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Most referrals fall apart not because people don't like you, but because they have no idea what to actually send you.

Renee Hribar unpacks a private round table she hosted with a group of women business owners, where she asked two deceptively simple questions: where are your clients coming from, and what can somebody actually buy from you? Their answers revealed that inconsistent client flow rarely comes down to marketing tactics — it comes down to proximity and clarity. Renee breaks down the difference between existing trust and borrowed trust, showing how real relationships, not funnels or reels, create the conditions for referrals to happen naturally. She also introduces the idea of a "no-brainer offer," a specific, time-bound entry point that gives your network a handle to grab onto when they want to send you business, instead of trying to describe your entire skill set.

Renee closes with a simple five-person exercise listeners can use to test whether their own network actually understands what they do and who they help. It's a reminder that visibility and clarity, not more content, are usually what stand between a service provider and their next client.

Mentioned in this episode:

Grace - Organize with Grace: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/organize-with-grace-declutter-downsize-move/id1486586569 Alexa's Book Marketing and Publishing Chat: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/alexas-book-marketing-publishing-chat/id1544686620

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Hmm, because you might not have a problem getting leads, right? You might not have a problem with finding the right people. You might have the problem that so many smart and amazing women have, and it's called the nobody knows what the heck to send me problem. Welcome back to the Selling Your Expertise podcast.

When we first got here, I didn't know anyone. Nobody knew me, and my Spanish, uh, let's just say Duolingo is not worried I'm coming for their job. But every day I walk the dogs, I see the same people, the same neighbors, the same shop owners, same people, that are walking their dogs, right? And my one dog has become, like, vicious, like angel in the house, devil in the street.

You know how that goes, right? but now that's familiarity, right? That's connection and trust. Not because I launched a Barcelona funnel, not because I made a lead magnet for my neighbors. Mm, and I thought about it. No. Click the QR code and learn all about each other. But, and I definitely didn't post 17 reels, uh, entitled Three Things Your American Neighbors Wish You Knew About Them.

I love this kind of stuff, by the way. So it's not something I market publicly, but I definitely invite people privately all the time. This is a kinda like under the radar, off menu stuff I do. So make sure you're on my email list. Like, if I DM you, it's me. It's not a bot. I did it. this whole little round table got me thinking, and I am changing the details and combining examples because the conversation was private, obviously.

I don't even record these. but I left thinking about it, and oh, we need to talk about this. Like, this is a podcast topic. So because I asked these women two incredibly simple questions: where are your clients coming from? Like, where are you getting clients? I mean, that's a good question to ask, right?

And as a sales coach, I know I can help them with that, but I don't know what they're working with. And the second question was, what can somebody actually buy from you? Just those two questions, and we spent a half an hour just talking about it, and their answers were all over the place in a good way.

And another had a podcast, and she had guests on, and so through the guests and the promotion of her podcast, she was connecting with some of her ideal clients. Someone else was being found through search. This person's, like, an SEO expert, getting into AIGEO and all the ways that she can show up organically.

She also has a very specialized set of skills. So others talked about professional groups, former clients, masterminds, LinkedIn, and, and people they'd known for years. And then I realized there's no magical room where you have to be. There's no secret platform where all of your ideal clients are hiding.

And they were getting close enough to the right people consistently enough for somebody to understand what they did, then trust them enough to start a conversation. and if you've been listening, right, for a while, like, to this podcast, like, this should sound familiar. It was in my book. I talk about it here all the time.

Because tactics change. Platforms change. MySpace, oh. Algorithms change every five minutes, right? Like, every five minutes, because apparently they enjoy keeping us emotionally unstable. Let's not start with that one. But being human beings, like, being human doesn't change. We still need trust So there was a woman who claimed she had no marketing and this woman in this conversation really caught my attention.

She's an introvert again, very much like most of the women that I work with and she's not networking her face off. Like she's not out there like in business card orgy land. she doesn't have a gigantic email list. I think she said she had like 200 some people, which is great. Imagine having 200 people in a room that were listening to you.

Know anybody who needs this?'" And people send her business. Now, would I recommend relying only on referrals forever? No, of course not but because, you know, obviously there's a lot of factors that go into it, but when you take out whatever gets, you know, put out there, like in other words, if you are only relying on referrals, then you are going to have to take whatever is handed to you.

But I don't want you to miss what this woman has built. Years of relational equity. People know her work. They know what she's good at. They trust her and when she says, "I have an opening," they know what to do with that information. That is marketing. It's just not wearing a ring light. Planet internet has completely screwed up our understanding of what marketing is supposed to look like.

