Episode 176: “What Makes a Good BNI Testimonial?”

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Synopsis

The BNI Testimonial is fundamental to chapter meetings. Here are some guidelines for giving a good one.

1. Focus on one person. A good testimonial is about one other member. Go into detail about how good they are.
2. Be specific. Talking in generalities does little or no good. “Specific is terrific in BNI.”
3. Whenever possible, make it a first-person testimonial. Even with an outside referral, you can say “My client/friend/colleague told me…”

It’s great to put your testimonial in writing, but that’s not a requirement of BNI. Go ahead and give your testimonial, and make it personal.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 176 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone 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 Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, CA. I am joined today by the Founder and Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. How are you and where are you?

Ivan:
Hi Priscilla. I am doing great and this week I am on my way to New Orleans for the US Member Extravaganza trip. All of the winners get together in New Orleans. We have done that a few times over the last couple of years – to New Orleans- to try to support them after all of the crazy things they have had to go through over the last five or six years- Katrina, then the oil spill, and the economy. We are trying to help them out and are doing our Member Extravaganza there this week. I look forward to seeing any member listening to this podcast later this week. It’s going to be in New Orleans.

Priscilla:
How many people go to that?

Ivan:
We usually have from 200 to 300 people. They are amazing. A lot of fun.

Priscilla:
So what are you going to share with us?

Ivan:
Well, today I want to talk about what makes a good BNI member testimonial. A BNI testimonial is fundamental to chapter meetings. You would think that it is a finely honed strategy that started from day one, but its origins are a little more of happen stance. We kind of fell into it. I want to talk a little bit about the history of it. But before I tell you the history of why we started doing testimonials, and what I am talking about is at the end of the meetings, if you have a referral, you give it and if you don’t, you give a testimonial for one of the members.

I’ll talk about the history of that, but before I do, I want to give a break down of what I think a good testimonial is. There are three really specific elements that you can focus on making a BNI testimonial work in your chapter. The first is to focus on one person. One person. A good testimonial should be about just one other BNI member. Don’t give a laundry list of who you have been using. Talk about one member and go into detail regarding how good they are in providing their products or service. That’s the first thing.

Second, be specific. Talking in generalities does little or no good. Talk specifically about what makes the member’s services good. What did the member do right? The more specific you are, the better. We’ll remember it much easier. Remember this:the specific is terrific in BNI. Specific is terrific. That counts not only with your 60-second introductions, but it also counts with testimonials. Use up your allotted time to share how good this person’s work is. Really, this comes right from the One Minute Manager, where they talk about an effective praising has to be specific. That really applies to the testimonial.

Third, whenever possible- and it’s not always possible to do this. Whenever possible, give it or try to make it a first person testimonial. Tell people how good you feel about what they did, how it helps the organization, BNI, when good service supports good referrals. Whenever possible, make the testimonial a first person endorsement. Tell the members what you thought of their service if you used them.

Now sometimes you don’t want every referral to be an inside referral. You want outside referrals. But you can even make an outside referral into a good testimonial. When you give the referral to a member, it’s an outside person, talk to that outside person. How did that referral work out? Did my BNI member do a good job?

When that person days they really did a good job and this is what they did, you can turn that into a first person endorsement. It’s a third person endorsement, but you can turn it into a first person endorsement by going there and saying, “My client (or my friend, or my associate) told me that this person did this work, and they did it really well. This is what they had to say.”Be really specific. You make it first person. When you give a referral, say you give a little of your reputation away and he just enhanced my reputation with my client because he did such a good job.

If you can make it first person, it makes it stronger. You can’t do it every time, but it’s a powerful one to remember. So focus on one person, be specific, and give a first person testimonial.

Now, there is a real history to the testimonials because when I started BNI, we did not have that in the agenda. I don’t know if you knew that or not, but it was not part of the agenda.

Priscilla:
I didn’t know that.

Ivan:
When BNI was only one chapter, we followed an agenda that is pretty similar to what we use today, but there were a number of differences. First, we gave our 60-second commercial and then we introduced our visitors, then the main speaker, and after that we passed referrals. Now, this last part, if you had a referral, you stood up and when it came to your turn, you’d say, “I have referrals. One is for so-and-so. One is for someone else.” But if you didn’t have a referral, you simply said “pass.” Then the next person would take his or her turn.

So we went around the room and people would say,”I have one referral.” “ I have two referrals.” “Pass.” We’d pass if you didn’t have a referral. We had been meeting about two months and at the end of one of the meetings, a chiropractor in our group came to me and said, “I haven’t gotten a single referral yet. Not a single referral.”

Now, he understood that it takes time, but he said, “Here is where my concern is: Nobody has even come up to me to talk to me about chiropractic. How can they refer me if they have never even talked about chiropractic?”

