Ep #391: Building a Sustainable Pipeline with Referrals… Without Asking For Them

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 teach a science-backed framework and methodology that generates referrals without asking. This podcast and working with me is all about taking control of your referrals on your terms. Join me every week as we break it down.

Okay, so back in November, I was invited by Lettuce Financial to present at their solo summit. Actually, I was referred by Amy Nelson of The Riveters.

Amy and I met at a conference in early fall, and when her contact at Lettuce mentioned that they were looking for another speaker to fill a spot, in their solo summit to present to their audience of solopreneurs on growing a business, Amy, the thought of me.

So she referred me to her contact at Lettuce, Lisa. Lisa and I met, had a great conversation, and then voila, I got to present. So, okay, note to self, I probably need to be doing more stuff in person in 2026.

Alright, well, Lettuce Financial, just if you’ve never heard of them, Lettuce Financial is dedicated to serving what I think is an overlooked part of the market. And that is the profitable solopreneur.

Those who are making multiple six figures and in some cases are very much intentionally staying small on purpose. They’re choosing to be solopreneurs, but of course they are actually doing financially well.

Not like every single year, right? I mean, most businesses are not immune to what’s going on in the economy or in our world, but they are usually profitable and intentionally staying small and growing and usually making multiple, multiple six figures. Of course, some making more than that as well.

So if you’ve never heard of Lettuce Financial, Lettuce is an automated tax and accounting product for solopreneurs, contractors, and freelancers.

I have to be honest, I had actually never heard of them until Amy referred me to Lisa at Lettuce, and then I got to learn about them. And I was just really intrigued by their model in terms of the market that they’re serving, which I personally believe is kind of overlooked.

For their solo summit, they put on an A-plus event. I was thrilled to be a part of it. They also shared the recordings from each of the speaker sessions with us, the speakers, so that we could do whatever we wanted with them.

And so what I decided to do for this episode is to play my presentation titled, Building a Sustainable Pipeline with Referrals Without Asking.

Oh. Before I forget, because we’re going to dive in to listening to this recording in just a minute, I do want to let you know coming up next week, December 15th, I’m doing a training called Ending the Year Referral Strong.

It is a free 20-minute training. So it is designed to pack a punch in a very short amount of time. We’ll see how I do. And of course, it’s free. So to join me, just go to staceybrownrandall.com/training so that you can sign up.

Okay, like I said, for this episode, we are going to play the presentation that I gave at the solo summit. So let’s roll the tape. Sorry, just like totally dated myself. Just kidding. Let’s roll the recording.

Kim (summit host): Today’s speaker has really cracked the code on what she does best. Stacey Brown Randall is an award-winning author. She is the referral expert who has helped thousands of business owners generate consistent, high-quality referrals without ever asking for them.

She has developed a proven methodology based on psychology and brain science that turns happy clients into referring advocates naturally and authentically.

So whether you need to start receiving referrals or you want to double or triple the referrals that you’re already getting, Stacey is going to show us how today to make that happen.

Without further ado I’m going to hand it over, I’m going to go off camera and hand it over to Stacey so you can take it away.

Stacey Brown Randall: Perfect, thank you so much. Alright, let’s get this going. Gotta have a PowerPoint. If it’s a summit, gotta have a PowerPoint. Like, what is a presentation without a PowerPoint these days?

Great, alright, I am so excited to dive in with you guys and talk about referrals, specifically referrals without asking, which of course is the way most of us want to generate them.

Here’s one thing I want you to know about referrals. There is a lot of thoughts and opinions and ways you should do it and the have tos. And if you don’t do it this way, you don’t get them.

There are people who take the definition of referrals, and they have watered it down and taught people that it means different things than it actually means.

And there are people who use referrals and they say, hey, if you use this service, you can get referrals. Sometimes that means it’s used as clickbait because some of those things you can’t actually generate referrals from.

There’s just a lot around referrals out in the marketplace today because it’s the thing we all want. So it’s the thing that gets our attention when someone says, hey, we can get referrals, right? We can get you referrals.

And so I just want you to understand from that perspective, there is a lot of noise when it comes to referrals, a lot of noise.

And that noise means that you probably have some thoughts and some opinions about how to generate referrals in your business that may be keeping you from generating them because you don’t love the advice that you’ve been hearing.

