/
RSS Feed
Companies are constantly seeking innovative approaches to customer acquisition. Traditional advertising methods are increasingly becoming less effective, while referral marketing is growing. According to HubSpot, companies that excel at referral marketing generate 69% faster close times and 59% higher lifetime customer values.
In this episode, Chris is joined by Brandon Barnum, Author of “Raving Referrals” and CEO of HOA.com, to discuss how this dual-purpose strategy boosts customer acquisition and offers significant insights into customer behaviors and preferences.
The Role of Community in Referral Marketing
A thriving online community can be a gold mine for your business in an era where every click, like, and share counts. By generating authentic conversations around your products or services, you heighten brand awareness and build trust, making it easier for community members to refer others. The notion is simple: people trust recommendations from those within their network, especially from a community bonded by common interests or needs.
Automating the Referral Process
Automation has revolutionized how businesses operate, and referral marketing is no exception. Implementing automated referral programs can ensure a seamless transition from receiving a recommendation to making a purchase, thereby increasing the chances of conversion. Automated email sequences, social media prompts, and even SMS messages can remind customers to share referral codes, provide testimonials, or partake in surveys. These computerized actions contribute to a rich data set that enables a deep understanding of customer preferences and behaviors.
Don’t forget to be Personal
Personalization serves as the linchpin for a successful referral marketing strategy. When you take the time to personalize referral requests or thank-you notes, you’re investing in a relationship, not just a transaction. Leveraging data to tailor messages or offering personalized incentives showcases your brand’s commitment to individual customer needs. This fosters trust and engenders loyalty, motivating customers to engage with the referral program and become long-term advocates for your brand. Personalization elevates your referral marketing from a mere tactic to a relationship-building strategy.
Unveiling the Benefits
Referral marketing is not just another channel to acquire customers; it offers multiple benefits that often go overlooked:
- High Conversion Rate: Referral leads typically have higher conversion rates than other media, as the authorities are usually pre-qualified.
- Cost-Effectiveness: A well-crafted referral program can be more cost-effective than traditional advertising, offering a higher ROI.
- Enhanced Customer Insights: The data collected through referrals can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and loyalty, aiding in targeted marketing and product development.
Three Key Steps to Maximize Gains from Referral Marketing
- Identify Key Advocates: Not all customers are created equal regarding referrals. Use your customer data to identify the most likely to refer others and target them with specialized incentives.
- Customize the Referral Rewards: One size doesn’t fit all. Customize your referral program to suit the various segments of your customer base. For instance, younger customers prefer discounts on future purchases, whereas older people might appreciate cash rewards.
- Measure and Optimize: To understand your customers better, continually monitor the metrics associated with your referral program. Evaluate the number of referrals, the conversion rate, and the quality of the leads. Utilize this data to fine-tune your program for optimal results.
Referral Marketing and Beyond
Referral marketing transcends beyond just a tactic; it’s a strategy that synergizes community building, automation, and data analysis to grow your customer base and offer profound insights into their behavior. Companies can expand and foster a community of loyal customers by identifying key advocates, customizing rewards, and adopting a data-driven approach.
Incorporating these elements into your referral marketing strategy will boost your customer acquisition and offer invaluable data, giving you a deeper understanding of your market. So why wait? Start transforming your customer acquisition strategy with the power of referrals today.
Episode Summary
In this episode, Chris Hood interviews Brandon Barnum, CEO of hoa.com and author of “Raving Referrals,” about the power of referral marketing. They discuss how referral marketing can boost customer acquisition and improve customer loyalty. Barnum emphasizes the importance of creating brand champions and influencers who can advocate for your business. He also shares strategies for automating the referral process and incorporating customer feedback into product improvements. Barnum highlights the value of personalized rewards and recognition in building customer loyalty. He suggests creating referral partnerships with other businesses that serve your target audience to expand your reach. Barnum also offers a referral score quiz to help companies identify areas for improvement in their referral marketing efforts.
Chris Hood (00:00):
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Companies are constantly seeking innovative approaches to customer acquisition. Traditional advertising methods are increasingly becoming less effective while referral marketing is growing. According to HubSpot, companies that excel at referral marketing generate 69% faster close times, and 59% higher lifetime customer values. In this episode, I am joined by Brandon Barnum, author of Raving Referrals and c e o of hoa.com to discuss how this dual purpose strategy boost customer acquisition and offers significant insights into customer behaviors and preferences. Grab a copy of my new book, customer Transformation, A seven Stage Strategy for Customer Alignment and Business Value. This is your essential guide for customer success in the digital age and a framework to adapt to your customer’s ever evolving needs and aspirations. Available now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or my website, and to support the show, visit chris hood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood and let’s get connected.
Voice Over (01:23):
Connecting Access. Granted, it’s the Chris Hood digital show. We’re global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Your digital evolution starts Now. Here’s your host, Chris Hood.
Chris Hood (01:55):
Let’s get to know our guest. Brandon, would you mind introducing yourself?
Brandon Barnum (01:59):
You bet. Sure. My name is Brandon Barn. I’m the c e O of hoa.com. I’ve been kind of in the technical world for really 25 years, building business by referrals, but for the last 13 years I’ve been building tech platforms to help people build more business by referral.
Chris Hood (02:16):
Awesome. Well, that’s a great place for us to start. Then we think about referrals and sometimes we look at that as a marketing effort or maybe we think of it as just a general business business development practice. Let’s define what is referral marketing or just referrals in general.
Brandon Barnum (02:35):
Referrals is all about, quite frankly, helping somebody solve a problem. But for a business, it’s about attracting new clients, new patients, new guests, whatever it is that your business focuses on, and there’s some really amazing statistics and research in the area. Chris, for example, 84% of B two B sales start with the referral. So if you’re selling to business owners is critically important that you get somebody as your champion, your advocate, somebody that’s opening the door and introducing you to the decision makers how deals get done.
Chris Hood (03:10):
Yeah, I had somebody reach out to me just a couple of days ago and wanted to talk about building some additional social media content for me, and I was like, that’s not my audience. They’re like, well, yeah, but everybody’s on social media. My audience is not on social media. Actually, a lot of my business is direct, we’ll call it word of mouth, which is really referrals. When companies start to think about this, they’re going to have a lot of different perspectives, and I just touched on social media. Isn’t influencers just another form of referrals?
