Episode 187: “The Three Core Competencies to Referral Success”

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Synopsis

Mike Macedonio of the Referral Institute joins Dr. Misner to show us some genuinely effective techniques for referral marketing. (As co-author with Dr. Misner of Truth or Delusion, Mike has learned to separate the wheat from the chaff.) Here are three core competencies:

1. Get the right education. Learn from the experts.
2. Stay immersed with the information. Apply what you know.
3. Educate your referral network. That’s what BNI’s Leadership Team training is for. (Hint—you don’t have to be on the Leadership Team to take this training.)

If you want to know more about the Referral Institute, you can visit their website or contact Mike at mikem [at] referralinstitute [dot] com.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 187 -

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. It’s great to start the new year here in the second week of January. I am in Petaluma, CA at the Referral Institute’s conference. Because of that, my guest today is Mike Macedonio. Mike is the President of the Referral Institute. Mike’s relationship with BNI goes way back. Mike has been involved with the organization; he’s an Executive Director. He has been involved with BNI since 1997- a lot of experience in the organization. He is also my co-author of my NY Times best selling book, Truth or Delusion. Mike Macedonio is one of the co-authors with me.

I haven’t mentioned this in my podcast yet, but this year, in 2011, we will have the 4th Edition of The World’s Best Known Marketing Secret. Mike Macedonio will be my co-author in The World’s Best Known Marketing Secret, which is actually a combination of World’s Best Known and Business by Referral. I am sure I’ll talk about it sometime this year in my podcast.

So Mike is my guest today. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike:
Thank you, Ivan. Thank you for having me on your podcast and welcome to Petaluma.

Ivan:
Thanks. The Referral Institute’s conferences are always very full of information, so this is a great opportunity to do this podcast. The topic today is the three core competencies to referral success. What is missing is an important aspect of this topic, so let’s start with what is missing?

Mike:
Well, I think if you look at the three core competencies, first, knowing what to do, secondly, doing it- the third thing is to have an educated network. Sometimes the third one is the stumbling block, but let’s take it in order.

Ivan:
The right referral marketing knowledge. Tell us about that.

Mike:
I think the first thing to go to is Ivan Misner who is a wealth of information on this. The one thing that I will say that we see out there in the world is that the information on referral marketing and networking runs from fantastic to fumbling terrible. The stuff that just fumbles along as good technique, in a lot of cases just doesn’t work at all. As a matter of fact, Ivan, you and I wrote an entire book on the truth or delusions of good networking.

One of the first commitments that any business owner needs to make at being effective in referral marketing is to go out there and learn from the experts. Find out what is working. Again, I will go back to you, Ivan. You have a wealth of information and knowledge that you share. This podcast is one of them. People on this podcast, obviously, are hungry for the knowledge and they want to learn from the best.

I also see BNI as having an endless amount of other resources, such as their Member Success Program, Leadership Team trainings, your books, the Del Fuego programs. Ivan, you probably have a list of others that you can share.

Ivan:
The SuccessNet is probably one of the best resources for BNI members, the Ask Ivan Misner website, which is sometimes a sponsor of the podcast is another great site. And as you mentioned, the many, many books.
So the right marketing knowledge is the first one. What is the second one? Stay immersed with the information. Tell us about that.

Mike:
We know the old saying, knowledge is not enough. We have to take that knowledge and apply it. Immersion is really where we take what we know and we start letting those lessons stick and behaviors changed to repetition. It is no different than exercise. You can know how hard to work out, but unless you are doing it and doing it on a regular basis, you are not going to get any significance in performance.

The more frequently we stay engaged in referral marketing and the longer we stay engaged in referral marketing, the more we fit it in to our lifestyle. It is not simply an event or something we turn on and turn off. One of my experiences with referral marketing is that a lot of it is counter-intuitive. When we think about going out there and looking for business, we go out there and look for business for ourselves. So much of referral marketing also involves looking for business for other people.

Ivan:
That is so true, Mike. I just read something on Entrepreneur.com’s Facebook page where people were talking about networking. The number one complaint was that they just go there to be sold to. They go to networking meetings and everybody and their mother is selling to them, which is very frustrating.

But staying immersed. In my podcast, I talk a lot about being immersed and engaged in a culture of learning. That is very important. But the third one is very important and you have a lot of additional information on this. This is the three core competencies to referral success. The third one is have an educated referral network. Do you want to talk about that?

