Ep #376: The Referral Opportunity You’re Overlooking

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.

More than a decade ago, I developed a science-backed framework and methodology to generate referrals without asking. As I’ve refined it, I have had the privilege to help thousands of business owners take control of their referrals on their terms. Join me every week as I break it down for you.

Welcome to the episode. Okay, do you wanna know, I think you wanna know, do you wanna know the one referral opportunity you’re probably overlooking? Ready for it?

It’s generating referrals from people who have already referred you. Generating referrals from people who have referred you before.

Long-time listeners of this podcast, and if you’re newly now watching me over on our YouTube channel, have heard me talk about this foundational strategy. And you’ve heard me talk about this so much because it’s so very important.

In fact, it’s one of, when I’m talking to my clients, right? It’s the one that most of my clients start with. This how to get more referrals from the people who’ve already referred you, it’s the strategy that most of my clients will start with, and I call it affectionately the low-hanging fruit strategy.

Have you heard the statistic about it being easier to sell to an existing client than to land a brand-new client? Some stats that support this say it’s like six times easier to sell to an existing client than a new one.

Or I saw this another way when it said your likelihood is 60 to 70% of selling to an existing client versus only like five to maybe 20% to getting a new prospect to say yes to working with you.

The same goes for referral sources. It is easier to get an existing referral source to refer you again than it is to turn a contact or COI or even a client into a referral source.

Once someone’s referred, everything gets easier. And that is what the entire strategy, that foundational strategy.

If you’re a longtime listener of the podcast, you’ve heard me refer to this as the growth by referrals strategy. It’s one of my signature strategies. It’s actually the first one I ever started teaching like more than a decade ago, because it is such a good one to start with.

Because once someone has referred you, like I said, everything gets easier. The outreach you’re going to do is easier. The language you’re going to use is easier. The cadence you’ll follow, guess what? Less is more, which is music to everyone’s ears to do less, not more.

And the objective of what you’re doing and why you’re doing, the objective shifts to true care and gratitude in just a whole new way. Everything gets easier.

And here’s the catch, or here’s the thing, or here’s the rub, I guess I should say. Most business owners don’t know by name who actually refers to them.

Now, they think they do, because I’ve heard it all. I’ll have people say, oh, I can recall that list for you by memory. I know who it is. Just give me a minute. I’ll come up with it, right? I can jot it down for you. I have heard it all.

But this is when recency bias runs amok. Because they don’t have data to know with certainty. Are you in the same boat?

Are you sitting here listening to this or watching this video and you’re thinking to yourself, oh, I think Stacey is talking to me. It’s like she knows that I’m watching this, and she specifically recorded this episode or this video just for me. Maybe I did.

The reality of it is you’re in a very full boat. There’s lots of people in the same boat with you. Don’t stress. As easy as it is to solve this problem, it’s not a complicated strategy to learn and put into practice or put into place.

You have to understand why it’s so important because the first big step you’ve got to take is to know who refers you. And that means you got to do some data diving. So you’ve got to be motivated to really dive in and figure out who are your existing referral sources.

But truly, truly, when I have clients work with me, once they complete their pre-work, and it doesn’t matter which way people are working with me, in the accelerator, the coaching program, or the VIP experience, they all complete basically, the VIP experience is a little bit more robust, but they all complete one standard piece of pre-work, and that is to identify who’s already referring them.

Everybody does it because I know if I can see who’s referring to you, I know how much faster we can move, and I know how much easier this will be for you.

Yes, there’s lots of other strategies to learn about new people referring you and your client experience and getting referrals from that and quality conversations and closing conversations with prospects and how to plant referral seeds when you’re networking.

And there’s tons of other like smaller strategies you can learn, like situational things you can learn, but this one is the biggie. And I have taught how to identify your existing referral sources.

If you don’t know who they are, that’s the people who’ve referred you before. I have taught this many, many times. And I’m going to keep doing it because it is so stinking powerful when you know who your referral sources are.

It’s like seeing their names in black and white, on a list written down or typed up. It’s like, boom, it hits you across the face. And most of the time when people go through this process, there is a level of surprise.

