Synopsis

This week Dr. Misner shares his surefire technique for difficult-to-refer businesses, like psychotherapists, recording studios, and management consultants.

• Educate people on how to refer you.
• Accept speaking engagements as referrals for BNI purposes.
• Write a letter to program chairs and distribute it to your chapter members so they can help you get speaking engagements.
• Give great presentations that compel your audience to contact you.

This technique made Dr. Misner’s company one of the easiest to refer, instead of one of the hardest. Read the blog post for more details.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 070 -

Priscilla Rice:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the 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 Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan, how are you?

Ivan Misner:
I’m doing great Priscilla, thanks.

Priscilla:
Where are you today?

Ivan:
I am at my lodge in Big Bear. I have a vacation retreat in Big Bear that I use for business and pleasure. I have BNI directors coming up for top management meetings for the organization. I am also a senior partner with a company called the Referral Institute and have Referral Institute people coming on up. We’re working while we have a great view of the lake. How cool is that?

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

Ivan:
I want to talk about something that comes up from time to time. It’s a technique for the difficult to refer business. I blogged on it last month. We changed the name of the blog, the old URL still works, but the new one is a little easier. It is networkingnowblog.com. Go back to August and take a look at that. I have a blog in there about this topic,” A Sure Fire Technique For The Difficult To Refer Business.” That’s what I want to talk about today.

There a lot of businesses that are really difficult to refer, more so than others. For example, psychotherapists have to be one of the toughest professions to refer. I would think someone in your profession, doing studio work, is not easy to refer or myself, as a management consultant. When I started BNI, I didn’t start it to be a separate company. I was a business consultant, and it was part of my consulting business in the beginning. It was very difficult to get referrals as a business consultant. People didn’t know how to do it, how to refer me. So, if you’re struggling to get clients or referrals through networking, there are a number of things you can do. First and foremost, you have to educate people how to refer you. That is key. You have to remember that your presentations each week are not about trying to close a sale, they’re trying to train a sales force.

There is at least one technique that I found really worked well for me when I was a business consultant. I’ve had particularly psychotherapists, and a few other professions, do this a lot. They’ve had great success with it. What I learned to keep my consulting business going, was a technique I’ve been training to business people for years. I call it , ‘working the rubber chicken circuit.’

Priscilla:
What’s that?

Ivan:
The ‘rubber chicken circuit’ is those business organizations that meet for lunch or dinner, and they serve rubber chicken. The Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis meetings, it might even be a Chamber that might be willing to have you come in and speak. Service organizations are always looking for someone to come and speak. You can’t go in and do a hard sale, they don’t like that at all. But you can go in and educate. I have found that it was a great way for me to build a lot of business. I learned it when I did speaking engagements; I got a lot of new business. The key was to get more speaking engagements while I was working on the long term process of word of mouth. I have to stop for a second, because our definition of a referral is the opportunity to do business with someone who’s ready to talk to you. This doesn’t really meet that; however, one of the exceptions we’ve always allowed, is that if you as a business person say, “I understand that’s the standard, but I’m willing to accept less and I’ll tell you what I’m willing to accept.” Let’s say that’s a speaking engagement. I will accept a speaking engagement as a legitimate referral. Then it’s completely legitimate, but the person getting the referral has to accept that.

So, let’s say you’re in a difficult to refer business and you’re willing to do speaking engagements, what then? I’ve found that if you have a specific strategy in the speaking engagement, it would work really well. What you want to do, is go to your chapter with a letter. Let’s say you have thirty members in your chapter, have thirty copies of this letter. If you go to my blog, you’ll be able to click on the actual letter. And of course, it will be in the transcript here. This is what I put in the letter that I handed out to all thirty of the members of the chapter I was in.

