Synopsis -
In This Episode, Dr. Misner Explains Why Business Networking Works - In Every Business.

Ivan’s In New York City On His Book Tour

Masters Of Sales Has Just Hit #6 On The New York Times Bestsellers List

When Using Networking Marketing, Don’t Focus Just On The Sale Itself, Focus On How It Comes To You

Why “Fred” Left His BNI Chapter Even Though He Was Generating Tons Of Referrals

The “Randomness” Of Referrals

You Never Know Which Fish You’re Going To Catch - And Neither Do The Fish!

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 026 -

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’m Frank Felker in Washington DC joined on the phone today by doctor by Ivan Misner, founder and chairman of BNI, calling in from New York City. I guess you are on your book tour today, Ivan?

Ivan Misner:
I am, in fact, in New York, for the book tour. I’m really pleased to announce that just last week, the less latest book from BNI, Masters of Sales, hit number six on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Frank:
Well. That’s awesome. You must be selling a lot of books.

Ivan:
We’re doing great with it. We hit the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list, we’ve hit number one on Amazon, we have hit the USA Today list. We have a quad effect of best sellers.

Frank:
That’s great. I understand that you have a message for us today about referral marketing and how it works in every type of business.

Ivan:
Yes, I do. I wanted to talk about an article that I published on entrepreneur.com in September of this year. It’s about why referral marketing works, and it has a great for BNI members or anyone who is networking to understand a little bit about why this works with the referral process.

With a fully functioning referral marketing strategy marketing operation, you can predict approximately how many referrals you can expect and what quality they’re likely to be. Now it’s true that you won’t know exactly who you will be selling to or how large the order will be, but that is really true of almost any marketing technique, wouldn’t you say? You don’t know exactly where it’s coming from.

One mistake to avoid is looking solely at the sale itself. When you do this, you’ll miss exactly how the sale opportunity came to you. In a way, it’s a little bit about the podcast that I talked about last week with a butterfly effect and how there are ripples.

Let me explain further. A few years ago, a member of the BNI group, let’s call him Fred, was a member of BNI and a well-liked business owner. He received lots of referrals. He decided to leave the group. When he was asked why, Fred explained that the referrals that he receives seem to be random coincidences. His clients can’t be replicated. He felt that the group wasn’t working for him in the way that it should, plus he’d been gaining some in a new clients and he didn’t see the need for the group anymore, which was ironic because many of these new clients had come from referrals. Fred left the BNI group.

Fred’s mistake was to evaluate his success against the abstract standard of repeatability. That’s where the issue of the butterfly effect comes in. You see these ripples may seem a random but they’re not. His professional training in sales taught him that he and his employees should call people from a list generated by the supposed demographics of his clientele to generate more business. This referral process seems sort of hard to replicate. It seems like there wasn’t a methodology that he could follow. Does that make sense?

Frank:
It was too random for him to believe in it?

Ivan:
That’s exactly it. It seemed almost too random. Each referral that he got had a unique story attached to it. It was random and something that couldn’t be repeated. That led him to believe that they were coincidental. It was a misconception because he focused on the referral itself rather than on the relationship that produced the referral. It is interesting.

In an article that I wrote on entrepreneur.com – and for any of the listeners who would like to see the article – I have over 60 articles there now. Go to BNI.com and on the right hand side you will see a little banner ad for Entrepreneur. Click on it and you’ll see all the articles that I’ve written.

In the article, I talk about the fact that referral marketing is kind of like fishing with a net. You think about how to cast the net in order to optimize your chances of getting a fish. You choose a likely spot and throw your net. You pull it in to find a number of fish. You have a pretty good idea of how many fish you are going to catch if you do this over and over overtime. But you don’t know which individual fish are going to end up in your net.

From the fish’s perspective, it’s total chance. Wow. I ended up in this net. How did that happen? But from a good fisherman’s perspective, it’s not a chance. Its ongoing hard work through consistent application of ideas and knowledge of the area that leads you to catch the fish that you’ve got.

I think that that’s a real important thing to understand in the referral process. It may look random but it’s not. Like the net fishermen, the referral marketer concentrates not on the individual fish but on the process. He knows the process will bring many referrals. He just doesn’t know who they will be our but I liked route they will get to him. I think that is what Fred really missed in his process. He didn’t see that it was a process that led to him getting their referrals. The random appearance of it is just the nature of the referral process.

Frank:
I was at Deep Creek Lake out in western Maryland with my nephew, Andy, one time and he put some bait on a hook and through the hook out into the water and he immediately caught a giant pike and pulled it in. Out in the lake, far out in the way has a single fisherman who hadn’t caught anything all day sitting in a john boat. I yelled out to the fishermen can you believe this kid’s luck? He yelled, what luck? I said well he just thrown his hook in and he caught a pike right away. The guy asked there was bait on the hook and I said yes. Then he said it wasn’t luck.

Ivan:
Good for him. He gets it he gets it. 5

Frank:
Even though he can’t catch a thing all day.

Ivan:
But that’s the way BNI members and people in networking groups are. It’s not repeatable. It’s not replicable- at least it doesn’t look like it, so they don’t think that it is a system when, in fact, it is a very, very valuable system. It is the process that leads you to the referrals. Every referral has its own story and the story may not be repeated, buy all of the process to get to that referral is in fact repeatable.

Frank:
That is very profound. Every referral is going to be different and they’re going to have all different types of aspects to them, but the system remains the same.

Ivan:
That’s it. You’ve got it.

Frank:
I think that is a great story and a great lesson for us today. We’re just about out of time for this week’s podcast. Any last pearl of wisdom for the listeners this week?

Ivan:
Referral marketing may seem a bit messy and random to those who have been trained to call a list of names in hopes of selling one in 100. But it is a system that works well because it ferrets out all of those unpredictable, hidden and complex connections that exist between people in everyday life. It allows you to make connections with people that you might not otherwise be able to connect with.

Frank:
And you just never know who that person might be.

Ivan:
That’s exactly right.

Frank:
Well, that’s it for this week. For Dr. Ivan Misner, I am Frank Felker saying we will see you next week on the official BNI podcast.