They think they know who’s on the list. And then they see the list and they’re like, wait, some people aren’t on it that I thought would be, right? They’re like, oh my goodness. Some people are on it and I had no idea they would be, right?

So the first thing you look is you’re like, wait, there’s people missing, but not based on the data, just based on what you think. And that’s not what we’re looking for here.

So in some cases, it’s like, wait, there aren’t people on here I thought would be, and there are people on here that I’ve been neglecting because I didn’t realize they were referring to me.

Now if someone refers to you every month, you’re probably not going to forget who that person is. I know with perfect clarity who my number one referral source is in my business, and that is because of the volume of referrals that I receive from him.

Not like clockwork, every Monday I get a referral, on the first of every month I get a referral, but I know on a monthly basis I’m probably getting a referral.

And if I don’t get one in one month, I’m probably getting two maybe the next month. And sometimes upwards of five, right? It depends on the rhythm of his business.

But I know that with a fact. And you probably do too. If you have somebody who refers you consistently and to the point where you’re noticing, wow, we’re getting a lot of referrals from this person.

And it’s been going on for a while. It’s not like this one hit wonder where I get a bunch of referrals and then nothing ever again for years.

But it’s more than knowing that one person who refers a lot to you. It’s about knowing all the other people who may refer only one or two times to you because those people are just as valuable.

If those people refer to you once or twice a year, imagine what it looks like if you could get, I don’t know, instead of one referral a year from them, what if you got two or three or four referrals a year from them?

Like that is the power of knowing who refers you and then knowing what to do to cultivate and nurture them.

And like I said, everything gets easier when you’re doing this for people who’ve already referred you because they’ve already done it. They’ve shown a propensity to actually refer you. So everything gets easier within the strategy, within the plan that you’re going to build to take care of them.

So here’s my question for you. Are you a hundred percent confident you know who your referral sources are? It’s okay. I’ll wait. Think about it for a minute.

Are you 100% confident that you know who your referral sources are by name, can be written down, and you can tell me exactly who they referred to you, whether it was a client or a prospect, someone who ended up not becoming a client?

And can you do that for at least the last year or two, maybe longer? Okay. If you can’t, if you’re like, is she looking at me? Cause I’m trying not to make eye contact with her. Yeah. I see you. I see you. Right? But I get it.

Some of you are like, Ooh, I don’t know. I don’t, I can’t say with a hundred percent confidence that I know who my referral sources are. Well, I’m going to walk you through a really quick overview of how you identify your referral sources. And then we’ll talk about what you do.

Number one, three steps. We’re gonna run them two times. First time though, we’re gonna run this through with our clients.

Step number one, pull a list of your clients from the last 12 months, at least the past 12 months. If you want a gold star, I’d really love it if you would go back more than two years, maybe to the three- or four-year range. you’ll be surprised what you learn about your business.

Now, if you’re in your second year, then we just work with what we have, right? But you’re going to pull a list of your clients from the past 12 months to possibly, maybe you’re going to go all the way back to three or four years.

It’s easier to do this in Excel. Just pull the Google doc, just pull the spreadsheet out, put in one column, the list of your clients.

The other thing I recommend is you actually put the date that they became a client, or if it’s going back a couple of years, maybe it’s the year, not necessarily the fact that it was like, you know, August 12th of 2022. Maybe you’re just going to put in 2022.

So you’re going to put your client, you’re going to put the year that they became a client. So that’s two columns, the date column, the client name column.

The third column you’re going to add in is where each of these clients heard about you. This is called the source.

Now, there’s lots of different types of sources. There’s tons of different examples. They could have come through an ad that you ran.

You could have met them at a networking event. They could be someone who worked with you at a previous company and now that you’re out on your own, they decided to hire you.

They could be a part of a board of directors or on a nonprofit board that you’re with. They could have seen your billboard if you’re doing billboards.

They could have seen an ad that you ran in a print magazine. They could have responded to a cold email. Lucky you if you get that. Maybe you made a cold call. I’m thinking not many people who listen to this podcast are making cold calls, so probably not. But if you did, great.

And then, of course, they can be referred to you. And a referral is a human, so you’ve got to have a name there.

So when you look at this list, you’re going to have the year or the date they became a client, the client’s name, and then you’re going to have where that client heard about you.