At the time I ran a consulting company called AIM Consulting. The letter said, Dear Program Chair, (it was addressed to the Program Chair of the organization). AIM Consulting is a management consulting firm that works with small and midsize businesses. During the past two years, we’ve given a presentation entitled, “Entrepreneuring in the 80’s,” to more than (at that time) sixty service organizations such as yours…And then I went on to describe what the presentation dealt with, which was mostly managing and motivating employees. Then I ended the letter by saying, “Here are some of the comments–this isn’t the entire letter, but it’s most of it– here are some of the comments we’ve received on this presentation. And then I gave three or four quotes from service clubs. That means when you go to these places, you have to ask them –I had a little form that I would ask them to fill out. It was basically on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rank this and could you give some general comments. I pulled from those. I had comments like, ” Fantastic! Every service club must hear this.” “One of our best, Ivan kept everyone excited.” I put those in there and I ended the letter with, “If you’re interested it his topic, we’d be glad to visit your club to give this presentation. And then I signed it.

I went to a BNI meeting, my chapter, I was a member, and I gave a copy of this letter to every single member and I said,” Look, I immediately go from being one of the more difficult people to give a referral to in the group, to being the easiest person here to give a referral. All you have to do is think about what organizations you belong to or know of or have a contact in, that might want to have an outside speaker. You’ve heard me speak. Go in and give them this letter and they can give me a call to talk about coming in to speak. At the time, these were free speaking engagements, I did them for free. It was a way to building my business because I talked about how to manage and motivate employees. I handed out a free tool to let people test it out and if they tested it out then they called on me and that’s how I converted them into clients. It worked really, really well.

I would hand that out at the BNI meeting and guess what? Every week somebody would come in with a referral for a speaking engagement. Those speaking engagements turned into business and enabled my members to give me referrals that ended up turning into business for me. If you’re a BNI member, and if you’re willing to do speaking engagements, take this letter– you can get the whole letter from my blog which will be listed in this podcast– take the whole letter and try it out. Make copies, go to the chapter meeting and you’ll go from being one of most difficult people to being one of the easiest. This technique made my company easy for everyone to refer and it got me a lot of clients while building my business. Most importantly, it’s a technique that can work for any business. So, the next time you think of rubber chicken, think leverage, think networking, think business and this will work for you.

Priscilla:
That sounds really great. I just have one quick question. What kind of tool did you give them and how did that get them to call you?

Ivan:
That’s a great question and that was the key for me in making this work, because you go in and do a presentation, and if you’re funny and interesting, they’re entertained. If you don’t leave them with something that would compel them to contact you, then the speaking engagement won’t have value to you. You want it to have value to you. My whole thing is you have to make this work for you, so you take this concept and apply it for something in your business. For me, I did a lot of behavior profile systems which measure drive, influence steadiness and compliance. My presentation was managing and motivating employees. So, how do you motivate employees? My argument was you don’t. You can’t motivate people. They have to motivate themselves.

You have to create and environment that they are capable of motivating themselves. The only way to do that is to understand their behavioral styles. What I would do is say them to think of a couple of people who work for you that you don’t fully understand. You want to get to know them better so you can manage them better. I’ve got an instrument here. It’s called a disk instrument, it’s very easy to fill out. I’m going to leave it right over here in the back. If you have an employee that you want to have take this, take one, send it in to me and I’ll give you a four page analysis on this person. I will describe the profile to you so you can understand how to manage them better.

That was great because I would go in and speak to twenty or thirty business people and I almost always, 90% of the time, I would get at least two or three of them to fill it out and send it in. I would always get the appointment and then I would get at least one client. I knew that from every speaking engagement I did, I would get at least one client from every speaking engagement or two that I would do. That was well worth my time.

Priscilla:
Wow. That is so great.

Ivan:
Let’s take your business in doing recordings. If you can come up with something that would compel them to want to contact you. I don’t know what that would be, you would know that better. Leave that with them so they’re compelled to connect with you and you have the chance to go in–and that’s the key–I didn’t just mail it to them, I went to their office and presented it to them. It was all free, but then that’s what allowed me to convert them into a client.

Priscilla:
Great. That is really great. That’s some wonderful information and I think we’re at the end of our podcast.

Ivan:
I think so. Just one last thing. This works great with psychotherapists as well because it’s one of the hardest professions to refer to. Speaking engagements for therapists gives them name recognition and credibility. I’ve had so many marriage and family counselors and therapists thank me for this technique because it works really well for them as well. That’s it for today.

Priscilla:
Great. Thank you Dr. Misner. That was wonderful I just want to remind the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by networkingnow.com which is 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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