So there are a number of solutions. I need more than two hands to count all the different solutions of how people try to teach referrals, but there are four that drive me crazy. They literally drive me insane.

So I’ll do my best not to go in a soapbox right now because we’ve got a lot of other great information to get to, but some of those solutions that I want you to be aware of that are the big ones that we are always hearing.

The first one, of course, being you’ve heard it. It’s part of the title. Right? The asking that, hey, if you want referrals, you’re going to have to be willing to ask for them.

And so you’ll hear people say things like, hey, don’t be afraid to ask. Or twenty-five ways to ask for a referral without looking desperate.

Most people, I’d say like ninety eight percent. That is technically a made-up percentage, but I know I’m probably close to being right. About 98% of folks don’t want to ask for referrals. It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable. It’s not what they want to do.

So it feels, if it’s awkward and uncomfortable, people are unwilling to do it. And so what we’re taught is, well, then you have to ask and then get over yourself, right? Here’s how to do it without being desperate. You can’t be afraid. You just got to do it.

And that advice has been taught to us for decades and decades and decades, right? And that can be very, very exhausting.

The next one I always hear people talk about is the incentivizing, right? It’s the kickback. It’s the under the table, hey, I’ll give you 10% for every client that you refer to me, right?

In that case, it’s actually not a referral. It’s passing a lead and getting money on that lead. I’m not talking about affiliates. That’s very different because that’s disclosed up front. I’m talking about the under the table kickback from that incentivizing perspective.

The third one that drives me insane is when people feel like they have to be overly promotional and gimmicky.

Like those that put in their email signature, hey, the greatest compliment you can give me is a referral. We definitely do not need to have that in our email signature or put it in your newsletter, right?

Oh, I would love it if you would refer me, right? The greatest compliment you can give me. Don’t keep me a secret.

So we’re taught that if you want referrals, the way to trigger them is to be overly promotional and gimmicky. And that doesn’t work for how most of us want to show up as the expert in our business, right?

Or we’re told we got to network, we got to know a ton of people, we’ve got to always be seen. And if we’re not always seen, then of course, people will forget us. And then they’ll never remember us. And they can’t refer to us, right?

Okay, so these are the four that drive me insane because we’ve been told we have to believe them and they’re not true.

Yes, you can do those if you want to. You’re a unicorn and in the small minority of humans that want to. The other issue though is they don’t work long-term and I’m gonna explain why in a minute.

But there is one solution that truly breaks my heart. And the one that truly breaks my heart is this one. Hey, well, if you won’t ask and you won’t pay for them and do any other things, well, then just do great work and hope you receive referrals.

Just do great work and maybe you’ll get some referrals. They’re telling you that because you won’t ask and you won’t incentivize and that’s not how you want to show up to your people in the marketplace.

Unfortunately, over time, this has become, well, if you do great work, you should just get referrals. Doing great work equals referrals.

So I’m curious. Hop into the chat. Tell me, do you do great work? Do you believe the work that you do, not perfect work, but do you believe that you do great work? Just hop into the chat. Give me a yes or a no.

Yes, I believe I do great work, right? What does that look like for you? Do you, yeah, just give me a yes or a no. Do you believe you do great? Yep, yep. Look, yes. All of you guys are like, this is what I expected. I’d be really sad if I got a bunch of nos, right?

Yes, you all believe you do great work. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Not perfect work, right? But great work. Not that you don’t have mistakes, you know how to fix those, but you are there to do great work.

I love it I even got a hell yeah right, yes, you do great work okay. So let’s stop putting into the chat your yeses for doing great work, so pause on the chat. If you haven’t put your yes in, it’s okay, don’t worry there’s another question coming for you.

So then tell me, are you drowning in referrals? Do you have so many referrals coming in on whether that’s a weekly or monthly or quarterly basis that you are drowning in them? Not that you just get a couple of referrals, but that you’re drowning in them.

Give me a yes or a no. Are you drowning in referrals? All that great work, look at all these, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, right? Nope, no referrals, right?

Okay, but here’s the thing. You guys aren’t wrong. You do great work. But you’re not drowning in referrals. So guess what? You’re not doing anything wrong. You just don’t know what you need to do to be able to generate referrals.

And we’re going to dive into this because there’s a few key things I want you to know and I want you to understand. Because doing great work does not mean you will be under a river of referrals.