Brandon Barnum (03:46):
It really is absolutely a hundred percent. We really talk about and teach people how to create brand champions for your business, and whether that is an affiliate program or an ambassador program where you’re incentivizing people to send you business and sharing some of that revenue with them, that’s one of the things that we recommend is a referral rewards program. But quite frankly, you should be influencing influencers. Think about who is already serving your perfect prospects, who already has a relationship and is in a position of trust with the people that you want to win over as clients. Those are the people that you need to court for your business as your brand champion.
Chris Hood (04:27):
Yeah. Now there’s a very basic marketing principle to this. We start off with the sale. They convert ultimately into that influencer or to that advocate, and there’s a process that we can track and determine at what point in time do they become that advocate for you. Part of building communities is understanding that the community is not just, Hey, let’s have this big community of passionate people, but it is understanding that they are going to advocate on your behalf to grow your business, and I don’t think a lot of businesses take that next leap. A community is much more than just a way to understand what your consumer is doing.
Brandon Barnum (05:13):
Oh, it’s huge. It’s huge. And it’s interesting. The man who’s known as the godfather of networking is Ivan Meisner. He started B N I Business Networking International, and they’ve got over 200,000 members around the world that meet in these local referral groups where they have one person in each industry that comes together to meet and have breakfast every week so that they can do business together. Well, he says 98% of businesses rely on referrals, yet only 3% have a system in place for their referrals, and that’s what we find all the time. People are uncomfortable asking for referrals. They haven’t automated the ask, which is one of the things that we teach, and as a result, they don’t have as many business opportunities as they’d like because they get, not because they ask not.
Chris Hood (06:02):
I think you touch on a good point, which would be how self-serve this? How do you build a platform that allows people to come in and basically say, Hey, I want to sign up for this. I want to be an advocate. I am passionate about your product and brand, and I want to be able to share my own experiences without going through all of the hassles that I think we typically think about like, well, I don’t want to be on video. I don’t want to. How do we customize and build that opportunity in an automated way?
Brandon Barnum (06:36):
It all depends on the type of business that you have, but quite frankly, when we talk about automating the ask, it’s ensuring that you have a referral program that’s built in to your autoresponder emails, your welcome emails to your clients, your members, if you have a physical location that you have referral cards that you hand out, that you help people see that you are there and you’re going to incentivize them to refer business to you. And then we also teach the art of the Ask. So automating the ask is ensuring that your systems are integrated with referral requests, that you’re constantly teaching and training your clients in your community that you work by referral and you would love to help the people that they care about in their life.
Chris Hood (07:22):
Now, I’ll give you a great example of this in play, there is a company that I was looking at for Backyard Furniture. They had a really unique way of building a referral program, and basically what they wanted to do was say, we trust in our furniture so much that we want you to go visit your neighbors who have the furniture in their backyard, so you can go and try it out, sit down and talk to them, and then those individuals sign up and say, yes, I want to be a part of your referral program. I’m happy to open up my back door and allow people to come in and check it out. It’s a fabulous idea. However, the process by which to become one of these individuals to open up their back door and come is a nightmare, and then you can’t just randomly go and show up to one of your neighbors and ask them to see their furniture. You’ve got to go through this entire sales and onboarding process before they will even give you the names and addresses of those neighbors so that you can go check it out. So there’s these blockers to become an advocate and there’s these blockers to go and get referrals from those advocates. Again, a great idea in theory, but so many restrictions along the way.
Brandon Barnum (08:43):
Yeah, you’ve got to make yourself easy to refer. That’s one of the things that we teach in the Raving Referrals book and system is make sure that you and your business is easy to refer, whether you print up little cards that people can hand out to others, or maybe you’ve got a rack card about your business, just a little one sheet [email protected], we actually create the referral partner blueprint. This is a whole guide that we give people, helping them understand how to build their referral partnerships because people use this to create partnerships with others and to pass on the knowledge and in the process, they’re giving the gift of hoa.com, which is exactly what we want them to do. So make sure that your business and that your service is easy for others to refer.
Chris Hood (09:32):
Now, I think there’s another side of the referral process, which I’m going to ask you about. A lot of times our consumers have fabulous ideas. Now what we’re banking on is that the advocates are going to give us good feedback, but how much of that feedback do you feel is being translated into product improvements, service improvements from the business perspective?
Brandon Barnum (10:01):
That’s a great question, Chris, and quite frankly, in the software world, we integrate this into our practice. For example, we reward people that give us great ideas, feature requests, suggestions. That’s going to improve our business because we always want to make it better for the end user, the consumer. In our case, it’s both professionals and homeowners because serving both the B two B and the B two C market simultaneously in our platform. But what I’ve always found works best is to create that sandbox, that suggestion box. It’s like when you used to have a box, an actual letter box where people would put in their suggestions for improvement, do that for your business, and you’ll be amazed how much wealth of information and great ideas you’re going to get from your super users. It’s a powerful concept that doesn’t get utilized often enough.
Chris Hood (10:53):
Chris, I totally agree, and I also think that even though you’ve got individuals who have bind themselves as super users, as advocates are part of your referral program, those are the ones who are typically the closest to the customers that are complaining. If I’m going to complain, I’m not necessarily calling up and saying, your product sucks, but if somebody contacts me or they’re referring word of mouth, I have a friend and we’re out to have dinner, and I’m like, oh, have you tried this? And they say, oh yeah, I tried it. I love it, I love it, I love it. And you say, no, I think it sucks. Well, you’re sitting there having a great conversation with your friend, but that’s the feedback that should be going back to the business, and that’s what’s often missing
Brandon Barnum (11:41):
Hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we teach our [email protected] that we want to look for those opportunities for improvement, and when somebody expresses some or friction point, we want to make our whole process as frictionless as possible so it’s easy for everyone, and we look that as gems, as jewels. So those are gifts to us, and that’s why we reward those people that share ideas that and suggestions that get put into practice because it helps everyone in the long run.
Chris Hood (12:15):
So let’s look at the entire organization. When we think about referral marketing, it typically comes with the terminology. It’s a marketing initiative. What you’re also talking about is you’re building the technology directly into the system so that you can simplify the process to get those opinions earlier into the system itself. And yet I see constantly how there’s usually a handoff. There’s usually, well, that’s not our department, that’s referral. There’s a team that does that. Go talk to them. How much of this is critical across the entire organization?
