need really, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in business.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in business. You’re going to need to know how to get new people to start referring you.

And the age-old advice is, well, if I want someone to refer me, I have to go ask them to do it, or I have to go tell them to do it, or I have to incentivize them with some money to do it. And that is going to backfire.

And Bre will learn all about that when she goes through the baseline knowledge playlist that I talked about in the beginning of this episode.

She’s going to need to learn, hey, how do you take somebody who you think is really well connected or just knows a lot of people or runs in some of the same circles with you but has those connections, has those relationships, and how do you get that person who’s never thought to refer you to actually want to do it?

It is going to be an entirely backwards process than what you think it’s going to be. So the playlist that I want Bre to think about and listen through for cultivating new people to refer her is this. And we’ve got a couple of them.

So the first episode is episode 306. And this is what potential referral sources need you to know. So that’s really about kind of like not just who they are and what you do and that kind of stuff, but it’s like what you need to understand about the situation you’re walking into when you are trying to get people to refer to you.

This is the things that they’ll never tell you, but they really want you to know. So that’s episode 306.

The next episode I would recommend is actually a combo. It’s episode 141. It’s where I break down what I refer to as the second layer of your referral strategy, which is this potential referral source and like really break down and understand what it is.

But I actually go in even deeper into it in a three part series, which is episode 89, 91 and 92. And that’s called digging in your referral sources. And it’s part one, part two, part three. Again, those episodes are 89, 91, and 92. It skips episode 90.

And so those five episodes are the ones that I really believe that if you want to understand, just understand, like getting started on identifying who these people are, and what kind of mindset you need to have, and what they want you to know but will never be able to tell you, to get to the place where they’ll actually be on the list of people who will refer to you, these are five great episodes to get started with.

Now, here’s the thing that I would say about any of the resources of mine that you’re going to listen to. They’re going to give you the information to put an idea together, to identify, to go deep on certain areas, but it’s probably not gonna be every single thing you need to do because that’s what I do with my clients.

But for Bre, for where she is, what she needs to ultimately start doing first is to figure out who these people are.

And it’s really important once she does that to be able to go deeper into, okay, now I know the who, now I have a basic idea of the what, like what does this look like to turbocharge this and what does this look like to really get this going and make sure I’m doing the right things and saying the right things and that kind of stuff.

So these episodes are going to get her the baseline, like let’s understand who is and who is not, right? Is someone a good ideal referral source. So that’s the first thing. This is something that Bre can control. She can control identifying and cultivating people to become referral sources.

It’s not going to be fast. So Bre, if you’re listening to this, which I really hope you are, this is not going to be like, oh, I identified you, and tomorrow you referred me. That’s not how this works.

This is something that you need to be doing, and you need to be consistently doing it, consistently. I was going to say constantly, which is basically the same word as consistently, but I mean both of them, constantly and consistently, until you have enough people referring you.

This is the one strategy that I teach, we call it the referring machines strategy. It’s how to turn clients and contacts into referring machines. And it’s available in the ways that I work with my clients within the coaching program and my VIP experience.

But this referring machine strategy is about how you take someone who’s never referred you and what you do and what you say so that they ultimately will refer to you. And it is the one strategy that I tell my folks that you don’t have to do this one consistently, constantly, like in the background forever and ever and ever, like a strategy we put in place that just runs.

This is one where you use it when you need it. And when you have enough people referring you, you can kind of take your foot off the gas. Most people never stop it completely because it just becomes a way that they communicate and talk to new people that they meet. And then it gives them a structure and a follow-up process.

But this is one strategy where like, hey, I now have 10 people referring me. And if I can keep getting referrals from those 10, I can take a break from this one strategy. This is it. And these episodes, episode 306, 141, 89, 91, and 92, will definitely get you started.

OK, so that’s new people referring. The next thing that Bre can focus on that she can control is her client experience.

I’m going to make the assumption that she’s probably doing other things to generate clients. If she’s a new agent, she’s probably doing some desk time. She’s probably taking phone calls. She may be taking buyer clients from other agents that need some help.

She’s probably getting her sea legs under her and figuring out how real estate works and how to make a career and build a company from this and be a business owner in this, not doing this as a hobby.

And so eventually, maybe she already has some clients, and maybe family and friends will start out as her first round of clients, which is very normal in the world of real estate. But within that, she needs to be building a referable client experience.

And there is a whole series of episodes on the podcast where she can go in and listen to not only making sure that your client experience is referable, but what you look for and what you do to generate referrals from your clients.

And that starts with episode 151 and goes all the way through episode 165. Now, does Bre need every single episode within that Referable Client Experience series? No, but it’s great start to finish and kind of each episode kind of builds on the last one. So they are great to listen to.

So it starts with episode 151. The title of that episode is called Being Referable and it runs all the way through episode 165.

