A four-step plan to build referrals deliberately: pick your strategy, find advocates, offer small incentives like gift cards, and track results. Use scripted asks instead of hoping people volunteer, tag contacts in your CRM, and make referrals a team goal with numbers attached.
I promise you, this is so far from anything that you've ever been to. And now, real quick, four steps. So determine the overall referral strategy. I'll give you some time to think about that. Identify your potential advocates. Determine your offers. Think about the offers. They don't have to be, I think the smaller, more subtle, just more manual effort. Like, I don't know, like, who doesn't like something at Starbucks? I mean, I think that's the easiest one. Not that coffee is really healthy for you, but anytime I get one of those cards, I give them away to people on my team. But it's just the coolest thing ever. It's like, oh, someone gave me a little card. And when I get them, I just feel so good about it, but it's not in my nature to do it. So make sure you make it part of a system and it just happens. It's in a top producer action plan and it happens. Or task somebody in your team to make it happen. Determine your offers. I think that's the fun part. Develop the benchmarks for your referral process. And there's some quick, easy down and dirty tracking systems that you can put in place, and they're in the worksheets book. Decide how you'll communicate to your advocates. So this is where you can, this is where you sort of decide if you want it to be inbound or outbound. How are you going to ask your advocates to go bat for you? I, I never personally liked. I don't know if Buffini taught Ford or Ford had just been around forever. But I didn't like calling someone up and be like, hey, Dan, beer, How's the family? How's your job going? What are you guys doing? Any vacations planned? What do you want out of your life? It's just like, oh, my God, I know you, Lars, and that's not who you are. I'm just like, hey, Dan, I'm growing my business and, and we set up some crazy goals for next year and I need your help. I know you had a good transaction with us. I hate that I haven't reached out to you in a couple years, but would you be willing to go back for me and keep your reticular activators up and send us business? We've got this cool referral program we just set up. Nothing special, but we have a special thing we do once a year for people. I mean, I think hitting someone with that in 60 seconds, they're like either yes or no. Like, okay, no, I didn't have a Good. As good a transaction as I thought. Like, all right, so I gotta work on him a little bit. Right. So I think a more straightforward approach and you're just telling them what you set up. And I need your help. Will you help me? Like yes or no? Like if you won't help me, like what's the problem? Like, what can I do to make you an advocate? There's some scripting involved here. You want to be the one to sit down and thoughtfully think about how you want your team to communicate this with their database. And so one thing that we've done differently, this has been a big shift for our team is that we're helping our agents reach out to their soi and come in with an soi. They're expected. I don't know if it's on day one. I think it is day one. We ask them to come to the table with 50 soi. I think you send out. Sure. You send out a Google sheets. So Google Docs where they fill in name, first name, last name, email address and phone number and some notes or something and they come to that and they enter those as part of their learning Boomtown into Boomtown, they tag them as their soi. So they have their soi and they're building their database and they're now identifying their advocates in their database. So we use Boomtown as our CRM for our agents. So agent. So even if the person's not set up in a search or they're looking to buy a home, it's their database that they go to with the tags in there that can pull up their soi and they can see that they're last contact. And so when you have something like that, like a database like that, like a boomtown or anything, even if you run out of top producer, you can set up template emails and get the scripting in there where they're generally following the process, develop other materials. I still like those referral cards and having those around the office. They're just private. But there is a next step to this. They need to know what to do with that and the language to use around, like why that referral card is in there. So you've got to be able to train your agents, you've got to be deliberate and look someone right there and say I did a great job for you. Right. Okay, who do you know? Give me two names right now. I know everyone has heard the Cutco story. I had this like 22 year old girl come into our house who was referred by a friend of mine friend of ours, and we thought the friend actually knew this girl. She didn't. But she got through selling us we didn't need knives. $658 we spent with this girl. And she, as she filled out the paperwork, she didn't even have a form. On a piece of notebook paper, like college ruled notebook paper, she wrote the numbers 1 through 20, drew a line at 10 and turned the paper around and pushed it to me and said, if you give me more than 10 referrals, I'll be entered into some contest or something. And her whole business was that she just got referred from person to person to person. She asked me for 20 referrals, not two referrals. Like, hey, do you know two couples exactly like you that don't need knives and will spend $700 with me? Like, you got a nice house. I know this is going to work out really well. All I need are two names. Can you tell me 20 of your neighbors? And I was just like, I'm not going to do that for you right now. But I took the piece of paper, I shared it with my team. But that's what you want to do. You want to be that deliberate. Can you imagine 20, 20 referrals she asked for? And then you got to launch the process, and you got to make it a thing. It's a thing in your business now that has a life. It's a lead generation pillar in your business. The way we do it now is that we just track it. We track. We do the 60 touch, and then we just track what comes in. But it's not a standalone pillar in our business. So we get a lot of business from it, but we don't have, okay, this goal as a team, collectively, you're going to get four referred leads, every one of you. So collectively, as a company, we're going to have 40 referred leads in this month. We don't have that right now. So that's the challenge for everybody, is to get to that level.