Brandon Barnum (12:58):
Well, that’s a challenge for CEOs like me, is how do we conglomerate and consolidate that communication so that we get the word from the street back to the people that are running and making the decisions about the organization? So one of the things that I’ve seen work really well, and again this comes out of the software world, is where you give your users the opportunity to suggest the improvements, and then it’s basically a feature request log, and then you allow your users to vote on what features they would most like to see. And that way what happens is the cream rises to the top, the things that impact the most people, that the most community members vote on essentially and say, Hey, this would make a big difference in my life and my business. Those things get elevated to the top and get worked on. That’s what I’ve seen works best to be able to get the voices of the people to the ears of the decision makers that implement the changes.
Chris Hood (14:02):
And if we think about this though and continue to break it down, we have an idea that comes through an advocate, and it’s a great idea. It gets upvoted by a lot of your users. It comes into the system. You begin to go through a process by validating it and defining it, iterating on it. But when I think about organizationally how that idea flows, again through a lot of companies, it’s still fairly siloed. I think what you’re talking about from a C E O perspective, ensuring that the communication, how critical these advocates are for the organization is one point, but if we started to list out all of the different types of teams within your company, from product to marketing to even human resources to that community management to leadership to technology, and IT dealing with areas like security, there’s a vast amount of people who are never thinking about what that referral program is actually accomplishing for the entire organization.
Brandon Barnum (15:14):
Agree Chris. And a lot of people that have no idea what the consumers of your product and service actually do. You’ve got people in your business that don’t really get it because like you say, they don’t interface with the actual users. And so the gap is how do we get that information to the people that can actually act on it and make a change? So one of the things I think is important when you’re talking about leadership styles and hierarchy is we’re used to kind of the typical top down approach where you’ve got a C E O COOs, you’ve got your C-suite, and now you’ve got your directors, and now you’ve got your managers. And that’s the way it is in most companies. And honestly, that’s the way it is in ours too. However, we also simultaneously want to focus on the workflows. When you give one of your managers or directors authority and oversight from an entire end-to-end perspective of what happens with that client and customer on that customer journey, that’s where we see the greatest gains because now it’s not siloed. Now you’ve got one thought leader that is hearing all the way from start to finish, how that customer experiences, that product or service. That’s what I’ve seen makes the biggest difference. Chris,
Chris Hood (16:29):
Let’s convert this though. We talk about the consumer and the customer journey, but how much effort is there in understanding that your employees are customers too, or your employees should be customers too?
Brandon Barnum (16:47):
They are, and I think there’s more and more understanding of that in today’s society. The reality is with our newer generations, our younger generations, they’re demanding that they be treated like a customer. If you don’t court your team members, they’re going to be on to some other company that favors them as the snowflake that they are, right? Because they want to be treated special. And we have a challenge as managers these days of how do we ensure optimization of profitability and productivity for the organization while really serving both our external stakeholders and our internal stakeholders? And if you’ve got a team that is checked out emotionally, they don’t care about your company and you’ve got a culture that’s dying and not thriving, then you’ve got real problems. So today, you’ve got to make sure that you’re featuring everyone and helping everyone be heard within your organization. I think that’s a real key to it, Chris. People want to be heard, they want to be respected, and they want to feel like their voice matters.
Chris Hood (17:54):
If your own employees can’t spread goodwill and word of mouth to generate business, you’ve got a bigger issue at hand. And it doesn’t matter how many and ambassadors you have for your organization externally, you’ve got to fix what is happening internally. First and foremost. I couldn’t agree more. Now you have a book on referral marketing. Share with us a little bit about that. Yeah,
Brandon Barnum (18:19):
So I wrote the book, raving Referrals. It’s the Profitable Way to Attract More Prospects to your business. And the reality is, I wrote this book after number one, spending 12 years in the mortgage industry and being mentored in the art and the science of raving referrals, and I personally used referrals. I got into the mortgage industry. I was in my twenties, I’d become a single dad. I got custody of my two year old son, and I was only making 20 grand a year at the time, and I got in the mortgage business, had somebody mentor me in the art and science of referrals, and was able to 10 x my income in 18 months. So I went from 20,000 a year to $200,000 a year thanks to this art and science of referrals. So ever since then, I’ve been on a mission to pass that education onto as many people as possible. The book is the first in a series, so we’ve since come out with raving referrals for dentists, which you’ll see over my shoulder. That’s our second book, and we have raving referrals for Mortgage Pros coming out next. And then we’ve got about 20 titles coming out in the next two years. Raving referrals for realtors, insurance agents, financial advisors, CPAs, and a whole host of other industries.
Chris Hood (19:33):
I think you’re touching on a couple of things. A lot of individuals out there listening are probably thinking, well, look, real estate dentist lawyers. I would assume all of that thrive in referrals. I mean, really the last time I saw a dentist advertisement versus word of mouth and go to see a dentist day and night, get a referral for a good restaurant, you’re going to go and check that out. I’m just wondering, are there industries or businesses that may not necessarily benefit from a referral program?
Brandon Barnum (20:10):
Well, it’s a good question, Chris. I focus on the industries that do. So for me, I don’t really think about who doesn’t this apply to? If I were putting that hat on, it would be education. Well, even universities use referrals, but governments, but not really. So you talked about dental for a second. I want give this example. This is you talk about how you can get care beyond the chair. This is a product that I’m actually teaching to a group of dentists next week in down in Dallas, Texas, and I thought, this is the most brilliant thing. This isn’t my product. But what this company does is they customize, lemme turn off my camera here or my light so you can see it. They customize the toothbrush with the brand of the dentist. In this case it says raving referrals and then the actual patient’s name.
(21:04):
Now imagine giving this as a referral reward. So you’re running a dental practice, a patient refers a new practice in or a patient in, or you just let people know, Hey, refer a new patient in, and you’re going to get a customized Oral B toothbrush that’s got your name on it. The reason I think this is so brilliant is that every morning when I brush my teeth, I not only see my name, I see the brand and logo of my dentist. So think about how you can incorporate a referral reward to activate your advocates within your company and your community so that they’re on the lookout for referring clients to you. That’s where it gets really interesting.
Chris Hood (21:48):
Yeah, I think brand and swag, obviously it makes sense, but it’s also one of these challenges. I worked at Google now if I showed up with a Google T-shirt, I was bombarded with people like, I want a Google T-shirt, right? Because brand awareness, if you put Google on a t-shirt, you can give it to anybody. But then I was talking with another company actually just a couple of days ago, and they were talking about getting some swag, putting some things together, and they were tossing out ideas. How about a beach bag or something? I don’t think you could put their brand on anything and their customers would care. There are some challenges that I think organizations have to think about as opposed to, Hey, let’s just go get a whole bunch of water bottles and pop our brand on it and give them away. I don’t think that necessarily works.