Mike:
Yeah. This sometimes is where the referral process gets a little sticky. As listeners to this podcast, you probably are immersed in education. You are immersed in the process. You probably have some very frequent skills, but some of you actually may be frustrated with the process because your network isn’t equally as educated and isn’t equally as skilled. This is critical to the referral process because it is a team sport.

On the first level, of course, they need to know who you are, what you do, who to refer to you and how to refer you. Just as importantly, they need to have an understanding of the referral marketing process. What are the strategies? What are the things that are going to make them more effective in generating more referrals for you? It would be equated to a professional athlete going out on the field with a peewee team. He is going to get very frustrated with their skills.

One of the nice things about BNI is it offers so many opportunities for the chapters to get educated and the chapters to learn together how to perform better as a team. You know, years ago as an Executive Director, I started to notice trends in my region. I would notice that certain months, the chapters would have significant growth. They would pass a significant amount of business. Then it would come down, and then it would take off again. When I looked at those trends year in and year out, I was noticing they always happened following our Leadership Team trainings.

Of course, the initial reaction was it has to be the training. With more training they were getting better at it and performing better after they left the training. But there was another thing that I started to notice. I started to notice that the chapters who had the most members attending the Leadership Team trainings were producing the better results in the region. Again, I misinterpreted that because I thought it was just the number of members at training that was producing the results.

It took me a number of years to actually realize that it was all of that plus the fact that they were experiencing the training together. Individually getting training would help, but when they did it together, they came back and played better as a team. I think this is one of the greatest opportunities that BNI members have. They have Leadership Team training, and these opportunities to go together.

I know, Ivan, this is unique, and I’m just experiencing my experience in the United States. But you would know better- is that something that happens across the organization?

Ivan:
Yeah. It absolutely does, and when you see regions that have everyone in the Leadership Team going through the training, which they are required to do- but when you have it happen consistently, that is when you have regions that tend to be more successful. But the ones that are really successful are the regions where more than just the Leadership Team goes. There are many regions of this organization where not just the three people- President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer (in some countries called the Chapter Director , Membership Coordinator, Secretary, Treasured). Whatever the title, oftentimes, many other people go to the Leadership Team trainings: the Visitor host, the membership committees, people in other roles within the chapter go.

When you have a chapter that sends a lot of people, that is really getting the group immersed and engaged in this culture of learning that I think is so important. So do you want to summarize for us, Mike?

Mike:
Yes. Just to review, our three core competencies is get the right education and learn in from the true experts in referral marketing. Secondly, take the information and stay immersed in the information. Practice the skills and make it a lifestyle. Lastly, take every opportunity you can to get your network educated about what you do and who you are looking to get referred, but also on the referral marketing process. Again, BNI offers a great opportunity for us to do that with our members on a consistent basis weekly, but also on the training that happens throughout the year.

Ivan:
Thanks Mike. The Referral Institute certainly takes that at an even much deeper level. I would like to let all of the members know that BNI has a long term strategic alliance with the Referral Institute. I like to call it a strategic alliance on steroids. You know, I am involved in both organizations. You run the Referral Institute, but the Referral Institute uses a lot of the content that I developed in my books and in our books. We have a really strong relationship.

I think that BNI is sort of vocational school for networking. It is where the rubber meets the road. You learn what you need to know to make a BNI meeting successful for you, but Referral Institute is really graduate school training. It’s where you go deep and explain how to build your business through referrals. So take a few seconds, if you don’t mind, Mike, to tell everybody about the Referral Institute, which is really the basis of much of your expertise in this field.

Mike:
The Referral Institute is a training and consulting company. Our specialty is referral marketing. Along with success in BNI, we also look at all the other sources of referrals that a company has and make sure that they have systems and a message in place that can be marketed by word of mouth and referrals. With getting a lot of the information that you have provided, Ivan, and a number of our other trainers in the company, we’ve had the pleasure of expanding into an international company doing well working side by side with BNI.

Ivan:
If someone wants to get information on the Referral Institute, where do they go?

Mike:
They can come to the website, which is ReferralInstitute.com, or feel free to email me at mikem@referralinstitute.com.

Ivan:
Mike, thank you so much for being on this podcast. We are also going to have you on next week to talk a little bit more about what your referral network really needs to know in order to pass you business. We are going to do that next week. To the listeners of the BNI Podcast, thank you so much, and I’ll turn it over to you, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
Thank you both very, very much. I think that is it for this week. I would 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 for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you will join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.