Episode 132: “Five Ways to Encourage Employees to Network”

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Synopsis

Many BNI members have employees, and we almost never think about them as a source of referrals for our businesses. But building a business through word of mouth is everyone’s job. Here are five tips to develop a networking mindset in your staff.

1. Include networking in the job description for every employee.
2. Establish clear and reasonable expectations.
3. Teach your staff how to network effectively for the company—bring them to BNI.
4. Motivate your staff to bring referrals to the company through an incentive program.
5. Be sure your staff sees you practicing your networking skills.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 132 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and 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 Berkley, California, and I am joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. How are you?

Ivan:
Doing great, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
What do you have to share with us today?

Ivan:
Well, today I’m going to talk about, I think, an interesting topic, Five Ways to Encourage Employees to Network. Many of our BNI members have employees, and I’m not talking about sales representatives, but just employees; they may be clerical, they may be administrative people. And we almost never think about them as opportunities for giving referrals to our company. I think we focus so much on bringing in new business ourselves, members in particular, because members tend to be either the owner of the business or the salesperson or professional running the business, and so they kind of overlook the support staff as a source of referrals. I think that building your word-of-mouth for your business is not the responsibility of yours to do marketing or sales, or just the sales department of a company if you’re in a larger organization.

I think everybody within a company can be a salesperson or a referral marketer for the business, so that’s what I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to give five tips on how to engage your staff in the networking process.

Priscilla:
Okay, great! What are they?

Ivan:
Here’s the first one. Include networking in the job description for each and every employee.

Priscilla:
Well, that’s a good one.

Ivan:
A lot of people don’t think about that, but it should be included in the job description for the employees. Often if a new hire knows up front that he or she is expected to incorporate networking into their job, it’s much more likely to happen. And if, I think, in the job description, you say, “Our expectation is that our employees will be referral agents of the company, will refer people to the organization,” then you’re giving them that mindset, the right mindset to start with.

The second is to have clear and reasonable expectations. Now, if your company manufacturers a real obscure product, your staff may have a really hard time bringing in a lot of referrals. However, keep in mind that people are more important in the networking process than the type of product being sold. When you have the right person, he or she will be able to help build the network around any kind of product or service. So some types of products or services might be harder for some employees, but any company should be able to build a cadre of staff and employees who are out talking positively about the organization and can help refer business and refer people and refer information and ideas and even refer vendors, possibly, into a company. There’s a lot of ways employees can refer into the organization to help the organization. Referrals for new business is only one of them.

Here’s the third one. Teach your staff how to network effectively for the company. Hold focus groups where you may role play to ask referrals from other customers. You get your staff learning how to do it, how to talk about referrals for friends and family. Bring in a local networking expert for in-house training. Better yet, send your staff to a networking class. Referral Institute has some great networking programs, Certified Networker Training and Pipeline and other programs. Brian Buffini, who’s a real supporter of BNI, does a lot of training programs. Send some of your staff, particularly the salespeople, of course, to those, but other people as well.

Here’s another idea. Have some of your administrative people come with you to a BNI meeting so they can see what this thing is all about. It’s really interesting. I was at a BNI meeting at a big event that I did just recently, and I had a woman come up to me. I thought it was so cool. She said, “I love when my dad travels.” She works for her dad, she’s an employee, administrator. “I love when my dad travels because I get to come to these meetings.” That’s what she said, and I thought that was great. She said, “I love coming to BNI meetings, and it was really an eye opener for me to meet the people that he had been talking about, to see the professions that he had been talking about.” And that, I think, applies to any company. If you’re a member, get your administrative team one at a time, you don’t have to bring them all in one day, but bring them over a course of a year so they can see BNI and experience it. And it’s a great way to teach them; experience is a great teacher. Teach them about the BNI program.

Okay, so here’s number 4. Motivate your staff to bring referrals to the company. My wife once worked for a business owner who incorporated monetary bonuses into her word-of-mouth marketing expectations. So for every new customer or client that she brought into the business, she was given a bonus. It was a real win-win arrangement for the company, and as each new client brought in revenue well above that bonus amount, it benefited everybody, but yet, she was rewarded for her efforts. And I think having some kind of referral incentive for staff, we think about referral incentives for clients. If a client refers somebody to us, we give them some kind of bonus or cash incentive or a gift or something, and I think we should definitely being doing the same thing for our own employees.

Having a bonus system in place made it obvious to my wife that she should be attending Chamber meetings with or without the boss and developing connections in the community, passing out cards for the company, and she got these really nice bonuses and had an opportunity to meet many people. By the way, she joined BNI because of that, and that’s how I met her, so it had some other benefits along the way as well.

Priscilla:
It worked well for you!

Ivan:
It worked out really well for me! But I think it’s something that works out for a lot of people, and I recommend, you know, give some kind of incentive for the people in the organization that are bringing referrals to your organization. And it’s one area that most companies don’t even think about. They think about everybody else, the clients, prospective clients, but they don’t think about rewarding their own staff for bring in referrals, and it’s a natural.

So here’s the fifth one, the last one. Be sure your staff sees you practicing your networking skills. Oftentimes, we don’t, as entrepreneurs or salespeople, we don’t share with our staff the amount of time and energy we put into building or maintaining our business through word of mouth. I’ve always felt very strongly about this point. If I’m going to expect my staff to do something, I need to motivate and reward them, and I need to show them how to do it; I have walk the talk and show them what I’m doing.

And one way to do this – of course, you want to track how much business you’re doing so that you can share that with people so that they see that your efforts are, in fact, making a difference for your business. And when you’re going out, oftentimes, I think companies, they say they’re going to a Chamber mixer, and employees think, “Yeah, the boss is going out to another party,” and listen, people are really good at networking. That’s not what it’s about at all. It’s about starting to make connections and build those relationships. So inviting your staff to these Chamber functions, showing them how – don’t just have them there and let them loose. Talk to them. Tell them what you’re doing. Teach them what you have learned. We have had so much content in these podcasts and in my books that teaches people how to work the network. Share that with your employees so they can see that it’s not just social, but it’s a way of generating business through your networking efforts.

So those are the five things that I would recommend to encourage your employees to network, administrative staff, not just salespeople, but the people who work for you and help support you and your organization.

Include a job description for everyone.
Have clear and reasonable expectations.
Teach your staff how to do it.
Motivate your staff to bring in referrals through some kind of incentive.
And be sure your staff sees you practicing the networking skills that we’re talking about.

And I think if people do that, they’re really going to add a whole new aspect to their results in networking.

Priscilla:
Well, that’s great. Ivan, I think that also, you could reward your staff with tickets to Chamber functions, like sometimes they have, I know in Berkeley, they have something called the Crush Festival, which is a really nice event, a wine tasting event. And you could offer tickets to your staff.

Ivan:
You know, that’s a great idea. For those people who have joined you and come out to Chamber functions, I think it’s a great idea. You said, “Hey, thanks for coming to those Chamber functions this year. Here’s a couple of tickets to some event that’s going on, if you’d like them.” Great idea.

Priscilla:
Yeah. Okay.

Ivan:
Well, thanks, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
You’re so welcome, and thank you, Ivan.

Well, I think that’s it for this week, and I’d just like 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. Thank you so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.