Brandon Barnum (22:39):
I agree. I think the reality is it depends on your company, and ultimately you want to create an emotional connection with your customer. That’s the only way I’m going to wear your stuff. Look, I go to trade shows and conferences all the time. They try and throw this swag at me, and I was just at one this weekend in New Orleans. They gave me the swag bag. I took one thing out of that and I brought it home, and that was it. The rest goes straight in the garbage. Now, something like this is different because now every morning I’m seeing that logo of that company. It’s something that makes a difference in my life. So if you’re going to do swag, do something that’s personal. I was just talking with one of the board members of a company called Mailbox Power yesterday. Now, what Mailbox Power does is they do one off swag that’s personalized to the individual.
(23:31):
So I have an account. I was recently meeting with a C-suite of a company called Home Scout who we ended up creating a partnership with. After I’d met with them in Atlanta, I sent the three executives each personalized gifts for the president of sales. I sent him golf balls that said, I am not lost. I’m hiding from Lloyd Denison. Okay, so the golf balls had their logo on one side and the man’s name on the other side. Do you think he’s going to ever throw those away? No. He may lose them, and that’s probably likely what’s going to happen, but he may not even use the golf balls because they’re so customized to him. Likewise, I met with their director of partnerships. Her name is Caitlyn Smith, and I sent her a mug again with their logo, not my logo, I’m not sending them hoa.com, because they don’t care about hoa.com.
(24:28):
They care about their brand. So I sent them a coffee mug with their Home Scout logo on, and the back said, number one, supermom and HUD’s fan Hu’s, no Supermom and Huddy Hudson’s number one fan. That was the name of her son. So I’ve sent her a mug where every time she drinks coffee, it’s got her company, her son’s name on it, and the fact that she’s Supermom Now, every time she drinks coffee, she’s going to think about me. She has no choice but to think about me. Now. I didn’t put my logo on it. It’s not about me. It’s all about her. That’s how you create brand champions when you make it about them.
Chris Hood (25:13):
Yes, I could not agree more all about them. It’s all about the customer. Now, if we were to start to break this down, there’s sort of a chicken or the egg type of philosophy in this. Do you go get your customers first? Obviously you have to have customers before you can have brand ambassadors, but on some level, especially startup companies, small businesses, you’re trying to figure out how to get that word of mouth out there, how to build that brand. Where should a company start? What is the key to making this process successful?
Brandon Barnum (25:49):
Well, Chris, I know you’re thinking about the customers and turning them into champions and advocates, and that’s a great place. Create an ambassador program, create an affiliate program, incentivize people to send you business, reward them when they do, whether it’s money or swag, about half of people like to get paid. The other half just want to recommend your brand because it’s good for the people that they care about. Okay, so number one, you should absolutely have what we call an ambassador program. You can also call an affiliate program. Create Referral Rewards so that you’re communicating constantly to your community that you appreciate their referrals and that you’ll reward them when they refer. Okay, so that’s number one. Number two, the real answer to your question is all about referral partnerships. What we teach in about half of the Raving Referrals book is about creating partnerships with people and companies that are already serving your perfect prospects.
(26:47):
Now, case in point on Wednesday, so two days ago, I created two new partnerships for hoa.com. One was with a company called care.com. Now, care has almost a million caregivers, and it’s a perfect partnership for [email protected]. They have caregivers that PET sit, that provide daycare for kids and elder care for adults, and they also provide housekeeper services. Everyone has a background check on it, and they serve about 4 million consumers. So it’s a perfect partnership for us because the homeowners that we serve need those services. So we created a partnership where we’re going to integrate those professionals into our platform, and when somebody goes to hoa.com and is looking for a caregiver, they’re going to find a care.com caregiver. Okay. Later that day, I was on with the c e O of Property Management Inc, which is the largest property management franchise in the us. They’ve got 400 property managers in every major market. They have property management franchisees, and so again, we’re creating a profitable, powerful partnership that is win-win. What I teach is one plus one equals 11. How do you partner with people and companies that are already serving your perfect prospect and add value to them so they can add value to the people that you serve?
Chris Hood (28:14):
What is the intersection between a loyalty program and a referral program?
Brandon Barnum (28:19):
Yeah, I think they can be one and the same. Really, any referral program is meant to build loyalty, but I think it needs to go beyond that. You can have it stop at loyalty. Most people like to be incentivized and rewarded, and again, whether it’s money or swag, giving them something increases their loyalty. And when it comes to referrals, ultimately it’s all about trust. Again, the research shows that 90% of human beings trust recommendations from people that we know. So when you turn people into advocates, consumers are 400% more likely to buy your product or your service when they’re referred to your brand. It elevates the trust. The overall profitability is 16% higher overall with a referred client because they buy from you more often, they buy at a higher price and they refer other people to your brand. So again, whether you’re just building loyalty, I think the answer to your question, Chris, is reward ’em. Why wouldn’t you? It’s just good business
Chris Hood (29:23):
And recognize that everybody enjoys different types of recognition in reward. There’s a sandwich shop that’s down the street from me. My first time there ordered a sandwich. The owner was there, I didn’t know who she was at the time, paid for my sandwich, enjoyed, walked out on my second visit, went back, ordered the same sandwich, and the owner said, hi, Chris. She remembered my name and everything from the first meeting. She’s got an exceptional memory I’ve learned since then. Every time I go back now, she welcomes me. She says, same thing. It’s like Norm at Cheers. I love that more than anything else that you can give me. Just the fact that she knows who I am and builds that personal connection, that relationship understands what my order is, is already typing it into the system when she sees me walking, and that to me is gold. Granted, I get that not everybody can do that, but it just demonstrates that everybody is going to want a different type of reward, recognition, loyalty, and you’ve got to also, I think, start to figure out how you can customize that experience for your individual customers.
Brandon Barnum (30:42):
A hundred percent. What a great example. And Chris, I got to ask you, how many times have you told that story or told others about that sandwich shop since you started going there?
Chris Hood (30:51):
It’s a great question. You’re the first person I’ve told. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, no, I have told a lot of people that story because if somebody’s like, oh, I’m hungry. I’m like, oh, go to the sandwich place. The owner will know who you are and give you great service.
