7 Steps to Invigorate Your Referral Business

Four steps to determine the overall referral strategy: I'll give you some time to think about that. Identify your potential advocate. Determine your offers.

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Think about the offers. I think the smaller, more subtle, just more manual effort, I think that's the easiest. Not that coffee is healthy for you, but anytime I get one of those Starbucks cards, I give them away to people on my team. It's just the coolest thing ever 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 plan part of a system and it just happens. It's in a Top Producer action plan and it just 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 process. There are some quick easy, down and dirty, tracking systems that you could put in place.

Decide how you'll communicate to your advocates. So this is where you can understand if you want to be inbound or outbound. How are you going to ask your advocates to go back for you? I never personally liked calling someone out of the blue as if I'm curious about what they want out of life. It's just like, "I know you, Lars, and that's that's not who you are." Instead, 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." He had a good transaction with us. I ask if he wants to go back for me. "Keep your keep your reticular activators up and send this business," I tell him, "We've got this core for a program we just set up." We have a special thing we do once a year for people.

You can say, "I didn't have a good transaction as I thought, so I got to work on them a little bit." 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? Yes or no."

If you won't help me like what's the problem. Like what can I do to make you advocate? There is 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.

So one thing that we've done differently - and this is 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 on day one when we ask them to come to the to the to the table with 50 SOI. I think Chari sends out a Google Docs where they fill in the name, email address, phone number and some notes, and they enter those into Boomtown and tag those as their SOI.

So they have their S.O.I. 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 even if a person is not set up in the search or they're looking to buy a home it's their database that they go to with the tags in there they can pull up their SOI and see their last contact.

And so when you have something like that (Boomtown, Top Producer, etc.), you can set up the same 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 props. But there is a next step to this that they need to know what to do with that and the language to use around 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? OK, 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 is referred by a friend of ours and we thought the friend actually knew this girl. She didn't, but she got through selling us knives that we didn't need.

Six hundred fifty-eight dollars we spent on knives, and as she filled out the paperwork, she wrote the numbers 1 through 20 drew a line at 10 and turned the paper around and push it to me. She said "If you give me more than 10 referrals I'll be..." entered into some contest. 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? All I need are two names."

She said, "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 with my team. But that's what you want to do you want to be that deliberate. Can you imagine 20 referrals?

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Launch Your New Referral Process. 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 do the 60-touch program, 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 it set up where as a team collectively we have 40 referred leads in a month. We don't have that right now. So that that's the challenge for everybody is to get to that level.