A good friend and marketing buddy of mine asked me a question the other day.

He asked “who are your top 20 referral sources?”

Crap. “I don’t know” I had to say. I was embarrassed. I should know. I know I should know.

If I had known the answer, he was going to followup with “how have you rewarded them?” And then he was going to “what do you know about them?” He wanted to know if I knew their birthdays, their anniversaries, their spouse and kids names, their ages, you know, the usual stuff.

But I hit a brick wall right off the bat. One question and I was out of the game.

It’s probably even worse than it sounds.

To be honest, I’m not sure if I could name the top five. Crap. I was really embarrassed. After all, I’ve built a reasonably successful practice. I should know the answer.

So I’ve gone to work to figure it out. Finding out is harder than it seems. We do a pretty good job of asking how someone came to our firm. But it’s not always black and white. Sometimes prospective clients say they came form our website. If we dig deeper we often find that they were referred to the website by a referral source. They usually don’t volunteer the information.

We’re used to digging and tracking for the referral source data. If we can figure it out, we’re reasonably good at writing thank you notes.

But we’re not really all that connected to who these referral sources are and being careful about following up with them. Clearly, I can’t be on top of our relationship with them if I don’t even know their names.

We tend to go to lunch and coffee with the referral sources we like the most, the people with whom we’re most comfortable, rather than those people that refer the most.

My friend asked good, although disturbing, questions. I’m motivated now.

What about you?

Do you know who your top twenty referral sources are? How about the top five?

If not, please use my embarrassment as your motivation. Don’t let what happened to me, happen to you.