Brandon Barnum (31:10):
Brilliant. I love it. Chris, thank you for sharing that story. I’m going to tell that story on a podcast later on. By the way, I think it’s a great example of exactly what we’re talking about. Now, some companies do that as a business practice, like for the Four Seasons, for example. Do you know they actually print out their guest registry and they train all of their staff to know who you are so that when you walk in, they greet you by name. Now, that’s going above and beyond. It doesn’t take them a lot of time. But coming back to Dennis, I was just on a podcast with the Arizona Dental Association, and I say one of the things I find that’s so interesting is in dentistry is dentists have these micro influencers coming through their practice every single day, and if they don’t understand who’s in their chair, they’re missing out on gold. For example, realtors. Realtors help people move into the neighborhoods that are surrounding their dental practice, and so if they just, what I suggest all the time in our, I have a dental consulting company, which is part of why I’m in that space, but literally, we train people to research all of the people that are coming through your door so you know who they are. You can customize your care for them and that you can have a conversation that’s about them. They feel the love, and then they share the love.
Chris Hood (32:34):
Absolutely. I love it. How can people get in touch with you?
Brandon Barnum (32:38):
For me, it’s real easy. The best way is go to brandon barnum.com. You can find all my links there. You can even book a podcast with me if you’d like to have me on as your guest. If you are in the home services space and you have a business that serves homeowners, go check out what we’re [email protected], and you can even click at the top, right and become one of our certified pros. And then beyond that, one of the last things that I would say is if you like what you’re hearing, I recommend that you take the referral score quiz. You can go to referral score quiz.com. It’ll take you less than two minutes. You’ll self-score yourself on the top 10 referral best practices, and you’ll probably see a few gaps in your business. So that’ll help you identify those blind spots so that you can fill ’em in and start attracting raving referrals constantly for your business.
Chris Hood (33:27):
Appreciate it so much. Thank you, Brandon.
Brandon Barnum (33:30):
My pleasure. Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hood (33:33):
And of course, thanks to all of you who are listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve and grow, and if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Hood Show, and please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Companies are constantly seeking innovative approaches to customer acquisition. Traditional advertising methods are increasingly becoming less effective while referral marketing is growing. According to HubSpot, companies that excel at referral marketing generate 69% faster close times, and 59% higher lifetime customer values. In this episode, I am joined by Brandon Barnum, author of Raving Referrals and c e o of hoa.com to discuss how this dual purpose strategy boost customer acquisition and offers significant insights into customer behaviors and preferences. Grab a copy of my new book, customer Transformation, A seven Stage Strategy for Customer Alignment and Business Value. This is your essential guide for customer success in the digital age and a framework to adapt to your customer’s ever evolving needs and aspirations. Available now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or my website, and to support the show, visit chris hood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood and let’s get connected.
Voice Over (01:23):
Connecting Access. Granted, it’s the Chris Hood digital show. We’re global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Your digital evolution starts Now. Here’s your host, Chris Hood.
Chris Hood (01:55):
Let’s get to know our guest. Brandon, would you mind introducing yourself?
Brandon Barnum (01:59):
You bet. Sure. My name is Brandon Barn. I’m the c e O of hoa.com. I’ve been kind of in the technical world for really 25 years, building business by referrals, but for the last 13 years I’ve been building tech platforms to help people build more business by referral.
Chris Hood (02:16):
Awesome. Well, that’s a great place for us to start. Then we think about referrals and sometimes we look at that as a marketing effort or maybe we think of it as just a general business business development practice. Let’s define what is referral marketing or just referrals in general.
Brandon Barnum (02:35):
Referrals is all about, quite frankly, helping somebody solve a problem. But for a business, it’s about attracting new clients, new patients, new guests, whatever it is that your business focuses on, and there’s some really amazing statistics and research in the area. Chris, for example, 84% of B two B sales start with the referral. So if you’re selling to business owners is critically important that you get somebody as your champion, your advocate, somebody that’s opening the door and introducing you to the decision makers how deals get done.
Chris Hood (03:10):
Yeah, I had somebody reach out to me just a couple of days ago and wanted to talk about building some additional social media content for me, and I was like, that’s not my audience. They’re like, well, yeah, but everybody’s on social media. My audience is not on social media. Actually, a lot of my business is direct, we’ll call it word of mouth, which is really referrals. When companies start to think about this, they’re going to have a lot of different perspectives, and I just touched on social media. Isn’t influencers just another form of referrals?
Brandon Barnum (03:46):
It really is absolutely a hundred percent. We really talk about and teach people how to create brand champions for your business, and whether that is an affiliate program or an ambassador program where you’re incentivizing people to send you business and sharing some of that revenue with them, that’s one of the things that we recommend is a referral rewards program. But quite frankly, you should be influencing influencers. Think about who is already serving your perfect prospects, who already has a relationship and is in a position of trust with the people that you want to win over as clients. Those are the people that you need to court for your business as your brand champion.
Chris Hood (04:27):
Yeah. Now there’s a very basic marketing principle to this. We start off with the sale. They convert ultimately into that influencer or to that advocate, and there’s a process that we can track and determine at what point in time do they become that advocate for you. Part of building communities is understanding that the community is not just, Hey, let’s have this big community of passionate people, but it is understanding that they are going to advocate on your behalf to grow your business, and I don’t think a lot of businesses take that next leap. A community is much more than just a way to understand what your consumer is doing.
Brandon Barnum (05:13):
Oh, it’s huge. It’s huge. And it’s interesting. The man who’s known as the godfather of networking is Ivan Meisner. He started B N I Business Networking International, and they’ve got over 200,000 members around the world that meet in these local referral groups where they have one person in each industry that comes together to meet and have breakfast every week so that they can do business together. Well, he says 98% of businesses rely on referrals, yet only 3% have a system in place for their referrals, and that’s what we find all the time. People are uncomfortable asking for referrals. They haven’t automated the ask, which is one of the things that we teach, and as a result, they don’t have as many business opportunities as they’d like because they get, not because they ask not.
Chris Hood (06:02):
I think you touch on a good point, which would be how self-serve this? How do you build a platform that allows people to come in and basically say, Hey, I want to sign up for this. I want to be an advocate. I am passionate about your product and brand, and I want to be able to share my own experiences without going through all of the hassles that I think we typically think about like, well, I don’t want to be on video. I don’t want to. How do we customize and build that opportunity in an automated way?
