Ep #357: An Attorney’s Referral Hot Seat

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.

Alright, real quick before we dive in for this episode, I just want to let you know that coming up on April 28th, I have a short three-part training that will help you tackle referrals as we move into summer, and of course, the back half of 2025.

So each day, I’ll go live for about 30 minutes, just teaching you what you need to know, really teaching you what you need to think, how you need to think and what you need to know and how you need to act to become a referral master.

You can sign up and join me. It’s totally free. Just sign up at StaceyBrownRandall.com/springtraining. I hope to see you there.

Alright. We are diving into hot seats. Now you may be like, wait, what is she talking about? I’ve never known her to do hot seats on the podcast.

Well, way, way, way back in the very beginning, I did. And actually, I’m not quite sure how many I did. Probably would have been a good thing to look at before I started recording this episode.

But I used to invite people onto the podcast where I would interview them questions, and then based on their answers to the questions, I would help them see what they need to do to improve their referrals.

And then for some reason, I just got away from it. But I did a live training back in March and during that live workshop, that live workshop that I did in March, I actually did something I hadn’t done in a really long time, which was to offer two hot seats.

So I picked two people for the hot seats, and I walked them through what they should do first to generate referrals based on how they answered some questions that I had provided.

So for every attendee that signed up to be on the workshop, they received an email from me that said, hey, if you want to be on the hot seat, here’s five questions for you to answer.

Then everybody who submitted those questions, I went through and I reviewed them. And I picked a couple that I would be able to highlight and spotlight on the workshop in March. I thought it’d be really cool for this episode and the one coming up next week for me to share those hot seats.

So you’re going to hear, or if you’re watching this on video, see, the actual interaction that happened as I was working through this hot seat. So you’re going to hear me review, and the first hot seat is Christine. She is an attorney.

You’re going to hear me review her answers to the questions that I had asked. And then you’ll listen as I map out what I recommended she do and in what order.

And then of course, she’ll come off mute and she’ll talk about how, what she thought about it and what it meant to her and how she would like understand that it worked for her. So you’ll get to hear her feedback as well, which I think is really cool.

So a quick note, for those of you who are watching this on YouTube, and you are seeing the video version of this, when I come off screenshare from that Zoom room, when I come off screenshare for those hot seats, you’re going to see a sea of people on your screen from my Zoom meeting room.

It’s going to be very busy. But don’t worry, we made a note of this the next time that I do a hot seat on a training, we’re gonna spotlight the speaker.

So next time if I ever pull these from a training or from a workshop and put them on the podcast, put them in a video, that you will actually just be staring at the person that I’m talking to versus having to look at the sea of humans that were on this training.

So next time around, lesson learned. Alright, so let’s dive in to our very first hot seat with Christine.

Stacey Brown Randall: So here are the questions that Christine submitted to me, the answers that she submitted. First, I said, what do you do? What’s your business? Because I want to understand what industry you’re in, because that always will tell me some things about your business. And then I want to know how long you’ve been in business.

So Christine is a family law and estate planning attorney in Tampa, Florida, and she has been in private practice for five years.

So the questions I asked were, how many referrals do you receive on average, what you guys just answered, and how many referral sources do you have. And so based on her numbers. And then I asked a question that’s a little open ended.

And that question is specifically, what’s your biggest frustration with referrals? Because that tells me where your pain points are and the gaps you want to solve.

So when I looked at the average number of referrals that Christine gets, she gets 35. The number of people she has referring her is 51. But it’s really key, not many of them are sending her ideal clients, right? So I’m hearing things already. I’m like, okay, we can solve some of these issues.

And some of her biggest frustrations with referrals, some of it is that she works in divorce. And so there is this perception that maybe people are hesitant to share who referred them. So I’m going to talk through that.

She’s also not great at tracking. So that’s an admitted, which I think everybody I work with at some point was like, I’m not great at tracking, it kind of just happens. And so she has a little bit of head trash into what’s possible and who should be referring her.

But she has identified that therapists would be great referral sources for her, but she doesn’t know how to reach them, except for cold calling, and she doesn’t want to do it. And Christine, I’m with you, I wouldn’t want to do it either.

But she does know when she meets with them, they connect and that she can build relationships, which is key, which is what I want to hear.

So based on that flowchart, and I’ll go back to that flowchart in a minute, that shows all the colored green, blue, and gold boxes, that I showed you guys that is the flowchart of the 19-20 strategies that I teach. This is exactly how I would stack for Christine.

Now, if Christine and I had a conversation, I asked a few more questions, I may change this up. But doing this in like back of the napkin, just kind of getting through this so we have time for a couple.

Number one, the number one thing I’m going to want to know is, is it true that she averages 35 referrals in a year and that she has 51 people referring her? Now, those are specific numbers, so I’m going to go with Christine probably knows her numbers, right?

She’s probably like, yep, 35 and 51. Those aren’t ranges. When people are like ranges, I’m always like, you don’t know, which is fine. We can figure it out, right?

So the very first thing I would have her do is actually identify her existing referral sources. It’s one of those foundational green box strategies. We’re going to identify your existing referral sources. What does our data show, right? And then we would build out a plan to get more referrals from hopefully those 51 people.

Then we’re going to make sure we shore up the tracking and the intake process. That would be the second thing that we would do. We’d work on tracking and intake. It’s actually technically two separate strategies, but I always do them together.