Doing great work does not actually generate referrals. We’re going to break down a couple of areas where you can focus, and I’m going to give you two pieces of homework to do if you want to start this journey of generating referrals.

Alright, so when we talk about what does generate referrals, there’s one, there’s a couple of things that I need you to know.

So there’s some baseline things I need you to understand before any of the two tactics I want to give you are going to make any kind of sense. So I need you to know these things. So let’s quickly hit them.

The first one is, so I can tell the animation is not working so it’s like the answers are already on the screen so let me just talk about it like it’s already there since you guys can see it.

What must exist for referrals is desire and opportunity, but you as the business owner, you only control the desire.

And the desire is that I would choose to refer to you. I refer to you, is based on the relationship we have. So you control my desire to refer to you versus your competitor. What you don’t control is how often I’m going to come across an opportunity.

When you try to control the opportunity by asking me to refer you or offering to pay me to refer you, you’re trying to artificially create, you’re trying to manufacture what must be there naturally.

You can control the desire that I would pick you over anybody else, but you don’t control my opportunity.

And most of the tactics out there today, they’re trying to teach you how to control opportunity, and it just doesn’t exist that way.

So if you want referrals, you have to understand that what must exist is desire and opportunity, and you only control desire. So stop worrying about opportunity.

But that also means you have to be really targeted on who you’re trying to create referrals from, because you want to make sure we’re picking the folks who actually come across your ideal clients.

The next thing I need you to understand is these basics of referral science, okay? There are some things you have to understand.

There are three things I’m going to give you right now. I’m not going to give you a science lecture. I’m going to hit this really high level.

The first thing is referrals aren’t about you. If I am thinking to refer to you, I’m not thinking about helping you grow your business.

I know that may be the first time you’ve heard that. It’s a bonus. You get a new client and that you get to grow your business.

But when I am actually referring someone to you, it’s because I know somebody who has a problem, and in that moment, I get to help them.

And the happiness trifecta is triggering in my brain. It’s the release of the feel-good chemicals in my brain that me, I’m like, wait, I know how to help you. I get to be the hero.

I don’t actually verbally say that, but that’s what happens in my brain. Wait, I know how to help you. And how I’m going to help you is I’m going to refer you to Katrina. I’m going to refer you to Leslie.

And so the idea there is, is referrals aren’t about you. So stop making them about you, asking, incentivizing, right? Always trying to feel like, be seen at every networking event possible. Those are making it about you.

Referrals are really about me helping someone who has a problem, solve the problem. And how I help them is you. You’re the solution provider. You’re how I help them solve the problem. So know your place when it comes to referrals and when they’re happening.

The second thing is there’s a reputation on the line. Now, the psychology of trust is the one that everybody gets with referrals, right? When I refer you to someone, they’re borrowing my trust, and they’re transferring it to you.

And everybody gets the psychology of trust, the know, like, and trust factor, right? Because there truly is a reputation on the line.

When I do refer you to someone, yes, I want to be the hero and help them. I also want it to go well, right?

But here’s what people get wrong about reputation and trust. What people really get wrong is that they assume, well, for you to trust me, to refer to me, you must know how amazing I am.

You must know all the certifications and all the degrees I’ve had and all the continuing education training I’ve done. You probably need to look at my portfolio. You probably need to understand everything about my business.

And the person referring to you is like, don’t care. I mean, they don’t say this to you, but they’re like, don’t care. I’m assuming because you’re in business, you must be good at what you do until you prove me otherwise.

So people are so focused on training their referral sources to refer them. They don’t want to be trained. They’re not dogs, right? They’re not pets.

They instinctively believe you do a great job until you prove them wrong. They do instinctively believe you do a great job. And then, of course, they’ll see how that unfolds after they start referring you as well.

And that’s where you have to grow that trust factor. But there is a reputation on the line, and you do need to understand it.

Which brings us to the third point, which is the most important, the type of relationship, so that you can control that desire, but not opportunity, control that desire to refer to you. The type of relationship is key.

And everything I teach my clients to do is baked and rooted in understanding behavioral economics. And I want to make this really clear. This is the good side of behavioral economics, not the taking advantage, the evil side, like taking advantage of reciprocity.

That is a part of behavioral economics that we don’t participate in. So it is also important of how you manage that relationship. And we use behavioral economics to do that.

