Ep #351: The Referral Must Dos (Part 1)

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

I’m your host, Stacey Brown Randall. I’m a card-carrying member of the Business Failure Club. I have taught my Referrals Without Asking methodology and strategies to clients in more than 14 countries around the world. And my mission is to help you unleash a referral explosion by leveraging the science of referrals and respecting your relationships.

Okay, so last month we wrapped up a four-part series on the must-knows about referrals. So we started with episode 347, and we worked our way down to episode 350, where you had an opportunity to hear from one of my clients about what it’s like to understand all of these must-knows and what it’s like to have referral success.

But we worked our way through understanding the things that you just need to understand. Because it’s going to be different than probably the tired, old advice that you have heard about referrals.

When I start working with someone, there’s one thing I have to make sure that we are on the same page about. And that is that they really understand that what I teach is different.

It’s not just some shiny packaging with some marketing that has a great tagline, like referrals without asking. And then yet what’s packaged up inside of there is all the things you don’t want to do.

So I really have to spend a good amount of time. It’s one of the reasons why I do this podcast. It’s why I have my first book out with my second book coming out later this year.

And I do webinars, and I do Q & A, virtual Q & A calls with the author and people are reading my book as a book club. And I will give virtual presentations, and I’ll stand on stages and I’ll speak.

And it’s teaching people to understand that there’s a lot you don’t know or understand about referrals. And there’s just some things you must know to be able to generate referrals in a way that’s going to work for you.

Because I recognize I am typically fighting against like a tide. It’s almost like a tidal wave of really bad advice out there about how to go about generating referrals.

And there’s lots of experts, gurus, companies, agencies that teach referrals, not because they actually teach referrals, it’s because they teach other marketing or prospecting or sales strategies.

But everybody knows when you talk about how what you do will get you referrals, it will get you people’s attention. And they’re like, Oh, wait, that thing you teach, that’ll get me referrals?

And the truth is, just about anything you do can probably get you one or two referrals. But I don’t know anybody who can be okay with just one or two referrals in a year. It doesn’t work for most of the businesses that I know that are my clients and that certainly wouldn’t work for me.

So this isn’t about learning some marketing or prospecting or sales or business development strategy or strategies and hoping that also one of the other outcomes of that would be a handful, a few sporadic referrals in a year.

We want something that is way more reliable than that. We want something that is way more consistent.

Now, I don’t mean consistent like you’re going to get one every single Tuesday, every week for the rest of the year. I don’t mean consistent like that. But I mean where you have, there is a sense of volume and consistency that you can count on.

Maybe not when you look back on an every day or every week or sometimes even every month, but when you look back on your quarters and your first half of the year and your second half of the year and your overall year, you can see an increase in the number of referrals you are receiving year over year over year.

And sometimes, for some of my clients, that’s a big increase. For others, it’s a smaller incremental increase. And they may start out with a dozen or so referrals, and it may take them a couple of years till they’re consistently getting 50 or 60 a year.

But to have a dozen, and then to start getting 40, 50, or 60 a year consistently, that’s a big shift for some businesses.

So when I talk about the things you must know, when we did the series on the must knows, it’s because I know I’m kind of fighting an uphill battle because I’m trying to overcome all the things that have been beaten into your head about what you have to know about referrals so that you are open and willing to see it another way.

And that, of course, is the way that I teach Referrals Without Asking. So we talked about a lot of things you’ve got to know when it comes to referrals. We talked about the two things that every referral has, but you only control one of them. Maybe you’ll remember what that was.

We talked about the science of referrals. We did some definitions so that we’re actually all speaking the same language and on the same page about things. But just a good baseline of things you have to know about referrals.

Now we’re moving into this series, and we’ll do this over the next couple of episodes, for us to talk about the must-dos.

Now, I want to be really, really upfront about this. This is not, by any shake of the imagination, an exhaustive list of the things you must do.

This is not everything I teach my clients, and this is not going to go in-depth so that you understand every little, tiny point of what I am going to teach you.