The third thing I’m going to have her do is we’re going to address the quality issues. She knows she’s not getting referrals that are quality. There is a right way and a very wrong way to handle a conversation with a referral source who is not sending you quality referrals. You have to know how to have that conversation correctly.</p&amp;amp;gt;

So the next thing I would have her do is address her quality issues by learning the quality conversation script and hav</p>

ing that conversation with people who have shown a repeated pattern of not sending ideal clients.

Then, after she’s making some progress, we’re going to deal with her head trash. We’re going to dive in, and we’re going to deal with her head trash.

Now

, there’s not a strategy in the flowchart that’s like, deal with your head trash. This would be in a one-on-one that Christine and I would have.

Because in all of the things that I offer, and all the ways that you work with me, there is a one-on-one option. And Christine and I would just dig in there and dig into the trash.

And then the next thing that we would look at, right, this would be the fifth thing I would have for her in her strategy stack, is she needs more people referring her, more potential referral sources.

So then we would dive in at that point and she would learn the strategy, another green box foundational strategy of how do I get those therapists, how do I connect with them and then get them to actually start referring me and other people as well.

This is how we take where you are to where you want to go. And there are five things I just mapped out. This would be my goal for her to accomplish if she was in the coaching program within the first 90 days.

If she could do it faster, great, but we’re all running businesses too. So we like to do things on a measured approach, right? So it’s looking at, here’s her numbers, and I instantly say, this is the order we’re going in, right?</p>

We’re going to identify existing referral sources, build a plan to take care of them. Then we’re going to do your intake and your tracking. Then we’re going to address our quality issues and deal with that. We’re going to deal with your head trash. We’re going to teach you how to generate new people referring you and how to nurture those relationships.</p> <p>So that is what it looks like for Christine. I believe Christine is here. So if you want to unmute yourself, just, I just down and dirtied this really quickly, but how, like, what was your response to that?</p>

Christine:</strong> Oh, I loved it. It makes a lot of sense to me. I will say that I think when I put this together, I was going on the referral sources I’

ve had since I’ve been in, since I hung my shingle, and so I have had, so I would say it’s more like 10 referral sources per year instead of 51 in one year.

&lt;strong>Stacey Brown Randall:&lt;/strong> So, perfect. I would add a sixth thing to our strategy stack, which would be any of those folks who they haven’t referred you in more than, it’s been more than two years since they’ve referred you, we actually call them inactive referral sources.

And we have a re-engagement strategy that I teach of like, how do you get them back in conversation to see if you should be re-engaging them as a referral source to make the inactives active.

So we would definitely not be, that’s your low hanging fruit right there, Christine. If you have 10 people referring you right now that are active, but we are leaving 40 other who have done it in the past, I would actually be like, we’re going to go there first. And then we are going to do everything else because that is your low hanging fruit.

So thank you, Christine. Thank you for taking the time to submit the information and being willing to like unmute yourself and chat with me.

Christine: Thank you.

Stacey Brown Randall: Okay, I hope you enjoyed that hot seat. One thing I don’t think people realize about the work that I do with my clients is helping them deal with head trash.

A lot of people who come to me, they come with what they think they should be doing to generate referrals or some bad advice that they’ve been told they needed to do, and most of it they don’t wanna do, it doesn’t sound right, and they build up this head trash about why they can’t do it and why it won’t work.

And a lot of times, they’re right because what they’ve been told is the wrong stuff. But other times what I found is that they take pieces of good referral strategies and pieces of bad referral strategies and they just kind of mix them all together and then they determine that to be what they’re supposed to do.

<p>And whatever that is, it makes them really uncomfortable. And so they don’t do it. So they have this like angst. And I saw it in Christine’s answer. She had like this angst between what she thinks she should be doing, but what she’s just quite uncomfortable doing.

So it’s this yin and the yang, it’s this push and a pull, right? Like you feel like I’m supposed to be doing these things, but this thing feels really, really awkward and there’s gotta be a better way. Of course there’s a better way, thank goodness, right?

But a lot of times what I will spend time doing with my clients, in addition to them learning the strategies and putting things in place, and understanding how we do all the different strategies I teach, is we’re gonna spend some time talking about what’s going on between their two ears, what’s going on in their head, dealing with their head trash.</p>

It’s one of the reasons why, in particular, when you’re inside my coaching program, Building a Referable Business, you have this thing called unlimited milestone calls.

Usually for folks, I find that when we get on a milestone call, whe

n they schedule one, maybe they schedule one every couple of months, whatever they need, that usually we’re going to end up talking about something they think they’re supposed to do or something they’re stuck on not doing or something they’re stuck on doing, but it’s actually they’re thinking about it wrong.

And I have to unpack that for them and have them see it differently. And in some cases, be like, you’re right. That’s terrible. Don’t do that. I wouldn’t want you to do that to me. Let’s find a better way.

And so we do that a lot within the programs and how I work with folks. But that head trash one was a big one for Christine because I’m like, oh, you were holding yourself back because you think it’s supposed to be one way, and it doesn’t. And you can have results, and it still feel good, which is super, super important.

So I don’t like it when people, when my clients, they get stuck in this vortex of thinking and doing nothing because they’re uncomfortable doing what they’ve been told to do. So I always try to fix that as soon as we can. And that was definitely the case that we would do something with Christine.

Alright, so I hope that you enjoyed this hot seat. Guess what? We’ve got more coming up. Of course, the resources mentioned in this episode can be found in the description below the video, and of course, on the podcast show notes page at “https://staceybrownrandall.com/357”>StaceyBrownRandall.com/357</a>.</p>

We’re back with another great episode next week. We’ve got one more hot seat from that March workshop coming your way, and it’s created with you and your needs in mind. Until then, you know what to do, my friend. Take control o

f your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.