Alright, here’s the next thing I want you to understand. Where referrals fit in your sales strategy.

Forever, we’ve been taught your sales strategy, or your business development strategy has a two-legged stool, right? Prospecting and marketing.

There’s things you do on the prospecting side, things you do on the marketing side, that’s how you build a sales, that’s your business development pipeline, right?

But the reality of it is, it’s a three-legged stool. And in that three-legged stool, what you need to understand is that referrals is its own leg.

So if we look at the first leg, let’s see if this will work. Oh, it is going to work. OK, I’m glad the animation works. It says leg two, but technically that’s leg one.

So this is leg one. This is the prospecting bucket, right? It’s like a bucket. All these different activities that you can do. There’s nothing wrong with this bucket.

Some people buy leads, some people send cold emails, some people do a ton of networking, some people join associations, right? But this is prospecting in nature.

And if you’re told that referrals fit in this bucket, that’s where you believe you have to ask and pay for referrals and network all the time.

But the second leg, which is the marketing is the second leg of this is all the marketing activities you can do. Maybe you have a website. You probably should, right? Very few people can get away without having a website.

Maybe you sponsor events, maybe you do digital marketing, maybe you do print advertising, maybe you do podcast guesting right. There’s different things you can do. The second leg of your stool is, of course, the marketing.

So prospecting and marketing, they’re all good. Hopefully, you’re not doing all the things in both these buckets. But referrals is its third leg all by itself.

But the referral bucket is different. It’s not a bucket collecting activities you do like rainwater. And of course, these are not an exhaustive list. It’s just all the things that would fit on nine circles dropping into the image.

But referrals is its own bucket. And it is like a planter. And I can see the animation is going over some of the other slides. So we’ll see how this works.

But with referrals, you have layers. And you start at the bottom. You work your way up. Then you want to make sure you’re always planting referral seeds, which is the water that comes. And from there, referrals are actually able to develop. That’s really important for us to understand what this looks like.

And understanding from that perspective, referrals, you build it in layers. And what I want to do is spend some time with you on that middle layer, talking about two important things that you can do. We’ll see if this works with it goes to the next thing.

Okay. What you couldn’t see behind that bucket was a flow chart of all the different strategies that I teach my clients.

Because what I want you to understand about referrals is that it’s not a nail and every solution is a hammer. It’s an ecosystem of how referrals lives, right? It’s an ecosystem of how referrals live in your business and understanding that.

What you couldn’t see on that one screen is when you looked at the green boxes, blue boxes, and then gold boxes, is on the green side, those are our foundational strategies. The green side being our foundational strategies.

These are these three. And where we’re going to spend some time, are the top two. Existing referral sources, people who already refer to you, and the referable client experience, which is getting referrals from your clients.

I want to give you two nuggets in both of those areas, okay? So just understanding what this looks like.

So now you know what you need to know, desire and opportunity, you only control desire, you understand some basics, some overview, high-level overview of the science, you understand where referrals fit within your sales strategy as its own leg, as its own bucket, planter bucket, and really what that looks like in terms of it being in an ecosystem in your business.

So here’s the thing. Some of you have people referring you right now. I want to walk you through a quick process so you can understand what it looks like to get more referrals from them.

It’s at a high level. I know it’s not going to be every answer to your question. I will give you some resources at the end where you can go and continue on. Because again, they only gave me 45 minutes. So I want to fit in as much as I can.

So I’m going to give you a top tip for your existing referral sources. And then we’re going to talk about something within your client experience as well and what that means and why you should do the homework that I’m about to assign to you.

OK, so first up, top tip for existing referral sources is you need to know who they are. Existing referral sources are people who are already referring you.

People come to me all the time like, hey, what do I do? And I’m like, the what question comes after the who question has been answered.

Let me say that again. The what you do comes after once you know who they are. You got to know who they are before you can determine the what. So let’s look at who they are.

Your referral sources are always human. If you’re buying leads from another place, that place is not referring leads to you. They are handing you leads that you are paying for. So it’s always a human.

They fall into two categories. They’re an existing referral source, which means they’ve already referred you, someone. It may not become a client, but they did refer you. Or potential, the people you want to refer you but haven’t ever referred you.

Then there are also four types, right? They can be your clients, they can be centers of influence, they can be family and friends, and they can be strangers.