What I want you to have an understanding is, is a baseline of things that you really need to make sure that you’re actually just doing. There are lots of other things you can do. Again, this is not going to be an exhaustive list.

You know, let me put this in context for you. I think it’s important for people to understand when I’m working with my clients, that there is a strategy behind how I teach what I teach. Now, it looks a little different depending on which of the programs you’re in.

So my clients that are as a VIP client, or if they are attending my small group referral accelerator, there is a rhythm and a cadence. And really, there is a process to how I teach all the strategies that I teach that people can actually absorb into their brains, because we’re doing it in two days.

With my VIP clients, I’m building everything, going to them, spending two days with them, with their team, I’m teaching their team, and we’re starting to work on implementation. And then they’re continuing to implement for an entire year after.

With my Referral Accelerators, it’s a similar framework. They come to me for two days in a small group format. I teach the same, like, the same, it’s like from the almost, almost, not exactly, because there’s some differences that we do within the two, VIP and referral accelerator, but it’s almost the exact same workbook.

Where we are gonna break down what I need you to know, understand, and then start implementing on and put into practice and put in as a process into your business. And we do that in two days

So there’s like a rhythm to it. There’s a cadence to it. There’s a why I teach this on day one versus why I teach something different on day two.

It is very well thought out in terms of the best way for folks to absorb the information and then to also later on, two weeks, two months, 22 months down the road, recall when they learn something and then know how to apply something.

Like there’s a lot of great deal of thought put into if you’re going to get what I know about referrals and you’re going to get it for me in two days, whether you’re a VIP or you’re attending my Referral Accelerator. That has to be done, like there is, it’s like an art and a science to it, right? There’s a way to make that happen.

Now with the folks in my coaching program, we actually follow a different cadence and we actually follow something a little bit different because we just have more time together. We have a full year for people to go through the information.

Now, most people aren’t still learning something new as they’re finishing their year, of course, most people are getting the learning in place in those first couple of months, or at least first six months, unless, of course, they fall behind, which happens. Life happens to everybody, even business owners, as we all know.

But there’s a cadence to it, and it’s a little bit more customized because it’s based on you and the order in which you’re going through things.

So the process that I teach it, or how I pull things together, looks very different for my coaching program members, just because we have a different cadence of working together, because they’re with me every week for Q&A calls. So it just looks different.

But when I think about this series, and I think about the things I want you to know and understand, it really makes me think about how I break things down for my VIP and my referral accelerator folks.

So just to put this in context, when I say this is not an exhaustive list, let me give you the six big categories that I talk about with my VIP and Referral Accelerator clients.

And so the way that it works, and this is the order we go in, that we do three a day. We start off with when referrals arrive, like when you receive a referral, when it arrives on your doorstep, what are all the processes? And there are five of them.

But what are the processes you need to have in place? And yes, for those of you who have been a longtime listener, or maybe you’re actually a client yourself, you know, Oh, I know those processes, right?

One of those processes, of course, is how we write a thank you note. So we’re not talking everything’s not complicated. But there are a series of processes like workflow processes that you need to know how to do when you receive a referral.

It’s not just writing a thank you note, right? And some of those things we’re going to talk about, because some of the when referrals arrive, when they show up, when you receive one, some of those are some must do’s.

I mean, I think they’re all must do’s, let’s be honest. But I also always tell my clients, you’re going to pick and choose what you ultimately think you will do. Because if you’re not going to do it, then that’s a big other issue that we have to deal with.

So, okay. So, when we’re thinking about that first thing that we do together when I’m working with a client in my Referral Accelerator or VIP, is we look at when referrals arrive, what are the processes, what are the workflows that you need to have running on repeat, on automatic, so to speak.

They’re not necessarily like automation, but just when a referral arrives, these boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, five things happen. And that’s what we teach first, so that everybody kind of has the operational part of referrals down before we dive into, OK, now let’s go get you some more referrals.

Then we move into how you receive referrals from people who already refer you. So I refer to these folks as your existing referral sources. And we talk about identification and then cultivation. And we build the plan and everything around that.

