Ep #330: Referral Q&A Episode

Stacey Brown Randall: When you, my listeners, ask me questions, I love answering them. I set aside every 10th-ish episode to answer questions that I receive. So let’s dive in.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 330 of the Roadmap to Referrals podcast, a show that proves you can generate referrals without asking or manipulation.

I’m your host, Stacey Brown Randall. My journey from a business failure to a successful business now 11 years in, I know generating referrals naturally and consistently has made all the difference. Working with clients around the world, we leverage the science of referrals, protect relationships above all else, and help you build a referable business.

Alright, so episode 330. First, I just want to pause for a moment and be like, holy cow, 330 episodes. That’s six plus years. I can’t do the math in my head that quickly when all of you guys are staring at me while you’re listening to me. So, okay, you’re not staring at me, but you know what I mean.

So it’s a lot of years. That’s crazy. That’s awesome. I’m really glad that you guys show up every single week to listen or binge. Like, you don’t listen every single week, but you come back, and you binge the episodes that you missed.

Or maybe you’ve just found me. And you’re like, what is this Roadmap to Referrals podcast? Is it really possible to generate referrals without asking? The answer is yes and welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

I show up every week dropping into your Air Pods or earbuds or your favorite podcast listening app, to bring you information about building your business the better way, which of course is the referrals without asking way.

And I show up every week and I do this because I know it helps you. And I’m so glad that you’re here. And I’m so thankful for those of you who show up, week after week, month after month, year after year, and keep listening. Thank you.

Thank you, my friends. I do this so that you guys have content that you need, resources that you need so that you can start generating more referrals in your business.

And it is an honor to be on the list of podcasts that you subscribe to and that you follow, hopefully that you love and possibly have left a five-star rating and written review on. That’s amazing, too.

Haven’t made a request for those in a really long time. So, you know, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking to yourself, yes, I do love this podcast, and I haven’t left a five-star review and maybe also a little written review as well.

Can you hop into your favorite listening app and do that for me? That would be amazing. But I’m here for you. So let’s get to answering your questions.

So I’ve got a couple of questions that have been submitted that I wanted to talk about. They’re each similar, slightly different, but really similar as well.

So when I was looking through these questions, for a couple of them, I was like, ooh, I feel like I may repeat myself. But I think that’s OK. I think sometimes we need to hear things more than once for them to really sink in.

So this is a question I received from a business valuation consultant. And he said, my biggest challenge is making the time and the processes in place to build real relationships.

So making the time to do the building of relationships and putting the processes in place to build, and I love this, he said real relationships. And that means he gets it, right? Oh, he gets it because he understands that these aren’t surface relationships.

These are not relationships where you are only seeking what can you get out of it versus what can you, you know, you’re thinking about what you can put into it versus what you can just take from it.

So, you know, we love our givers. And so I respect this quandary. I respect this question. This is the challenge for him, is making the time. And I think it is for most of us.

When I talk to people about joining any of my programs, whether it’s my starter program, Your Next Five Referrals, which is just an online program, or you’re coming into my 12-month coaching program, or maybe you’re joining one of my coaching cohorts, or you’re doing the VIP level, the VIP experience with me, you need to make time to do the work and then implement what we’ve built.

And so I respect that. And it’s no different for me in my business, right? There’s different things that I look at optimizing and doing better and utilizing better in my business.

And I always know, like, I may want to do that, but if I’m not going to put in the time and energy, it’s just going to stay a want until maybe it becomes a, you know, a hot mess, burning fire, and then it becomes a need to do right?

But we need to be making time for things in our business before they became a massive, massive need. So, all right, so the biggest challenge is making time.

So, here’s the thing I like to tell folks, and this is one of the things that I notice with people in my coaching program, is making the routine time is usually helpful, right?

So, I have one business consultant actually in my program who makes time like every Monday morning. It’s just kind of like his referral space. I like to call it his Stacey space, and he always laughs when I say that, but it is his referral business development space with a strong focus on referrals.

Now, does he need to do something with referrals every Monday morning? No. But if he’s received a referral the week before and he didn’t write a thank you note, he knows he’s got time carved out to do that.

It also carves out time for him to make sure he’s doing his outreach to the people he’s trying to cultivate into referral sources and kind of creating that space.

Now, I know there’s many of you listening to this and you hear me say he’s carved out time every Monday morning and he holds to it, and he does his referral slash business development time or work during that time.

And most of you are thinking, you can put it on your calendar. But you know you will blow right past it come Monday morning off to do something else. That’s a bigger issue, right? That’s not that you can’t do it.

That’s that you’re choosing not to do it. You’re choosing to blow past it to do something else, which means it’s just not a priority for you. And that’s OK, right?