And if it’s a referred client, they’ll have a name in that third column for the referral source. It’ll have the referral source’s name, first and last name, please. So that is how you do this step.

Now, I said, you’re going to run it two times. The second way to run this or the round two to run this is with your prospects. So the first time we ran this with our clients, right?

Because I start there because you should have this data. These people have paid you money. So it should be easy to pull this data.

Maybe if you don’t have a CRM, a client relationship management tool, or some type of online database or cloud-based database, maybe you at least have this information in QuickBooks or whatever accounting software you use because these people have paid invoices or make credit card charges, right? So you should be able to pull who your clients are.

The second that was a little bit more harder, because you may have not kept great records and that’s okay, you can change that going forward. But that is to do this three steps again with your prospects.

So you’re gonna pull a list of your prospects, the people that maybe showed an interest in working with you, maybe you had a call with them. But for whatever reason, they didn’t say yes. They either said no or not now.

So you’re going to pull a list of your prospects. Most people can only go back 12 months with this. After that, if they don’t have great records, it’s really hard to kind of like recreate this stuff from memory or find it.

But if you can go back further than 12 months or six months, that’s great. But pull a list of your prospects. Follow the same process. The date or the year that they were a prospect in your business, the prospect’s name, and then the third column is the source.

So you’re actually going to put down where you heard from the prospects, same way you just did it for your clients. And if that prospect was referred to you, you got it. You’re going to capture the referral source’s name as well.

Okay. Once you have all that information and you get your clients, you get your prospects, you can merge those together and then you can sort the list and then only pay attention to those where there is a name in the source column, where it’s a name for the referral source. And then you’re going to look to who are those people.

That, my friend, is your list of gold. That, my friend, are the humans, the people that make up your low-hanging fruit. And you can now start to take care of them in a meaningful and memorable way, a science-backed way where your focus is on gratitude and thankfulness.

And also giving you the opportunity to plant specific language that I happen to call referral seeds. And that’s to keep them thinking about you, feeling confident with you. Not being able to forget about you.

And then of course, getting them thinking about you from a referral perspective as well, without ever having to ask.

If you don’t know how to build out a plan that is memorable and meaningful, that is based on the science of referrals, where your focus is on gratitude and thankfulness, but you also know how to plant the right language, the referral seed language, then I want you to listen really closely to this, because this opportunity is not gonna come around again.

For the first time in years, like many, many years. I’m going to teach the foundational strategy of how to generate more referrals from your existing referral sources.

Again, like I said earlier, if you’ve been around a long time, you know your existing referral sources and the how we take care of them is the signature strategy of mine that I’ve been referring to over the years as the growth by referrals strategy.

It is a standalone strategy. It fits within your ecosystem. It is usually the starting point and the launchpad if you have referral sources where we can quickly get some referrals going for you. That is always the game plan.

I can’t guarantee it, but that’s the game plan of where we start. That’s where my clients start having most of their success.

And so it’s really important for you to understand this, is that since 2021, this strategy, the specific strategy, the growth by referral strategy where you can get more referrals from your existing referral sources, this strategy has not been available as a standalone strategy that you could purchase and learn from, from me.

Because in 2021, I moved all of my individual strategies into my coaching program, or my VIP experience, and of course the Referral Accelerator. So I took all 20 strategies that I teach, and I bucketed them together within those three programs.

So I don’t provide standalone, one-off, a la carte strategies, and I haven’t since 2021. But here’s what I know. I know that my programs, whether it’s the BRB coaching program, the VIP Experience, or my two-day accelerator, they’re not for everybody.

And you might be thinking that you just need one, just the one of my signature foundational referral strategies to get you started.

Well, if you have people referring you, then this strategy, the Growth by Referrals strategy is where you start. So I am bringing this Growth by Referrals, the GBR training, out of the vault, and I will be teaching it live, live, so no videos.

You don’t have to watch any videos in my online portal. I am going to personally teach it live over the course of three class sessions. I am very excited.

I haven’t done this in so very long. I don’t actually remember the last time I taught this live, let alone since 2021 had this strategy available. So I’m very excited.