Then we move into what do you do when problems arise or when you have issues that you have to deal with from the referrals that you are receiving or things that keep you from getting referrals.

So that’s how we break down day one. It’s when you receive a referral, what are the workflow processes? How do you get more referrals from people who’ve already referred you, your existing referral sources? What does that strategy and plan look like?

And then when you get referrals that aren’t perfect, because they’re not always perfect, or there’s other issues that you notice you’re losing on opportunities to receive referrals, how do we fix those problems? Do you have the tools in your toolbox to know how to fix those problems? That’s what we cover in day one.

In day two, then we go in and we’re like, okay, now let’s talk about having a referable client experience, and what does that look like?

Then we move from the referable client experience, and we move into now let’s start identifying new people to refer to you. So people that have never referred but you want them to, our potential referral sources.

Then the final, I guess it’s the third thing on the second day, or the sixth grouping of things that we do, the final thing that we talk about is really understanding the other opportunities of where you can be planting referral seeds, though usually this is the category where I’m like, use sparingly.

But we’ll talk about it from an events perspective, a networking perspective, a social media perspective. We will talk about other ways to weave in the referral seed language.

Now, the referral seed language, as you can imagine, starts from the minute we start talking on day one until the minute we stop talking on day two.

But those are the six categories that we follow when I am teaching my clients my entire strategy. So when I say multi-layered strategy, customized for them, it’s falling out of those six categories.

What do you do? What are the processes when referrals arrive? How do you get more referrals from your existing referral sources? What do you do when you have problems or issues arise with your referrals?

Referrable client experience, new people referring you, and then, of course, what I kind of just call my catch-all, which is other places to plant referral seeds, so that’s social media, networking events, et cetera.

That’s what I teach, in a nutshell, to my clients. That’s the breakdown of what it looks like. So when I say that this series is clearly not an exhaustive list, I want to be able to put that in context for you, because it’s not.

We recently did our Referral Accelerator, our first Referral Accelerator for 2025. And I had, as someone was leaving, somebody said, all right, I got everything I need. Right? I got everything I need. I’ve got some things in processes. I know what to do. I’ve got some things already happening. And now it’s up to me to just keep it going.

And that is the truth. That is the truth with anything with being a business owner. So when we walk through this series, it’s not all those things. Of course not. No one would expect that, right?

No one would expect something that my clients come to me for, whether as a VIP in my coaching program or in my Referral Accelerator and would expect that that would be broken down in depth on podcasts.

Actually, I think if I did that, it would probably be like, I don’t know, like a 70-hour podcast maybe. I don’t even know. It would be a very long one. But you also have to be ready for it. And that’s what I find with my clients.

When my clients show up to work with me, I know that they have finally reached a point where, as the student themselves, they are ready. And when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And that’s why they ultimately start working with me. And everyone does it on their own timetable. And that is OK.

So when I go through this series and we talk about the must-dos, these are the things you just, if you never worked with me and you never learned all those other things I just mentioned that I teach to my coaching clients or to my VIPs or to my Referral Accelerators, if you never worked with me and did any of those other things, please do these things at a minimum, okay?

These are the things I want you thinking about. So again, understand how this all fits. Alright. Now, before we dive in to the must knows, let’s go ahead and do the pardon the interruption.

Stacey Brown Randall: OK, so please pardon the interruption. I want to let you know I have a private live training coming up at the end of March to show you the behind the scenes of how I double, triple or quadruple my clients’ referrals.

I haven’t taught a live training like this since January of 2024. It’s been a minute. Shame on me. And I’m excited to teach it again. But this training will have a twist.

Once you sign up for the training, you’ll be able to submit your name to do a live hot seat with me during the training, where I will walk you through building out your roadmap of the steps you need to take to increase your referrals this year.

The first step is to sign up by submitting your application. That’s right. This training, you only get access to it, and you’re only invited to it if we believe that we can help you be successful. So if I believe I can help you be successful, then you can come to the training.

