Synopsis

This week, Dr. Misner invites you to take the surveys at BNI.com, then print the results and bring them to your meeting. Here are a few results of the surveys:

• 75% of respondents network for new business, while only 8% chose education as their primary objective.
• Compare the results of “Where does most of your business come from?” with the results of “Have you ever taken a college course that covered networking or word-of-mouth marketing?”
• 54% of respondents got 3/4 or more of their business from referrals.

Go to BNI.com and add your vote.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 066 -

Priscilla Rice:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to Official BNI Podcast brought to you by networkingnow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I’m Priscilla Rice and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. I’m joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan, where are you today?

Ivan Misner:
Hi Priscilla. I am in Vail, Colorado today. I am participating in the Transformational Leadership Council Meetings that are run by Jack Canfield, one of the co-authors of the Chicken Soup For The Soul series. A few years ago Jack invited me to participate in TLC, so every six months I go to one of those meetings and pick up a lot of great ideas.

Priscilla:
That sounds great. I wish I was there with you.

Ivan:
It’s a lot of fun, but I have to tell you, they run sessions starting at 8:00 in the morning and run them until sometimes 8:00 at night. There’s a lot of material to absorb.

Priscilla:
That sounds good. What are you going to share with us?

Ivan:
Today, I want to talk about some of the networking surveys that we have at BNI.com. If members have a few minutes, I would love to have you go to BNI.com and take a look on the left hand side of the website. You’ll see something called BNI Live Vote. There’s usually a survey up there. We change it every month or two. Below it, it says, ” Take more surveys”. If you click on that, it will take you to a page that has 8 or so different surveys on different subjects relating to networking. The listeners might find the results kind of interesting. I would love to have you listening to this, to print those survey results and take them back to your chapter and talk about them. I want to talk about 2 or 3 of them here today, if I can.

Priscilla:
Okay great. Which one are you going to tell us about?

Ivan:
The one I want to start with, is a survey that surprised me a little bit. It was, What Is Your Primary Objective For Networking? I thought that–there were 3 choices on that, new business, education or career advancement. I pretty much figured that new business would be the higher of the three, but I didn’t realize it would be so much higher– 75% of the respondents, and we had over 2400 people respond to that survey. 75% of the respondents said, ” new business”. Their primary purpose for networking was new business, and I have to admit, I was a little bit surprised that it was such a high number. I talked about this in my blog recently for entrepreneur, the networking entrepreneur.com. It’s interesting, because most of the people who looked at the survey on the blog said they weren’t at all surprised that that was the reason. Of course that’s probably the reason we have most of our BNI people who are networking, is to get more business.

Priscilla:
What did you think it was going to turn out to be?

Ivan:
I figured that new business would be the number one, but I didn’t realize it would be 3/4 of the vote. I figured 60% maybe. Maybe 1/2 of the respondents were for new business. Education is an important aspect for networking and career advancement. You hear so much in the media about career networking, that I figured career networking would be a larger percentage–that worked out to be about 15% of the respondents networked for their career. But I think we have to remember in BNI, many of the members of BNI are business owners or independent contractors and so they’re in a career that they’ve created themselves. The career aspect of networking–it’s not like they work for a major company and have to rely on a payroll check, so in retrospect it makes sense, because many of our members are self-employed or own their own business.

Priscilla:
Right. Tell me something else about these surveys.

Ivan:
There’s some really interesting ones. There are two separate surveys that I think are interesting to look at side by side. One is the question, Where does most of you business come from, What’s the primary source? The second one is, Have you ever taken a college course that covered the subject of networking or word of mouth marketing? The first one, Where does most of your business come from, What’s the primary source — there are four choices: advertising, public relations, networking/ referrals, and cold calling. There was almost 4000 respondents to the survey and 73% of the respondents said that networking and referrals were the place where most of their business comes from. That didn’t surprise me, that made sense. It’s also very close to the 75% of the previous survey that said it was the primary objective for networking, so it’s very consistent. Here’s what I thought was interesting. In the question, Have you ever taken a college course that covered the subject of networking or word of mouth marketing, the question isn’t have you ever had a class on it. The question is, have you ever had a class that talked about it–that covered it. Interestingly enough, with almost 2400 votes, 87% of the respondents said, “No”. I think it’s really interesting to look at the two surveys side by side. 87% of the respondents said they never had a class that even talked about networking. But 73% of the respondents said that networking was one of the most important ways for them to build their business. I think this is a great example of the travesty of our educational system, that we don’t teach business people, people that are working towards a business degree, some of the things that are most important to them. Clearly, based on this survey hands down, networking and referrals was the number one way to build their primary source of business. Number two was advertising, and that was 12%. There’s a huge difference, yet 87% of the respondents never had a class that covered networking. Now you know, if you have a business degree, you have classes available on advertising, but based on this survey and other surveys I’ve seen, it’s a much smaller end result need for the average business person than networking. It goes to show how our professors are so caught up in the academics of business, that they forget where the rubber meets the road in actually generating business.

Priscilla:
Do you think there’s a lot to add to a class in networking? Is it a deep subject in terms of academia?

Ivan:
I know it can. I’ve developed a course on networking for a university. It’s being taught at Davis College by Debby Peters right now. The Certified Networker Training Program is being taught there. I know other courses on networking and social capital are being taught. A good friend of mine, Dr. Wayne Baker teaches a course on social capital and networking at the University of Michigan. I’ve taught networking and social capital at Cal Poly Pomona in the past. I know there’s a handful out there. I know that it can certainly be taught in a college curriculum. I also know that most college professors have never had a real job in their life and they’ve never really worked a business, yet they’re teaching business. They don’t understand the real need of networking as a course. I think these two surveys really point that out.

Listen, there’s at least one more survey that I want to point out to the listeners. There’s a great survey response with What Percentage Of Your Business Comes From Word of Mouth Or Referrals? There were well over 3000 respondents. 54% of the respondents said they got 3/4 of their business through word of mouth or referrals. So 3/4 of all of their business, more than half of the respondents said that 3/4 of their business came through referrals. So the power of what we’re doing in BNI is very clear based on the results of the various surveys. There’s many other surveys up there. Go to BNI.com and take a few. Then take this information back to the chapters and share it with members. They may find it of value in their local business operation.

Priscilla:
Okay great. I’m going to recommend that to my chapter, for sure.

Ivan:
Thank you.

Priscilla:
Okay, Dr. Misner, I think we’ve come to the very end of this podcast. I want to let the listeners know that this podcast has been brought to you by networkingnow.com, the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. Thanks for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of the Official BNI Podcast.

 

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