I told him, “You are absolutely right. You’ve got to get them to use you if you want them to refer you.” You have to remember, Priscilla, that this is 25 years ago in 1985, when chiropractic wasn’t quite as well-known and respected then as it is even now. So people were really hesitant. So I said to this chiropracter, I thought this was a great idea, you know, “Why don’t you offer a free initial consultation to get them to come and see what you do and how it works? Then they will be able to refer you. So at the next meeting, just stand up and offer everyone who is a member a free first visit. Do an x-ray or an adjustment so they know what chiropractic care is all about.”

He said, “ That’s a great idea. I’ll do it.” So he stood up at the next meeting and made the offer. There were like two dozen members. Do you know how many people took him up on the offer?

Priscilla:
All of them.

Ivan:
Only one.

Priscilla:
Oh, really?

Ivan:
Yeah. Yeah. I was really surprised. Only one guy took him up on the offer. The chiropractor came up to me afterwards and he looked at me and said, “Brilliant idea, Ivan. They didn’t exactly flock to me, did they?”

I felt really bad and I said, “ You tried it. Let’s see how it goes.” Here is the interesting thing, and this is the power of the firsthand, first person testimonial.

The following week the meeting was moving along nicely and we were passing referrals. It came around to this guy who said he would see the chiropractor the previous week. He stood up, looked at me and said, “Ivan, I don’t have a referral today, but I don’t want to pass.”

I said, “Okay, what do you want to do?”

He said, “I’d like to say a few words.”

I said, ”Okay. What do you want to say?”

He said, “I want to talk about the chiropractor. I went to see Dr. Reuben. Wow. It was amazing! I had an x-ray done. He showed me all around his facility. He explained all the things that he did and then he did an adjustment. I had this lower back pain for years- nothing incapacitating, but just this nagging ache that bothers me when I stand too long. He showed me his facility- did you know he does sports medicine? I had no idea he did sports medicine. He did deep tissue massage to help with the adjustment.”

He went through this who litany of things that the doctor did, and he said, “He did an adjustment on me. Then I came back a couple days later and he did another adjustment. For the first time in seven years, my lower back doesn’t hurt me.” He looked at the members and he said, “You are all crazy if you don’t take him up on this offer! That’s all I wanted to say, Ivan. I hope you don’t mind.”

I looked around the room, and Priscilla, I saw about a dozen people picking up their pens and filling out referral slips for the chiropractor.

Priscilla:
That’s great.

Ivan:
I thought, wow, my agenda- what I wrote- doesn’t work. It’s efficient. You know, if you have a referral, give it and if you don’t, pass. But it’s not effective. You can’t just tell people to pass. You have to give them a chance to talk about the business they have done with other people. It’s critical. And that’s why when I started the BNI testimonial process, it’s really the very first thing that we changed in the agenda. I literally- I am going to really date myself here. I pulled out the White-Out and I Whited-Out that part of the agenda and typed it over on my IBM electric typewriter the add-on if you don’t have a referral, give a brief testimonial about the business you have done with another member. Now we talk about testimonials in another way. If you don’t have a testimonial for a member, give a testimonial for BNI.

It was really an instant referral multiplier that we discovered by accident. When I designed the original agenda, I set up the process efficiently but not effectively. That is why we made that change. I learned that it was more important to be effective and really focus on giving information about each other. I think without testimonials, we were missing a great opportunity to generate referrals.

If you as a member, keep this in mind when you are doing your testimonial- be specific. Be excited. Try to make it first person in any way you can. You are going to give a great testimonial. I say to people, and they don’t always believe me, is that sometimes a really good testimonial is better than a single referral. For this chiropractor, Priscilla, that is exactly the case because one person standing up and giving a testimonial got ten people to use him. What was amazing was one week later, he had his first outside referral. One of the people who had just seen him brought him a referral outside of BNI. From there on out, most of the referrals were from outside of BNI for this individual. And that is the power of a really good testimonial.

Priscilla:
It’s so true because we trust the other members of the group. We know them. We have solid relationships with them. If they think this particular person is incredible, then that’s good enough. Then you feel very comfortable referring them, and it really works. In our chapter, we love testimonials so much, that not only do we give them when we don’t have a referral, but we give them when we do have a referral. Our problem is to reign in the testimonials, you know.

Ivan:
Right. And here is something else. I know some countries have gotten in the habit of only doing testimonials when they are in writing. That is not a requirement of the organization. We do recommend that your testimonials be in writing if they can because that makes it much more powerful. But a testimonial does not have to be written to be given at a BNI meeting. I think that is really important to note. That was a big topic of discussion recently on a SuccessNet article that I wrote. I had to clarify that it doesn’t have to be in writing. But you want to make it personal because it makes a difference in people’s lives.

Priscilla:
Absolutely. Okay that’s great.

Ivan:
Thanks Priscilla. Great podcast for today.

Priscilla:
That is it for this week. I would 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. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice and we hope you will join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.