It doesn’t do us any good to have people in that training that I can’t help because we don’t move as fast in that training because the questions aren’t aligned to what I can do well. And that’s very important.

So the first thing you have to do is actually submit an application. You submit the BRB, the coaching program application. There is no obligation to join the coaching program after the training, but to get your invitation to the training, you’re going to have to submit your BRB application.

Once you submit your application and it is approved, you’ll get all the details on the training and how to submit your name to participate as one of the hot seats.

So, the link to submit your application can be found at StaceyBrownRandall.com/referable, or of course you can find this link on the show notes page for this episode. Now, let’s get back to the episode.

Stacey Brown Randall: Okay, so with our first of our three episodes on the must-dos, here’s the things I want you to start off by thinking with.

The first thing is I want you paying attention to is capturing the correct information in your intakes. Like when your new prospects, like your prospects come in the door, I need you capturing the right information.

I need to make sure that, yes, you’re probably capturing, like, their name and their phone number and their email address, and probably a little bit about, like, what the problem is that you’re probably going to be able to help them with, right?

So think about this if you’re an estate planning attorney, right? Are they coming to you because they need probate, or are they coming to you because it’s time for them to actually get off their bottoms and do a will, right?

So the basics of like what are they planning on hiring you for. I know you’re taking that basic information, almost everyone is.

Whether you’re taking it over the phone when they call in, or you’re asking for that information over an email after they reach out, or of course if they refer to you and you’re reaching out, or if they’re filling out a contact form, or somebody on your team is answering the phone from where someone’s calling in.

You’ve got to have your intake information correct. You’ve got to make sure you’re capturing that. Now, when I say correct, there’s one thing to me that makes that correct.

I know you’re capturing a lot of information and it’s all valid. It’s very important, right? Name, email, phone number, problem, right? That kind of stuff. Any details that you need to take in the intake process.

But you also need to make sure that you’re capturing where they came from? How did they learn about you? Are you capturing the source of how they came from?

And if they’re referred to you, do you have a mechanism in place to make sure that not only are they telling you that they were referred, but they’re then also giving you their referral source’s name?

Now, they don’t call that person the referral source. That’s just the person who sent them to you. The person who connected them to you. The person who told them about you. Are you capturing that information? That’s really important.

During the Referral Accelerator, I had an agent, a real estate agent that was there, and he, like, that’s one of the things I love about, like, being right there in the moment with my folks is because we were talking about making sure that he had the right structure in place for his intake process to be capturing the referral source’s name.

And I was like, they all bring their laptops, right? So I’m like, pull up your CRM. Let me look at it. So we went in the back end of his CRM, and he pretended to load me in as like a pretend prospect. And he walked me through the process, and I could quickly identify that’s where it goes.

Like, you’re able to tell me you’re capturing that person, me as a fake client or prospect, as a referral, but there’s no way for you to add, like, a dropdown where it says who the referral comes from, like who’s the referral source.

And right there on the spot, he was able to manipulate that CRM and start capturing that information. Game changer, right? Super important, you gotta know where your people are coming from.

And not just because I want you to know where your people are coming from because they’re referred to you, but I want you to know how other things that you’re doing in your business are working.

When somebody comes into my world and they’re not referred to me, they’re probably going to tell me one of just a handful of things. One of them is going to be, I heard you on somebody else’s podcast, or I heard you present to a group that I’m a part of. That’s probably going to be one thing.

Another thing they may say is that I read your book. Now, when you have a book and it is on Amazon, that’s the one thing it’s very hard to control, like how people actually learned about your book.

Because that’s where the Google algorithm, the Amazon algorithm, like some days Amazon’s just loving me and puts me out there and more people see it. Lots of times people are, like they recommend my book to others. Book clubs decide to read my book, things like that.

And so the book piece is a little bit harder. That’s a little bit harder to wrap your arms around in terms of trying to have some strong strategies behind it.

