If you’re going to make a lot of referrals to other service providers you trust, there’s some information you should be collecting and maintaining from your network which will be important to have at your fingertips, so that you can make more relevant referrals. For example, it helps to have a sense of a service provider’s ideal clientele, the services they provide, and their rates. Having this information in-hand can help you qualify potential clients on their behalf and reduce a lot of the back and forth that often happens when trying to make referrals.

It’s tempting to want to create a database or a form where you have everyone’s services neatly tagged and categorized. It’s often a fool’s errand to try to perfectly codify information about all of the service providers in your network. The service providers you trust have different ways of defining their services, packaging ways clients can engage with them, and articulating their pricing. It can be really difficult – and often unnecessary – to try to get everyone to provide information in a consistent, codified format.

Even if you do want to add some custom questions that help you get more data from your service providers, there are a few pieces of information you should allow your partners to concisely express in their own free text.

• ‍Ideal clientele: Have your partners tell you (roughly) who their ideal clients are. Encourage them to share any context on company stage, industry, situation, and/or stakeholders. For example, a really specific description of ideal clientele might be “CFOs of B2B SaaS companies with $10M annual revenue preparing for a fundraise.” You should let your partners be as narrow or wide as they want with these descriptions, and encourage them to list multiple if relevant.‍
• Services: Again some service providers articulate their services very granularly (e.g. “SEO audits for e-commerce businesses”) or very generically (e.g. “Fractional CMO services”). You generally want them to provide as much granularity as they’re able to, but you don’t need a ton of detail on how these services are provided. Service providers tinker with how they package their service offerings all the time, and frankly you do not need that level of detail to make referrals.‍
• Rates: Having data on rates is critical to being able to qualify who is a good fit. There’s nothing worse than making a referral that seems like a great fit on the surface, only to realize that there was a huge mismatch between the client’s budgets and the service provider’s rates. As a connector, one of the more valuable things you can do when making referrals is ensure budget fit. In order to do this, you need your partners to tell you what their rates are. Everyone articulates their rates differently, so it’s another fool’s errand to try to over-codify this. For example, a marketing agency may articulate their rates as “retainers starting at $10K/m” and the hourly rate math is actually pretty complicated. On the other hand, some consultants may just base all of their pricing on an hourly rate. Some people have value-based pricing for specific projects (e.g. “$5K for a designed 15-slide deck”). It’s best just to have service providers articulate their rates their own way.

You can always collect more information, but if you add data that you need to collect from your partners, it should arise from a real need. It’s really tempting to come up with a lot of other information to collect that doesn’t end up being useful. 

You can see how people do this in the wild like Steve Guberman’s Outsource index. Here’s a template of an ideal questionnaire we recommend to collect information from your network.

Note that this information is always evolving for service providers. They change their pricing or start offering different services frequently. This is why it’s always good to keep this simple. And collecting this information upfront is just the start. If you’re maintaining a strong referral network, you’ll want to give your partners ways to update this information over time.

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