6 Ways to Reduce Referral Overwhelm When Clients Aren’t a Good Fit or Your Practice is Full
In the early days of being a therapist every single referral that came through my inbox or voicemail felt exciting and full of possibility. I was eager to practice my skills, step more into the therapist role, and fill my caseload. Referrals meant validation that those awkward networking efforts, learning about website SEO, and signing up for all those directories was finally paying off! Clients were choosing me and I felt honored to be considered. Fast forward to present day and referrals can now feel more like a chore, sadly. Supporting my current clients, running a private practice business, going to my own therapy, and managing my personal life takes up most of my capacity.
Whether your caseload is full or an inquiring client isn’t a good fit (presenting concerns, location, fee, insurance, etc.) finding referrals can be exhausting and tug on your heartstrings.
Finding Referrals Can Be Exhausting
As an HSP specialist working with adults, I often get requests for other populations and presentations in my niche that are hard to fulfill. For instance, finding an HSP child therapist who is seeing clients in person in San Francisco is nearly impossible. You would think having access to a facebook group of over 5,000 fellow HSP therapists would help, but so many of my usual referral sources don’t have openings or are burned out and scaling down their availability.
So what can you do?
You Don’t Have to Hold Everyone
You may have accepted that you need to hold everyone who reaches out to you, either by welcoming them into your practice or metaphorically holding their hand through the referral-finding process. Inevitably this approach will lead you to feel depleted, resentful, or guilty when you simply don’t have the bandwidth to follow through in depth with every request.
This happened to me recently and it was a wake up call! Historically, I get back to any potential clients within 48 business hours. This is what I promise on my website and I like to follow through. But here I was distracted by some events happening in my personal life and I took over a week to get back to someone seeking my therapy services, even though they reached out twice. Of course, this is okay and I recognize my humanity but I felt so guilty for leaving this person in limbo. My inner perfectionist was not happy with me!
Streamline Your Referral System
There are so many systems I have set up in my practice to keep it sustainable (automated scheduling and invoicing, for instance) but this is clearly an area that needed a tune up! Even though I’ve always responded with personalized referrals in the past to anyone who reaches out, I have to admit that approach is not sustainable anymore and that’s okay! I’m not (and cannot be) responsible for everyone and neither can you.
You Can Be Responsive Without Depleting Yourself
Here’s how I’m releasing the burden of finding referrals for everyone who reaches out while also being responsive and helpful:
I’ve removed my phone number off my website so I only have one place to track referrals - email. This allows me to respond on my own timeline and not worry about scheduling phone calls (or dealing with the energy drain). Sending an email allows me to get back to folks much quicker than setting up a phone call.
Turning on an autoresponder in my email that lets folks know I don’t currently have openings and provides a few referral sources immediately. Since I work solely with HSPs, I include the HSP-knowledgeable therapist list and directories that I know list this specialty such as TherapyDen and Inclusive Therapists. You could include niche-specific directories as well as more general directories that you find valuable.
Since many inquiries come through the forms on my website (through Squarespace), the autoresponder will not work in this scenario since the email isn’t directly from the client but Squarespace. Here I’ll have the same message from my autoresponder saved as a template in my email to quickly reply with. If you don’t have the ability to save a template in your email system, you can also keep it in a document on your desktop so you can copy/paste.
You can also:
Update your outgoing voicemail message to let folks know you don’t have availability and/or redirect them to your website to reduce call screening when you are accepting new clients.
Put a banner at the top of your website or a note on your contact page when you’re not accepting new clients. You can also clearly outline who you work with/don’t work with and other logistics such as fee, location, availability, and so forth. This won’t be a full-proof fix to getting mismatched inquiries, but will help reduce the quantity.
Regularly update your directory listings to accurately reflect your availability. I find it helpful to put a recurring reminder in my online calendar so I don’t forget to do this. You could also manually put this reminder in your paper calendar.
Set Down the Burden and Automate Your Process
If you’re drowning in referral requests that you don’t have the time, energy, or bandwidth to manage, it’s okay to approach this task differently. Set down the burden with me and automate as much of the process as you can. Save your precious energy, dear Sensitive Therapist, for your current clients, your business, and of course - yourself! You are not an infinite source of empathy and support and without boundaries, burnout is just around the corner. Allow yourself to unhook from needing to show up for everyone perfectly.
