Your Best Referral Source Isn't a Happy Customer
David Selva · · 3 min read
Referral Systems, Moving Companies, Partnerships
A delighted customer refers you once every several years. A realtor who trusts you refers you twice a month.
A delighted customer refers you roughly once every seven years, because that is how often the people around her happen to move.
A realtor who trusts you refers you twice a month.
That is the entire argument for where a moving company should put its referral effort, and most owners have it pointed the wrong way — a customer referral program with a gift card attached, and nothing at all aimed at the handful of businesses who meet their next customer before they do.
The customer referral math doesn't work in moving
I'm not against asking happy customers. It costs nothing and it occasionally lands.
But look at the frequency. Moving is a rare, stressful, expensive purchase. Your customer loved you in April and will have no natural opening to mention you until somebody in her circle moves, which might be next month or might be never. You cannot build a pipeline out of an event you have no way to schedule.
Partners are structurally different. A realtor closes deals continuously. A property manager turns units over every month. A storage facility watches people load boxes all day. Their opportunity to refer resets constantly, and that is the only property that matters here.
Who is already standing next to your customer
Build the list specific to your market:
- Residential realtors, particularly the ones doing volume in the neighborhoods you cover
- Property managers and apartment complexes handling turnover
- Self-storage facilities, whose customers are mid-move by definition
- Senior living communities and downsizing specialists
- Home stagers and estate attorneys
Every one of these people is in a conversation about moving before you are. That's the qualification. Nothing else on a networking list matters as much.
What makes a partner refer you a second time
This is where most attempts quietly die. An owner takes a realtor for coffee, hands over a stack of cards, hears nothing, and concludes that partnerships don't work.
A partner refers you again based on one thing: what they learned about the first person they sent. If they never heard how it went, the lesson was that referring you produces silence — and silence is not a reason to do something twice.
So the mechanics matter more than the relationship does:
- The partner is told when their referral books, not only if it closes
- They hear briefly how the job went, without having to ask
- The referral is tracked to them by name, so it never dissolves into somebody recommended us
That loop is the program. The gift card is optional. The feedback isn't.
The awkward question about money
Referral fees are routine in some of these relationships and prohibited or frowned upon in others, and it varies by state and by license. Ask directly instead of assuming either way.
A realtor who can't accept a fee can almost always accept being made to look good in front of her own client, which tends to be worth more to her anyway.
Make a list of ten businesses
Not ten people to network with. Ten businesses whose customers are structurally about to need a mover.
Then work out, for each one, how they would find out what happened to the first person they sent you. If you can't answer that for a name on your list, you don't have a partner there yet. You have a coffee meeting.