Synopsis -
In This Episode, Dr. Misner Tells Us About The Six “Ps” of Networking, Including:

1: It’s All About People

2: It’s Not About Professions

3: It’s All About People

4: It’s Not About Places

5: It’s All About People

6: It’s Not About Paper

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 017 -

Frank Felker:
Hello everybody and welcome back to the official BNI podcast, brought to you by networkingnow.com, the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Frank Felker in Washington DC joined on the phone today by Chairman and Founder of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner, calling in from BNI headquarters in southern California. How are you today Ivan?

Ivan Misner:
If I were doing any better, Frank, it would be illegal.

Frank:
Well I’m just going to have to let that go. You’ve said that a couple of times and I really don’t want to know what that means. But I’m glad to hear it and I understand that you have some additional information to share with us about networking.

Ivan:
Yes. Today I would like to talk about an article that was just released this week in Success Net. You can go to Success Net and take a look at the article. It is about the six P’s of networking. It was written by my wife Elizabeth and me. If you’re listening to this podcast sometime after it goes up, you can find it in the archives at Success Net, the BNI newsletter. You can actually read it as well as listen to this podcast about it.

Frank:
OK. So what are the six P’s of networking?

Ivan:
Actually there are three sets. I will give them all to you and then we will talk about each one. The first one is it’s all about people, not profession. The second set is that it is all about people, not places. The third is that it’s all about people, not paper. It is about people not professions, people not places, and people not paper. Those are the six P’s of networking. They certainly apply to BNI.

Frank:
So what does that mean?

Ivan:
Well, this is a people business. Networking is all about people and building relationships. So often, I find that BNI members get focused on some things that while they may be important, they are not as important as the type of people that you bring into the organization.

Starting with the first one – people not professions – a lot of chapters try to build their membership by focusing solely on what categories they’re lacking in the group. I want to say there’s absolutely nothing wrong with looking for specific professions that are needed in the group. As a matter of fact, it is important to do that. However, the only thing more important than that is finding the right person.

It is so much more than finding the right profession. If you have three people in a room all from the same profession and none of them are a good fit, if none of them are positive or supportive or belief in the concept of givers gain, then the profession becomes completely irrelevant because the only thing more important is the person and finding somebody who is willing to get up and support group. That is the first – people not professions.

Second, is it is about people not places. Oftentimes, I will see a chapter that is really concerned about where the member or potential member is located. I think this really secondary. Just last month I was visiting a chapter at a regional event and a visitor at the regional event asked if he should join a group that was near him in the suburbs where he lived or if he should join a group in this central business district where his office was.

I told him the same thing but the flip side of it. It’s really about the right people on the group but not about the place. Don’t worry about whether you join a chapter in the suburbs or in this central business district where you work. I asked if he could service both. He said absolutely, the territory was no problem. I said that what he wanted to look for was not the place because regardless of whether it was in the central business district or not, it didn’t mean it was going to be a successful group. It’s the makeup of the people in the group that really counts.

So let’s flip that back to the chapters. If you’re a chapter member and you’re looking for someone and maybe they don’t live near where the group is meeting or they lived near there and their office is for away – it doesn’t matter. You want to take a look at the person. Is the person the right fit for that group? Forget about where they live or where they work as long as they can serve as the community where the chapter is. It’s infinitely more important than the place of the work or where they live.

The third thing and when we wrap up I love to come back to the places thing if we can – but the third thing is it is about people in a paper. It’s all about people. It’s not about stuff. It’s not about support material. When I started BNI, I opened twenty chapters in the first year and we had nothing. We had no brochures and no visitor invitation cards – no postcards, no newspaper articles, no reprints, no fancy invitations. We didn’t have any of that.

All we had was an invitation. I just invited people, personally invited people, to a group. I think we have become too dependent on collateral material to invite people into our networking groups. We say okay here’s lots of material so take a look at this and read this and come join. People don’t join because you gave them a brochure. They never have and probably never will, not the majority of people. It really is about connecting with someone on a personal level and inviting them.

As a matter of fact if you think about it, what is the excuse that people give or what do you say when you’re talking to a salesman and you want him to go away?

Frank:
I’m not interested.

Ivan:
Or if you don’t want come right out and say you’re not interested, you just say do you have some material?

Frank:
Yes then he can hand over the collateral.

Ivan:
Right. “I’ll take a look at it.” That is the best answer to give someone when you don’t want to hear anymore. You really don’t want to talk about it. A lot of times I see members go and deal out a lot of brochures and I’m thinking, how many people came to your meeting? It has nothing to do with paper and it never has. It always has something to do with the people and the relationships and connections that you make with people.

Oftentimes brochures in paper enable people to do that is often not why they come to the meeting. Those are the six pieces of effective networking and they all related people. It’s all about people not professions, people not places, and it’s about people not paper.

Just to bring that into full circle, I said a talk a little bit more about the people and places. BNI is built this organization based on people not places. We have opened virtually completely through word of mouth. Some of the places that we have opened up early on in our history, I would’ve never expected. For example, the third or fourth state – was Montana. Montana was one of the very first locations that we opened up BNI. I think there are more mountain goats in Montana than there are people. That was our third or fourth state – if you gave me a list in the early days of BNI and you said where are all of the states that you will open up and in what order approximately? I would’ve put Montana towards the bottom.

Word of mouth is all about people. Places become irrelevant if you focus on the people. We followed connections that we made through word of mouth. We followed the word of mouth process. When you do that, it can lead you to the most unusual places. You may open up in countries or states in the U.S. that you would have expected because you followed people are not places. We’ve found that that’s a very successful strategy not only to build an organization build a local chapter.

Frank:
That’s great. You’ve obviously learned a lot since 1985. Well, we’re just about out of time for this week’s podcast. Is there any last pearl of wisdom that you’d like to share with the podcasts listeners this week?

Ivan:
Like I said, this is a relationship organization. Relationships depend on personal interaction. They depend on taking time to build partnerships of people that will far outweigh the shelf life of various support material that we have available in BNI. If we remember that it’s all about people and not professions, places, or paper, our BNI chapters will continue to grow the way they have all around the world.

Frank:
That’s great. It makes a lot of sense. It’s all about networking one person to the next. That’s it for this week’s episode of the official BNI podcast. For Dr. Ivan Misner, I am Frank Felker saying we will see you next week on the official BNI podcast.