The job is finished, the customer is pleased with you, and you have their attention for about as long as it takes to hand over an invoice. Two different asks want that moment. One is a review. One is a referral. Almost every guide on either subject writes as though the other does not exist.
They are not additive. Ask for both in one breath and you have given someone a decision to make at the exact point you wanted them to do one small thing without thinking about it. So the real question is not how to ask for a referral. It is which of the two asks gets the moment, and where the loser goes instead.
The results for this term are written for a different business
Search it and you get scripts for account managers: quarterly referral targets, a CRM field to log the source, a programme with tiers and a landing page. That advice is coherent for a company with a sales team and a named contact who has a budget.
A roofer, a dental practice or a salon has none of that. It has one customer, standing in a doorway, who is about to get back into their car. The ask has to survive being said out loud in a single sentence, by whoever happens to be holding the paperwork.
Both asks hang off the same trigger
There is no separate question of when to ask for a referral. It is the same timing problem as the review, with the same answer: attach the ask to something that already happens every time, rather than to a mood you hope to catch. We worked that through in the best time to ask for a review, and the argument transfers without modification, so we will not rebuild it here.
What is different is the choice of asset. The trigger tells you when. It does not tell you which of the two things to ask for, and that is the decision this page is about.
Spend the moment on the review
For a business that gets found through a map, the review is the default, for a reason that has nothing to do with which is more valuable per unit.
A review works on people who have not met you. It sits under your name in a list of local options, and it is read by a stranger deciding which of three numbers to call. You cannot produce that effect any other way, and every review you collect keeps working on every stranger who looks afterwards.
A referral works on one person, once. It is worth more when it lands, because it arrives pre-trusted and often ready to book. But it lands only if your customer happens to know somebody who needs your trade right now, and on any given job the honest answer to that is no. You are spending a certain moment on an uncertain condition.
So: the review gets the end of the job. Wording for it is in how to ask customers for reviews, and the copy we send is in the review request templates.
Where the referral ask actually belongs
Not at the end of the job. Later, and attached to a different trigger, because the condition that makes a referral possible is not "the work went well", it is "this person is now talking to someone with the same problem".
Triggers that carry that signal:
- A customer comes back a second time. A repeat is evidence, not a hope. Ask on the second visit, not the first.
- They tell you about somebody else's problem unprompted. Their sister's boiler, the unit next door. That sentence is the opening, and the ask is just the next sentence.
- A seasonal job on a street you are already working. Neighbours share the same weather, the same drains and the same roof age.
- The review you already collected names the job. Someone who wrote a paragraph about you in public is not going to mind being asked one thing in private.
That last one is the ordering. The review comes first and it also qualifies the referral ask, which is the opposite of treating the two as competitors for one slot.
Wording, both asks
Keep the shape identical, because the shape is what makes it easy to say. One sentence of context, one specific request, one thing to do, nothing to decide.
For the referral: name the kind of person, not "anyone". "Anyone you know" is a question about their whole address book and gets answered with a polite nothing. "If either of your neighbours ends up with the same leak, would you pass on my number?" is a question about one street and gets answered yes or no.
Do not send a form. Do not send a portal. The referral you want arrives as your customer saying your name to somebody, which means the only thing they need from you is the name, the trade and a number that works.
The one rule that is different between them
You can offer something in exchange for a referral. You cannot offer something in exchange for a review.
Google's policy on fake engagement names it directly, prohibiting merchants who "Offer incentives, such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services, in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review." The same policy says merchants should not "require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises."
A referral bonus is not content posted on Google, so that rule is not what governs it. A discount for a review is exactly what the rule describes. This is the single place where treating the two asks as interchangeable will cost you something real, and it is worth reading the rest of the boundary in what Google's review policy forbids before you print anything that mentions a reward.
If you only take one thing
The referral is not a second review request with a different word in it. It is a rarer event with a different trigger, a different wording and a different rulebook. Give the end of the job to the review, keep the referral ask for the moment your customer tells you it is possible, and stop asking for both at once.