How to Get Referred: The One Sentence That Makes You the Only Name in the Room

Somebody you know is in a room right now. It could be a board meeting, could be the sideline at a soccer game, could be a group text with six women who all run things. And somebody in that room just said, “Do you know anyone who…” and then described exactly what you do, your thing, the thing you can do in your sleep. Here are three things your friend might say back. One might be, “Oh, I know somebody. She’s in consulting, something with operations, I think, right?” Or two, “Oh, my God, yes, you have to meet my friend Karen. She’s amazing, one of the smartest people I know.”

Three, “Yes, she’s who you call when your company doubled and your systems didn’t.” One of those gets you that phone call; the other two get you a new friend. I’m Karen Yankovich. This is Good Girls Get Rich, and today we’re making sure your friend says number three.

So, if you were here last week, you know we played a little game. I put you in the buyer’s chair. You had to pick between two consultants, Diana and Marisol, and then you had to read your own LinkedIn headline the way a stranger with one problem and about four seconds would read it. And what a lot of you found out because you told me is that the stranger wouldn’t have picked you. It’s not that you’re not better; you probably are better. You definitely are better. The stranger just couldn’t tell what you were for. That was last week—the buyer looking right at you, right?

This week is even harder because, and I think it matters more because this is that magnetic approach that I want, that magnet force that I want you to have built into your marketing. Because this week the buyer isn’t looking at you at all. She’s never even heard of you, right? She’s asking someone else, and what happens next depends completely on what that somebody else can say about you from memory, with no warning, with no prep. So that’s why I gave you homework. I asked you to text three people who know your work and ask them a quick question, no wrong answer: If someone asked you what I do, what would you tell them?

And I also told you not to hint. So if you did it, I would love you to pull those replies out in front of you. If you didn’t, and I know who you are, you’ve got two choices: pause me and send that text right away—I’ll wait—or do what I’m doing today, which is pull up what people have already written about you, your LinkedIn recommendations, testimonials, that thank-you email you saved because it made your whole week. It’s the same raw material: people describing you in their own words when you aren’t standing over their shoulder. Because full disclosure, I’m not reading your text replies today. I’ve got years of things clients have written about me, and I’m going to sort mine right along beside you. And I’m going to warn you, some of this is not flattering to my own marketing. So let’s go.

All right. So before we sort anything, I want you to see where this is happening. Because I think that when I say referral, you picture something formal—somebody sitting down and writing a thoughtful introductory email—and that happens, right? But maybe that’s like one in five, maybe even one in 10, right? Here’s what really happens: it happens in a meeting. It happens in like the last four minutes of the meeting, when someone says, “We need outside help on this, who do you know? Does anybody know anyone?”

And then there’s a pause, and whoever fills that pause wins, because they want to be done. They want to move on to the next thing. They want to fill that spot, right? Or maybe it happens in a group text. Someone types, “Does anybody have a person for this? And who do we know that…” I mean, I’m in a couple of different masterminds, and we have Slack groups, and somebody’s always doing that: “Hey, I need an expert in my, you know, my program for this. Who do you know, right? I need somebody to help. I need help with my email open rates. Who do you know, right?” And then three dots show up, and whoever’s name gets typed in the next 30 seconds gets the call, because I trust my mastermind peeps, right? Nobody scrolls back up later to add a better suggestion, right?

Or maybe it happens like in the hallway at a conference between sessions, holding, you know, your tea: “Oh, you should talk to this person.” And then either a name comes out with a reason attached, which makes you remember it, or it doesn’t, right? It’s just a name, and you’re like, “Okay, well, if I have time, I’ll check that person out, right?”

