Are You Too Busy For Referrals?

The Refer­ral Mas­ter­mind: Bri­an Buffini

Ask just about any real­tor in the coun­try if he or she has heard of Bri­an Buffi­ni and you will hear a resound­ing YES. Bri­an came to the U.S. from Ire­land in his ear­ly twen­ties to live the Amer­i­can dream. He became a real estate agent in San Diego. Bri­an quick­ly became a very suc­cess­ful and high­ly rec­og­nized agent not only in San Diego but also across the U.S. for his unique way of grow­ing his busi­ness by referrals.

I used to go to the same church as Bri­an and worked with him on some sum­mer side busi­ness endeav­ors while in high school. Bri­an could sell just about any­thing. He was such a pos­i­tive and upbeat man des­tined for help­ing oth­er real­tors to suc­ceed in the art of sell­ing by referrals.

After a num­ber of years of being one of the top real estate agents in the coun­try, he moved into the con­sult­ing world, which he called Buffi­ni & Com­pa­ny. He devel­oped a com­plete lead gen­er­a­tion and coach­ing busi­ness around the art of ask­ing for refer­rals. Bri­an has taught thou­sands of real­tors to use a rather sim­ple tech­nique to grow one’s busi­ness. You may have heard it: ​“I am nev­er too busy for refer­rals!” You might see this quote at the bot­tom of an email, mar­ket­ing piece, or per­haps a real­tor will wrap up a con­ver­sa­tion with those words. I’ll admit, it can seem a lit­tle cheesy and fake when I hear it, only because I know where the phrase became pop­u­lar. Yet it got me think­ing about my con­trac­tor friends and asked myself, ​“Are they ever too busy for referrals?”

Being Busy Is a Good Thing, Right?

Going on inside a busi­ness own­er’s head right about now: ​“The phone is ring­ing off the hook. I’m work­ing 70 – 80 hours a week. I’m sell­ing jobs at the price I want. I am hav­ing a hard time hir­ing new crews to keep up with my work­load. Cus­tomers seem hap­py with my ser­vice. Employ­ees aren’t com­plain­ing. I am so busy. My busi­ness is grow­ing, so life should be good right about now.” If this sounds famil­iar, you know you have that gut feel­ing that some big things are still miss­ing. Chances are you have become so busy with the day to day oper­a­tions and keep­ing your head above water you are per­haps miss­ing three very impor­tant things:

1. End­ing a job as though it is your only job: Cus­tomers don’t care you are busy. They care about their home and their sched­ule only. They can tell when you are rush­ing at the end of a job to rush off to the next project. This will begin to cre­ate doubt and ques­tion the qual­i­ty of your prod­uct if they feel you are hur­ry­ing through their project. They might start look­ing around for things you missed or feel you are too busy for refer­rals. They don’t want to rec­om­mend you to a friend and feel embar­rassed if you drop the ball because of being busy.
2. No fol­low up plan once the project is com­plete: This is a pret­ty com­mon mis­take even when you are not busy. If you don’t use and work with a Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) pro­gram, chances are, you’ll miss this step. It is a good prac­tice to make sure you always have a fol­low up plan. I know a few clients who use a sys­tem called ​“Send Out Cards” when they fin­ish a project. They have it cus­tomized up front to send out per­son­al­ized greet­ing cards for the next cou­ple of years until a free war­ran­ty inspec­tion can take place. No fol­low up means no con­tact with your pre­vi­ous cus­tomer, and this will cause your cus­tomers to begin to for­get who you are or feel that you again must be busy and not need the refer­rals or future work.
3. You are too busy to ask for a refer­ral: This one impor­tant step might be one of the key dri­ving fac­tors as to why your com­pa­ny does not get more referrals.

Tak­ing Action Should Not Be Painful

No mat­ter how busy you may get this time of year, you should con­sid­er mak­ing it a prac­tice for every­one in your com­pa­ny to ask for refer­rals. This should start at the begin­ning of your rela­tion­ship with a cus­tomer. Tell them that most of your busi­ness comes by refer­rals and repeat busi­ness (if it does). Tell them you plan on giv­ing them the best pos­si­ble ser­vice start to fin­ish. Be gen­uine about this! Plan on mul­ti­ple ways to hug your cus­tomers (read the book) through­out the entire process: espe­cial­ly the end.

Final­ly, why is work­ing by refer­rals so vital­ly impor­tant even though it sounds like a lot of work and a roy­al pain? Close to 80% of my dad’s paint­ing busi­ness is repeat and refer­ral work. The extra 20% of his rev­enue comes from things like the web, trucks, yard signs, spon­sor­ing events and so forth. That takes a lot of time and mon­ey to pro­duce that 20%. Also the final 20% are typ­i­cal­ly the least prof­itable jobs because he has to spend his resources hunt­ing down the work and being extra com­pet­i­tive on pric­ing. So we are con­tin­u­al­ly look­ing for ways to increase that 80% to 85% and some­day 90% and more. The more you can work by refer­rals the less time and resources you need to spend chas­ing down jobs that will not make you much money.

I’d love to hear by email, on the social net­works or in the com­ments below how you build your busi­ness by refer­ral. What do you do now or pur­pose to do to keep cus­tomers hap­py and refer­ring your services.