Stacey Brown Randall on Rethinking Referrals

Show Timeline:   

3:17 How Stacey helps advisors generate referrals without asking
4:42 An unconventional way of driving referrals
7:03 Recognizing the patterns in your clients’ referral behavior and leveraging that information
10:37 The importance of keeping information about your client referrals tracked and handy
13:05 How Stacey coaches advisors to understand and generate more referrals
16:10 Stacey’s overview of the 5-step referral process strategy
19:17 Appreciating and building meaningful relationships with clients who are referral sources
24:45 How to manage a referral that is outside your target market
28:32 The language advisors should use to allow them to plant referral seeds
32:30 Why you need to provide your referral sources with a memorable experience
35:07 Top three things financial advisors should do to generate more referrals

Links:

Website: https://staceybrownrandall.com/
LinkedIn: https://ee.linkedin.com/in/staceybrandall
Twitter: https://twitter.com/staceybrandall
Blog: http://growthbyreferrals.com/blog/
Podcast: https://staceybrownrandall.com/podcast/ 
Book: Generating Business Referrals Without Asking: A Simple Five Step Plan to a Referral Explosion
Advisor Thought Leader Summit: advisorthoughtleadersummit.com

Want more?

Stephen Wershing: www.TheClientDrivenPractice.com/checklistblog
Julie Littlechild: www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

Julie:              
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and on this week’s show, Steve and I are more than a little excited to be speaking with Stacey Brown Randall. Why? Because she teaches a no-asking, referral generation strategy. We think it’s a great message, and a great process.

Stacey is a three-time entrepreneur, the author of Generating Business Referrals Without Asking, and host of the Roadmap to Grow Your Business podcast. We talked to her about her five-step process to drive more referrals in a way that’s comfortable and reflects why clients refer in the first place. And she tells us the top three myths that get in that way of driving more referrals. What’s so interesting about Stacey’s approach is that it’s born of pure experience. The lessons she teaches were learned in the trenches as she grew her own business. And she’s very open about what worked and what didn’t.

And with that, let’s get to our conversation with Stacey.

Speaker 2:       
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And now, Becoming Referable.

Julie:
So Stacey, welcome. So happy to have you here with us today.

Steve: 
Welcome, Stacey.

Stacey:  
Thank you, Steve and Julie. I appreciate it.Julie:

Well, I’m so excited because it seems we all have a common interest in referrals. So that’s a good place to start this conversation. And I’m going to talk to you about some of the great work that you’re doing, and some of the methodologies that you’ve got for advisors, but can you just start by telling us a little bit about the work that you’re doing, just to give our listeners some context for that?

Stacey:    
Sure. It’s interesting. I started out as a productivity and business coach when I started my second business. And it was during that time with starting my second business that I realized there was a way to grow my business better than I needed and wanted to be able to do. And so I really stumbled upon referrals, and from there figured out some ways to do some really great work with clients and with my own company of growing my business on referrals. And I kind of shifted my whole practice into that focus of really helping people generate referrals without asking, through my online trainings, my VIP one-on-one coaching that I have, and really helping people dive in to understand how referrals work and then how do we make it work for us in a way that isn’t what is typically the advice we hear, which is how to ask. But I’m the exact opposite of that: focused on how you generate referrals without asking.

Julie:        
So are we. So we won’t argue on that point.

Steve:     
We’re in complete agreement there.

Julie:     
So that’s interesting. You actually switched gears because you were finding success in this other area. But I assume you also spotted a good opportunity or recognized that a lot of professionals were probably grappling with this same issue. What was the problem that you saw that you really thought you could fix?

Stacey:    
So I have to be honest, I would tell you that the problem I saw I wanted to fix for myself. I mean, that was ultimately why I started working and looking at referrals. And the problem that I saw was when my first business failed. It was an HR consulting firm. When it failed and I looked at how I generated business I realized I worked entirely too hard for every client that I did land. And there wasn’t anything easy about that business. And that’s not the only thing that led to its failure.

I had to get a job after my business failure. When I had an opportunity to leave my job, go back out on my own, I wanted to make business easier for myself. So ultimately that was what I was after. I was like, I need to find a way to do business development in a way that I’m willing to do it. Where I can be authentic, I can be somewhat happy or willing to do it. I wasn’t going to do tactics that wasn’t going to work for me. But I also didn’t want to go through another business failure, so I was willing to try different things too.

So when I looked back at my first failure and I realized, wow, I had no referrals in my first business. What does it look like to grow a business with referrals? That’s when I started doing all the research and being like what does this look like for me. And so that’s really how I stumbled upon I want to generate referrals, but wait, I don’t like that advice that I have to ask, can I figure out how to do it different.

My business was the guinea pig. I didn’t know if it was going to be successful, to be honest. It was successful, and I happened to be coaching what would become my ideal client, for my referral work. So with my small business owners and solopreneurs, a lot of professional firms that were focused on building relationships like financial advisors, insurance agents, realtors, CPAs, attorneys, those were also who I was coaching. So when I started talking about my business success around referrals, and how I was doing it, they just wanted to know more. And it’s then that I discovered what I had figured out isn’t specific to me. It isn’t because Stacey is who Stacey is that makes it work. Because when they started having success with it that’s when I realized I’m actually onto something here. There is a way to generate referrals in a different way for those that are open to it.

Julie:          
Tell us about that testing process. It’s fascinating that this is tested in the trenches in a way. How did you go about trying different approaches? Just talk us through that a little.

Stacey:      
I think the first thing you have to pay attention to when you’re looking at wanting to generate referrals is if you’ve been in business for any amount of time, usually more than two years, is looking back to the referrals you had received. When I started my second company, my coaching practice, I realized that very quickly my first couple of clients came on board because they knew me. Going out to have coffee with people that are in my network that knew me, and I was doing that just because I wanted them to know. This is what I’m doing now, so they could keep me in mind. What I was ultimately after was them just remembering what I was doing, but they became clients, which was unexpected. And then that’s where my referrals really started, from those first handful of clients and then it would snowball from there.

So I paid attention to when the referrals were happening. And that’s really what it was. I just started paying attention to why are they referring me and when are they referring me. And the why they were referring me is because I was doing great work and they were having success. And when people have success or transformations in their business or in their life, they are usually more willing to talk about it. And the second thing is is that I was paying attention to when. And it typically happened after I had done something for them. Not necessarily the work for them, like a coaching session, but when I was taking care of them and I was showing gratitude and thankfulness to them for being a client. And then for a while, thank you for referring me. Then I noticed that there was always usually a pattern to it.

And so as I started to take that pattern and apply it to my business, that’s when I realized there’s actually some steps here, there’s a process here. And then that’s what I ultimately ended up teaching to my clients. But that testing ground, it really was, hey, there’s something happening here, let me pay attention to it. Let me be open to it and pay attention to it. And then as I started teaching it, that’s when I realized, wait, it’s five steps and here’s what it looks like, and here’s the language you use, and here’s what you’re supposed to do. All of that came after I actually started teaching it to others. But in the beginning, it really was just what’s happening, when is it happening, why is it happening, and can I figure out a way to duplicate that.

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