Some of you will never have a stranger refer to you. Others of you have been in business forever and your reputation has grown over time. And every once in a while, somebody will send someone to you, and you don’t know who that person is.

That’s our definition of a stranger, right? The definition of a stranger in this case is they know you; you don’t know them.

And some of you do work that your family and friends do not understand. To this day, I still don’t think my mom knows or understands what I do.

She can tell people that I’ve written books, but I don’t even think she knows what a podcast is, and that I have almost 400 episodes on my podcast Roadmap to Referrals.

So some of you will never have family and friends refer you. But some of you, maybe if you’re a real estate agent or an interior designer or CPA, you might. Most of us have our clients refer us, and then centers of influence refer us, which is a COI.

Center of influence by definition, of course, are people who know what you do, don’t do what you do, so there’s no competitive overlap, and they come across your ideal client with some level of regularity.

So you’ve got your clients and you’ve got your centers of influence. That’s usually where we spend our time and energy.

Centers of influence being not everybody you know on LinkedIn, not everybody that’s a contact in your phone, but the people who know what you do, don’t do what you do, and come across your ideal client with some level of regularity. That’s really important.

So here are the basics of knowing who referral sources can be. I want to walk you through how to figure out who they are. And it’s a quick and easy three-step process.

First step, you’re going to list out your clients. Now, here’s the thing. I’m going to ask you to give me one year’s worth of data.

If you’ve been in business for longer than a year, you should have one year’s worth of data. So maybe you’re going to go back till November of 2024, and that’s going to be one full year.

Now, when my clients work with me, they know they have to give me three or four years of data because we now know, OK, if someone’s referring you three years ago, sometimes it allows us to see potential opportunities that’s been lost over time.

So if you want the gold star, do three or four. Go back, give me the data from ‘22, ‘23, ‘24, and what you had so far in ‘25. List out your clients and determine the source.

And determine the source of where they heard about you. Where did they first hear about you when you determine that source?

That means do they come through a Facebook ad? Were they referred to you? If they were referred to you, we need the referral sources name, right?

Did you meet them at a networking event? Did you used to work with them at an old company and then you started your business and they then became a client? There’s lots of different sources.

But if they were referred, you’re going to make sure you put in the referral sources name. And then doing this in Excel is the easiest way to do it. You’re going to sort that list to show only the referral sources.

I’m going to show you what this looks like in a spreadsheet in just a moment. I did see a question pop in about what if you’re just starting out? This strategy is for folks who have been in business at least a year or more and have people referring to them.

What’s coming up after this, Karen, will be about, hey, if you don’t have anyone, you’re just starting out, then it’ll give you something to consider for your client experience.

So this is only for people who have folks referring to them. And so we will talk about if you don’t in just a minute.

Now, when you look at listing out your clients, identifying the source, keep a couple things in mind. A repeat client is not a referred client. People always get that wrong.

When a client comes back to work with you, they are not referring themselves. A client cannot refer themselves. They’re a repeat client. That is its own individual source.

And you’re not referred by an association. You’re referred by somebody in that association. Unless you’re on a directory and people can go into the directory and find you, then that person found you on the directory of that association, but they weren’t referred by the association.

So get really granular. Remember, the referral source has to be a human. So you’ve got to have a name if it’s going to count as a referral source.

If you do this in Excel or a Google Doc, it’s three columns. You don’t need me to hand you a template. You just need to make three columns. It’s super, super simple.

So it’s the date or the year. If you’re doing this back in 2022, I don’t expect you to know that it was February 2, 2022. Just put the year they became a client, then the client’s name in this middle column, and then put the source in the final column.

Now, you can do this again with prospects, people who you had a conversation with, but they never hired you. They didn’t end up working with you.

So you can make a second tab and do one tab for clients and one tab for prospects if you want a complete list of who your referral sources are.

Then you’re just going to sort by that third column under the source tab. And all the Facebook ads will come together because it’s alphabetical when you sort.

And then you’ll have these random names that are all throughout it. Those are the ones you want to grab. Those are the ones you want to capture.

Because that’s your list of gold. That’s your list of existing referral sources. And that is so very important. So we want to make sure we know who these people are.

Some of you will do this and you’ll have like one or two or three people. That’s okay. Some of you will do this and you’ll be like, oh my gosh, I have 30 people. That’s great, right?

