How to be fully engaged in referral marketing
How to be fully engaged in referral marketing
BNI teaches there are 5 ways to be fully engaged in referral marketing.
- Attendance or participation: You have to participate to be fully engaged. You have to meet your commitments. You have to be on time. I will say that you absolutely cannot be engaged without participating. Whether it is BNI or your local chamber, PTA meetings, Rotary, your industries’ association group, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, your appointments with your clients or your church, you first have to participate in order to win.
- One to ones: We need to meet face to face with our referral marketing team. Not just our BNI members, but every member of our Referral marketing team. Who should be on our team? Whoever we can give a referral to, our contacts, customers, competitors, family members, friends, employees, employers and yes even strangers. Anyone we meet or know that needs something. The definition of referral is: When someone (that’s us) introduces someone (that’s our contact) to an expert in their field (that is our referral partner). So first we need to be engaged with our contacts by having one to ones with them in order to see what they need. The next group of people that are in our referral marketing team are our referral partners. We need to have one to ones with our referral partners to see and learn what they can do for our contacts and the new people we meet. Our referral partners are anyone we meet that is an expert in their field. We need to first meet with our partners until we gain a mutual trust in each other. Some of these partners are in our BNI chapter, some are in other chapters, some are in other cities, and some can be your competitors, your customers, vendors, BNI alumni and yes even non BNI members.
- Referrals: Referrals are obviously an important part of becoming an expert in referral marketing. I do not give referrals because I am a member of a referral organization; I am in a referral organization, BNI, because I give referrals. When I first heard of BNI in 2008, I wanted to be a member so I could receive referrals. Then I started to get to know my members and started building good relationships with them and I wanted to give referrals to them to help their business. When I saw how happy I made my customers and contacts by referring them to an expert in their field I started giving more referrals, not so much because I like my referral partners, or to help their business, I do so to help my contacts and customers. One of my strategies in recruiting new BNI members and growing my personal referral team is to seek out someone in a business I don’t have on my referral team, have a one to one with them and then start sending referrals to them. Sometimes they become a BNI member and sometimes they don’t, either way I have an expert to meet the needs of my customers and contacts. If they don’t become a member of BNI I start recruiting someone new. I use the kissing frogs approach in Dr. Misner’s BNI podcast #389.
- Visitors: Visitors are the life blood of BNI and every other business and organization. Visitors bring energy, they sell stuff, they buy stuff and they sometimes become part of your referral team and your BNI chapter. I use my BNI chapter as a platform to grow my personal referral team. I ask my customers, vendors, sub-contractors, competitors all to attend my meeting so I can introduce them to my other referral partners, I even invite business owners whose categories are already filled in our chapter.
5: Continuing education: BNI calls it CEU’s, chapter education units. Referral marketing is a skill that must be learned. Someone might be an expert in their field and a horrible referral marketer. In 2011 I was the president of my local BNI chapter and had been a BNI member for 3 years. I started a library for my chapter  and said that I wanted to be known as the education president. Our chapter’s library was my personal library. I had every motivational book there was. My Area Director, Mike Tobin, saw the books and asked “where are the networking books, where are the BNI books?†I was shocked he didn’t approve of my books for I had the best books ever. To make a long story short, he donated the BNI library to our chapter. I had not even read ‘Givers Gain†yet. I started with “Givers Gain†and read one BNI book after another and I can say my skill set went way up!