This is something I have been thinking about for some time. The consensus seems to be that referrals are a bad form of lead generation, as they are unreliable and out of our control. Whereas, if you do content marketing, you can control how much content you put out into the world, what you say and who you say it to.

But that isn’t looking at the full picture. Referrals don’t just happen out of thin air. Referrals happen because other humans know what you do and trust that you can solve a genuine problem that someone in their network has.

And the more humans you get to know and build a worthwhile relationship with, the more likely you are to get referrals.

So in that way, it is something you can control. Business is built on connections with other people and trust is the main currency. To stay in business, we all need to be creating more connections.

This might all sound very contrived and unnatural. But isn’t this the same with any of our human relationships? We often form lifelong friendships at school and university. We had to put in effort then to become friends with our fellow students. And after school, we might have made friends with people we work with. Again, we had to put in effort. We had to go out for lunch with people, or after work drinks. For many, this is harder than when we were at school and university.

Freelancers need to put in more effort

But what happens when we start freelancing? We no longer have co-workers to become friends with. We have to put in even more effort to develop relationships. Furthermore, we have to seek like-minded people. We have to join communities, networking groups or masterminds. We regularly attend conferences and meet-ups. This effort is required to even have the opportunity to develop natural relationships and friendships with others.

Developing a referral system is no different. Referrals are a by product of the connections and relationships we have. We need to continue to put the effort in to develop these relationships and form new ones.

So the referral system is actually a human connection system.

The tools

So how do we build such a system?

I’m still in the process of building mine, so these are my early thoughts on the matter.

There are purpose-built personal CRM tools. Here are a few:

• Dex
• folk
• Nat
• LeadDelta
• Clay

The other option is to build a simple tool using something like Trello or Airtable.

I went with Dex. It comes with the following features:

• pulls in contacts from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and email
• tag and group contacts
• group your contacts with smarter searches
• Set the frequency in which you’d like to stay in touch
• Take notes on contacts
• Set reminders for contacts, such as birthdays and important events and milestones

Using it on its basic level is simple. It will know when you were last in touch with someone via the email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp integration. And if you have been in touch with someone within the frequency you set, it will remind you. It will also remind you of someone’s birthday.

All this is available on the main Home Screen and the timeline view.

Making time

I have a time block in Sunsama for Dex. Which simply means opening Dex and connecting with those that I’m reminded to.

The rest I keep as natural as possible. After all, it's about building real human connections. A simple hey, checking in or offering some help. Sometimes I’ll jump on a Zoom call with friends or past colleagues.

It’s still early days in using Dex as a tool to aid in building and maintaining connections. But so far, it’s promising.