It also happens in LinkedIn comments. This is what I want for you. You’ve seen those posts looking for recommendations for a blah, blah, blah, and then people tag names. Have you ever seen this happen about a realtor, like in your local Facebook groups? Oh, my God, it’s like 50 people post, right? But if somebody says, “Do you know a realtor that focuses—that’s in this town that focuses on first-time homebuyers?” boy, that list gets a lot smaller, right? If that’s you, you’re going to get called, right? Because people are going to tag names and go look at one of those threads. Sometimes names that come with a sentence attached to it get clicked on. The realtor with, you know, that specifically handles this town with this type of buyer is the one that gets clicked. The other ones are just a tag, a bare name that just sits there, because there’s just so many other names there. Nobody knows why to reach out to that person.

And here’s the newest one, and I don’t think we’ve even caught up to this yet: it happens when somebody opens up their AI tool of choice and says, “Who’s a good person to help me with blah, blah, blah?” I mean, that’s a room too, right? There’s nobody in it, and it can’t take you to lunch, but all it has to go on is what’s been written about you, by you, for you, about you, by other people, out loud, where it can be found. So that’s five rooms. You’re not in any of them, and in every single one of them, the whole thing comes down to a few seconds and a few words.

And listen, there’s good news here. There’s good news. I really want you to hear this part: you can’t control whether you’re in the room, so stop trying. You can’t network your way into every meeting on the planet, but you have a lot to say over what gets said in there—way more than you’re using, I bet, right now.

All right, so let’s look at the… if you have your replies, your replies are in front of you. You’re making piles—three main ones, and then a fourth that I think is going to surprise some of you.

• Pile one is the label. This is a job title or an industry: “She’s a consultant,” “She does HR work,” “She’s something in finance,” “She’s a coach.” And if there’s a question mark at the end of that reply, by the way, it goes right into this pile. Here’s one of mine: a client wrote, “Karen is a brilliant LinkedIn strategist.” I’ll take it. Thank you very much. But listen to that: what is that? It’s a job title with an adjective on it. When was the last time you were in a room and somebody says, “Does anyone know a LinkedIn strategist?” It doesn’t happen. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I can tell you almost nobody wakes up or dreams in the middle of the night thinking, “Oh, I need a LinkedIn strategist.” What they say is, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and no one knows who I am,” or “I left corporate eight months ago, and my phone’s still not ringing.” And my label doesn’t pop up as an answer to that, because a label tells people what drawer you’re in, and it doesn’t tell them when to call you, right? So think about how many people are in your drawer. If the reply is “She’s a consultant,” well, so are a few million other people. Your friend just described you and several million strangers with the same three words, right? So that’s the first pile.

• Second pile is the compliment. “She’s amazing,” “She’s so smart,” “You’d love her,” “She’s the real deal.” Someone put on my LinkedIn recommendations: “Her expertise in LinkedIn strategies is phenomenal.” I love that. I want to put that on my mug, right? But it’s useless in the room. Nobody’s ever asked, “Who do you know that’s phenomenal?” Nobody. This is not a search that anybody runs, right? Nobody puts that in a search bar. I want to stay here for a second because, for a lot of you, this is going to be your biggest pile, and it’s going to feel like the best one, because who doesn’t love those amazing compliments? I know I do, right? It’s the one you screenshot. It’s the one you hang on your refrigerator, and of course it’s your biggest pile. We spent entire careers being great to work with, reliable, generous, the one who makes everybody else’s job easier. That’s the good girl tax showing up one more time. You paid in for 30 years, and what you got back is “She’s phenomenal.” So if your whole stock is compliments, hear me: that’s not bad news. It’s always great when people like you a lot. They just have no idea where to send you, and that’s a much easier problem to fix than the reverse, believe me. I can’t make people like you. Okay, so that’s pile two, the compliment.

• Pile three is the call. These replies have a person in them and something that happened. They sound like “She’s who you call when…” or “She’s the one who…” or they tell a little story about a before and an after. So here are two of mine: “After revamping my LinkedIn profile, eight new people connected with me, interested in my services. They had seen my profile and want to work with me.” And then there’s another one: “Karen’s LinkedIn advice is converting into paying gigs.” Do you hear the difference? Nobody called me phenomenal, but they said what changed. And if somebody in a room says, “I need more people finding me,” the person who wrote that has something to say. She’s got a story with a number in it. She can tell it in 10 seconds, and it ends with my name, right? That’s what a call is. It’s a reply that would still make sense if you heard it across a table from someone who’s never met you.

