We Ran Three Referral Channels and Couldn't Tell You Which One Was Working
Where the trail went cold
Swikriti ThakuriSep 30, 2026Updated Sep 30, 2026
Ask most formation businesses which referral partner sends their best long-term clients, and you'll get an opinion, delivered with total confidence. If you’d asked us the same question 18 months ago, we’d have also given you that – an opinion, because nothing downstream of “company formed” was ever actually tracked back to where the client came from.
Where the trail went cold
The problem wasn't a lack of referral partners. The problem was that a referred enquiry became an email thread, the email thread became a formed company, and the company disappeared from view the moment it left our hands.
Whether that client ever opened a RentalBux account, or spoke to UK Property Accountants, wasn't something we could see. We knew the volume each partner sent us. We had no idea which partners sent us clients who stuck around in the group.
One record, from enquiry onward
That changed when we moved our enquiry pipeline onto FigsFlow's CRM. Parties, roles and referral sources tracked against the client record itself, rather than living in whoever's inbox the enquiry happened to land in.
| Before | Now, on FigsFlow | |
|---|---|---|
| Referral source on a new enquiry | Recorded if someone thought to ask and note it down | Captured automatically at first contact, on the record |
| Which package a lead was quoted | Wherever it landed in an inbox | A stage on the client record, visible to anyone who needs it |
| Whether a formation goes on to use RentalBux or UK Property Accountants | Anecdotal — we'd hear about it, sometimes | On the same record the formation itself lives on |
| A stalled enquiry, gone quiet after “package chosen” | Nobody's problem in particular | A flagged stage in the FigsFlow pipeline, not a client we simply lost track of |
What we're not going to tell you
We're not going to hand you a conversion percentage dressed up as insight. That's the kind of number this piece is deliberately not printing, because we haven't audited it and neither should you take our word for it if we did.
What we can say honestly is this: “which partner refers the clients who stay in the group” used to be a guess we'd have made with total confidence and no evidence behind it. Now it's a question we can answer on FigsFlow in a couple of minutes, on the record itself.