When people come into my coaching program, I want two things to happen. Well, okay, I want three things to happen.

One, I want them when they joined it to be a hell yeah, like they wanna be there. They’re excited to do the work and they’re ready to watch this happen and they’re ready to do the work to make this happen and they’re ready to watch their results, right?

Two, I want them to obviously get the results of the goals that we’ve set that they are after. But three, I need them to be committed.

That doesn’t mean they’re committed every single week or even every single month over 12 months with me. Most of them will fall off the wagon and disappear for a couple of months at some point during those 12 months. Most important is that you know to come back.

So if you are putting things on your calendar and then you’re blowing past them, and I am 1,000% guilty of this, for a lot of different things. It means you’re not making it a priority. And it means you are struggling with some level of procrastination. And that’s just a bigger issue.

That’s not an issue specific to referrals or specific to business development in the same way that it’s not an issue specific to your bookkeeping, right?

If you set aside time every month to do your own bookkeeping, which really, as soon as you can outsource that, please do that. But if you set aside time every month to do your own bookkeeping and then you blow past that time because you’ve decided to do something else or answer emails or deal with another burning fire that maybe is not really a burning fire, but you feel like it is, so you do the work, that is a prioritization and a commitment issue.

It’s not really the task issue, right? I mean, of course, anything you can outsource is great to outsource. But this guy got it right because he said, I want to build real relationships. And that means he’s going to have to put in the work, which means he’s going to have to make space and make time for it.

And there isn’t a way to sugarcoat that. There isn’t a way to be like, hey, if you want this to work, you’re going to have to do the work. I don’t sell an easy button or a magic bullet. I sell proven processes that work as long as you’re willing to do the work.

And come to me when they’re not working so I can help figure out what’s going on and we can tweak what we need to tweak for you so that we can make it work. Like, that’s what I want my clients to understand.

But making the time for it, that is always going to be a bigger issue than just one particular thing you need to make time for. You’ve got to decide it’s a priority and only you as a grown adult running a business can decide that for yourself.

I’m sorry if this like hits some of you like right between the eyes and you’re like, okay, didn’t need that right now, Stacey. Maybe not. So hopefully you’ve heard it said in love versus probably like the sternness I feel like I just said it with.

But making time for anything in your business will always be something as business owners that we have to be committed to and that we may struggle with. It’s why there are so many people out there who teach productivity stuff. Right?

There’s courses and coaches and books and trainings. I mean, there’s tons of stuff out there to help you become more productive. But even when I was a productivity coach, I used to tell my clients, I can teach you everything under the sun. But if you’re not going to do it, what does it matter? This is no different.

But I really appreciate this guy’s question because he understands he’s got to make time for it. That is his biggest challenge. But also, because he wants to make sure he’s building real relationships.

The real relationship piece, that really comes into play when you are doing the cultivation of identifying who should be your referral sources, that can refer to you, and then cultivating them into a referral source, and that has to be real.

And so that you just need a process to follow. Again, you still have to follow the process. That’s never going away. But if you have a process to follow, it makes everything easier.

And that’s what I teach in one of my strategies called Referring Machines. It’s called How to Turn Clients and Contacts into Referring Machines, which is basically getting new people to refer to you.

It has a process for it so that you can build real relationships and put the other person first while planting referral seeds through the process that allows them to become referral sources. It’s a couple of things working together to make it work.

So the right processes typically means you’re more likely to stick to it if you can trust that this will work. I just need to do the work. Typically, you can make a greater commitment to it to do it.

But this guy was right on the money when he was like, I got to make the time for that. But what helps you make the time is knowing that the process you are following will work.

So just make sure the processes you’re following to cultivate referrals from people already referring you or cultivate new people into referral sources so that they start referring you. Make sure you’re following a process that actually works.

Because if you’re just doing things in vain, like a whole bunch of email asking people not to forget about you, that is not going to generate referrals for you at all.

Okay. Second question I got came from an interior designer. And the interior designer says, I struggle with finding non-cheesy ways to encourage my clients to refer me to friends and family. I also need better meaningful ways to thank those clients and peers who send me referrals.

Okay, here’s what I want you to understand about that. Really, okay, I’m gonna break this down, because there’s two questions and there’s one question, right?

So I struggle with finding non-cheesy ways to encourage my clients to refer me to friends and family. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, non-cheesy is the goal, right? You’ve got to find a way that’s authentic and genuine for you.

The way that I teach it is that it comes from a place of thankfulness and gratitude, so it never feels cheesy. And then the what you do builds on what your referral sources need, which you would be surprised how little they actually need. Usually, they need acknowledgment. But also factoring in what feels authentic to you.