• And then there’s pile four. Pile four is the old job. This is the reply that describes somebody you used to be: “She’s at the bank,” right? I mean, you left the bank five years ago. “She’s the one who does our events.” No, you haven’t run an event since 2000, and you do strategy now. “She’s in pharma.” You were in pharma; now you’re consulting in three companies and trying to get on a board, right? So if you’ve made a move in the last few years—and so many of you listening have—I know that you are going to find this pile, and it’s going to sting a little, because it means that the people who love you are confidently sending the wrong version of you into these rooms. They’re not being careless. Nobody told them. You changed your LinkedIn title, and you thought that was an announcement, but it isn’t, right? People don’t get a memo when you change. They keep saying the last sentence they had from you until they hand you a new one.

And there’s one more thing that might be in front of you, which is nothing: you texted three people and no one answered. Don’t make that mean something terrible, but notice it, because sometimes no answer is somebody who started typing and realized they didn’t know what to say and put the phone down. That’s information. That’s what you want to know, right? So count them up: labels, compliments, calls, old job—and write the numbers down.

So now let’s read this like we’re reading our lab work, because this is the mix that matters:

• If you’re mostly labels, you’ve been introducing by your title for years, maybe decades, right? In meetings, on LinkedIn, at every event where somebody handed you a name tag, people are just repeating what you taught them. The fix is on your side, and it’s simple.

• If you’re mostly compliments, people have experienced you, but they’ve never heard you say what you’re for. You let the work speak for itself, and the work did speak—it said “She’s amazing,” “She’s phenomenal”—and it just didn’t say anything specific enough to repeat.

• If you’ve got the old job replies, you have an announcement problem. You did the hard part, you made the move, and then you whispered it, right?

• And if your replies are all over the place—three people, three completely different answers: one says marketing, one says coaching, one says she speaks, I think—then you’ve been saying yes to everything, and each of these people met with a different version of you, right? And I say that with love, because I have done this. I have done this. When the work is coming in, you take the work, right?

Now, if you’ve got one call in there, even one, I want you to put a star on it—big star. We’re going to use it in a few minutes. That reply is somebody telling you in her own words exactly how to be referred. And if you have zero, don’t panic. That’s probably most people. I mean, many very accomplished people. I’ve seen women with 30 years in, you know, a title that would stop traffic, and not one person who could say when to call them.

So here’s what I want you to understand about the person doing the referring, because we never think about her side of it, right? Somebody asks, “Who do you know?” and your friend has about five seconds. She’s got no notes. She isn’t going to pull up your LinkedIn profile under the table, right? She’s doing you a favor from memory in the middle of her own day, while also thinking about, you know, what she’s got coming up in the next half hour, her call that’s coming up. So she reaches for the easiest sentence that she has about you. If it’s a label, that’s what comes out, and the other person nods politely and forgets it by the time they get to the elevator. If it’s a compliment, she sounds like your mother, right? Like, “Oh, she’s lovely,” right?

And then there’s a second thing going on that we forget: when she recommends you, she’s spending her own credibility, right? So if she sends her colleague to you and it’s a bad fit, that’s on her. So she only says a name when she’s sure what she’s sending that person into. And if she’s fuzzy on what you do, staying quiet isn’t rude. It’s just her being careful. The vaguer you are, the riskier you are to recommend, no matter how phenomenal you are. I’m going to say that again: the vaguer you are, the riskier you are to recommend.

And if she doesn’t have a sentence at all, she’ll say, “Let me think about this and get back to you.” And she won’t—not because she doesn’t love you, but because she’s busy and you gave her nothing to carry, right? So remember Diana and Marisol from last week’s show? Same mechanism, one room farther out. Last week the buyer at least had your headline in front of her, right? Now she’s hearing about you secondhand from somebody you know eating a salad at lunch with her.