But all of you can probably make an assumption of what you think you have now. So I’d love for you to tell me in the chat, how many existing referral sources do you think you have?

It’s okay if the number is zero. No one’s holding you to this. No one’s going to remember what you put into the chat, right? So it could be 0, 1, 2. It could be 20. It could be 50. Right?

How many referral sources existing, meaning they’ve referred you before in the last two, three, or four years, do you think you have?

Alright, five, two to three, one, four, 10 or more, zero, a couple of zeros, twos, threes, I see a five. Yeah, great, 10. Awesome.

Here’s the thing. I’ve done this for 12 years. I’ve been working with clients for 12 years. You’re probably wrong. Very few of you are going to be right. But I asked for a guesstimate.

I don’t expect you to be right. But the data will tell you what you need to know. You’re going to end up with a list of people who have referred to you. You’re going to end up with this list of people who have referred to you, which is amazing.

So great, awesome. What do you do? At a minimum, I need you to write them a handwritten thank you note. That sounds so simple. That sounds so basic.

But the majority of you probably don’t send a handwritten thank you note when you receive a referral. Maybe you text, maybe you email, maybe you leave a voicemail or your call. But those tactics are quickly forgotten. A handwritten thank you note says something very, very different.

Now, hear me say this. You cannot, you cannot unleash a river of referrals, a referral explosion with a bunch of handwritten thank you notes. That’s not how it works. But it is a starting point. And if you don’t need to worry about anything else, if you’ve never done this.

So you’re just going to write him a thank you note. Pull out a note card. I don’t care if your logo is on the front. I don’t want your logo on other things when you do referral stuff. But a thank you card doesn’t matter.

And write a thank you note saying, hey, thank you for referring, and then list out the names of the people that they referred you. You have it right there in the data in the spreadsheets.

Just be like, “You may not remember, but you referred me 5, 6, 7 people, right? I just want to say thank you. I really appreciate your referrals. Let me know how I can help you.” Boom. Three sentences. Very, very simple.

I know I’m going to get the question about addresses. I bet it’s already in the chat. I’m like, I know these things because everybody asks about addresses. You can find them online.

Sometimes they’re in the contact form of someone’s website, sometimes in the privacy policy of their website, but you can also just ask them for their address too.

All you have to say is, write this down as I say this, right? “Hey, there was something I wanted to send you.” Don’t tell them what it is. Just say, “it’s something I wanted to send you. Do you have an address you’re comfortable sharing with me?” That’s it. It’s one sentence.

“Hey there, how you doing? Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me, right? But I had something I wanted to mail to you. Do you have an address you’re comfortable sharing?”

Most people, if they have a relationship with you, will be comfortable sharing an office or a home address depending on where they’re working. And if they don’t share it, don’t worry.

Not everybody will, but most people who’ve referred to you will actually send you note cards. Here’s the thing. This cannot be an emailed card. Full stop. There are no exceptions around this.

If you haven’t been thanking people for referring to you, you need to pull out a card, get an envelope and a stamp and hand write them a thank you card.

This is kind of one of those soap boxes I get on and I don’t get off because it’s really important because receiving a handwritten note card tells me something that an e-card or a text or an email can’t tell me, which is I’m worth your time.

Because writing a thank you card may take me two minutes, but to me, when I receive it, it tells me that I’m worth your time, even if it’s just two minutes. And that matters most.

Now, what I want for you past that, because you will not unleash a river of referrals from just these handwritten thank you cards. You may get some. but it is your starting point.

But a better option is you need to have a plan. I would love it if throughout 2026, you came up with five or six ways that you were going to show care, show thankfulness, show gratitude to these people who take care of your business.

If you believe you should take care of the people who take care of your business by referring to you, then you definitely want to make sure that you are saying thank you to them. But throughout the year, five or six times throughout the course of 12 months.

So that it’s not just, you’re not just thanking them when they refer you. I want you to do that too. I also want to make sure that they are never feeling like you forgot about them. They’re top of mind, right?

This way you stay top of mind, and you can impact how they feel. This is how you create the desire to remember you to refer to. So five to six times a year.

This is not five coffees in a year. This is not five gifts in a year. That’s actually really creepy. Don’t do that. Depending on how well or not well you know the people, if I got five gifts from you, that’d be like, that’s weird.

