Why visitors will not help your chapter
Why visitors will not help your chapter
The number one and only reason a visitor will not help your chapter is when they are not invited and they are not there. Visitors are the life blood of our BNI chapters. I worked in retail before I started my company and we always said, “Customers are the lifeblood of our business.†I treat all visitors like customers, and they are to our chapters.
Recently my chapter went through a little rift and we needed an insurance agent and a realtor at the same time. Wow that never happens. Our past insurance agent had taken the commercial and the property and casualty categories, the membership committee wanted to open up both categories. How exciting, because of the rift we invited other BNI members to our meeting for moral support. We of course invited realtors and insurance agents. We had more visitors than members, it was awesome! The energy in the room was phenomenal. I want to share a little bit about what I learned from the experience.
As the president of the chapter, I rejected the idea of a closed meeting to talk about the rift. I chose to focus on the plan and not the problem. I focused on brining visitors and it worked. One thing I realized is that we should always be inviting realtors. I think that realtors are the engine of our economy. Oh by the way or is it acceptable to write, btw? We received three realtors, a commercial agent and a husband and wife team that attend together as our residential realtor. We also received two insurance agents, one commercial and one property and casualty, they sit side by side and became friends and refer to each other.
We had up to 8 realtors and 5 insurance agents in our meeting at one time. We had up to 5 other BNI members from other chapters and we had some BNI alumni, we passed a ton of referrals with the visitors.
I think we should change our culture and invite business owners in categories we already have. If a member always says they want to be introduced to their golden goose, invite them. I think the protocol would be as follows.
- “Hi realtor friend of mine (or any other category) would you like to attend my BNI meeting next week, my (plumber or electrician or our chapter’s lender) is doing a 10 minute presentation next week and I would like to introduce you to them. Now I need to tell you we have a realtor named_________ so don’t come to receive referrals and it will be nice for you to meet my most trusted business partners.†The other business owners will attend, and they don’t expect to receive referrals. They tell me all the time how nice it is to meet people they can refer to. Not everybody uses referral marketing the way we do.
- Let the other member know you are inviting their competitor for the purpose of introducing them to the other members. Make sure you are passing tons of referrals to them, it works better! Invite your own competitors and introduce them to your members. You might even find that you can pass referrals to each other, I have and it is awesome.