Okay, so here it is, and I want you to write this one down. Okay, if you’re driving, come back to this. You don’t have to be in the room, but your sentence does. You need to build this sentence, okay? Three steps. I’m doing mine out loud so you can hear how messy this gets, and then we’ll do three more so you can hear it in other lines of work.

• Step one: Steal their words. Go through all your replies, all of them, even the ones in the wrong piles, and circle every phrase a total stranger would understand—not the nice words, the plain ones. From mine, I’m going to circle “paying gigs.” I’m going to circle “they’d seen my profile and wanted to work with me.” I’m going to circle “speaking engagements.” And nobody wrote “leverage.” Nobody wrote “thought leadership.” Nobody wrote “visibility strategy,” right? Those are my words from my website, and not one client reached for them, and that should tell me something, right? It does tell me something. The words in your replies are the ones that have already traveled, because a real person already said them without being asked twice. Your marketing language is what you wish people would say. Their words are what they’ll really say. So build with their words.

• Step two: I’m going to give you the frame for them: I’m who a specific person calls when a specific moment—person in a moment, not a service, not a list of features, okay? So here’s my messy version, the one I’d have given you if you’d stopped me in a hallway: “I help women entrepreneurs and executives leverage LinkedIn and PR to build visibility and authority…” and I can’t breathe anymore. I speak too much. Could you repeat that to someone tomorrow? I couldn’t, and I wrote it right now with their words: “I’m who accomplished women call when they’re great at what they do and the right people still don’t know it.” Notice LinkedIn isn’t even in there. That used to make me nervous. I’m not going to lie; it still makes me nervous. LinkedIn is how I do it. You throw my name in a Google search and you get 50 pages of LinkedIn training and strategies up there, right? The sentence, though, is who you call. Once you’re on the phone, I promise you, I’m all going to get around to mentioning LinkedIn, right?

So let’s do a few more. And these are like made-up people, but maybe recognize them:

• A leadership coach. Her version: “I help leaders unlock their potential and step into their power.” Okay, which leaders? What potential? Step into what? Right? If you can say that sentence in a room, nobody’s face changes. It just sounds like you’re reading a—like one of those, what are those called? Motivational posters that are on the walls in some offices, right? How about this: “I’m who a newly promoted VP calls when she’s suddenly managing the people that used to be her peers.” Do you know someone in that exact spot right now? Because you probably do, right? That’s the test of a good one: a face comes to mind. “I’m who a newly promoted VP calls when she’s suddenly managing the people who used to be her peers.” That’s a sentence that gets you referred.

• Here’s another one: A woman who spent 25 years in healthcare and sales, and she wants a board seat. Her version: “Seasoned executive with cross-functional leadership experience seeking board opportunities.” I can’t even say that with a straight face, right? Come on. And so is everybody else! So is everybody else in the world! How about: “I’m who a board calls when the company is about to start selling into hospitals and nobody at the table has ever done it”? Right now, she is one of 400 seasoned executives. A particular board with a particular gap, micro-targeted, would recognize itself in that sentence: “I’m who a board calls when the company is about to start selling into hospitals and nobody at the table has ever done it.”

• One more: A former head of HR, now she’s consulting. Her version is a list: culture, compliance, training, employee relations, and executive coaching. That’s five things. And if you give somebody five things, she’ll remember none of them, right? How about: “I’m who a CEO calls when there’s a complaint about a senior leader and it has to be handled right”? You practically hear the phone call, right? “I’m who a CEO calls when there’s a complaint about a senior leader and it has to be handled right.”

And look at what every one of those did: not one of them got smaller. That’s the fear, I know it is: “If I say one thing, I lose everything else.” You don’t. The sentence is the door. It isn’t about the whole house. You need to get people to come in through one door, and once they’re inside, they find out about all the other stuff. But nobody walks into a house that’s all doors, right?

So a couple of things to watch for while you’re writing yours:

• Watch the word “and.” Every “and” in your sentence is a place where your friend is going to stop talking. Cut it down to one person and one moment, and write this down and put it in front of you—underneath your keyboard—so that when you’re being interviewed for things you can say them right. You need to say it a lot to remember it.

