Profitability in BNI

 

The BNI Platform promises a horizon of opportunities for the business owner.

 

Through the Givers Gain philosophy, Chapter members stand to gain more than just referrals and closed sales. The intangible benefits include increasing one’s net worth, growing strong and meaningful relationships and personal growth.

 

That said, profitability in terms of Sales Growth, is a fundamental objective for every business owner. Profitability targets may vary from trade to trade, and is dependent on a variety of factors (we observe that some business owners profess to join BNI not for profitability, and we respect that).

 

This workshop aims to help BNI members understand why they are not gaining as much as they desire in terms of referrals. More importantly, the workshop will assist them to discover their blind-spots, and areas in which they should focus on as priority before arriving at a higher achiever level.

 

The three-hour workshop is broadly divided into 3 segments:

 

1. Self-Discovery

Understand yourself. Understand your Chapter and how you can develop a better business relationship with your members.

 

2. Your Strategy in BNI

Re-visit your business strategy. Does your current strategy bring you the results you are seeking?

 

What are the missing gaps in your strategy that can ensure better success? How will you fill these gaps?

 

3. Develop a winning Strategy

Fine-tune you strategy to allow you to become more effective in BNI. This may require you to apply changes in the way you operate, developing new habits and behaviors, and achieving measurable results.

 

Facilitators:  Michael Tey, Executive Director, BNI Singapore

        Joseph Chong, Assistant Director, BNI Singapore

 

Registration (expected turnout 60)

 

Deadline:             22^nd March 2010, 5:30pm

Email to:              miketey@bni.com.sg

 

Workshop date:  29^th March 2010

Venue:                Exhibition Room, 2^nd Floor,

    Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry

Address:              47 Hill Street          

Time:                   8:45am – 12:30pm

Fee:                     $30 pax ($50 for substitute)

 

** Members can pay through their Chapter Secretaries, who should contact

    Michael through email.

** All BNI members to bring their own BNI name tags for training.

 Please note the Singapore time is 17th March 1am (USA 16th March 10AM PDT / 1PM EDT).

Extracted from BNI Dr Ivan Misner’s latest article

“Although the full complexity of your network may not be apparent even to you, the results of a good referral networking system are measurable.
…..
The returns you receive through networking are like the apples you pick from an orchard you started from a single seed. You don’t expect anything the first year, or even the second or third. But in the fourth year that tree will not only bear fruit, it will spread the seeds that ultimately become a whole grove of apple trees. With networking, the time scale is not that daunting; it may not take years to start seeing results, but it will probably take many months. You might get a few early referrals, but the real payoff in measurable business comes after you’ve stuck with it long enough to build a substantial referral network.
…. ”

For the fill article, click here.

The following are simple Flash Animation which appears on BNI podcast Episode 142 which are good and simple visual tools to learn about

1. Why Join BNI - the 4 Reasons

2. How BNI Works - the 5 steps

3. Benefits of BNI

Date:25 Jan (Monday)
Time:9am - 12 noon
Venue: Marketing Institute of Singapore
210, Middle road, #07-08, IOI Plaza, Room #1017.

Investment: $30 per member
Dateline: Registration by 20 Jan

Top 10 ways to totally fail as a networker

What do you have to do to be a complete failure when you’re attending networking events ?

This latest article is one great one to read, practice and remind ourselves about the old age question about how we can grow our business through getting more referrals.

Dr. Ivan Misner, our BNI Founder and Chairman said “The answer is simple, but not easy. It includes both a mindset and a skill set. ”

For the whole article, click here.


Posted by Ang Ah Sin

These are the two things you should know about networking:

1. “Practice makes perfect” is not enough.

Practice alone is not enough. It must be “effective” practice. In martial arts, the sensei (master) says, “Perfect practice makes perfect.” In other words, if you’re just going through the motions, you are not learning and growing. Every time you do a kata (a system of basic body positioning and movement exercises in karate), you must do it as though you were in a tournament, or as though the sensei were there watching you. Only with that intensity of focus does one improve.

The same applies to your networking efforts. If you are applying the techniques halfheartedly, you’ll get less-than-acceptable results.

Practicing the skills necessary to become a good networker is important. But would-be networkers cannot expect to become master networkers by just going through the motions. Take, for instance, the 60-second presentation or brief commercial you make every week when you attend many types of networking groups or various other organizations. Most people come to the meeting unprepared and unrehearsed, with only a vague idea of what they will talk about. While others give their presentations, instead of listening, they’re thinking about how to say what they need to say. When their turn comes, they stumble through an amateurish, marginal presentation. Yes, they practiced, but it was far from perfect practice, and the results prove it.

If you’re a teacher, do you wing your lesson plan? The better teachers set goals and objectives for what they want their students to learn. They spend time planning exactly what they are going to cover in class, sometimes down to the exact wording, and they prepare visual aids and handouts that reinforce the subject matter and facilitate learning.

As a businessperson, you should have similar goals and objectives. Ask yourself what, exactly, do you want your listeners to learn about your business that they can pass along to prospects for a possible referral. If you’re vague and unprepared, your potential referral partners are going to leave the meeting without a clear idea of how to refer you.

You also need to practice delivering your message. Winging it is not going to get you what you want. You have to practice it perfectly if your goal is perfection.

2. Good networkers should talk about more than just business.A referral relationship is much more than just, “I do business, you do business, let’s do business.” A better approach is to find common ground on a personal level, then relate your business to it.

The longer I’ve been involved in networking, the more I’ve seen the power of personal interests in making connections. Networking is about building personal relationships. If you remove the personal from the equation, you limit the amount of business that can happen. In one networking group I worked with, I introduced an exercise I call the GAINS Exchange, in which people share personal and professional information about themselves (including their Goals, Accomplishments, Interests, Networks, and Skills).

