How to Turn Your Referral List Into a Referral Team

Now, for many people, they'll spend a big chunk of time getting that list figured out, evaluating people, and, and get it all done, and then they expect the referrals to just start flowing, and nothing happens.

Six months later, you still don't have any referrals.

You're frustrated.

You throw it all away and move on to something else.

Now, oftentimes you didn't ever reach back out to those referral partners, or maybe you did just one time follow up with them.

Building a referral team is not a one-time action.

It's a process with four distinct steps.

And unfortunately, many business owners try and leapfrog from step one all the way to step four without doing the middle two, and that simply never works.

Here's the actual four steps you should be going through in order to convert those potential referral partners into customers.

The actual sequence looks like this.

Step one is the warm introduction or the cold ask, but done right.

You can't really partner with someone you haven't met.

It just doesn't work.

So step one is getting in front of those people.

To get in front of them, there's typically two different paths.

The warm lead is oftentimes the easiest.

Look at that list of potential partners and ask yourself, "Who do I know that can introduce me to that person?" A mutual contact that can send a two-sentence text message or email is worth 100 cold leads.

Imagine if the mutual acquaintance sent a group introduction text message that said, "Hey Bob, you should meet Tom over here." What would that be worth? That's huge.

That warm introduction does so much to lift up the level of trust that's going to be placed on you because a, a mutual connection introduced the two of you already.

Unfortunately, sometimes there's just not a warm path, and if that's the case, you've got to do cold outreach to get in contact with these people.

And it's important to recognize that a cold ask is okay, but you wanna be really specific.

Instead of saying something generic like, "Hey, I'd love to sit down, grab coffee sometime, and learn about your business," maybe you could say something like this: "I'm a residential plumber that works with a ton of homeowners during and after the buying process.

I'd love to take you to coffee to learn more about how you help homeowners buy and sell homes." Now, it's important that you're not trying to pitch them anything during that warm introduction, except for, "Let's sit down and connect." This type of message often works well b- because it's direct, clear, and to the point, and it's really great because you're not trying to shove a bunch of sales pitch down them at the same time.

All right.

Let's jump to step two.