We think marketing means post more, make another reel, start another newsletter. Ah, get on whatever platform everybody is screaming about this week. Meanwhile, there's a woman over here sending one email to people who already trust her and filling an opening. Like lean in, right? Hello. Hola. Pay attention.

They're professionals inside organizations, and what she does is specific enough that some of them are not even aware that they need somebody like her until they meet her So where does she find these opportunities? Industry conferences. If you've not been to an industry conference, like I went to a dental conference, I went to a construction conference, freaking awesome.

I, I, I'm the only salesperson there. It's great. Be the only one. You'll be special. So industry conferences. The same kinds of conferences that this woman used to attend before she became a business owner. And there it is again, proximity. She understood the conferences. She had been there before in a different capacity.

It's like we get LLC, we get an LLC and we get LLC amnesia. Sorry, that sounded better when I wrote it. Where would I possibly find these people? I don't know, Susan. Where have you been for the last 15 years? Where do they gather? What are they already attending? Who already has their attention? Where did you know these people from before somebody on Instagram convinced you that what you really needed was a funnel?

That's how much I loved it. She actually analyzed where her clients came from, like literally. I love a woman with a spreadsheet. Give me the data. I love it. I'm a data and a word nerd. And so this is what she discovered, that a huge part of her business came through some form of existing or borrowed trust.

Existing trust is obvious. Somebody knows you. They've worked with you. They've heard you speak. They've been in your world. Borrowed trust is different Somebody they trust says, "You need to talk to her." Oh yeah, now we're getting somewhere, right? Because borrowed trust is one of the most valuable currencies in a service business.

That's why conversations, starting real conversations, whether it's DMs or emails or on a Zoom call or in person, is so vital to the growth of your business. It's like you're nurturing the soil and you're planting the seeds. That is what does it. And that's why being known for something makes all the difference.

I used to run this talk about, like, what are you taggable for? Uh, back when, you know, I had just my Facebook group and that I had no email list. I had nothing else going on. And I'm like, "What are you taggable for?" 'Cause everybody wanted to be tagged, right? You know, "Tag me, tag me." What are you taggable for?

Biz dev is short for business development. Somebody asked me that today. I was like, "You know what? I live in a... I, I, I live in my own head." It's one of those things, biz dev, that I just say all the time, and I just assume everyone knows what it is, but thank you for asking me. It means business development.

So anyways, bottom line is at some point, people have to know you exist Bottom line. And posting is not enough. So then I asked the question that made everybody a little squirrely. They're like, "Oh, I think I have to go." After we talked about where everyone finds clients, I asked, "Okay, what can somebody buy from you?"

So this is where the conversation changed though because talking about what we do, easy. I help companies with... I work with organizations that... My expertise is... Great, great, great, great, great. But then I started asking, "What does an engagement look like? What does a project look like? How, how long does it take?

Uh, what do you... what do they get?" And yes, "What does it cost?" 'Cause you might have thought I asked everybody to show me their bras or something because I talked about money. Oh, no, money. We're talking about M-O-N-E-Y again. Listen, pricing is personal. Your price doesn't have to make sense to everybody on planet internet, and you do not need their permission to charge whatever you want.

You just made their job harder and created a ton of friction where there doesn't have to be any. So my, what I wanna put on a frame is don't make your connectors do your sales work. I don't want people that are connecting me to try to have to sell me. I just want them to connect me, to feel confident enough to transfer some of their trust to that person about me.

Is this hundreds of dollars? Is this thousands of dollars? Tens of thousands of dollars? Pricing is all over the map. I don't need your entire price price sheet tattooed on my forearm. Imagine. A, I don't have tattoos. I'm that age, uh, that we didn't get them. Some of... But if I ever get one, I'll let you know.

Okay. But anyways. But you gotta give me something to work with. So yes, I don't need anything tattooed, but I definitely do want something. Because your network, like mine, isn't sitting around studying my services page. They have lives. They're picking up somebody from soccer. They're trying to figure out what's making that smell in the refrigerator.

Which brings me to one of my favorite ways to think about offers, right? Your offer is like a handle. Like, this is one of those times when I want you to imagine. Remember those big boom boxes in the '80s? Like, big ones, and r- remember, like, the ads you would see or, or fun videos where they were, like, holding the handle and, like, holding it on their shoulder?

Like, these boom boxes were approximately the size of a Buick, right? And if I tell you, "Move that thing," you need somewhere to grab it. That's what the handle is for. Your offer is the handle for your expertise, because your expertise might be enormous. You might know how to solve 17 different problems. I bet you do.

So I call these no-brainer offers, and I teach my clients how to build them because the no-brainer offer is not necessarily the only thing you'll ever sell that client. Quite the opposite, in fact, if I have my way. It's often the front door to deeper work. Work that doesn't go out of scope, right? 'Cause it's specific.