Two of the participants in this group had known each other for more than a year but had never done business. During the exercise, they discovered they both coached their sons’ soccer teams. They quickly became close friends and were soon helping each other conduct soccer practices. After a few months, they began referring business to each other–two guys who had barely spoken to each other the first year because they seemed to have so little in common were now doing business because of a personal connection.

Here’s another example of the power of common interests. One of BNI’s most instinctive, natural networkers and an avid sailboater, whom we shall call “Bob,” found himself sitting in an airport shuttle, very casually dressed, next to a man wearing a shirt with a Nautica label. “Do you sail?” he asked. “Yeah, a little bit,” said the man. “Why?”

Bob started talking about his own sailing experiences. It turned out he had won a national championship sailing in the harbor where this man lived. They got into a lively conversation about sailing, the man’s hometown, and other common interests and experiences.

After a half hour or so, the man asked, “So, are you a professional sailor?” Bob said, “No, I’m in the training business, but it’s a lot like sailing, and here’s why.” They talked a bit about that, with Bob using sailing as a metaphor for much of what he did. The man expressed an interest in hearing more about it on a professional level. At the airport, the two men exchanged cards and went their separate ways.

If Bob had started the conversation by saying, “I’m a professional trainer,” that probably would have been the end of it. Instead, by finding a common interest and starting with that, Bob made a connection that had a good chance of turning into business.

Perfect practice makes perfect, and personal connections lead to business. Entrepreneurs who implement these two strategies into their networking efforts get a lot more business than their competition.

Called the “Father of Modern Networking” by CNN, Dr. Ivan Misner is a New York Times bestselling author.  He is the founder and chairman of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization.  His latest book Masters of Sales can be viewed at MastersBooks.com.  Dr. Misner is also the senior partner for the Referral Institute, an international referral training company. He can be reached atmisner@bni.com.

Referral networking is more about farming than hunting.

  An over-emphasis on running from one networking event to another looking for new relationships is a waste of time, money and energy that you should be using to develop the relationships you’ve already started. It’s like running around knocking coconuts out of trees, when you should be planting coconut trees for the future.

  When we train people to network, we surprise them with one of the first things we tell them: Stop networking for a few moments. Stand still, look at what you have, prioritize it, database it, cull it, and then, rather than continue to work on only the “V” part of the VCP Process (visibility, credibility, profitability), devote more time to the “C” and the “P.” Credibility comes with a closer, deeper relationship, and profitability is the goal that can be maintained only through constant nurturing of that relationship for mutual benefit.  It’s not “Nice to meet you; now I’ve got to go talk to someone over there.” It’s “How are you doing, and how can I help you achieve your goals?”

One reason that people feel compelled to “Network, network, network,” is that there aren’t many sophisticated measurement systems that can tell you how successful a given referral tactic is in getting the results you want.

For want of a better system, the “more is better” instinct takes hold, and off you go to yet another networking event. In actuality, all you’re doing is adding to your cold-prospecting opportunities and looking for that one big sale.The only measurable result of this sort of activity is whether you make an immediate sale. It becomes a lottery; for every contact made, it’s a hit or, more often, a miss.

 The long-range success of relationship building isn’t measured, because it doesn’t happen. And yet, that’s the real objective of referral networking: you want to develop relationships that will serve as conduits to other customers. The contact that counts, the one you turn into a referral connection by taking the time to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with, may never even buy your product or service.  If your focus is the immediate sale, you’re going to miss a lot of future opportunities.  

Mike Garrison is vice president of the Referral Institute. Mike is a sought-after speaker, coach and consultant on business networking, referral marketing and Christian business topics. He shared the following story with me recently:

I know one couple, a highly successful two-person real-estate operation, that had so much business and developed so many referrals that they had to form a new networking group to find enough people to pass them to. They weren’t looking for new referrals for themselves–just enough new people to handle all the business they were bringing to the groups.  But unless you are just overwhelmed with business to pass along, I wouldn’t recommend doubling up your strong-contact referral networking.

The truth is, you can attend too few networking meetings, but you can also go to too many. If you’re in a strong-contact referral group, you’re probably required to show up at the weekly meeting.

There’s a good reason for this, and it has to do with building and maintaining relationships with your referral partners in the group, keeping up with the different products and services they provide, and being there not only to receive referrals but to pass them to your networking partners as well. But if you make all your required, meetings and then proceed to spread yourself too thin by joining and attending a dozen other groups of various kinds, you’re quickly going to run out of quality time for your partners.  You can also spread yourself too thin by getting more referrals than you can manage–in other words, too much of a good thing.

Australia’s top networking expert Robyn Henderson, author of Networking for Success tells us,

“Many people make the mistake of establishing dozens of strategic alliances, forgetting that maintaining these alliances takes time, money and a lot of energy.” Keeping these relationships healthy and productive means meeting your partners regularly and generating lots of good referrals for them — at the peril of neglecting your own core business.

Henderson’s advice: “Aim for quality, not quantity.” Set up your alliances so that you can conduct much of your face-to-face business over the phone or by teleconferencing or videoconferencing.  Focus on three alliances in a given year, rank them in importance by your expectations, and scale your time on them accordingly.  Track and evaluate your results. And don’t over commit.  Letting a referral relationship wither from neglect is more damaging than never having formed it in the first place.   

Called the “Father of Modern Networking” by CNN, Dr. Ivan Misner is a New York Times bestselling author and author of Entrepreneur’s Networking Now blog. He is the Founder and Chairman of BNI the world’s largest business networking organization. His latest bookMaster of Sales can now be ordered off the Entrepreneur Press. Dr. Misner is also the Senior Partner for the Referral Institute, an international referral training company.