This is also the topic of what my next book is about, which will be out in October of 2025. So I can’t recommend that book because obviously this episode’s going live in December of ‘24, and that means we are 10 months out from the actual second book on the Referable Client Experience being available.

But one day when it is, we’ll update. So the second book would also help Bre with that perspective as well, but again, it won’t be out until October of 2025.

Okay, so we’ve looked at new people referring Bre, which we call potential referral sources. We’ve looked at the referable client experience and the entire series that Bre can listen to that about really honing in on the processes and the workflows and how she does what she does to build out this great client experience, but not just focused on the work that she does, but also focused on the relationship that she’s building.

And then the third thing that Bre can completely control is always making sure she knows how to write a proper thank you note. And that may seem pretty simple and you’re like, yeah, I know how to write a thank you note, but I’m talking like handwritten and with words that actually matter.

And we talk all about that in episode 303. The title of that episode is, The Best Referral Thank You Card. And there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. If you want it to have impact to plant future, referral seeds. And that’s episode 303.

So the three things that she can really focus on controlling until she’s starting to receive a lot of referrals. Now if Bre had said, hey Stacey, I’m a new agent, but I’m getting five or six referrals a year, I would have a different playlist for her.

It would probably include some of the stuff, but it would have other things included that would allow her to turbocharge her results faster. But that’s not what she said. She’s like, I’m new, and I need to know where to get started. So that’s what this playlist is all about.

So she’s going to focus on new people referring her, potential referral sources, her referable client experience, and making sure that she can write the best referral thank you card ever.

All right, so the third piece I wanted to break down is I think it’s important that you hear from people who have gone before you. Now, in this case, I specifically picked three episodes where I interviewed other real estate agents.

But I think any of the episodes that I do on the podcast where I’m talking to other people who have worked with me and they are sharing the results that they’re having and whether that is number of results or whether that is time saved results or that is just their aha moments of how they think about referrals differently and how it’s changed their practice.

I think any of the episodes that I do where I am interviewing somebody who has had referral success is valuable at any stage of business for you guys to listen to. But sometimes you just want to hear it from people in your own industry.

So the three episodes that I picked for this playlist so she can hear from other agents who have gone before her is episode 298, episode 254, and episode 168.

You know, it’s interesting, I was pulling these and I was like, I don’t interview enough of my clients. I have a bunch of amazing clients and most of them I never actually get on the podcast and I’m going to make a change for that in 2025.

But those are three great ones for her to start with. Agents who have gone before, when they put in the work. And that is the thing I want Bre to hear me say and all of you as well.

What you’re going to hear are three agents that actually put in the work and that’s why they got results. They didn’t just read the book and do nothing and get results.

They didn’t just join a coaching program and never show up and never do anything and never watch a training and get results, right? Like these are folks who put in the work, they followed my proven process, and then that’s why they started having success.

Now, the last thing I just want to mention, if Bre wanted to invest in something and it’s not my VIP experience or my coaching program or even one of my cohorts or the referral accelerator we have coming up in February of 2025, those are all multiple thousands of dollars for an investment. If that’s not where Bre is right now, that’s fine.

The best place for her to start if she does want to invest in really getting some basic foundational principles in place and workflow processes in place and know how to handle things like when somebody says, hey, I told someone about you.

That’s not a referral. You need to know that’s word-of-mouth buzz and you need to know what to say to flip that into an actual referral. If she wants to learn those basic things, then I would encourage her to invest in the Your Next Five Referrals online starter course.

You can find that at StaceyBrownRandall.com/starter. So that’s a great place for her to start if she’s just like, OK, I’m ready to invest just a little bit of money. And I want to understand all the things I need to know and it would distill down a lot what’s in this different playlist but also give some information that you’re not going to find in the book or even on the podcast that is in that starter course, Your Next Five Referrals.

So you can learn all about the starter course, Your Next Five Referrals at StaceyBrownRandall.com/starter. All the information’s online. So you can go in and read like what is included in each of the modules and what do you get and what are the bonuses and all that kind of stuff is there.

This was really fun to put together this playlist for Bre. I’m so glad that she reached out to me and direct messaged me on Instagram, and I got to build out this playlist for her, understanding what she does and where she is in her business ownership journey.

And I know someone like Bre has a great future ahead of her. And the reason why I know that is because she wasn’t afraid to reach out and ask questions and ask for some help. And I was excited to be able to build out this playlist for her.

So again, we did understanding your knowledge baseline, like get some definitions and understanding of what I teach and referrals in place.

Then we talked about three areas where Bre can focus on that she can control, client experience, new referral sources, and thank you cards.

And then some episodes for her to hear from other agents who’ve put in the work and had success. Plus one resource she can invest in when she is ready.

But all of these resources linked to every episode, the starter course, my book, everything can be found in this episode on the show notes page at StaceyBrownRandall.com/340. That’s three four zero. And don’t forget, Stacey 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.