Referral and word of mouth, engineered

Referral converts better than anything else, costs almost nothing, and is the channel most often left entirely to luck. People say word of mouth is their main source and then do nothing whatsoever to cause it, which means it arrives at whatever rate it arrives at.

Three things make it happen more often. Ask, at the right moment — which is immediately after something went well, not months later in a newsletter — and ask specifically: "do you know anyone else dealing with this?" beats "let me know if you hear of anything", because a specific question is answerable and a general one is not. Second, make it easy to pass on: give them a sentence they can forward, since the friction is usually that they do not know how to describe you, which is exactly what the ENT-106 statement fixes. Third, close the loop — tell the referrer what happened and thank them, because people who see that a referral was handled well refer again.

What to avoid: paying for referrals in a way that makes the recommendation less honest, which damages the thing that makes referral valuable in the first place; and asking so often that people start avoiding the topic. And a hard boundary — referrals come from customers, not from an ENT-101 research conversation, because a research conversation was not a sales call and turning it into one afterwards is exactly the behaviour that makes people refuse the next student who asks.