But usually when people come to me, they’re going to say, I was referred to. I heard you speak, whether on a podcast, or gave a presentation at a conference that I was at, or you spoke virtually to a group that I’m a part of, or I read your book.

Eventually, they will find their way to this podcast. Maybe it’s one of those ways of how you first heard about me, and then you found your way to this podcast.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t other ways that people hear me, but those are the biggies. So that’s where I spend my time, and that’s really valuable information.

Now, I’m sure if I did some other strategies, I would probably see an increase in prospects. But for me, it’s not just an increase in prospects. It’s an increase in prospects that will ultimately become a client. That’s really important, too.

Okay. So, as we look at this, I need you capturing the correct information in the intake process when you have a new prospect that’s coming in. You need to be capturing where they’re coming from.

And if you’re capturing where they’re coming from and it’s a referral, you have to be able to input the name of the person who is the referral source.

Because as you guys learned in the must-know series that we just did, a referral source is always a human, they have a heartbeat. They got a first and a last name and you have to put that into your database. Okay, that’s the first thing of your must-do’s.

The second thing of your must-do’s is your identification of your existing referral sources. I cannot tell you how very valuable this is for folks.

Your ability to identify your existing referral sources. It’s huge. Because these are the people who have already shown the willingness to refer to you because they’ve done it before.

Now some of them may have done it a number of years ago and haven’t done it since, and some of them may have done it every year for the last couple of years. All those names, all those humans are valuable to know because we have strategies for how we want to look at each one of those.

So, one of the things that my clients do is once they’ve identified who their existing referral sources are, the people who’ve referred them in the past few years, one of the things I have them do is look at the list of who’s active versus who’s inactive.

And that’s just based on a timetable. We determined that inactive referral sources, it’s been more than two years since they’ve referred you. But active referral sources, well, they’ve referred you in the last two years.

Well, how we go about building a strategy to generate more referrals from those existing referral sources, we start them in different places if they’re active versus inactive.

That matters because we’re dealing with humans, and we’ve got to understand and kind of acknowledge where they are in their journey with us, and what their relationship looks like with us.

Now it’s not complicated, the inactives get one extra step than the actives get, but it’s still important to recognize that. So you need to be able to identify who are your existing referral sources.

I will tell you, when people do this step, this is the step every single one of my clients does when they start working with me. It’s even included in our starter course, Your Next Five Referrals, the breakdown of like, how do you identify your existing referral sources because it’s that valuable.

Every single client does this. This is a part of their pre-work or assessment work before they get going with me. VIP, Referral Accelerator, BRB coaching program does not matter.

This ability to identify your existing referral sources tells me so much about your business. That’s why I want to know it. That’s why I want to see it. And that’s for me.

For you, most people who go through this process will tell you, because this is what they verbalized to me, wow, that was really empowering. To know in black and white who are the people who take care of my business, it tells you a lot about a lot of things.

It tells you about how well or how poorly you take care of those folks. It tells you about how well or how poorly you even know who’s on that list.

There’s always somebody who comes back to me and says, I am missing names. I’m like, what do you mean? How are you missing names? You did the whole process to identify your referral sources. You did the three steps.

And they’re like, yeah, but I’m pretty sure these four people who I’m very close with and we talk about business all the time and they talk about referring me all the time, they’re not on the list at all.

I’m like, that’s because they’ve actually never referred you. They’ve just talked about referring you. Now there’s a way to gives some guidance there for them to start referring you, right? You’re not going to train them to do it. They’re not dogs.

But there is a way to kind of maneuver that conversation to get to a point that maybe if they actually have potential to refer you, they will do it.

But people think people are on the list that aren’t. Because you can only get on this list if you’ve actually referred. So you need to know how to identify your existing referral sources.

This is not a complicated thing. At a high level, here’s what you’re going to do. It’s also mapped out in Chapter 8 in my book. We have lots of other resources, freebies that you can grab that will walk you through this as well. It’s very, very important.

And again, it’s also in my starter program, Your Next Five Referrals, if you want me to show you exactly how to walk you through it.