Of course, I teach it live in some of the programs if you’re in one of my programs. But I mean, I haven’t taught it as like an a la carte live, as just a signature strategy standalone by itself.

So just think, in less than a couple of hours, right? Cause I just need you for three, one hour class sessions and just a couple of hours, you’ll start taking action to generate more referrals from those who have referred you before.

And with this one strategy, this is really the best part. I mean, obviously the referrals it produces is probably the best part, but the next best part is that this is a strategy that you should rinse and repeat it for years to come.

What we are going to build is how you take care of your existing referral sources, that five to seven touchpoint plan based on my four-part science-backed framework

 And those touchpoints you should do not only this year, right, and the next 12 months, but the year after, and the year after, and year after.

There’s a rinse and repeat process to this so that you will have this in place for years to come and you will keep generating referrals each and every year.

So if you felt like you’re leaving potential referrals on the table by not having a system that is built on science for how you cultivate your existing referral sources, and then all it takes is a few hours to build momentum and start receiving more clients by referrals, then this is your opportunity.

Again, this is a virtual masterclass. It’s held over three sessions, and I haven’t taught this strategy live like this in years, and I’m going to be honest, I don’t plan to do it again. I don’t plan to have this strategy available like this, where I teach it live every year.

This is a very specific opportunity. And the reason for that is, is that I know there are some people where business looks different this year. It just does.

So business looks different this year. So you’re evaluating and assessing opportunities differently.

And so maybe now is just not the right time to join my Referral Accelerator, my two-day Referral Accelerator, or to invest in my BRB, Building a Referable Business Coaching Program, or come along inside my VIP Experience and work one-on-one with me and let me build it for you.

It’s not the right time for everyone. But that doesn’t mean most people aren’t needing something to get started.

So maybe you’ve invested in my Your Next Five Referrals program, but you know those are like the standard operating procedures of things you have in place. It doesn’t tackle one of my strategies.

And if I were to teach a strategy to anybody, it would be this one, because I know it’s how you can get started quickly. But you have to have people referring you.

If you don’t have anyone referring you or your concern is you need new people referring you, this is not the masterclass for you. This is not. We may consider doing that training at another time, maybe like in 2026. It’s definitely not happening this year. That’s not the training.

This training is you have people referring to you and you can check out all the details on like, is this the right fit for me? Just go to StaceyBrownRandall.com/morereferrals.

There’s no hyphen it’s just more referrals so StaceyBrownRandall.com/morereferrals. And of course, Stacey has an E.

You can learn more about the master class, you can find out the dates and the times. Of course there’s going to be recordings, you may not be able to make every one of these three classes. There is also a bonus Q&A session that we will do as a fourth class. So you will learn and you will build, and you will get feedback.

And then when we’re done with those three classes, not only will you be asking questions to those sessions, you’ll also get to come to another fourth session where it’s just Q&A with me live. And I’m going to answer all your questions and review what you’ve built and put together.

So if this sounds like the thing you’ve been waiting on, this is your sign that today is the day. You want to get in and you want to secure your seat inside the More Referrals Masterclass. If you have any questions, of course, you can always reach out to me.

So again, the masterclass registration link and the transcript of this episode can also be found on the show notes page at StaceyBrownRandall.com/376. Don’t forget, Stacey has an E.

I cannot wait to see some of you in our masterclass that we have coming up in just a couple of weeks, we’re kicking off soon, so make sure you get in and secure your seat while you can.

Like, think about kicking off, like, maybe, I think at the point of this episode releasing, it’s probably we’re kicking off in two weeks. So, get your spot.

Alright. I can’t wait to see some of you on the masterclass. And for others of you, if you’re like, I don’t know if I have people referring me, that’s what this whole episode was about. I just taught you how to determine if you have people referring you.

Now we are going to do that again with a different level of refinement as part of class one within the masterclass. But if you’re trying to figure out if this masterclass is right for you and do you have people referring you, I just taught you the three steps.

Do round one, then round two, right? And then you’ll know, oh yeah, I’ve got more than five or six people referring me. The masterclass is the perfect next step for me. Then you should join while you can.

Alright, thanks for making it to the end of this episode. Until next week, take control of your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.