This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "Why Referrals Are the REAL Secret to Agency Growth 1" (created July 23, 2025). It is an English interview-style conversation between Eric Siu and Neil Patel focused on agency growth and the importance of referrals and relationships versus AI-driven recommendations (ChatGPT/Perplexity). Topics include building relationships and events, differences in referral percentages (Eric cites ~30–35% for his agency; Neil cites ~70% for enterprise work), agency success rates (~80% when measured by ROI/NPS), impacts of external factors (example: tariffs affecting campaign performance), and a brief promotional mention of karrot.ai/ABM. The episode ends with an outro asking viewers to rate, review, and subscribe.
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How did you get people working at ChatGPT and Perplexity to refer? Because it's like, usually that's not a normal thing because like at least with Meta and Google you have that relationship, but how is that happening with ChatGPT and Perplexity?
We're building relationships with them.
Oh, okay, you're reaching out, building relationships, events, things like that. Yeah.
Yeah, because in a world of AI you can get recommendations from a platform like a ChatGPT, And that's great. And I think for small things, inexpensive things, new toothbrush, a camera, a television, I do believe people are going to use ChatGPT because it could be more analytical. But when it comes to like big expensive items, like someone signing up for Single Grain or NP Digital, our contracts are not cheap, right?
Mm-hmm.
I don't know what your pricing is, but I'm guessing your pricing is 6 figures plus for majority of your contracts. Because it's such a big decision, they're not going to just do research on ChatGPT and say, ChatGPT told me so, I'm going to sign up. You'll get a small percentage, but I genuinely believe just like most service-based businesses, the majority of your revenue is still going to come from referrals and relationships. I don't know how it is right now on Single Grain, but I'm guessing because you've been around for more than 10 years, a large chunk of your revenue comes from referrals and relationships of just knowing other YPOers, EOers, and them referring business to you. Would you agree with that statement?
Yeah. Yeah, I would. And, you know, actually, I was just telling Noah here, my past 2 days sleep has been bad because, you know, I was at a— I hosted like an AI founders dinner around here. And then yesterday was AI potluck, it was like AI founders potluck, right? And this is— it's no different than joining a peer group or like an EOYP or Hampton or something like that, or even us hanging out or like, you know, us having mutual friends where we hang out like once a year. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, It allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai, K-A-R-R-O-T, and we'll see you on the other side. In a world that's really driven by AI, people are going to long for more human connection. And who actually controls the power at the end of the day? It's actually the relationships. It's sure, you can be number one listed and that, that is important, but nothing thing beats relationships more because everything is people to people and people like doing business with people, not necessarily a ranking.
Yes.
So ranking is usually like when you're not sure what to look for, but when you have like a word of mouth thing, oh, Neil, who do you go to for a dentist? Oh dude, I go to this dentist over here and you get to watch TV and you wear these glasses over here. Like you're selling it to me, telling a story, right?
Yeah.
And then my friend's like, oh, you got to go to this eye doctor over here. Like they'll do this and that. Like sold, done. I don't need to think anymore.
Yep.
Because I trust the person.
When, with your agency, with your revenue, you do a lot more than a million bucks, but let's just use million dollars as a hypothetical. If you looked at a million dollars, what percentage of the revenue would you say comes from referrals and relationships?
I'd say right now it's probably like 30 to 35%.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
That's good.
What is yours?
70-ish percent. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's for enterprise, for SMB, it's probably 20-ish percent referrals, 80%, um, inbound and other forms of marketing. But from enterprise, which is majority of our revenue, you're looking at 70-plus percent.
And that makes sense because people move around.
Yeah, right.
And so that's most of the 70% is coming from people moving around that you did a good job for.
Yes.
Yeah. And the thing is, by the way, we'll call this out too, as an agency and even a software company, you're not going to do the best job 100% of the time.
No.
Maybe like, what do you think the percentage of time you're doing a good job?
It depends what you consider a good job. Like if you're talking about producing positive ROI, positive NPS, CSAT or something. Yeah. It's majority of the time by far.
80%.
Yeah. 80+ percent I would say. But there's going to be like 5, 10% of the time where things just don't align and you can't always control it. A great example of this is if you're doing marketing for Nike, okay, I'm giving you a real hypothetical here. We'll see what happens in the next few months. The US just passed a deal with Vietnam where it costs 20% more. I believe they implemented a 20% tariff. I don't know what it was before, but let's just go with it costs roughly 20% more now.
Yeah.
That means Nike, who produces a lot of products in Vietnam, they have to— they don't have to, but I'm guessing over time, because they usually say the business owners pass that cost over to the consumer because everyone has to end up paying it. It's going to hurt the people who are doing marketing. So if you're doing marketing for Nike and you're producing an amazing ROI, but just hypothetically imagine they increase their prices 20%, you're not going to perform as well and it could be a loss. And that was a campaign that didn't go well. But is that your fault? Is it external factors? The reality is it doesn't matter. It didn't work whether it was your fault or because of external factors or because of the company paying you. They had a shift in people and they never got anything implemented. You're never going to have 100% success rate, but when you fail, it doesn't matter if you were in the right or wrong, it still hurts you. And when you do good work and people are happy, it doesn't matter if you're in the right or wrong and you do some campaigns are messed up, but overall you made them a lot of money. You'll keep getting referrals.
What matters is ultimately, if we were to simplify this, is that you're learning and then you're just improving and then you're just being consistent for a long time. And that's really what, how all of this works. So we're going to end the episode here. See you guys later. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.