Variety is your fan. Variety is what you’re looking for here. So that’s what I want you to consider. This is taking care of the people who take care of your business. Never, ever forget that.

And this list, if you have people on this list, is your list of gold, because these are the people who’ve already referred you, and they’re the easiest group to get to do it again.

When you go to my website and you see, wow, Stacey doubled my referrals or quadrupled my referrals in 90 days or a year or whatever, nine times out of 10, it’s because they had people referring to them.

We used the five to six times to say thank you, and we were able to get fast results and better results because they had a group of existing referral sources.

Not everybody does. Some people start from scratch. But if you have it, you need to make sure you’re paying attention to it.

Alright. The next thing I want to make sure I give is a tip for those of you who are like, I don’t have any referral sources. That’s fine.

But for everybody. Also, there’s a client experience happening every day as you work with a client, right? There are client experience always happening.

And so when you think about, from that perspective, your client experience and making it referable, there’s some things we get wrong that we need to definitely change.

So the top tip I have for you is I need you to map out your current client experience now.

Now, here’s the thing. I know I’m giving high level information. I’m going to give you two resources, less than 20 bucks at the very end. They’re my books, spoiler alert, where more information is provided.

Because again, I have like 10 minutes to go. And I really want to leave time for questions because I know you guys have been asking them. And I want to make sure that I’m able to answer them.

So for the client experience, to make it referable, your first stop is to figure out exactly what you’re doing now. Map out your current client experience.

So let’s talk a little bit about the basics of your client experience. The client experience starts the minute a client says yes to working with you.

They may say yes to themselves before they tell you, but they say yes to working with you, something happens. They complete a contract, they register, they send you an email and say, I’m in, let’s get started.

The formula of your client experience is not just the great work you do. It’s also the relationship you build. And this is why you’re not bridging the gap to referrals.

Because if we’re thinking it’s great work and we’re not building relationships, we’re missing an opportunity, right? And of course, the client experience technically ends when the client is done. When you’re done doing the work with your client, they just move into the alumni stage after that, which is what I call past clients, right?

So there’s new, active, alumni, unless you’re like a CPA or financial advisor and your clients never leave, then you stay in the active phase as an ongoing basis.

But it starts when they say yes, and you have to make sure you’re delivering on work, that amazing work you all said you did at the very beginning, and building relationships.

But building relationships with your clients in a repeatable way, so the same thing happens for all clients when they hit a certain point in your client experience.

So what do I mean by that? This is how you’re gonna map this out, right? Oh, TP stands for touchpoint. Sorry, I can’t put all that on the screen, so I always abbreviate. Does not mean toilet paper. It means touchpoint.

Okay, so first thing, you’re gonna map out what you do with a client from start to finish, and I mean everything. Mostly the stuff your client never sees, right? All that stuff that happens behind the scenes.

And then you’re going to mark what’s work with a W, and you’re going to mark what’s relationship focused with an R.

So I just had a client who joined me in my coaching program. It’s called Building a Referable Business, and it’s a coaching program. He joined on Tuesday. Here’s what’s happened for him behind the scenes.

He filled out a registration page. Then he got a contract to sign for the coaching agreement. So he had to sign that. Then he gets a welcome email that explains to him how to do his pre-work.

He’s going to complete his pre-work and upload his pre-work. I’m going to approve it. Then he’s going to get an email that’s going to let him schedule his one-hour onboarding call with me privately.

Five things that have happened. What he doesn’t know, these are all the things that he can kind of see and he understands are happening because it’s the work I deliver, right? Those are touch points of work. Those are like the output of the work.

What he doesn’t know is behind the scenes, my team’s making sure that he gets his welcome box. Now, do you have to do a box? No, this is just what I do. And so I’m using that as my example.

That’s my relationship touchpoint. Five work touchpoints, and he’s getting one relationship touchpoints through that process. And that is where I’m starting to build a better relationship with him.

And so five and one, there’s my 20% within those first five touch points, there’s one relationship thing happening.

Now, over the course of an entire client experience, we look at this differently. We’re not doing like 50 relationship touch points if you do a lot of work or a lot of recurring work, but that’s kind of what we’re aiming for is about 20% to be relationship-based, from that perspective.

