Who are My Top Referral Sources? OMG, I Don’t Know

family law marketing referrals

A good friend and marketing buddy of mine asked me a question the other day.

He asked “who are your top 20 referral sources?”

Crap. “I don’t know” I had to say. I was embarrassed. I should know. I know I should know.

If I had known the answer, he was going to followup with “how have you rewarded them?” And then he was going to “what do you know about them?” He wanted to know if I knew their birthdays, their anniversaries, their spouse and kids names, their ages, you know, the usual stuff.

But I hit a brick wall right off the bat. One question and I was out of the game.

It’s probably even worse than it sounds.

To be honest, I’m not sure if I could name the top five. Crap. I was really embarrassed. After all, I’ve built a reasonably successful practice. I should know the answer.

So I’ve gone to work to figure it out. Finding out is harder than it seems. We do a pretty good job of asking how someone came to our firm. But it’s not always black and white. Sometimes prospective clients say they came form our website. If we dig deeper we often find that they were referred to the website by a referral source. They usually don’t volunteer the information.

We’re used to digging and tracking for the referral source data. If we can figure it out, we’re reasonably good at writing thank you notes.

But we’re not really all that connected to who these referral sources are and being careful about following up with them. Clearly, I can’t be on top of our relationship with them if I don’t even know their names.

We tend to go to lunch and coffee with the referral sources we like the most, the people with whom we’re most comfortable, rather than those people that refer the most.

My friend asked good, although disturbing, questions. I’m motivated now.

What about you?

Do you know who your top twenty referral sources are? How about the top five?

If not, please use my embarrassment as your motivation. Don’t let what happened to me, happen to you.

Related articles:

  1. Fire Your Referral Sources
  2. The Top 8 Personal Hygiene Mistakes That Turn Off Prospective Clients and Referral Sources
  3. What about Referral Sources Who Don’t Refer?
  4. TechnoLawyer: Nine Ways to Nurture Your Referral Relationships
  5. Why You Aren’t Getting Referrals from an Old Referral Source?

  • Leanna

    I do. I figured it out this summer using a combination of my client tracking system and my quickbooks. Turns out that many of the networking events I was attending because I thought they were important to my business, weren’t resulting in any business. And that there were a few people I hadn’t thought about in a while who were sending just a few referrals, but they were excellent clients with high fee cases.

    Needless to say, once I figured that out, I sent some nice restaurant gift certificates to those folks to thank them for their help with my business, and to the people who had introduced me to those referral sources as well (I track my referrals back as far as I can to find the original source.) And I found a few other people who have referred some cases, and have the potential to refer more, so I took each one of them to lunch.

    The other nice thing about figuring out where your clients actually come from is that I can now skip those networking events sometimes without feeling like it’s going to result in a loss of business.

  • http://fa.smithbarney.com/jameshart Jim Hart

    Great post Lee! It is so important to track where and who your business is coming from. If you don’t, you will never know whether your marketing dollars are producing any results for you. With a large marketing budget, this is important information!

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