Strategic Connectors
Serving the right ICP tells you someone could refer you. It doesn’t tell you whether they will.
A while back, I almost passed on someone before I gave her a real shot. She’s a solo operator, capped at a handful of engagements she can actually carry at once, nowhere near the kind of book that usually makes someone worth the investment. I trusted her, and I knew our clients were exactly who she serves. But I looked at how little volume she had and made the call that it wasn’t worth the time.
In one year, she sent me three referrals. Two of them turned into great clients. I was wrong, and I was wrong for a specific reason: I stopped my evaluation at one number and never looked past it.
Serving the right ICP tells you someone could refer you. It doesn’t tell you whether they will, or how often, and neither does trust on its own. Two more things decide that, and I’d only looked at one: how much real exposure someone has to your kind of problem, and how deep their client relationships actually run.
Exposure isn’t just a client count. Someone spending real hours a week on networking and visibility has genuine exposure even with a small formal book. Depth isn’t about how often they talk to a client either. A well-run quarterly review can carry more weight than a shallow weekly check-in. Depth is really about whether the client trusts this person enough to act on what they say, not just whether the person happens to be nearby when it matters.
Run those two questions against four people who could otherwise look interchangeable on a business card.
A fractional CFO. Real depth. The clients trust her; she’s genuinely embedded in their businesses. But the model caps out around four clients, so there are only ever a handful of chances a year for your kind of problem to surface on her watch. When a referral comes, it means something. It just doesn’t come often.
A business coach. Wide exposure across a real portfolio of client companies, and real depth in each one, sitting inside recurring strategy sessions with a leadership team. This is close to the ideal combination. The tradeoff is that people like this tend to be in demand, and you’re one of several people trying to earn a piece of their attention.
A bank business development officer. High exposure. The job is built around meeting a large number of the right people, fast. But the moment the account opens, it gets handed to someone else, and the relationship that would have made a referral land never has time to form.
A business broker. Low exposure, a handful of deals a year, and each one ends the moment the deal closes. This is the one that’s easy to get wrong, because the role looks selective and high-end rather than weak. It’s actually weak on both counts at once.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. The person you’re most likely to over-invest in is the one who’s easiest to be around: the loud networker, the person who always says yes to coffee. That’s volume without depth, and it’s exactly what most people build their whole list around, because it feels like progress.
Stop giving someone a spot on your list because they’re easy to talk to, and stop cutting someone because their book looks small.
Run both questions on purpose, on every name.
We work through calls exactly like this live, with people’s actual lists, at the Referral Clarity Workshop.