Why? Why do you care? Because being referable means that you have a curated client experience where not only you deliver great work. Here’s the key point. That’s why it’s bolded.

You also impact how your clients feel. And it is in the feelings that is your client experience. A client experience is defined as how your client feels while working with you.

The problem is, is that we’re trying to evoke these emotions we want just from great work, and it’s not working.

Relationship touch points infused throughout your client experience is the best opportunity to evoke those emotions that really connect your client to you to feel seen, right? And it allows you to plant referral seeds language.

And that is the secret sauce that I teach my clients as gives us opportunities when we’re doing these things to also plant referral seeds.

When you have a referable client experience, you’re delivering great work and you’re building relationships and then you’re ready to bridge the gap to generating referrals.

The first thing you gotta do though is figure out what are your work touch points? What does it look like? And are you infusing a relationship?

So the example I gave you was the welcome box. Another example, maybe you have a client appreciation party. That can be a relationship touchpoint.

Maybe you send out holiday cards. I do to all my clients and my referral sources. You can do that, too. I also send it to prospects if I have their address at that point in their process with me.

So the holiday card can also be considered a relationship touchpoint. So it’s really important that you kind of pay attention to we’re creating an experience here.

The first piece of homework I gave you was to make sure you could identify your existing referral sources and then thank them with a handwritten note. You’re starting an experience for that group of people, your existing referral sources.

And you’re doing the same for, of course, your clients, you’re building an experience for them that makes you referable.

So I said I was going high level. I have a couple of minutes left for questions and I want to get to those. There’s a ton, so Kim’s going to help me figure out which ones to answer.

But if you want to go deeper, my first book, Generating Business Referrals Without Asking, is about teaching you the five steps you need to understand about existing referral sources. If you don’t have existing referral sources, you don’t need that book yet.

My new book that just came out, The Referable Client Experience, that’s, of course, about the client experience. It’s in the title. That’s what we were just talking about.

Stacey Brown Randall: I hope you enjoyed my presentation that I gave at the Solo Summit that was hosted by Lettuce Financial. We’ll link to them in the show notes for this page if you want to go check them out.

And I have a favor to ask, and it’s the same favor I’ve been asking for a few weeks now. So first, I just wanted to say, because I failed to mention this last week, and shame on me.

For everybody who left a review right before Thanksgiving, so for those of you in the States that are actually celebrating Thanksgiving, right? It was the end of November.

But for those of you that went and left a review, we hit our goal by Thanksgiving of 25 reviews, which was amazing. And now we’re on the hunt for the next goal.

So first, if you left one of those 25 reviews, we’re just a couple away right before Thanksgiving to hit that goal of 25, and we hit it. So if you’re one of those folks who left a review, bless you. I love you so very much.

But now we’re on the hunt for 50. And we’re trying to get to 50 reviews of my new book, The Referable Client Experience, before December 19th, which to me is kind of like the last day of the working year.

It’s not for most people, and technically I’ll probably still be working a little bit over the final two weeks of the year, but I slow down dramatically. And I believe most people do too.

So before people start slowing down to those final two weeks of the year, I am hoping that you can help me out by leaving a review if you haven’t already. Unfortunately, you can’t leave a second one if you’ve already left one.

So we’re trying to get to 50 reviews by December 19th. And obviously, my preference is a five-star rating and review, so… I want it to be honest for you, but obviously that’s the goal here is that you read the book and you love it.

And you lead not only a five-star rating, but also a written review, something that you enjoyed about the book, or you want to share about the book. It’s because those reviews help other people find it.

And when you start hitting certain numbers, like the 25 mark, the 50 mark, the hundred review mark, it really helps the algorithm within Amazon as well for other people to find books.

Now, if you didn’t buy the book on Amazon, that’s totally cool too. If you bought it somewhere like Bookshop or Chapters, or maybe you bought it from an indie bookstore, or maybe you bought it from Barnes and Noble, you can leave the review on whatever platform they have as well. That is still awesome too.

Either way, if you loved the book, The Referable Client Experience, please help a sister out and hook me up with a 5-star rating and written review.

Alright, you can access the transcripts for this episode with the book links, where to learn more about Lettuce Financial as well, on the show notes page of this episode at StaceyBrownRandall.com/391.

I want to thank you for making it all the way to the end of this episode. Until next week, take control of your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.