Something unusual is happening in marketing right now.
The output is very high. The results are low. Business owners tell me that they are publishing more content, sending more emails, and conducting more communications than ever before, and the phone is ringing less than it did 2 years ago.
Here’s what I think is going on.
Great flatness
AI makes skilled marketing cheaper. Any business can now produce a decent blog post, a cool email, and a professional looking ad campaign in an afternoon.
So everyone does.
The result is a flood of marketing that sounds the same. Consumers can no longer tell who is good because everyone looks good on paper. And when everything looks professional, the professional stops saying much.
The other two shifts are stacked. Advertising costs keep going up, and I don’t need to quote the statistics that you already feel in your budget. And consumers are doing some of their research inside AI assistants. They ask ChatGPT or Claude who to hire, get a curt answer, and may never see your website at all.
It also adds that the channels most businesses rely on for new customers (content, ads, opt-outs) are becoming more complex, expensive, and unreliable all at the same time.
Half of the journey no one can do for themselves
I have taught the Marketing Hourglass for 2 decades: Know, Love, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer. Unlike a funnel, it gets wider after the sale, because the customers you keep and the followers you create are where the best growth comes from.
The AI just made that second half even more important.
Anyone can produce Know, Like, and Trust content now. The experience delivered still has to be earned. Likewise, a customer tells a friend, “hire these people, they will take care of us.”
The bottom of the Hourglass is built one customer at a time, and that’s why it’s going to be the highest-returning part of your marketing.
I wrote this book 16 years ago
In 2010 I published Transmission Engine. The argument was simple: referrals are too important to be left to chance, so build a program that generates them.
Here is a surprising fact people. I am known Duct Tape Marketingbut Transmission Engine it is my best selling book. It is still sold today, 16 years later. The owners have always understood at a gut level how important referrals are, and the book continues to find readers because the problem has not gone away.
What most students lacked at the time was urgency. Referrals are always a good channel, they are appreciated but never built, because ads and SEO and email were working well.
They are working less now. And the ideas in that book turned out to be designed for this exact time. Here are the most important ones.
People have lines of reference
Making a good referral feels good. Social capital: introducing a friend to a big business makes you look smart and helpful. Those strings didn’t change when the tools did.
Which means your customers want to refer you. Many don’t, because nothing in your business makes it easy, clear, or timely.
That is a systemic problem. System problems are fixable.
A referral system is more than a referral hope
Many owners treat the transmission like weather. They may or may not happen.
But a referral system has the same components as any other marketing program: a clear picture of who you want to be referred to, a language your sources can borrow, a gift that makes the referrer look generous, a trigger for when to ask, and a way to follow up.
Here is the new part. Tracking used to kill referral programs. Someone should have remembered to ask, to customize thanks, to keep colleagues warm. AI handles that kind of tracking pretty well now. Strategy still has to come first, but the old excuse of not having time is gone.
Reference comes before referral
There is no trick to fix an unremarkable business. Before any referral campaign, answer one question: what is happening in your business that you should talk about?
Close the gap between what you promise and what customers get. Then engineer one minute worth of re-downloads. A surprising entry. A problem you fixed before the client noticed it. A ride that felt acceptable instead of doing paperwork.
Referrals are a product of experience design.
Your best referral source may be another business
Direct referrals are from customers. Indirect referrals come from strategic partners: businesses that serve your customer directly before or shortly after.
For many B2B companies, the partner engine is large, and underdeveloped.
Try this. List the 5 businesses your best customer hired from in the 12 months before they hired you. That’s your partner’s short list. Teach those companies who to refer you to, give them something to offer, and send business back on purpose.
I will give you a live example in our store.
My friend Mike Michalowicz runs a business consulting group called Prosper. These are creative people who already believe in profit, performance, and the big picture. If one of their clients needs sales leadership to achieve a growth goal, guess who’s name is asked.
We are currently working with 3 clients who have come to us through that group. The conversations are going well, and the whole engine is going well: the results of the sent client are the ones that generate the next referral. Recently, another consultant referred a new client to us in the same way.
The part to study is the order of events. Those early directives were self-evident. The program came second. Now we discuss the consultants who send us business to learn what led to each referral, we explain exactly which founders we want to send our way, and the tools to build a consultant can give the client during the marketing session from the planning session.
Your business probably has a pattern like this running right now. You see the work, and you make it official.
And a quick word if you are a business consultant yourself. If a client needs marketing leadership and wants to give them a name you can trust, that’s the gap our consultant partnership fills. See how a mentor partnership works.
A new feature: AI listens to your customers
Here’s what makes a 2010 book feel current in 2026.
When someone asks an AI assistant who to hire, the answer is gathered from reviews, testimonials, case stories, and mentions spread across the web. Your customers’ names are the raw material that AI uses to describe and recommend you.
Word of mouth now travels from machine to machine.
That turns review production and evidence capture into discovery infrastructure. Every satisfied customer writes part of your AI sales pitch.
Try it yourself. Ask 3 different AI assistants they can recommend for your category and market. Compare what they say with what your best customers say about you. The gap between those two answers is your job.
Where will you start?
Four steps in this quarter:
- Track where your last 10 customers actually came from. Many owners are surprised at how much of their growth is already driven by referrals.
- Pick one moment in your customer experience and make it worth talking about.
- Create a short list of your colleagues using the above activity and set up 2 interviews.
- Ask for reviews in the top places (right after a win, renewal, thank you email) and make it a 30-second job for the customer.
Do it that way. A referral push without a strategy underneath it is just another random act of marketing.
The businesses that will win over the next few years will treat the second part of the Hourglass as their primary growth channel and develop a plan to drive it. The good news is that your competitors are all busy producing more content.