The Three R’s of BNI
Word of mouth will spread like wildfire at successfully damaging the lazy networker’s credibility and trust factor. You probably already know this and was appalled at my title. I know this because a lazy networker would never take the time to read an article.
Lazy networkers think that referrals will fall in their lap like ripe cherries off a tree, they won’t. The one key word in networker is the word WORK! It takes work, hard work to be a successful networker and I would like to share some of this hard work with you.
In this article, I want you to imagin with me a volleyball player. The volleyball player must position their bodies’ just right on the court to effectively return the ball. There are three key positions a player can take that a referral marketer can learn from.
Before we look at these three placement strategies notice we are talking about the players and not the spectators. Referral marketing is for players and doers not spectators. The first thing a player must do before positioning themselves to return the ball is to decide what balls they should return and which ones they should let another player return.
After the player decides that another player is to return the ball they then will positon their body to support the player that is returning the ball. In referral marketing it is paramount to know which referrals you want. You need to teach your referral partners what a good referral for you is verses what a bad referral is. You should not and cannot take every referral that is hit over the net. If you don’t have a referral partner on your team that can service the referral you should seek one out. When you double your referral partners you can triple the referrals you receive and give.
I heard Dr. Ivan Misner, founder of BNI say that “a company’s vision should be audacious.
And BNI’s vision is just that; “changing the way the world does business!†What is interesting about this vision and this statement is the fact that BNI is changing the way the world does business back to the way the world use to do business.
Just a couple of hundred years ago the world did business the way BNI’s vision suggest and that is doing business with people you know and trust or at least with someone that you were referred to by someone that you know and trust to someone they know and trust.
A lot of knowing and trusting is the key to the way people really want to do business. People are forced to do business with someone they do not know and trust because they do not know someone in that field of expertise.
People hire more companies through Google than they do through referrals. A lot more! It is so much more it would appear that referral marketing could soon be a thing of the past. People go do Google in the droves and the reason for it; people don’t know enough professions. Consumers are forced to go to Google and hire a total stranger that they do not know nor do they trust because they do not know someone personally in that field of expertise.
The reason referral marketing will always be around is the same reason it has always been around, people want to do business with people they know and trust or they at least want to be referred to someone that is known and trusted by someone they know and trust. (Key words; know and trust)
I had a customer that attended my BNI meeting for the sole purpose of meeting contractors. She was a property manager for the State and had a waiting list of customers a mile long. She did not need referrals to customers she need referrals to business professionals that could meet her needs.
To answer this statement we first “NEED†to define need; a requirement, necessary duty, or obligation; need also means commitment, demand, obligation, urgency and essential. When I really want to know the meaning of a word, I like to find out what it doesn’t mean, its antonyms, which are; nonessential, comfort and luxury.
I think that you can probably see we don’t “need†the basket. I bet we needed the basket in 1985 when Dr. Misner started what turned out to be the first BNI chapter of many. I would like you to imagine with me 30 years ago and all the changes that have been made.
No internet! No email, no cell phones, no smart phones and most people did not have a personal computer in their business or homes. We used pagers, briefcases, land lines, lead was in our fuel, and it was a long distance phone call with a hefty fee to most of our neighboring towns where we did business.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!
I say do! Put all your eggs in one basket. The saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket is a motivational myth.
I have a list of what I call motivational myths. A motivational myth to me is when we take a saying that is not true but we think it is true. And because we think it is true and we act on it, then it squashes our motivation. My favorite one of these motivational myths is “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt us.†A motivational myth is partially true. It takes a truth but it takes it out of bounds, it takes it too far. It is like catching a pass in football, but you catch it out of bounds. Its true sticks and stones do hurt us, but words have hurt us more than sticks and stones ever could! Other people’s words won’t hurt us unless we allow them to but our words can hurt us or help us depending on our words.
BNI is a brand
I read in the BNI President’s manual, that BNI is a brand and our BNI chapters are a product of the brand. I never have liked to use the word product unless I am describing a tangible product like sodas or grocery items. I guess it is because I was in retail management for twenty years and I only used the word product for grocery items.
I have heard other industries like banking use the word product to describe different types of investing and financial “productsâ€, it sounded foreign to me or out of place to use this word in those contexts. So when I read that our BNI chapters are a product of our BNI brand and when that sounded strange to me, I decided to do a word study on the word product. I was blown away on what I learned.
Product means: an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale. That is what I always thought it meant, that does not sound like a BNI chapter. Then I dug deeper into the meaning. Product also means: a person or thing produced by or resulting from a process. And process means: A systematic series of actions directed to some end. Now that is starting to look like a BNI chapter, you could read it like this; Your BNI chapter is produced by or resulting from a process through a systematic series of actions becoming what it is today. A deeper definition of product is; the result obtained by multiplying two or more quantities together. Now that sounds like a BNI chapter.