• DON'T FORGET ...
  we will be collecting $40.00 for the Fast Track cd program from each participating member at our next meeting
  
  for more information go to: http://www.delfuego.com/gallery/NEW%20Fast%20Track%20Stories-Summer%202010.pdf
  

Attention Members! If you have an announcement or event that you would like added in the next newsletter, send an email to Steve@doxiadesign.com.

THANK YOU to everyone who invited visitors. Here is a list of who was here. PLEASE (everyone) take a moment and give them a call thanking them for coming and inviting them back. ALL of us play an important role in growing our chapter.

• No visitors last week. We need to invite people every week! Are you doing your part to build our chapter?

Reminder: Do you go out of your way to welcome our visitors? Do you get their business card and follow-up with them to see what they thought of our chapter and to encourage them to join? Remember, that's not just the "job" of our leadership team, but the responsibility of all members.

• Referrals Passed last week: 16
• Thank You's Passed last week: $8,711
• Absentees this week: Bill Haughee, Custom Computer Services

Any gifted spy, or anyone who has watched a lot of espionage movies or TV shows, knows that the best place to hide anything is in the open, in plain sight--someplace the searcher will just overlook. 

In recent weeks, these pages have made mention of athree-cd set put together by BNI FOUNDER Dr. Ivan Misner with the help of Del Fuego Publishing.  It’s called  BNI Networking Secrets: http://www.delfuego.com/bni/.   So what are these secrets? Not exactly a magic potion or the discovery of a holy grail. The most powerful secrets in BNI are found when we discover truth sitting out in the open that we've just been overlooking up to now.

I'm taking much of my material for this week’s posting from a SuccessNet blog entry written by Jon Colson, an assistant director from Idaho.  It's called 5 Lessons From BNI That Many Members Miss: The Danger Of Forgetting The Basics.  Here they are:

1. The most important part of the meeting is everything outside the meeting. The structure of the meeting is great for introducing visitors to BNI.  However, it is at the one-to-ones and functions that we learn more about who and how to refer to each other than during the meetings.  Has your business changed over the last six months?  So have the other members' businesses.  If you have not had a one-to-one with every member recently, it is time to catch up.  
2. Treat your Sales Manager Minute as a sales training moment, not a sales pitch.  When you spend the bulk of your 50 seconds reminding the members what you do each week, it does not leave time to educate them as a sales force.  Go ahead and say what makes you fabulous and unique in your craft once in awhile, but do not spend one-half of your time each week on it.  If you had 60 seconds to train a paid sales force, you would spend the bulk of it teaching them specifically who and how to refer business to you.
3. Asking to be introduced to referral sources will get you more business than asking for referrals. Sure, it’s great to ask for someone who could use your product or service, and you should do this sometimes. But it’s also important not to forget about asking for referrals to people who can refer you to many potential clients.  Why do people use your product or service?  Who uses your product or service?  Answer these questions, and then figure out who can connect you with several potential clients.

For example, an event which often leads to the purchase of a home is a wedding.  A realtor does well to ask for people who are getting married, but that same realtor can create a career by connecting with the right wedding planner, jeweler, photographer, etc.  If a doctor is a good referral for you, ask to meet the chief of staff.  If you can get that gatekeeper as an advocate, you will have a steady stream of business—or at least she will open the gate for you to come in sometime.  Massage therapists: Would a sports coach be a great referral for you?  Think a level deeper to find a stream of referrals.

1. How do you want us as your sales force to contact good referrals and good referral sources for you?  If you are a printing company and specifically ask for a referral to the owner of a local lotion manufacturer, your BNI sales force needs a little more information on how to form the basis for this logical connection and how to articulate this to the lotion company owner.  Why is she a good referral for you?  If I know that owner, what should I tell her?  What questions should I ask?  How can I get you in front of her?  The answers to these questions might be obvious to you, but they’re probably not obvious to us.  It is your job to bridge that gap by training your fellow members how to generate this referral.
2. There is no such thing as a bad visitor. We often act like a one-person membership committee.  We consider whether or not a person would benefit from BNI or be a contributing member to our chapter.  But think again.  You may not know an aspect of their business that would be a great fit in BNI.  Also, a single, stay-at-home mom is a great visitor.  It is unlikely that she will join BNI, but how many people in your chapter might she be a client for?  It is also possible that she knows quality professionals who would be great BNI members, including her own partner or spouse!  Don’t promise membership, but invite everyone.  Leave it to the visitor and the membership committee to decide whether they will be good members.

So how can we benefit best from BNI Networking Secrets?  We have to do it as a whole chapter.  That means everybody buys, listens to, and internalizes these cDs.  Then everybody passes a simple test proving that all of us have heard the key points, and we are then designated as a Fast Tracker chapter.  But it doesn’t stop there.  Del Fuego Publishing has designed a whole 12-week curriculum that we will study as a group, and there are ways that Fast Trackers from all over the globe can communicate best practices to one another online and through teleconferences.  It’s a living tool that uses peer-to-peer continuous learning to help us all work smarter, getting consistently higher-quality business results after just a little extra investment in time and money on the front end.

Visit http://successnet.czcommunity.com/to-the-next-level/5-lessons-from-bni-that-many-members-miss/3352/ to read Jon Colson’s original article, as well as other, equally helpful blog entries written by BNI members worldwide.

And that’s today’s Educational Moment.