• Watch for the service instead of the moment. When they need “strategic planning as a service,” nobody feels that, right? When they’ve missed their number two quarters in a row, that’s the moment. Somebody is in that moment right now and losing sleep and needs you.

• And watch for words that you would never say in a sentence. You would never say to your friend or your sister—if you wouldn’t say “optimize” at a kitchen table, it doesn’t go in this sentence, okay?

All right, and then the last thing: test it. Test it with three quick tests:

• The repeat test: Say your sentence once to somebody today—somebody, your partner, your sister, the guy at the deli, I don’t care—and then change the subject. And then an hour later, ask them to say it back. Whatever they drop, cut it. If they can’t get any of it back, it’s not a sentence yet; it’s a paragraph in a nice outfit, and you’re not done yet.

• The face test: Say it to someone who knows a lot of people and watch. If she says, “Oh, you know who needs to talk to you?” you’ve got it. And if she says, “That’s great,” and nothing else, you’ve written a compliment about yourself. Go work on it again. Go back to the drawing board.

• The wrong call test: Does your sentence make it obvious who shouldn’t call you? Because a good one saves you from the coffee meetings that you really didn’t need to take. And none of us have time for that. I don’t. I really don’t need to make new friends at this point in my life. If anybody at all could hear your sentence and thinks, “That’s me,” it’s too wide. It’s too wide. You’ve got to be specific.

And I hear you. I can hear you out across the ether webs, right? So let me take—let me list a couple of things that I know are in your head right now. I hear these words coming back to me now, like coming across the vibrations here: “But Karen, I really do do three different things.” I believe you. Pick the one you want more of, right? Not the one you’ve done for the longest, and frankly, the one that makes you the most money—the one where if five more of those calls came in next month, you would be jumping up and down, right? That’s what gets the sentence. The other two don’t disappear; they just don’t get to stand… they’re not the doorway, right?

I hear another voice. That other voice is saying, “But Karen, my work is complicated. It doesn’t fit in a sentence.” I get it. The work is complicated, but the moment somebody needs you is not. You know, a surgeon’s work is complicated, right? But when I go to the surgeon because I have arthritis in my knee, I say, “My knee hurts when I take the stairs,” and that’s how I find the surgeon. I just, you know, so describe the stairs. I don’t really need to know what else the surgeon does; I need to know who can help me when I’m going up the stairs or down the stairs.

I also hear this one: “But Karen, I’m not a consultant. I’m in a corporate role.” This is all the more reason why this is important, because your rooms are the ones where promotions, board seats, the big assignments—they all get decided there. And you are definitely not in those if somebody says, “Who should lead this?” and somebody either has a sentence for you or doesn’t: “She’s who you give it to when it’s already gone sideways twice.” That’s a sentence! “She’s strong” is a compliment. Compliments don’t get these assignments. They don’t get the board seats. They don’t get the promotions.

And the last one, this is my favorite: “But Karen, I feel like I’m bragging.” I knew we’d get here! You knew we’d get here, right? Look at the sentence again. There’s no “award-winning” in it. There’s no “top-rated.” It doesn’t say you’re good at all. It just says who should call you and when. That’s not bragging. It’s just instructions, directions! You’d give someone directions to your house without feeling like you were showing off, right? And honestly, the most modest version is the one that costs your friends more, because they don’t know what to say. Then they have to come up with… it’s too vague, and they have to come up with the specific things, right? When you’re being too humble, you’re making the people who want to help you do all the work of figuring out how to help you. Being clear is the most generous thing you can do for your friends that want to help you.

All right, so now you’ve got it, or you’ve got a rough one, right? And rough is cool, rough is good. And it goes in four places, and you can do all of them this week:

1. Your LinkedIn headline: Not your title, not that row of four jobs with the little lines between them—this sentence, or the heart of it. You can drop the “I’m who” and start with the person: “The call accomplished women make when…” however it fits. And remember, that headline follows you everywhere on LinkedIn. Every comment you leave, every time you show up in a search, it’s sitting right there under your name. So every comment you write this week carries your sentence into someone else’s feed.