Brandon Barnum (06:36):
It all depends on the type of business that you have, but quite frankly, when we talk about automating the ask, it’s ensuring that you have a referral program that’s built in to your autoresponder emails, your welcome emails to your clients, your members, if you have a physical location that you have referral cards that you hand out, that you help people see that you are there and you’re going to incentivize them to refer business to you. And then we also teach the art of the Ask. So automating the ask is ensuring that your systems are integrated with referral requests, that you’re constantly teaching and training your clients in your community that you work by referral and you would love to help the people that they care about in their life.
Chris Hood (07:22):
Now, I’ll give you a great example of this in play, there is a company that I was looking at for Backyard Furniture. They had a really unique way of building a referral program, and basically what they wanted to do was say, we trust in our furniture so much that we want you to go visit your neighbors who have the furniture in their backyard, so you can go and try it out, sit down and talk to them, and then those individuals sign up and say, yes, I want to be a part of your referral program. I’m happy to open up my back door and allow people to come in and check it out. It’s a fabulous idea. However, the process by which to become one of these individuals to open up their back door and come is a nightmare, and then you can’t just randomly go and show up to one of your neighbors and ask them to see their furniture. You’ve got to go through this entire sales and onboarding process before they will even give you the names and addresses of those neighbors so that you can go check it out. So there’s these blockers to become an advocate and there’s these blockers to go and get referrals from those advocates. Again, a great idea in theory, but so many restrictions along the way.
Brandon Barnum (08:43):
Yeah, you’ve got to make yourself easy to refer. That’s one of the things that we teach in the Raving Referrals book and system is make sure that you and your business is easy to refer, whether you print up little cards that people can hand out to others, or maybe you’ve got a rack card about your business, just a little one sheet [email protected], we actually create the referral partner blueprint. This is a whole guide that we give people, helping them understand how to build their referral partnerships because people use this to create partnerships with others and to pass on the knowledge and in the process, they’re giving the gift of hoa.com, which is exactly what we want them to do. So make sure that your business and that your service is easy for others to refer.
Chris Hood (09:32):
Now, I think there’s another side of the referral process, which I’m going to ask you about. A lot of times our consumers have fabulous ideas. Now what we’re banking on is that the advocates are going to give us good feedback, but how much of that feedback do you feel is being translated into product improvements, service improvements from the business perspective?
Brandon Barnum (10:01):
That’s a great question, Chris, and quite frankly, in the software world, we integrate this into our practice. For example, we reward people that give us great ideas, feature requests, suggestions. That’s going to improve our business because we always want to make it better for the end user, the consumer. In our case, it’s both professionals and homeowners because serving both the B two B and the B two C market simultaneously in our platform. But what I’ve always found works best is to create that sandbox, that suggestion box. It’s like when you used to have a box, an actual letter box where people would put in their suggestions for improvement, do that for your business, and you’ll be amazed how much wealth of information and great ideas you’re going to get from your super users. It’s a powerful concept that doesn’t get utilized often enough.
Chris Hood (10:53):
Chris, I totally agree, and I also think that even though you’ve got individuals who have bind themselves as super users, as advocates are part of your referral program, those are the ones who are typically the closest to the customers that are complaining. If I’m going to complain, I’m not necessarily calling up and saying, your product sucks, but if somebody contacts me or they’re referring word of mouth, I have a friend and we’re out to have dinner, and I’m like, oh, have you tried this? And they say, oh yeah, I tried it. I love it, I love it, I love it. And you say, no, I think it sucks. Well, you’re sitting there having a great conversation with your friend, but that’s the feedback that should be going back to the business, and that’s what’s often missing
Brandon Barnum (11:41):
Hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we teach our [email protected] that we want to look for those opportunities for improvement, and when somebody expresses some or friction point, we want to make our whole process as frictionless as possible so it’s easy for everyone, and we look that as gems, as jewels. So those are gifts to us, and that’s why we reward those people that share ideas that and suggestions that get put into practice because it helps everyone in the long run.
Chris Hood (12:15):
So let’s look at the entire organization. When we think about referral marketing, it typically comes with the terminology. It’s a marketing initiative. What you’re also talking about is you’re building the technology directly into the system so that you can simplify the process to get those opinions earlier into the system itself. And yet I see constantly how there’s usually a handoff. There’s usually, well, that’s not our department, that’s referral. There’s a team that does that. Go talk to them. How much of this is critical across the entire organization?
Brandon Barnum (12:58):
Well, that’s a challenge for CEOs like me, is how do we conglomerate and consolidate that communication so that we get the word from the street back to the people that are running and making the decisions about the organization? So one of the things that I’ve seen work really well, and again this comes out of the software world, is where you give your users the opportunity to suggest the improvements, and then it’s basically a feature request log, and then you allow your users to vote on what features they would most like to see. And that way what happens is the cream rises to the top, the things that impact the most people, that the most community members vote on essentially and say, Hey, this would make a big difference in my life and my business. Those things get elevated to the top and get worked on. That’s what I’ve seen works best to be able to get the voices of the people to the ears of the decision makers that implement the changes.
Chris Hood (14:02):
And if we think about this though and continue to break it down, we have an idea that comes through an advocate, and it’s a great idea. It gets upvoted by a lot of your users. It comes into the system. You begin to go through a process by validating it and defining it, iterating on it. But when I think about organizationally how that idea flows, again through a lot of companies, it’s still fairly siloed. I think what you’re talking about from a C E O perspective, ensuring that the communication, how critical these advocates are for the organization is one point, but if we started to list out all of the different types of teams within your company, from product to marketing to even human resources to that community management to leadership to technology, and IT dealing with areas like security, there’s a vast amount of people who are never thinking about what that referral program is actually accomplishing for the entire organization.
Brandon Barnum (15:14):
Agree Chris. And a lot of people that have no idea what the consumers of your product and service actually do. You’ve got people in your business that don’t really get it because like you say, they don’t interface with the actual users. And so the gap is how do we get that information to the people that can actually act on it and make a change? So one of the things I think is important when you’re talking about leadership styles and hierarchy is we’re used to kind of the typical top down approach where you’ve got a C E O COOs, you’ve got your C-suite, and now you’ve got your directors, and now you’ve got your managers. And that’s the way it is in most companies. And honestly, that’s the way it is in ours too. However, we also simultaneously want to focus on the workflows. When you give one of your managers or directors authority and oversight from an entire end-to-end perspective of what happens with that client and customer on that customer journey, that’s where we see the greatest gains because now it’s not siloed. Now you’ve got one thought leader that is hearing all the way from start to finish, how that customer experiences, that product or service. That’s what I’ve seen makes the biggest difference. Chris,
Chris Hood (16:29):
Let’s convert this though. We talk about the consumer and the customer journey, but how much effort is there in understanding that your employees are customers too, or your employees should be customers too?
