How an HR Advisor Built a Thriving Referral Network and a New Income Stream

About Shelby

Shelby Wolpa has been a people leader at a number of high-growth, venture-backed companies including Palantir, One Medical, and Instacart. Today, Shelby advises CEOs, People Leaders, and Venture Capital Firms to bring those learnings to companies around the world at Shelby Wolpa Consulting.

Shelby Needed a Solution to Manage her Referral Network

Shelby has spent her career building a large network of trusted service providers that she can refer out on behalf of her clients’ needs. Like most in-demand consultants, Shelby didn’t have a great solution to manage her referral network, creating a few challenges:

1. She didn’t have a clear process to remember who was in her referral network or what referral incentives they had agreed to.
2. She lacked an easy way to promote a client’s need to her network without incurring hours of additional overhead and back-and-forth communication.
3. She had no easy way to track the status of the referrals she’d made or settle up with a referral partner when a fee was owed.

Structured Referral Incentives Made it Easy to Align on Referral Terms

Shelby makes a number of referrals each month between her clients and her network. She was looking for a solution that helped her form referral partnerships with her network but was concerned about broaching these partnerships in a way that was too formal or transactional.

After signing up for Switchboard, Shelby was able to use a simple partner onboarding workflow that allowed her to determine an appropriate referral incentive and quickly send a partnership invite. Within 48 hours of sending out her referral terms to her network, everyone had accepted them.

Switchboard has helped Shelby onboard 50+ referral partners and given her a single dashboard to view each partner, their shared referral terms, and any referrals they've exchanged.

"I’ve been making referrals for years, but it was always awkward to broach referral incentives and partnerships with my high-trust network. Once I started using Switchboard, I was pleasantly surprised at how painless and mutually beneficial it made it for me to form partnerships with my network."

Opportunities Make It Easy to Share a Client's Need with a Broad Network

When clients hire Shelby, she brings much more to the table than her advisory services. She also brings a large network of partners that she can refer to her client when they have a need she can’t support. While it might seem easy for her to take a client's need and find the right person in her network who can help, it’s actually an extremely time-consuming process. From describing the client's need to understanding who has capacity to take on a new client, to surfacing a shortlist of people to her client – this process can take hours.

This is where Switchboard Opportunities came into play for Shelby. When a client came to her with a need, she would create an opportunity on their behalf, share the opportunity link with trusted HR consultants, and collect pitches from those whose skills align with the client need and want to be considered. With those pitches in hand, Shelby could create a shortlist of the most qualified candidates and share that list with her client, giving the client the ability to request introductions to several qualified service providers.

Shelby has created over 30 opportunities resulting in 30+ referrals and countless hours of time saved.

"I have a very client-centric mindset, and when my client is looking for support, I can usually find a great person in my network that can help. But I don’t want to spend hours running a search process on my end. Opportunities are a win/win/win. My network can easily pitch themselves, I can create a shortlist of great candidates, and my client can pick and choose who they'd like to be introduced to."

Referral Tracking at Every Stage

Once Shelby had her partnerships set up and began sharing opportunities, she started making a high volume of referrals to her network. Historically, Shelby didn't have much insight into what happened after a referral was made. With Switchboard, everything involved with referral tracking is handled for her.

Switchboard's referral dashboard provides visibility into all referrals that Shelby has made and the status of each referral. Each month, Switchboard automatically follows up with any referral partner she's referred a client to and requests a status update, keeping Shelby in the loop along the way.

If her referral partner is hired by her client, Switchboard handles the referral fee transfer from her referral partner to Shelby. With Switchboard, Shelby's job is to make referrals. Switchboard handles tracking, status updates, and referral fee payments after the referral is made.

"With Switchboard, I can take more meetings, and even if I'm not a fit, I have the support behind the scenes to help me help them find someone great in my referral network."