A four-step process to build referrals: set your strategy, find advocates in your existing clients, test small incentives like coffee gift cards, then track results with scripts and clear asks. Systematize it by assigning tasks and capturing contacts from day one.
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? But I didn't like calling someone up and be like, hey, Dan, beer. How's the family? Like, how's your job going? Like, what are you guys doing? Any vacations planned? Like, 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 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, you know, 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 as good a transaction as I thought. Like, all right, so I got to work on him a little bit. You had me at reticular activators, right? So I think a more straightforward approach and you're just, 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, 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, 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.
