The Referral Ask That Doesn't Feel Gross

Your highest-converting lead source, and the one you're probably not asking for.

Referral leads close at 50–70%. Google LSA leads close at 30–45%. You already know this. The reason you don't ask more is that most referral asks feel like begging, and you'd rather keep the relationship clean.

The fix is timing, not wording. Ask at the wrong moment and no script saves you.

Stage 1 — Find your moments

prompt 1

You are a customer-experience strategist working with a residential solar
installer. I want to build referral asks into my existing customer journey at
moments where asking feels natural rather than transactional.

### MY TOUCHPOINTS
[list what already happens: install day, PTO, first true-up, service visits,
production reports, warranty claims resolved, anything else]

### YOUR TASK

Identify the moments in my customer journey where a referral ask will land well,
and rank them. For each:
  - why this moment specifically
  - who should ask (tech, office, owner) and through which channel
  - how long the window stays open
  - what must have gone RIGHT for the ask to be appropriate

Then tell me the moments where I should never ask, and why.

### CONTEXT
Referral leads close at 50-70% versus 30-45% for paid local-services leads, so
the value of getting this right is high. Home-services review data shows asks
made immediately after a completed job convert dramatically better than asks
made the next day by email — assume referral behaves similarly.

### RULES
- Be specific to solar, where the gap between sale and install is months and the
  gap between install and first true-up is a year.
- Flag any moment where an ask would put an existing warranty or service
  conversation at risk.

### OUTPUT
Ranked table: moment | who asks | channel | window | preconditions | risk

Stage 2 — Write the asks

prompt 2

Write referral asks for a residential solar installer, one per moment below.

### MOMENTS
[paste the top 3 from Stage 1]
### MY REFERRAL OFFER
[cash, bill credit, charity donation, nothing at all — say which]

### WRITE, FOR EACH MOMENT

  - a spoken version, for a tech or the owner, under 20 seconds
  - a written version, under 100 words
  - one follow-up, sent only if there was a positive response and nothing came
    of it

### RULES

- No guilt. No "we're a small business and we depend on referrals." It is true
  and it still reads as pressure.
- Make it specific. "Do you know anyone who'd want solar" gets nothing. Give
  them a concrete person to picture — a neighbour who asked about the panels, a
  relative with a big summer bill.
- The out has to be real and easy. A referral ask that is hard to decline damages
  the relationship it is trading on.
- If I offer an incentive, say so plainly. If I do not, do not manufacture one.
- Never ask a customer with an open service issue. If my brief implies that,
  push back.
- Bodies as single-line text with \n where line breaks go.

### OUTPUT
CSV: moment | channel | spoken | written | followup | preconditions

What to do with it

Wire the top moment into your actual process — a line in the tech's close-out checklist beats a campaign. The ask that happens every time at the right moment outperforms the perfectly-worded one that happens occasionally.

Want this run for you instead of by you? That is the job.
adrian@atlasautomates.com · atlas automates