Brandon Barnum (16:47):
They are, and I think there’s more and more understanding of that in today’s society. The reality is with our newer generations, our younger generations, they’re demanding that they be treated like a customer. If you don’t court your team members, they’re going to be on to some other company that favors them as the snowflake that they are, right? Because they want to be treated special. And we have a challenge as managers these days of how do we ensure optimization of profitability and productivity for the organization while really serving both our external stakeholders and our internal stakeholders? And if you’ve got a team that is checked out emotionally, they don’t care about your company and you’ve got a culture that’s dying and not thriving, then you’ve got real problems. So today, you’ve got to make sure that you’re featuring everyone and helping everyone be heard within your organization. I think that’s a real key to it, Chris. People want to be heard, they want to be respected, and they want to feel like their voice matters.
Chris Hood (17:54):
If your own employees can’t spread goodwill and word of mouth to generate business, you’ve got a bigger issue at hand. And it doesn’t matter how many and ambassadors you have for your organization externally, you’ve got to fix what is happening internally. First and foremost. I couldn’t agree more. Now you have a book on referral marketing. Share with us a little bit about that. Yeah,
Brandon Barnum (18:19):
So I wrote the book, raving Referrals. It’s the Profitable Way to Attract More Prospects to your business. And the reality is, I wrote this book after number one, spending 12 years in the mortgage industry and being mentored in the art and the science of raving referrals, and I personally used referrals. I got into the mortgage industry. I was in my twenties, I’d become a single dad. I got custody of my two year old son, and I was only making 20 grand a year at the time, and I got in the mortgage business, had somebody mentor me in the art and science of referrals, and was able to 10 x my income in 18 months. So I went from 20,000 a year to $200,000 a year thanks to this art and science of referrals. So ever since then, I’ve been on a mission to pass that education onto as many people as possible. The book is the first in a series, so we’ve since come out with raving referrals for dentists, which you’ll see over my shoulder. That’s our second book, and we have raving referrals for Mortgage Pros coming out next. And then we’ve got about 20 titles coming out in the next two years. Raving referrals for realtors, insurance agents, financial advisors, CPAs, and a whole host of other industries.
Chris Hood (19:33):
I think you’re touching on a couple of things. A lot of individuals out there listening are probably thinking, well, look, real estate dentist lawyers. I would assume all of that thrive in referrals. I mean, really the last time I saw a dentist advertisement versus word of mouth and go to see a dentist day and night, get a referral for a good restaurant, you’re going to go and check that out. I’m just wondering, are there industries or businesses that may not necessarily benefit from a referral program?
Brandon Barnum (20:10):
Well, it’s a good question, Chris. I focus on the industries that do. So for me, I don’t really think about who doesn’t this apply to? If I were putting that hat on, it would be education. Well, even universities use referrals, but governments, but not really. So you talked about dental for a second. I want give this example. This is you talk about how you can get care beyond the chair. This is a product that I’m actually teaching to a group of dentists next week in down in Dallas, Texas, and I thought, this is the most brilliant thing. This isn’t my product. But what this company does is they customize, lemme turn off my camera here or my light so you can see it. They customize the toothbrush with the brand of the dentist. In this case it says raving referrals and then the actual patient’s name.
(21:04):
Now imagine giving this as a referral reward. So you’re running a dental practice, a patient refers a new practice in or a patient in, or you just let people know, Hey, refer a new patient in, and you’re going to get a customized Oral B toothbrush that’s got your name on it. The reason I think this is so brilliant is that every morning when I brush my teeth, I not only see my name, I see the brand and logo of my dentist. So think about how you can incorporate a referral reward to activate your advocates within your company and your community so that they’re on the lookout for referring clients to you. That’s where it gets really interesting.
Chris Hood (21:48):
Yeah, I think brand and swag, obviously it makes sense, but it’s also one of these challenges. I worked at Google now if I showed up with a Google T-shirt, I was bombarded with people like, I want a Google T-shirt, right? Because brand awareness, if you put Google on a t-shirt, you can give it to anybody. But then I was talking with another company actually just a couple of days ago, and they were talking about getting some swag, putting some things together, and they were tossing out ideas. How about a beach bag or something? I don’t think you could put their brand on anything and their customers would care. There are some challenges that I think organizations have to think about as opposed to, Hey, let’s just go get a whole bunch of water bottles and pop our brand on it and give them away. I don’t think that necessarily works.
Brandon Barnum (22:39):
I agree. I think the reality is it depends on your company, and ultimately you want to create an emotional connection with your customer. That’s the only way I’m going to wear your stuff. Look, I go to trade shows and conferences all the time. They try and throw this swag at me, and I was just at one this weekend in New Orleans. They gave me the swag bag. I took one thing out of that and I brought it home, and that was it. The rest goes straight in the garbage. Now, something like this is different because now every morning I’m seeing that logo of that company. It’s something that makes a difference in my life. So if you’re going to do swag, do something that’s personal. I was just talking with one of the board members of a company called Mailbox Power yesterday. Now, what Mailbox Power does is they do one off swag that’s personalized to the individual.
(23:31):
So I have an account. I was recently meeting with a C-suite of a company called Home Scout who we ended up creating a partnership with. After I’d met with them in Atlanta, I sent the three executives each personalized gifts for the president of sales. I sent him golf balls that said, I am not lost. I’m hiding from Lloyd Denison. Okay, so the golf balls had their logo on one side and the man’s name on the other side. Do you think he’s going to ever throw those away? No. He may lose them, and that’s probably likely what’s going to happen, but he may not even use the golf balls because they’re so customized to him. Likewise, I met with their director of partnerships. Her name is Caitlyn Smith, and I sent her a mug again with their logo, not my logo, I’m not sending them hoa.com, because they don’t care about hoa.com.
(24:28):
They care about their brand. So I sent them a coffee mug with their Home Scout logo on, and the back said, number one, supermom and HUD’s fan Hu’s, no Supermom and Huddy Hudson’s number one fan. That was the name of her son. So I’ve sent her a mug where every time she drinks coffee, it’s got her company, her son’s name on it, and the fact that she’s Supermom Now, every time she drinks coffee, she’s going to think about me. She has no choice but to think about me. Now. I didn’t put my logo on it. It’s not about me. It’s all about her. That’s how you create brand champions when you make it about them.
