Ep #378: Is Your Referral Generation Lacking?

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’ve 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.

Alright, welcome to episode 378 of the Roadmap to Referrals podcast. We are gonna be talking about something that you may find frustrating, and that is the idea that maybe your referral generation is lacking.

Now, let me first set the stage about who this episode is for, okay? I wanna be really clear as I break down, I know you’re feeling it, some frustrations you may have about you’re not receiving the referrals you want, right? You are trying to, but it’s just not happening.

So let me break down who this episode is for. This episode is not for you if you’re doing nothing, have no intentions of doing nothing, but yet want to know how to like, snap your fingers and magically make referrals appear.

There is no time on this, whether you’re watching this on YouTube or if you’re listening to this in the podcast, that I can pull a rabbit out of a hat and be like, presto, bingo, there you go. Here are all your referrals. You did nothing. Congratulations, right? Not how it works.

So this is not for you. This episode is not for you if you plan to do nothing, don’t want to do anything, and just want to receive stuff and not actually have to do work for it because that’s not how referrals work.

But most people who listen to this podcast aren’t those kinds of people. I think if the people listen to this podcast and they’re like, I don’t want to do any work, they turn me off pretty fast because yeah, there’s always going to be some level of work involved.

Okay, this episode is also not for my clients who are working with me, but not implementing, because then the truth is you know what to do.

And if your referral generation is lacking and you’re doing all the things you need to do, we’re having a whole different conversation inside one of the ways that I’m supporting you, whether that’s through our weekly Q&A calls, like our weekly office hours, or you’re hopping on a one-on-one call with me, or we’re talking about it over email.

So of course, while my clients do listen to the podcast, and I love that, if you’re a client and your referral generation is lacking, and you’re implementing what you’re supposed to be implementing, we’ve probably already had conversations about that because you’ve probably already brought it up to my attention.

And ebbs and flows in your referral generation are always going to happen. It happens in my business. It’ll happen in your business. It’ll happen in the businesses of my clients where I talk about their results.

We talk about their case studies, even people that clients that we’ve had on this podcast that are like, oh my gosh, I got all these referrals. They will always experience a slowdown. But we know we have the right strategies in place that will always turn the tide for us as well.

So this isn’t necessarily for my clients who are like, I’m just not doing the work. That’s not who this is for. So then who is this episode for?

I’m going to make some assumptions. This episode is for you if you’re doing some of what you need to do to generate referrals, right? Maybe you’re tracking the referrals that you are receiving.

You’ve got your intake process dialed in so you know where people are coming from. You know how to send thank you notes for referrals received and you’re doing it. And you’re not like trying to do a shortcut with just emails and texts.

You’re actually sending a handwritten thank you note and you’re doing some outreach as well. Basically, this episode is for the person who, you’ve listened to a bunch of podcast episodes. You’ve probably read my book, my first book, Generating Business Referrals Without Asking.

Maybe you’re eagerly anticipating my second book, which will be out late October, The Referrable Client Experience. And so you’re definitely doing some things.

You’ve listened to the episodes. You’ve pulled what you’ve heard on the podcast or what you’ve heard from the book or any of the resources you’ve downloaded from the website. Maybe you get the weekly email, and you implement what I’m talking about in the weekly email.

You’re going off of the information that I am providing, and you are trying to maybe bootstrap it together or you’re listening to something and then implementing it. This podcast episode is for you.

And I will tell you right now, what I’m not gonna say to you is that your referral generation is lacking because you’re not working with me. That’s not what this episode is about. Of course, I would love to work with you if you’re the right fit for me.

But this episode is to meet the listener, whether you’re watching this on YouTube or you’re listening to this in your favorite podcast app, is to meet you, the business owner, the listener of this podcast, right where you are.

You’re doing the best you can. You’re doing a number of things. Yes, maybe you haven’t taken the plunge to work with me to know all of the things, but you are listening to these episodes.

