The small shift that makes referrals repeatable.
How changing the way you ask removes friction and leads to more consistent introductions.
For agencies and B2B service firms.
Presented by
Dan Englander
CEO & Founder of Sales Schema
- working with agencies on referral-driven growth since 2014.
The real issue with referrals.
If you run an agency or B2B service company, with a small team and high-trust deals, referrals matter.
They brought you some of your best clients.
The issue isn’t relevance or quality, it’s reliability.
Introductions show up reactively
- not in a way you can plan around.
Most referral asks create friction.
Most referral asks sound something like this:
“Do you know anyone
who might need what we do?”
That single question pushes all the work onto the other person. They’re now expected to:
Understand what you do.
Decide who might be a fit.
Recall people at the right moment.
Write the introduction emails themselves.
Even people who like you hesitate.
A lower-friction approach changes the shape of the ask.
Instead of asking someone to invent a referral, you ask for specific introductions.
You’re no longer asking them to think, you’re making it easy for them to help you.
When the ask is clear and concrete, helping stops feeling like work, and referrals start happening consistently.
A vague referral ask:
Open-ended
High effort for the other person
Easy to postpone or forget
Specific introductions:
Clear and concrete
Low effort
Easy to say yes to
Why this matters more than finding new leads...
This pattern shows up consistently when working with more than 200 agencies since 2014.
When referrals feel unreliable, the instinct is to chase new channels, new relationships, and more activity.
But the agencies that break through usually don’t start from scratch.
They get more leverage from the relationships they already have, by making it easier for those relationships to turn into introductions.
What changes when referrals are easier to give.
When you remove friction from the referral process:
Introductions happen more reliably
Conversations start warmer
Growth feels less chaotic
See how this works in practice...
If this sounds familiar, the short walkthrough below breaks down the shift, step by step:
About the presenter
Dan Englander
CEO & Founder @ sales schema
Since 2014, has worked with more than 200 specialized agencies on referral-driven growth - particularly firms with small teams, high-trust sales cycles, and non-mass markets.
The focus of this work has been practical: understanding how referrals actually happen in real agency environments, and how small structural changes can make them easier to generate consistently.
This walkthrough is based on those observed patterns, not theory.
What agency owners notice after this shift...
These reactions tend to come up after agencies change how they ask for referrals:
"After going through Sales Schema’s program, our team was able to drive a number of high-value opportunities using targeted outreach, but more importantly, their mindset about sales completely changed."
-Ethan McCarty, Integral
"Sales Schema's program was perfect based on the size of our agency and what we can actually manage for ourselves."
-Lindsey Seyman, Fancy LLC
"I got a ton out of Sales Schema’s program because it was organized in a way that allowed my team and I to see the big picture and snap everything into place."
- Adam Benjamin, Starke Marketing
Want to see how this works?
Who this is for
The walkthrough is the BEST fit for agency and B2B service owners and biz dev people who:
Don't have a sales team.
Sell high-trust, high-value services.
Want intros to feel easier to initiate and more reliable over time.
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