Chris Hood (25:13):
Yes, I could not agree more all about them. It’s all about the customer. Now, if we were to start to break this down, there’s sort of a chicken or the egg type of philosophy in this. Do you go get your customers first? Obviously you have to have customers before you can have brand ambassadors, but on some level, especially startup companies, small businesses, you’re trying to figure out how to get that word of mouth out there, how to build that brand. Where should a company start? What is the key to making this process successful?
Brandon Barnum (25:49):
Well, Chris, I know you’re thinking about the customers and turning them into champions and advocates, and that’s a great place. Create an ambassador program, create an affiliate program, incentivize people to send you business, reward them when they do, whether it’s money or swag, about half of people like to get paid. The other half just want to recommend your brand because it’s good for the people that they care about. Okay, so number one, you should absolutely have what we call an ambassador program. You can also call an affiliate program. Create Referral Rewards so that you’re communicating constantly to your community that you appreciate their referrals and that you’ll reward them when they refer. Okay, so that’s number one. Number two, the real answer to your question is all about referral partnerships. What we teach in about half of the Raving Referrals book is about creating partnerships with people and companies that are already serving your perfect prospects.
(26:47):
Now, case in point on Wednesday, so two days ago, I created two new partnerships for hoa.com. One was with a company called care.com. Now, care has almost a million caregivers, and it’s a perfect partnership for [email protected]. They have caregivers that PET sit, that provide daycare for kids and elder care for adults, and they also provide housekeeper services. Everyone has a background check on it, and they serve about 4 million consumers. So it’s a perfect partnership for us because the homeowners that we serve need those services. So we created a partnership where we’re going to integrate those professionals into our platform, and when somebody goes to hoa.com and is looking for a caregiver, they’re going to find a care.com caregiver. Okay. Later that day, I was on with the c e O of Property Management Inc, which is the largest property management franchise in the us. They’ve got 400 property managers in every major market. They have property management franchisees, and so again, we’re creating a profitable, powerful partnership that is win-win. What I teach is one plus one equals 11. How do you partner with people and companies that are already serving your perfect prospect and add value to them so they can add value to the people that you serve?
Chris Hood (28:14):
What is the intersection between a loyalty program and a referral program?
Brandon Barnum (28:19):
Yeah, I think they can be one and the same. Really, any referral program is meant to build loyalty, but I think it needs to go beyond that. You can have it stop at loyalty. Most people like to be incentivized and rewarded, and again, whether it’s money or swag, giving them something increases their loyalty. And when it comes to referrals, ultimately it’s all about trust. Again, the research shows that 90% of human beings trust recommendations from people that we know. So when you turn people into advocates, consumers are 400% more likely to buy your product or your service when they’re referred to your brand. It elevates the trust. The overall profitability is 16% higher overall with a referred client because they buy from you more often, they buy at a higher price and they refer other people to your brand. So again, whether you’re just building loyalty, I think the answer to your question, Chris, is reward ’em. Why wouldn’t you? It’s just good business
Chris Hood (29:23):
And recognize that everybody enjoys different types of recognition in reward. There’s a sandwich shop that’s down the street from me. My first time there ordered a sandwich. The owner was there, I didn’t know who she was at the time, paid for my sandwich, enjoyed, walked out on my second visit, went back, ordered the same sandwich, and the owner said, hi, Chris. She remembered my name and everything from the first meeting. She’s got an exceptional memory I’ve learned since then. Every time I go back now, she welcomes me. She says, same thing. It’s like Norm at Cheers. I love that more than anything else that you can give me. Just the fact that she knows who I am and builds that personal connection, that relationship understands what my order is, is already typing it into the system when she sees me walking, and that to me is gold. Granted, I get that not everybody can do that, but it just demonstrates that everybody is going to want a different type of reward, recognition, loyalty, and you’ve got to also, I think, start to figure out how you can customize that experience for your individual customers.
Brandon Barnum (30:42):
A hundred percent. What a great example. And Chris, I got to ask you, how many times have you told that story or told others about that sandwich shop since you started going there?
Chris Hood (30:51):
It’s a great question. You’re the first person I’ve told. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, no, I have told a lot of people that story because if somebody’s like, oh, I’m hungry. I’m like, oh, go to the sandwich place. The owner will know who you are and give you great service.
Brandon Barnum (31:10):
Brilliant. I love it. Chris, thank you for sharing that story. I’m going to tell that story on a podcast later on. By the way, I think it’s a great example of exactly what we’re talking about. Now, some companies do that as a business practice, like for the Four Seasons, for example. Do you know they actually print out their guest registry and they train all of their staff to know who you are so that when you walk in, they greet you by name. Now, that’s going above and beyond. It doesn’t take them a lot of time. But coming back to Dennis, I was just on a podcast with the Arizona Dental Association, and I say one of the things I find that’s so interesting is in dentistry is dentists have these micro influencers coming through their practice every single day, and if they don’t understand who’s in their chair, they’re missing out on gold. For example, realtors. Realtors help people move into the neighborhoods that are surrounding their dental practice, and so if they just, what I suggest all the time in our, I have a dental consulting company, which is part of why I’m in that space, but literally, we train people to research all of the people that are coming through your door so you know who they are. You can customize your care for them and that you can have a conversation that’s about them. They feel the love, and then they share the love.
Chris Hood (32:34):
Absolutely. I love it. How can people get in touch with you?
Brandon Barnum (32:38):
For me, it’s real easy. The best way is go to brandon barnum.com. You can find all my links there. You can even book a podcast with me if you’d like to have me on as your guest. If you are in the home services space and you have a business that serves homeowners, go check out what we’re [email protected], and you can even click at the top, right and become one of our certified pros. And then beyond that, one of the last things that I would say is if you like what you’re hearing, I recommend that you take the referral score quiz. You can go to referral score quiz.com. It’ll take you less than two minutes. You’ll self-score yourself on the top 10 referral best practices, and you’ll probably see a few gaps in your business. So that’ll help you identify those blind spots so that you can fill ’em in and start attracting raving referrals constantly for your business.
Chris Hood (33:27):
Appreciate it so much. Thank you, Brandon.
Brandon Barnum (33:30):
My pleasure. Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hood (33:33):
And of course, thanks to all of you who are listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve and grow, and if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Hood Show, and please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.