You are implementing what you hear and what you learn, and you are reading the books, and you are going through the free resources, and you are doing things, but you still feel like your referral generation is lacking.

Could it be lacking because you don’t have all the pieces that I teach to my clients? Yes, but here are also four other reasons why it could be lacking. So this episode is for you.

Number one, here’s one of the reasons why your referral generation could be lacking. You’re not really connecting. Now, what do I mean by that? Let me break this down.

What I mean when I say you’re not really connecting, I mean that you think you’re doing outreaches, you think you’re doing connections with other people, but it’s actually just keeping you on the surface.

What you’re doing is keeping you on the surface, right? So maybe you meet somebody at a networking event, and they have a conversation with you and then you exchange contact information, and you go back, and you put them on your broadcast email that goes out weekly or monthly or quarterly.

And you’re like, okay, good. Now I’m connecting with them. No. I hope first that you had their permission to put them on your email list because it’s against the law to just put somebody on your broadcast email list without their permission.

I mean, like when you think about getting on my email list, it’s because you’ve probably downloaded something of mine and landed on the list. Or maybe you heard me do a presentation and you clicked on a QR code, right? And you downloaded something, and you ended up on my list.

You can’t just add people willy nilly to your list without their permission. OK, that’s an aside. I’m not going in. I’m not going to get the details and the laws there. But you meet somebody, and you add them to your email list and then you start dripping emails to them. That’s not really connecting.

You run into somebody, and you slam 14 business cards into their hand and you’re like, hey, let’s make sure we keep in touch. Here you go. That’s not really connecting.

You see somebody every four or five months and you say, hey, and you always seem to talk about business and you’re like, okay, I’m doing some stuff. I’m making some contacts happen, but that’s not really connecting, not in the way you need to, to make referrals happen.

So take a look at the things you’re doing that you would consider, here’s the things I’m doing that I would consider connecting, hopefully for the potential for referrals, maybe even future referrals, and look to see if the connecting you’re actually doing is keeping you at the surface and not allowing you to truly connect and get to know them better and really actually stay on their radar and occupy space in their brain in a different way.

Because you can’t do that. You can’t really connect with someone when you’re hanging out at a surface level.

Okay, so here’s the second thing that actually may be happening for you, right? And the second one is who you want to refer to you, can’t actually refer.

And I know this one’s kind of hard to hear because you’re like, wait, I’ve identified these people. I want them to refer to me. I’m trying to cultivate a relationship with them. And I think I’m doing all the right things, but they’re not referring.

Sometimes not enough time has passed. Sometimes you may not know the exact language to be using to plant referral seeds. Then you may not be developing that relationship the way you want.

But sometimes, the people we want to refer us can’t, so they don’t. They don’t come across your ideal client. That’s why making sure that you are targeting who you’re going after to turn them into or cultivate them into referral sources really matters.

It’s really important that you understand who are the referral sources who swim upstream from you and you’re dialed in on who those people are so that you have the potential to be there when they need when they’re having conversations with their clients or prospects, and they uncover a problem that you do, they’re going to send that downstream to you.

So you’ve got to be really clear on who is talking with clients and prospects or just business owners, if that’s who your market is, right? Could be consumers if you’re B2C or business owners, if you’re B2B.

But who’s having conversations with people where what you solve would come up in conversation so that there would be the potential to refer them to you. It’s not everybody. So even if you really want people to refer to you, they just can’t.

In the other case, they may not be able to refer to you because they’re already connected and tied in in a relationship with a competitor of yours, somebody who does what you do, and that’s who they’re always going to refer to.

It’s a reality that we just have to face, right? So just because you want them to refer to you, doesn’t mean they can actually refer to you. So take a hard look at who you’re trying to cultivate referrals from and ask yourself, okay, can this person actually even refer me?

Do they come across my ideal client with some level of regularity? Are they in conversations with clients or potential clients of mine where there would be that natural ability to refer them to me, right?

