MBA1643 Guest Teacher – Stacey Brown Randall – How to Generate Referrals Without Asking

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Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show the place to get the information so you can do the implementation every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a guest teacher epis. On our guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today's guest teacher is Stacy Brown Randall and she'll show you how to generate referrals without asking. Referrals are the backbone of most businesses. I know for a fact with our software business webinar Ninja, it's the second most common way we get customers. When somebody recommends something to somebody else, it's often all they need to hear to make the decision to buy. Whether it's a restaurant referral or or the right tool for the right job or your product or service. But how do you get those going, those referrals going without sounding desperate and asking every five seconds. Well that's why we brought on Stacy to teach you her guest teacher lesson. There's so much she's going to be sharing with you, including a step by step plan to do exactly that to get referrals without asking. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Stacy Brown Randall, our guest teacher today is a best selling author. Her award winning book is Generating business Referrals without asking. She's also the host of the Roadmap to grow your business podcast. She's been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, CEO World and Cheddar tv and she's here today to teach you her step by step plan to get referrals for your business without asking. So I'm going to pass it on to Stacey, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and to give my insights. But for now, take it away, Stacey.

Hey there, I'm Stacy Brown Randall. Thanks for joining me. Today I'll be teaching you how to generate referrals without asking. So let's get down to business. For generations we've been taught that if we want referrals for our business, we have to ask for them. But what if you could generate referrals for your business without asking for them? I know it sounds contradictory based on how we've been taught to generate referrals and for the last few decades, but if you flip how you look at referrals and pay attention to the brain science and the psychology behind why referrals happen, then you quickly understand why asking for referrals is just all wrong. The first thing we have to understand about how to generate referrals without asking is to really understand what where those old school referral triggers like asking came from. There are actually three most common what I call old school referral triggers. One, it's the advice that you have to ask or two, it's the advice that says if you want referrals you have to pay for them. Or three, the advice that says if you want referrals you have to be overly promotional and gimmicky. So if asking, paying and being overly promotional and gimmicky just doesn't fit with your brand reputation or the image you're projecting in the marketplace, well, you were just out of luck because that's the only way we've been taught to generate referrals. And those three most common old school referral triggers, asking, paying and being overly promotional and gimmicky. It's important to understand where they came from because when you know where they came from, then you can understand why they have been around forever. And that starts with us really understanding how we've been taught and to build a sales strategy. Now most training will teach you when you're building A sales strategy, you've got two parts. Part one is of course you've got your prospecting plan. The prospecting plan is the stuff that you do that's supposed to get you as fast as possible to the prospect. So it could be pay for, click right, it could be Facebook ads, it could be networking, cold calling, cold emailing, or having a one on one coffee. But it's the idea that you'll quickly get to that prospect who may want to say yes to working with you. It's called the prospecting activities or the prospecting plan. The other part of the sales strategy we've been taught that we have to have is marketing. And the marketing is, you know, when you think about it a little bit longer term in terms of making it work and turn prospects into clients. But the marketing could be your website, it could be the advertising that you run, it could be the publicity or PR that you go after. But the idea here is that we've had activities that fit within either prospecting or marketing. That is how we actually drive business development and sales within our business. And they're both really good, they're things you actually do need to grow your business. But the problem is what's missing is how we look at referrals when we try to look at them understanding from a prospecting mentality or a marketing mentality. So when we take referrals and we think prospecting, we try to get you as quickly as we can to the referral, which is where all that advice that you must ask or pay came from. If I'm trying to get you quickest to the referral, naturally, decades and decades ago, what we came up with, right, was that I need you to just go ask or offer compensation, offer a kickback, offer something that'll get that person to say yes to sending you a referral. Except that violates the human dynamic and the psychology behind why referrals really happen. And if I'm thinking about referrals from a marketing perspective, well, that's where the let's get gimmicky and overly promotional comes in. That advice comes in if I'm trying to put it under the marketing umbrella. Now here's the thing. Your sales strategy is not a two legged stool, it's a three legged stool. So if you really want to generate referrals, you need your prospecting plan, you need your marketing plan, but you also need a separate referral plan. And that's the key and super, super important. So the advice to ask, pay or be overly promotional and gimmicky came because we were trying to slam referrals into the prospecting mentality or the prospecting plan or the marketing mentality. The marketing plan. But what we know is we really need a third plan of how we treat referrals and our overall sales strategy and umbrella. Okay, so now you understand what those old school referral triggers were. And now you get, okay, I actually need a referral plan. It's kind of that fourth and better way to generate referrals is by having a referral plan. So what does it look like to have a referral plan? What are the steps that are fit within that referral plan? Well, there are actually five. Step number one is to understand who are your referral sources. You actually need to go through the process of identifying who are the clients that were referred to you and then who did the referring Identify who are your referral sources. I know it's not the sexiest of all the steps, and it definitely involves data digging into