2. The top of your about section: Only the top couple of lines show before someone has to click “see more,” and plenty of people never click. So your sentence goes up top, and the story of how you got here can come after.

3. Your mouth: I mean it. The next time someone says, “So what do you do?” you say the sentence out loud to a human. It’s going to feel strange the first few times—that’s why I want you to write it down and practice it, like wearing somebody else’s dress, somebody else’s shoes. Say it anyway. People repeat what they hear you say much more than what they read.

4. And then the one everybody skips: That’s the intro you hand to other people when a podcast host asks how to introduce you, or an event sends you that form asking for a bio, or a friend says, “Send me something I can forward.” Stop sending her your bio! Your bio is a label pile with dates on it. Send two lines with the sentence in them. You’re writing their script for them. They’re going to be so happy. They’re going to thank you, because nobody enjoys having to write the introduction. They want to make the introduction, but nobody wants to have to write it, right? And that goes for recommendations too, right? The next time a happy client offers to write you one, don’t say, “Whatever you want to say is great.” Say, “It would mean a lot if you mentioned what was going on when you called me and what changed.” You’ll get a call instead of a compliment in public with her name on it. P.S. Do the same thing when you’re writing recommendations for people: give them a call, not a compliment.

All right, you know I’m going to give you some homework. Here we go. It’s one text. Go back to those same three people, or pick three if you’re starting fresh. And if you’re picking fresh, don’t pick your three closest friends. Pick three people you know who are in the most rooms—the connector, the one who knows everybody, the former boss who sits on everything, right? Send them this: “This is what I’m telling people now,” and then pop your sentence in there: “Who’s one person who should hear it?” That’s it. That’s the text.

Okay, look at what that does: you’ve handed three well-connected people the exact words to use. You’ve replaced the old job version if they had one. You asked for a name while it’s fresh, which is the part we never do. And now, when a name comes back—and I bet one will, right?—let’s not blow it, please. Don’t write to that person with a pitch. Write to her like a human being: “Oh, my gosh, my friend Mary thought we should know each other.” Tell me a little bit about what you’re working on, and then just ask a real question about it. That’s it. You know my rule: no pitching on the first message. Nobody wants to be pitch-slapped by a stranger, even one who came recommended, right? The sentence gets you the introduction. What happens after that is the conversation, and you already know how to have one of those, right?

And if all three people write back “Love it” and no name, that’s information too. It’s not failure; it just means you’ve got to go back to the face test and tighten it up.

All right, so let me recap this fast. The decisions about your next client, your next board seat, your next big thing, your next big opportunity are getting made in rooms you’re not in: a meeting, a group text, a hallway, a common thread, right? What gets said about you in there falls into piles: a label, a compliment, an old job, or a call. And only one of those produces your name with a reason attached.

You build a call out of the words people already use about you, right? One person, one moment: “I’m who she calls when…” Bing! Then you put it in your headline, at the top of your about, out of your mouth, and in the hands of the people who introduce you. You are never going to be in most of these rooms. I’m not either, and I’ve made my peace with that. You don’t have to be in the room; your sentence does. And that’s the magnetic force that I want you to be building into your strategy. That’s how you become one of these people that are constantly getting opportunities instead of somebody that’s throwing spaghetti at the wall every five minutes and nothing’s sticking and you’re wondering why.

So, once you’ve got it, the next question might be, “How do I get it in bigger rooms, the ones full of people who have never heard of me? Where one good conversation could put your sentence in front of hundreds of the right people at once?” That is what my free masterclass is about. It’s called Borrow The Stage. It’s on demand. It’s at KarenYankovich.com/bts. That’s BTS for Borrow The Stage: KarenYankovich.com/bts. Check it out. You should join us, and I will see you back here next week with another episode of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast.