Episode 272: Power Teams and Contact Spheres

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Synopsis

Special guest Mike Roberts, Executive Director of BNI New Hampshire,  joins Dr. Misner today to talk about the difference between Power Teams and Contact Spheres. Dr. Misner first coined the term “Contact Sphere” in 1994. BNI members have wanted to take that idea further, which led to the creation of Power Teams.

• A Contact Sphere is a group of symbiotic professions who have a good opportunity to provide referrals to each other.
• A Power Team is a group of individuals who have actively committed to generate business for each other.

The fourth edition of The World’s Best-Known Marketing Secret addresses this difference on page 155. The Power Team is contained within the Contact Sphere.  Only BNI members for whom you can regularly generate business (and vice versa) should be on your Power Team.

Recommendations for a Successful Power Team

• Meet with your Power Team weekly, or at minimum every other week.
• Have a chairperson for the meeting.
• Have each member describe a good referral.
• Brainstorm ways to get others in the Power Team involved in each project.

An effective Power Team generates more referrals for the rest of the chapter as well as for its own members.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcript of BNI Podcast Episode 272 -

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 am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, CA. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. How are you? I hear you have a guest today.

Ivan:
I certainly do. We are going to be talking about power teams and contact spheres. Particularly, we want to talk about the difference between the two and what they are and why they are so important to BNI. My guest is an Executive Director of BNI who has over the years also become a personal friend, Mike Roberts. Mike is retired from the Salem, New Hampshire Fire Department. He was Deputy Firechief. In 1998, he became involved as a BNI member when he was operating a business, a finance company, later. Since that time, he has become the Executive Director for the New Hampshire region. In May 2001, Mike along with his wife, Debbie, who is also an Executive Director, now expanded to Maine and western Massachusetts, the adjacent area of Orlando and Jacksonville, FL, which probably aren’t that adjacent, but I think a lot of people from the East Coast go back and forth during the cold time of the year.

Mike oversees about 130 chapters. He has over 2800 members. He sits on the Founders Circle of BNI. He is a National Training Director and currently serves as the Training Manager for the BNIConnect project. Mike is very engaged in BNI. We are very lucky to have you, Mike, as an Executive Director and Trainer in the organization. Welcome to the podcast.

Mike:
Thank you very much.

Ivan:
We are going to talk about something very interesting today, at least for me. That’s contact spheres and power teams. I came up with the phrase “contact sphere” back in 1994 in the first edition of World’s Best Known Marketing Secret. So what do you see as the difference between a power team and a contact sphere?

Mike:
Over the years, people have taken contact spheres and wanted to do something more than a contact shpere was really designed to do. So they came up, probably 18 years ago, with the term “power teams”. The difference between contact spheres and power teams over the years has been kind of gray and shadowed and confusing to some people. Some regions and some chapters actually treat them as the same and they are not. They are totally different.

A contact sphere is a non-symbiotic group of people or professions that could easily provide referrals for each other.

Ivan:
I think you have symbiotic professions that can work together. Go ahead.

Mike:
They work together real well and can provide referrals to each other, so there is a good opportunity. Keyword for the context here is opportunity. There is an opportunity to do business.

Versus power teams, where we have taken the power teams, especially within chapters and we developed the relationship to the point where the members are actually committed to generating business for one another. There is a commitment.

So if you look at contact spheres, there is an opportunity to do business. They have that opportunity. Power teams say I have created business for you and you have done the same for me because of our relationship and because of the VCP process. That is typically what I see is the difference.

Ivan:
I think you are absolutely right. When I first came up with the concept, I was looking at it from the perspective of contact spheres, what could be a symbiotic profession. Over the years, this idea of a power team kind of evolved from that. The fourth edition of the World’s Best Known Marketing Secret addresses that. The first three editions didn’t but the fourth edition you can tell immediately because it is sort of a black and gray cover instead of the yellow addresses it on page 155. It basically shows that power team, if you looked at concentric circles, a power team is inside the contact sphere. Take a look at page 155 and you will see the description. That’s a good description that you gave, Mike. So who should be on your power team and contact sphere?

Mike:
Who should be on your power team? People within your contact sphere that you can generate business for. On a regular and consistent basis you can generate business for them and they can do the same for you in return. That’s the idea of power teams. Contact spheres could be symbiotic basis. You could have that relationship with them, but there is not always the opportunity to consistently generate business for them. That’s a power team. Generating business for each other.

Ivan:
You know, a power team in the context of BNI, these are BNI members that you are symbiotic with and that you have a relationship with, right?

Mike:
Correct. See, your contact spheres, you can actually have people in your contact spheres that are not BNI members, not members of your chapter. Versus power teams, they should be members of your chapter so they have the system and the accountability piece that goes with it.

Ivan:
I know you and your regions do a lot of training on power teams. I think that is really valuable. There are really successful power teams. So talk a little bit about what makes a successful power team and what a chapter should do to help develop successful power teams in a group.