your business. But if you have a database or a CRM, this will be a little bit easier. But what you need to do is look at your list of clients and then identify the source of how they became a client. Did they come through a Facebook ad, or did you meet them at a networking event, or were they referred to you right by Pat Brown? It just kind of depends on where they came from. And the idea here is, is to. Once you've identified who your referral sources are, then you can start. The next step in the process is making sure you know how you're going to take care of them and cultivate more referrals from them in the future. Now, truly, step two feels a little out of line in terms of how these steps fit together, but it's really important, and it is your ability to remember, handwrite a thank you note every time you receive a referral, because why should I send you any more referrals if you can't thank me for the one I just sent you? Pretty simple step. Step three, though, is we actually need a way to cultivate a relationship with our referral sources in an ongoing way that allows us to be memorable and meaningful. But to do that in a way where we're actually taking care of our referral sources in between that opportunity to write thank you notes because they've sent us a referral. So what we have to focus on is where referrals come from. Relationships. So your job is to cultivate relationships. Deeper, better ones, stronger ones, ones built on gratitude and thankfulness with your referral sources. Yes, of course, you do that by writing thank you notes every time they send you a referral. But also you do it in between sending those thank you notes in an ongoing way that allows you to have a true relationship, top of mind relationship, memorable and meaningful with your referral sources. And then, of course, the fourth step is you gotta use the right language when you're doing your outreach to your referral sources. So I call them planting referral seeds. But it's your way of thanking your referral sources for the fact that they're referring you by also taking care of them and also planting referral seeds when you're doing your outreach to them. So here's a really simple example that'll probably make this all make sense. When you're looking at who your referral sources are and you realize they have some commonalities, let's just say for sake of argument that they happen to be business owners who are also parents. So as part of your memorable and meaningful outreach to your referral sources, you could recognize Mother's Day and Father's Day. And how about for Mother's Day, you actually sent a Wonder Woman water bottle. And on the card you could say, never forget, you are a hero. You're definitely my hero for referring clients to me. We're planting a seed. We're being memorable and meaningful, and we're meeting our referral sources where they are and recognizing that we see them and we understand where they are in life. A business owner or even a working parent. Right. That is also, of course, a parent. It's this idea of understanding what's memorable and meaningful to your referral sources. So the outreach I do to mine would probably be different from the outreach you do to yours, because it starts with step one, which is the identification of who these referral sources are. And remember, referral sources are always humans, so we're always doing something for someone else. But when you understand who your referral sources are, you can group them together and then use that right language and create a system around it where this can actually be a system and a process within your business. It's not like you're trying to do individual outreach multiple times a year to individual referral sources. You can start grouping them together as well. So it's really important that you understand the number one thing you can do right now is figure out who are your referral sources, identify who your referral sources are, and then of course, you can go through step two through five, make sure you know how to send them a thank you note, make sure you are going to follow up with them in a meaningful and memorable way that keeps you top of mind planting the right referral seed language and creating this into a system so it becomes part of your workflow and you actually execute on it. If you want to generate referrals without asking for them, then you're going to have to have another process. And it's exactly the step by step process I taught you. Identify your referral sources, thank them when they send you a referral. Make sure you're staying top of mind with them by being memorable and meaningful and consistently making sure that they know how much you appreciate them using the right referral seed language. So that's how they think about you and turning this into a process or system. When you think about it and know that referrals only come from relationships, it makes sense that this would be the process you would follow to generate more referrals in your business. All right guys, this was Stacy Brown Randall and if you want to continue learning about how to get referrals the right way, I challenge you to take my Referral Ninja quiz@referralquiz.com It's just nine simple questions to test your ability and your skills at generating referrals. It's just referralquiz.com thanks so much for joining me today. Back to you, Omar.

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Thank you so much, Stacey Brown Randall, for that great guest teacher lesson. I can tell you firsthand from our own referral system at Webinar Ninja, where we have nearly 3,000 referral partners. We found that 95% of all the revenue we make from referrals get generated from only 5% of all our referral partners. So even within the people that refer you right zone in on the people that do a fantastic job that bring in most of your referrals and nurture that relationship so that you can make sure that stream of great referrals keeps on coming in. I love some of the gift ideas that Stacy mentioned. Even giving them a simple shout out in your newsletter. Mentioning them in their website and their business is a huge compliment and something.

That they won't forget.

Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you don't miss a beat. Also, if you want more content, if you want more exclusive tips, go ahead and follow us on instagram over@instagram.com 100mba Before I go, I want to leave you with this Recommendations are gold. And if you have any kind of recommendation system or referral system, introduce it to your customers. Once they've established themselves as, you know, sort of long term customers, like even if they've just been with you for two months or so, send them an automated email and tell them, hey, do you know about this program that we have? If they're happy and they're sticking with you, that means they're happy to recommend you. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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