September 24, 2025
How do I generate more referrals?
We had a 30-minute hot seat this morning in Ditcherville with a member who wanted to generate more leads for his growing software dev shop.
We considered a range of lead gen approaches, ranging from cold outreach to piggybacking on conferences to answerbombing in online forums.
Ultimately, everyone on the call agreed that the best fit for this particular Ditcher was to pursue a systematic referral strategy.
This is a fairly unusual outcome because I’m typically not a fan of relying on referrals as a primary channel for new business.
However, in the case of this particular Ditcher, it made tons of sense.
Here are three reasons why:
- He has a list of externally verifiable characteristics of his ideal clients, both the business itself and the buyer.
- He sells a productized service that has a crystal clear value proposition, and the price is published right on his website.
- He knows exactly where to find the people who can refer him to his ideal clients, and it’s in their best interest financially to do so, even without referral fees.
With these three boxes ticked, putting a system in place to generate referrals is a no-brainer.
Yours,
—J