Or maybe quite possibly, I’m a real estate agent and they know 30 other real estate agents. Do I kind of stand a chance? You just got to ask these hard questions. They’re not fun questions and I’m not actually loving being the messenger of this message either.

But these are things that you have to consider, and you have to realize is, hey, if someone’s not referring you, it may very well be because they can’t refer. They don’t uncover the problem you solve when they’re talking to people, or they actually already have somebody like you that they refer to. So that’s number two.

Alright, number three. If you are doing some of the right things, the other reason why your referral generation could be lacking is because your follow up and your follow through is not consistent.

I know most business owners like kind of cringe and hate that word consistent. Like we all know we need it, but we all still kind of like cringe with it, right? It’s like, ah, I know I need to be consistent, but I just get busy, or I don’t have a system. I don’t have a process. I don’t have a follow up.

You’ve got to have dialed in, locked in follow-up and follow through. That has to be consistent. So if you’re trying to develop relationships with people and trying to connect with people that you are hoping will refer you and then you ghost them for nine months, of course it’s never going to happen.

Or if you say, hey, I’m going to do this, and then you don’t. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with something being delayed. But if you say you’re going to do something, then do it.

If your follow through and your follow up is not consistent for you to either be able to move from keeping in touch to staying top of mind, and obviously they can’t count on you, then if that’s not consistent, you’re not going to be able to generate referrals from them no matter how bad you want to receive referrals.

And the fourth one is, you haven’t really built the foundation of a relationship. You think maybe you’ve built a relationship with folks that you want to refer you, but you haven’t really built the right foundation of a relationship, so you don’t really have one.

The relationships that eventually turn into referral sources have a couple of components in common. One is, of course, this is somebody who’s going to come across people they can refer to you, right? We’ve talked about that. That makes sense.

The second thing is, is they’re not obviously referring to a competitor of yours, right? And sometimes they won’t ever tell you if they are, because they don’t want to hurt your feelings.

But the other thing is, is that you’ve spent time nurturing that relationship without an expectation of referrals. You have put time and energy into that relationship, focused on them, helping them.

That is the objective when you’re developing a relationship with someone you want to refer to you, is to actually show up differently than everybody else who does the same thing you do and see how you can help them, right?

And of course, there are ways to do that and ways that work and there’s a variety of what that looks like.

But when you’re really like building that foundation of a relationship, most people just like dive into, hey, I need to make sure you know who to refer to me. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about who they can refer to you until they know you care about them.

These are people, not an algorithm. So it’s really important to keep in mind that when you’re building a relationship, you’ve got to do it the right way, and you’ve got to make it about them.

And I know that kind of sounds like, oh, that’s going to take forever. It might, but if you want somebody to put their reputation on the line and refer people to you, that’s just not going to happen because you show up once and you’re like, hey, look at me. I’m so great. You’re so great. You should refer to me.

That’s just not how it works. You got to build a relationship. You got to put the other person first so that you actually build the right foundation to that relationship.

So go back, listen to this episode again if you need to. Go over these four possibilities as why your referral generation is lacking.

If you’re trying to do some things and you’re not 100% sure, maybe it is because one, you’re not really connecting. You’re just staying at the surface level. You think you’re connecting, but you’re not.

Two, who you want to refer to you actually can’t refer to you. So it’s like you’re developing a relationship with someone that the referrals will never flow.

Three, your follow up and your follow through is not consistent in how you nurture that relationship and follow up with people and make sure you’re staying connected.

And number four, you haven’t built the foundation of a relationship, right? So you don’t actually have one. You maybe spent time with this person, but you’ve made the focus on yourself, not on helping them.

And so you haven’t really established a relationship to where you occupy space in their mind so that they would actually think about you when referrals come along. Those are four reasons why referral generation for you, my friend, may not be working.

Alright. If you are looking for the transcripts for this episode, and of course, anything else that we’ve mentioned in this episode, you can find it on the show notes page at StaceyBrownRandall.com/378. That’s 378 because that is our episode number. And don’t forget, Stacey has an E.

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Until next week, take control of your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.