The Geneology of a Referral

if you're a real estate agent today we are going to look into the family tree of your business my name is Chance Brown I'm the broker owner of CB&A real tours and you know one of the things that's kind of trendy right now is people taking all these DNA tests and sending them off to ancestry.com or 23 andme and really discovering who they are well what I would like to do is take a look at kind of the genealogy of a referral-based business and find out where your business came from really what it boils down to to is what does the family tree of your customer base look like you know we talk a lot especially with new lenses about having this select group of people in our brokerage we call it the top 50 um that are going to be the ones who are your brand Advocates who are your army who are out there helping you build your business to become your initial referral base and that's all great but what does that look like 5 six seven years down the road what I like to do is if I close a referral I like to say thank you to the person that referred now for most people that's kind of where it stops but if we were to pull the string on that just a little bit more how did we find the person that referred us were they a referral from someone else were they a referral from someone else and you can kind of just step back through your business and why not reach out to each one of those people don't just go one level back in the family tree go five levels back and say thank you you to them have a gift for them have a lunch or whatever it is going all the way back to you I just want you to know how special I find it that I just closed a transaction that was a referral from so and so who was a referral from so and so who was a referral from so and so that you referred me seven years ago that's how important it is that you continue to refer me is that it just it helps me grow my business now X number of years in the future it's going to make somebody feel so special and so part of what you're doing that they're going to want to continue to do it looking back this way at your business does a couple of things I think number one is it really does give you a holistic picture of how referrals work and how one person 5 10 years ago can have such a profound impact on your business today and into the future I think that's important for one primary reason is it's going to have you start to think differently about the value of that one transaction the value of that one Prospect or client you start looking at it as less of a transactional oneoff and more of a this is the continued life source of my business and that one person may have been worth a $5,000 commission or they could be worth $75,000,000 in Revenue over the next decade and that is a much longer term View of how to profitably run a real estate business