Episode 981: The Psychology of Why People Refer

Synopsis

Dean Jackson explains to guest host Spencer Reynolds how you can use the psychology behind referrals to your benefit in BNI and in business.

• Referrals are driven by self-preservation. People make referrals to add value to their own social groups.
• People are highly protective of their close connections and want to share good experiences and warn against bad ones.
• Recommending useful resources raises a person’s standing within their group, creating a natural sense of mutual value exchange.
• Instead of asking your referral partners to tell people about you, train them to identify opportunities and report them back to you.
• Make the referrer the hero. Create valuable, easy-to-share materials your referral partners can pass along.

• Visit Dean’s website: https://deanjackson.com.
• Listen to the I Love Marketing Podcast.
• Visit the BNI Tampa Bay website.

Priscilla:
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast. I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. And I’m joined on the phone today by Spencer Reynolds, who is standing in today as a guest host for Dr. Misner, and he will be joining us from time to time. Hello, Spencer. Welcome to the podcast.

Spencer:
Thank you, Priscilla. I appreciate it. Excited to be with you.

Priscilla:
It’s great to have you. And who are you presenting us with today?

Spencer:
Today’s guest is someone that has spent decades, honestly, with business owners and teaching them a really powerful truth about marketing, and that it’s the world happens through relationships and trust and referrals. He’s a legendary marketer. He’s a co-host of an iconic podcast called I Love Marketing, and he’s a brilliant thinker on philosophy. And this is a good friend of mine. His name is Dean Jackson. Dean, welcome to the show.

Dean:
Thank you. Welcome. Glad to be here.

Spencer:
Yeah, you know, Dean, it’s hard to believe that we’ve known each other for 24 years now.

Dean:
Is that how long it’s been? That’s crazy.

Spencer:
And I’m only 22 in my head, so that math.

Dean:
Yeah, exactly. Me too. That’s so funny. We actually had Dr. Misner on our I Love Marketing podcast years ago.

Spencer:
Fantastic. Well, Dean, today I really want to talk about some of the wisdom that you’ve learned over years inside of marketing, and referrals in particular. But let’s talk about why. You know, Simon Sinek says start with why. So let’s start with why do people refer?

Dean:
I think that’s the biggest misconception that people have is that often one of the first blocks we have to overcome to really optimize the number of referrals that you can get, is to understand that people are not referring as a favor to you or a gift to you. When you have this mindset that you have to earn referrals or that you are somehow asking for referrals, you’re going down a path that is kind of counter to what we, as species, have evolved to do. As long as we have been playing the cooperation game and escape the food chain, basically we’ve become the most successful species ever. That we have learned the importance of looking out for each other and maintaining what I call our status in the herd. That if we look at it, that that’s the primary reason that we do anything, and the reason that we avoid anything is if we feel like something might damage our status in the herd.

And it’s a very, very… you know, it goes all the way back to when we were gathering as you know tribes of 150 people or groups, that we always had to kind of look out for each other, and we realized that we were going to be better off if we were constantly looking out for and adding value collectively. And so you see the remnants of these things happen, you know, evolve into even, our society things. The way we are today, we’re not kind of out on the savanna with our just 150 people. We’re in big cities, but we’re still among our group of 150 people. There’s been a lot of research on this, and you may have heard of Robin Dunbar.

Spencer:
Yeah.

Dean:
His research on what’s become known as Dunbar’s Number, and that number is 150, and it’s the number of relationships that we can maintain. Now we may know and recognize 1000 or more people, but we truly have relationship with 150, and we’re very guarded in those relationships. It’s our role to add value to our herd and to protect our herd from getting damaged. That’s why we’re…  If you look at everything we do, we want to recommend things to people.

Spencer:
Yeah, we do.

Dean:
You see it all the time. If you see a movie, or if we’re talking about movies, we already know, “You got to see this one.” or “Oh, don’t see that one.” We’re even guarding people’s experiences. We don’t want them to waste their time reading a book that wasn’t worth it or making sure that they do read a book that was. And it’s the same thing for service providers and products that we that we come in contact with.

Spencer:
Talk more about this status in the herd. Because you came out to Tampa [Florida] in our [BNI] region and did a conversation with me on stage at one of our big conferences, and that’s been talked about so much. That’s why I really wanted to bring you here. So give us that hunter-gatherer conversation so that people can hear you.