We teach that in I believe module, not even going to say which module because sometimes I get my modules confused. But in Your Next Five Referrals, that’s only a four-module starter course. It’s definitely in one of those.

So the identification of your existing referral sources is really, the easiest way to do this is just create a list of your clients, go back three or four years, map out all new clients who came in each year over the last four years.

Then identify how they learned about you. You may have this captured in a CRM. You may not. You may have to do a walk down memory lane and try to remember. Look back through some notes and emails and calendar appointments and folders.

But that’s really what you’re doing. You’re writing down your list of clients, and then you’re also writing down how that client learned about you. How did they come to know you?

And of course, the ones that were referred to you, you’re writing down the name of the referral source. It’s not complicated.

You do it once for clients. You go through the process once for clients. And then you go back through the process for prospects, meaning people who came to you, you had conversations with, they went through part of your buyer’s journey, but they did not buy.

Because some of those prospects are also referred to you, and you need to know those referral sources. This helps us so much. There’s so many things you can know when you understand who’s been referred to you and if they stayed a prospect and didn’t hire you versus if they did.

But identify your existing referral sources. And we’re going to have some downloads with this episode that you can go and grab so that you can do some of this work yourself.

So again, the show notes page where you can find this information and these resources to go ahead and grab, they’re free for you, is StaceyBrownRandall.com/351. And don’t forget, Stacey has an E.

Okay, the third thing I want you to be able to do is to identify the people you want to start referring you. This is as simple as keeping a list.

When you meet somebody, when you think about a client, when you look back at your client list that you just did for step two, who are the people on there that you wish would refer you?

When you go to that networking event, who are the couple of people who just seem very well connected that you wish would refer you? Who are the people who are actually ideal to refer you?

Like, every time I work with someone, there is usually a group of humans that they can identify has good potential referral sources. Maybe, again, I don’t know, like, let’s just talk about this in general terms.

Depending on what you do, maybe divorce attorneys are a great referral source for you. Maybe CPAs are a great referral source for you. Maybe business coaches are a great referral source for you. Maybe CPAs or bookkeepers are a great referral source for you.

Think about other people who are having conversations with your clients and identify problems that they don’t solve so they would need you to send clients to, to help them solve that problem. Those are your potential referral sources.

Your potential referral sources fall into a couple of different categories. We talked about it in the must knows. And the big thing about understanding this is that you’re probably going to hone in on clients and centers of influence, or one or the other.

Not everybody, like my personal injury attorneys, you’re probably not thinking to yourself, let me go start having conversations with all my clients and see if they’ll refer me. You’re their personal injury attorney.

Pretty sure if they know someone who has a tragedy happen in their lives, they’re probably going to think about you anyways, as long as they had a great experience.

And so from that perspective, start thinking about who should be referring to you, who you want to refer to you, and who has the ideal kind of environment to refer to you because they come across your ideal clients.

Mostly these are going to be clients and COIs. But this is a list, my friends. Just start the list. That’s what I need you to do. Because when you start putting people’s names down on a list, you actually may come up with connection points you already have with these people.

You may not, right? You may need to learn the strategy that I teach about how we cultivate potential referral sources. And that’s cool. I’m here when you’re ready to learn that.

But sometimes folks just putting things down on paper and looking at who the people are will tell you the path. The path will reveal itself right there. And if not, I’ll help you with it. But the reality of it is you got to just start. And this is another one of these very, very important must-dos.

Again, I’m gonna have some resources that’ll help you with identification of existing referral sources and potential referral sources, but I’m gonna go and tell you right now what’s on that potential referral source download resource that you can have.

It’s gonna be a list. Yes, there’ll be some tips, but it’s gonna be a list. So do that, okay?

Alright, so definitely go to StaceyBrownRandall.com/351. That is where you’ll find the resources to help you with our first in a three-part series of our must-dos. Yes, there are more must-dos, and they are coming up for the next two episodes as well.

But just remember, all the resources mentioned can be found on the show notes page, StaceyBrownRandall.com/351.

Okay. 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.