Mike:
We do have a training and advanced workshop that we have for power teams. It part of our advanced member success program. We train the power teams on how to be successful. We have recommendations that they should follow. But what makes a power team successful is the fact that the members are generating business outside of the BNI meeting. They meet regularly. They look at who they should have on their power team that is not here right now and then they recruit that individual. They are also looking at referrals that they are receiving as individuals in this power team, whether they are from BNI or outside BNI. It really doesn’t matter. They look at referrals and how they can incorporate other members of their power team in there so that they can generate business for them based on the referrals they are receiving.

So they look at those things and those are how power teams become effective. They do that and do it regularly. We, in our region, and I know that other regions do the same thing, is encourage power teams to meet once a week. There are regions where they recommend that they meet not so much. It doesn’t really matter. I think the key is that they are meeting and doing the key things, whether they meet weekly, biweekly- it doesn’t really matter that much.

Ivan:
Can you give people some specifics? Let’s say there is a chapter that doesn’t have much experience with this. What are two or three things that should happen at every meeting?

Mike:
Every meeting. You have a chair person for that meeting. Whether that changes every meeting doesn’t matter either, as long as someone is chairing the meeting. They call the meeting to order. They go around the room. “What’s a good referral for you?” Just like we do in BNI. Then they start looking at what referrals they received. How can we come up with a strategy of if I received a referral, how do we as a team come up with a strategy that we can get as many people on the team involved in the referral?

If I was a plumber and I received a referral for a new building, I would look at who is doing the heating? Who is doing the electrical work? Can I get these people involved early on in the process? Do that and they will find that they are actually generating more business as a power team.

Ivan:
What percentage of your chapters have power teams and are doing these well?

Mike:
We have some chapters that are doing power teams very, very well and we have some that only have one power team in a chapter but are doing it well. We also have some that are doing the basics but are not generating the business and are not taking it to that step, that forward step. Percentage wise, I would say 10-20% of our chapters are using the power team process. It’s fairly new. You know, anything new in BNI takes 3 years to catch on. It’s starting to catch on.

But the success of the chapters that are using it and the people in the chapters who are using it well are always incredible. I know of one chapter, you probably know him, Steve Lavie, who has a power team in his chapter that is incredible. They generate all kinds of business for each other to the point that it is over a million dollars.

Ivan:
Wow, so with power teams, you are really talking about drilling down in the relationship with people who are symbiotic to you to generate even more referrals. Bottom line, yeah?

Mike:
Absolutely.

Ivan:
I know I have seen what some people might think of as potential competitive professions. For example, I know of a chapter that has multiple attorneys, and they are all attending power team meetings because this attorneys all have different specializations. On a per capita basis, those attorneys generate more business for each other than any one other member in the group. Have you seen that kind of thing happen at all?

Mike:
I see that happen a lot. The other thing I see too which is really interesting is that power teams when they are good, effective power teams, actually generate more referrals for the rest of the chapter because they are generating so much business for each other that they are finding more referrals for the other members of the chapter outside of the power team. When you have a good, functioning power team, you’ll see that they are passing more referrals outside of the power team than they are inside the power team.

Ivan:
That’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought about that before but I think you are absolutely right. Before we went on, we talked about something really briefly. I had a chapter that said to me that the power team chapter was great but they have been doing it so long that there was a sense of almost exclusiveness for those few members of the power team toward those people who were in a power team that wasn’t as strong as the other power team. They felt excluded. Have you seen that happen at all with any of your groups yet, where they feel that way?

Mike:
We have.

Ivan:
They gave me a suggestion. I think it’s just brilliant. This chapter said one of the things they did to feel more inclusive with their members rather than exclusive is they started inviting one person to each meeting who was not in their power team as an observer. They could talk and ask questions but they were mostly there to observe and feel like they are part of our power team in a way, rather than feel like they are excluded and can’t come. He said it completely changed the attitude in the group. Now, all the power teams are inviting someone to come to their meetings and so you have sort of cross pollenization. Members are feeling inclusive rather than exclusive and they are learning from each other.

I just thought that was a brilliant idea, particularly with groups that had a power team for a while. What are your thoughts on that?

Mike:
I like it. I think it’s brilliant to the point where I am going to add that to my training for power teams. I think that’s a brilliant idea.

Ivan:
I think we are just about out of time. Is there any other key point that you would like to share with BNI members about power teams and contact spheres?

Mike:
I think the key point is don’t confuse the two. Don’t pretend the power team is a contact sphere. Remember that contact sphere equals opportunity. Power team equals commitment.

Ivan:
That is a really good way of putting it. Contact sphere means opportunity. Power team means commitment. That is a great way to put it. If you want to see the differentiation between the two in writing, take a look at the fourth edition of the World’s Best Known Marketing Secret, page 155. You will graphically see the difference between a contact sphere and a power team.

Mike, thank you so much for being on our podcast today. You are a great director and a good friend. I appreciate the information and I think we have a lot of people who hopefully have this a little clearer in their mind as to what the difference between the two is and a couple of things that they could implement of their chapter. Thank you very much.

Mike:
Thank you for the opportunity.

Ivan:
Priscilla, back to you.

Priscilla:
Okay. Great. That’s it for this week. Thank you so much, Dr. Miser and Mike. 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. Thank you 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.