Dean:
If we look at it, that we constantly are looking to, I’ll call it like “keep our balanced books.” That this is what Robert Cialdini would talk about with reciprocation. That if I do something nice for you, then you kind of owe me a favor, and you see that all the time playing out just in our normal interactions. But how that would have worked back then is let’s say we’re out and we’re hunting and gathering, and I find a big patch of blueberries, and I see you on the trail, and I say, “Hey, Spencer, there’s a big patch of blueberries over that hill. Go get you some blueberries, too. And I’m going to carry these big ones all the way back to the camp.”

Now, in that moment, I am higher status than you because I have just added value to you. You feel this need to balance that out, so you may say to me, “Well, watch out behind those rocks because I saw a lion over there,” and now we’re even. I showed you where the blueberries were. You protected me from the lion. That’s the way the give and take of society works. So we’re constantly looking for opportunities to protect our herd and to guide our herd to different things. And whenever we do something nice for somebody or thoughtful for somebody, that is raising our status. They kind of owe us one in a way, and that’s what really drives the way that we that we interact with people and the way that we introduce new things or protect people. That’s why you see, like you see it all the time. So many people, like we depend on all the people around us. That’s why testimonials, and that’s why reviews and things are kind of like… we’re by proxy taking somebody else’s… They’re helpfully giving us advice on something.

Spencer:
Yeah, and that’s what I was going to ask: is why does that matter more now than it ever has in the past?

Dean:
Yeah, because there’s so many people that we don’t know that are trying to take advantage of us, you know. And so that’s why we try and protect the people that we know in our 150. Imagine, a city is just all these interlaced herds of your inner circle of 150 people And let’s just talk about Dunbar’s Number there. The 150 that we’re talking about are people that if you saw them at the grocery store, you’d recognize them by name. You’d stop and have a conversation with them. You have a relationship with them, and we’re constantly in conversation with those people, and that’s the absolute key to the referrals – that we have a relationship with somebody, we’re going to have conversation with them, and in those conversations, certain things have to take place. They have to notice that the conversation is about whatever it is that would be useful for you. They have to think about you, and then they have to introduce you to the person that they have the conversation with, and that’s how referrals actually happen.

Somebody, if I’m a real estate agent and I’m talking with one of my top 150, and they’re saying, “Oh, we’re getting transferred. We’re going to have to sell the house and move to Poughkeepsie.” Now, if I am, you know, if I’m in that situation and I hear somebody saying that, I may say, “Well, you should call Spencer because Spencer’s a great realtor, he can help you out. That’s my realtor. Tell him I told you to call.” That kind of thinking that we’re doing the right thing, and that’s often what people train their clients to do. They’ll tell people make sure and tell your friends about me, but what that doesn’t do is that doesn’t connect the dots between you and the person that you are referring.

And it’s an important thing because then somebody you know, you may run into them at the grocery store, and they’ll say, “Hey, did my friend Spencer ever give you a call?” “No, no, I never heard from him.” “Oh well, I guess they’re gone now.” “But I tell people about you all the time.” You hear people say that, right? That you encourage people to tell people about you. That’s exactly what they do. And what would be more valuable is instead of concentrating on them telling people about you, we need to train them to tell you about people. To tell you about their friends that are moving, and the best way to do that is to give them the opportunity to be the hero. So if I have a book…

Spencer:
Yeah. And Dean, we are going to have to wrap up here in just a minute. So I’m just wanting to make sure that you got that, and that we can finish up with this thought because this is good.

Dean:
No problem. So if I have a book called How to Sell Your House for Top Dollar Fast, and I train my clients to say, “Hey, just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about selling their house, and then if you do, give me a call or text me, and I’ll give you a copy of my book to give to them.” Now you’re giving something of value to somebody that’s going to make them look like a very thoughtful person. That’s going to reflect well on their status, that you thoughtfully went out of your way and you got me something.

Spencer:
And just like that, you raise your status in the herd.

Dean:
That’s exactly right.

Spencer:
Fantastic. Well, Dean, this is really good. I really hope people can see that inside of the philosophy. We have to think a little deeper than just surface level on the motivations of why people want to refer us, and I think this was a really great way to teach some of that. So thank you so much for your time. What’s the best way for people to be able to find out more about you if they want to hear more of this, Dean?

Dean:
I’m pretty easy to find at deanjackson.com.

Spencer:
There you go. Priscilla, back to you.

Priscilla:

Okay, perfect. Thank you both so much. That’s it for this week.

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Thank you so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we look forward to having you join us again next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.