So when I help my clients build out that five, six, or seven touchpoint plan, that they’re going to do for their referral sources who are referring to them, right? That means we’re thanking them throughout the year, not just with a handwritten thank you note.

So, her other question was, I need a better meaningful way to thank those clients and peers who do send her referrals. Yes, send a handwritten thank you note. You do not need to include a gift card. Do not include your business card either, if you still have those.

But you really need to make sure that you are taking care of them throughout the year. That is how that we build out something that is meaningful.

Actually, the framework that I teach, the plan for people who refer to you of how you take care of them, there’s a framework there. And it’s based on what we call the Platinum Principles and a few other things that we pull from behavioral economics.

And one of the things is what we call minding your M&Ms, which is memorable and meaningful, which means that newsletter you want to send out, not going to cut it. Not going to cut it.

That card you want to send out for every major holiday, starting with New Year’s Eve, running through St. Patrick’s Day, maybe Valentine’s Day, hitting maybe Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and on and on. Not going to cut it because then you’re just mailing out a bunch of cards.

Memorable and meaningful is the way to go. And so understanding the framework and the science behind that allows you to build something that will allow you to be meaningful when you’re thanking your clients, in between them actually sending you referrals. Because when they’re sending you referrals, you’re also sending them a thank you note.

Now, of course, she also said non-cheesy ways to encourage her clients to refer her, right? And so that comes down to what I just answered the question before with having a process in place of how we cultivate people into referral sources.

Someone who’s never thought to refer you, but may, but could, but they’ve just never done it because maybe they’ve never thought of it. This isn’t about a very specific, like, wow thing you have to do or multiple wow things you got to do to get these people to refer you. This comes down to you building a real relationship with them, putting them first, and knowing the right language to use.

The thing that encourages your clients to refer to you or your centers of influence to refer to you, is knowing that you care about them, that you’re not out for yourself, and that you also then know how to plant referral seeds so that the idea referring you percolates in their consciousness and subconsciousness and actually becomes their idea, even though you’ve been planting the right language all along.

That is the missing piece that I find people get wrong more than not. It’s the language of how we plant referral seeds that matters. And we don’t plant them in every conversation or every interaction. There’s a cadence to it.

But that language piece, I mean, I’ve always said this, that is my secret sauce. When I figured that out and I figured out that’s what was helping me start generating my own referrals and then seeing it work for my clients, that is my secret sauce and that is what I provide to my clients.

Because I know we don’t just come up with this stuff on our own. Like, when you see it, you’re like, oh my gosh, that’s so simple and authentic and feels right. And you’re like, why didn’t I think of that myself? It’s like, just because you didn’t, right? And that’s OK.

Alright. And so my last question comes from a real estate agent. And the real estate agent asked, the biggest challenge for me is to come off authentic and not pushy or salesy.

She’s like, many in my industry have a bad reputation for being overly aggressive. That’s not me. I don’t want to pester. And I want to be authentic and be transparent and have integrity in all that I do. So maintaining those values while still generating referrals without asking is a nut I have yet to crack.

I totally get it. Every single client who shows up on my doorstep feels the exact same way. They want to be authentic. They don’t want to be pushy. They don’t want to be salesy. They don’t want to have a bad reputation as being aggressive or pushy, right?

They don’t want to pester people. They want to be authentic. They want to be transparent. They want to be genuine. And they want to have integrity in what they do. And they want to keep those values while still being able to receive referrals.

And that is exactly what I teach inside my programs, whether it is Your Next Five Referrals starter course, or it is the Building a Referable Business 12-month coaching program, or my VIP Referrals in a Day experience.

All of those things. All of those programs that I have teach you exactly how to do that. There’s not one podcast episode I could do lay it all out for you, right? And of course, I wouldn’t because that’s what my clients pay me for.

But that is the exact question. I mean, I thought this question was like bullseye to what a lot of my clients say when they talk to me before they become a client.

They’re like, I want referrals, but I want to do it in a way that feels good. But I also want it to work. And I want to make sure that I’m being authentic. Yes, and all of those things are possible. You just gotta follow the path to get there.

Alright, so thank you for these questions that were submitted. Anytime you have a question you want me to answer here on the podcast, all you have to do is shoot me an email. Just email me.

If you’re on my email list, you can respond to the weekly email you get from me every single Wednesday. Just hit reply on that email and ask me, hey, will you answer this question for me on the podcast? And I would be happy to do that.

Alright, the show notes page for this episode can be found at StaceyBrownRandall.com/330. It’s also where you’ll find links to any resources mentioned like the three ways to work with me.

We’re back with another great episode next week created with you and your needs in mind. Until then, you know what to do my friend, take control of your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.