It's time-bound. Oh, those are my favorite words. The client understands the initial result. It feels easier to say yes to, and if there's more work to do afterward, now you have the information and trust to talk about the bigger problems, the transformation, the three-month, six-month, 12-month offer that is $10,000, $20,000, $100,000.

I know. You're talented. You can help lots of people. Congratulations. So can WD-40, right? Sorry, I just heard... We have these really creaky, I would call them a, like a- A door to the closet, like a closet door, but they're called something else here. I don't know. Point is this, I just heard it, it made me think of it.

That's what I need your network to be able to do for you. Recognize the problem. I want somebody halfway through a conversation to stop and say, "Wait, I know who you need to talk to." That is gold. But they don't do it if all they know is she's a marketer. For what? She does operations. What kind? She helps businesses grow.

How? You like my voices? Okay. Give people enough specificity to connect the first few dots. They don't need your dissertation. They need a handle. And then there's the money thing. One woman shared a newer offer. She knew what she did. She knew how much it work, work it required. She knew it created value, and almost immediately after saying the price, she started explaining why she was charging less.

No. What I'm saying is know why you picked the number. There's a difference between I'm intentionally offering a founding rate while I test this, and I lowered the price because saying the actual number made my armpits tingle. It's a real thing I've heard before. Don't even d-don't. I have so many stories that I could never tell.

Okay, but those are two different pricing strategies. For real, let me get serious here. And hello again to our old friend from the latest episode, the four inches between your ears. I can tell you to raise your prices every Tuesday until the cows come home. It doesn't matter. You have to own the number.

One exercise I have clients do is write down everything they're actually doing inside of a project. Think about the last time a mechanic handed you a bill. Parts, labor More parts that he had to order from some other place. Some mysterious thing you've never heard of that apparently cost more than your first car, like the flux capacitor, it was broken.

I don't know. But suddenly you see what went into the number. You need to do the same thing with your expertise because so many women look at what they do and say, "Oh, that only took me an hour." No, babe, that took you an hour plus the 15 years that made you capable of seeing the problem in 10 minutes, and then using the rest of the hour to fix it.

'Cause here's what I loved most about this room that I hosted. Every woman did something different. Different businesses, different ways of finding clients, different offers, different price points. There wasn't one sales system everybody needed to copy, thank God, because it's boring, and it's also not reality.

Because I spent enough years in rooms where everybody was building the same funnel. The same funnel, different font. Everybody I want... Everybody I knew wanted the same funnel. Oh, the new funnel drop, and then every sales page has the exact same layout, just different words. I'm like, "Really? Really?"

That's a business. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. So let's talk about you. You might be thinking, "Okay, Renee, but I still need more leads." Maybe. You might. But before you add another platform, before you launch another lead magnet, before you decide you're going to post twice a day until your thumbs fall off, test something simpler.

Five people who genuinely want to see you succeed, and ask them this I'm making it easier for people in my network to understand who I can best help. If you were describing my work to someone, what would you tell them I do? Then do not correct them. Don't explain anything. Don't send them your new positioning statement.

Don't turn this into a hostage negotiation. Listen to them. Their answers are your data. If all five basically describe the same thing, excellent. Fan-noodle-y tastic. Your signal is clear. If five people give you five completely different answers, well, also excellent because now you know where your referrals are coming from in a random way.

Think what's the handle, and that brings me back to Barcelona. 'Cause three months ago, people I'd pass walking my dogs were strangers. Now we recognize each other. Some know the dogs. Some know us. I understand more of what they're saying. They understand more of my truly magnificent Spanish. I said facetiously.

Nothing dramatic has happened. We just kept crossing paths. That's how relationships work, and it's how a lot of businesses work. You don't need everybody on planet Internet know- to know your name. You don't need to be famous. I said from the beginning, and maybe you remember I wanna be rich and unfamous.

You already are brilliant. Make yourself easier to refer. And if you're listening thinking, "Renée, yeah, I get it, but I don't know what my handle is. I don't know what to charge. I don't know what I should be... who I should be talking to or what I should be saying," or, "I know all of it and I'm still not doing it," that's exactly why I built resources, and they're all at askmecoach.com.

Seriously, reviews help more women find this podcast, and that's the whole mission. You're leaving 30 seconds of feedback, and that can put this conversation in front of another woman who's sitting there thinking, "I'm so good at what I do. Why can't I figure out this selling part?" I want her with us. So if this show has helped you, ...

help me find her. Find the subscription, find the review, then go do a five-person experiment, and I can't wait to see what you come up with. I'll see you soon, probably still in Barcelona, hopefully speaking slightly better Spanish. Adios.