8. BNI Members Prefer BNI Members

BNI Members prefer to refer (and use) BNI members when they need work done or services provided. Every day I hear members asking for BNI recommendations for professions that are not represented in their chapters. The opportunity to be a BNI Unicorn is real. So is the opportunity to fill your chapter with great service providers.

Transcript

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Well, hello there, and welcome once again to the Imperfect Podcast. I am Wendy Lloyd Curley, your host for today, and I've got a great topic for you today. I want to talk to you about the power of BI. Now, don't hang up. If you are not a BI member, this is going to be really interesting to you, I think, as a business owner. I, as an executive director, get to participate in lots and lots of WhatsApp chats between members. Some of them are chats that associate the entire chapter. Others are just the visitor hosts or just the leadership teams. And I also am the administrator of a lot of Facebook groups that all of our members participate in. And what I wanted to bring your attention to was the fact that these people in BI actually ask first for other members in other chapters who do things that they need done. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, let me give you an example. We have an accountant who needs an arborist, and there's not an arborist in their chapter, so they go out to the wider community and they ask the wider community, are there any arborists in BI? Or it might be that someone really needs a specialist in a specific area, like in a business broking category, and maybe their chapter doesn't have a business broker in it. And so they put it out to the community. Now we do have search functions in the B and I Connect system so that those searches can be done worldwide, actually. Our members can look in all 325,000 members and do a pretty good keyword search as well as geographic search in order to find members. But BI members are just as influenced by recommendations as the general public. And so they look for recommendations. So what I would like to share with you as a member of the general public who is a business owner and someone who doesn't use BI as a marketing strategy, I'd like to share with you that it would really make sense to consider whether or not BI would be right for you, especially if you are in a category that is not held by very many BI members. Let me give you that example, an arborist. An arborist in my region of Sydney Northeast would be able to get all of the work of all of the property managers and all of the builders and all of the buyers' agents who have buyers who now want to either get rid of or plant a tree. It would get the attention of every single chapter and all of the people in those chapters because it is what I call a unicorn category. I don't think that every chapter would end up having an arborist in it unless you, and I would be happy to teach you this, start to get a lot of return on investment from your BNI membership, and then other arborists pay attention to that and realize that they too could develop relationships that are going to result in more qualified referrals. It's really cool actually. Our BI members use BI like qualified yellow pages. It's our little black book of resources. And we prefer to go to BI members at our first point of call because we know that BI members have been interviewed and vetted before being allowed to become members. And we know that BI members go and attend to their business growth needs week after week by participating in the BI system. So there's already a level of trust. Now, I don't believe that we have automatic trust. I think that it is helped and developed because of BI membership, but I also believe that if we are calling someone that we've never met before, it's important that we talk to them and ask questions that are going to help us qualify their ability to deliver the services. What I really wanted you to know is that it's important that as a member, if you are a B and I member, please fill the category openings in your chapter. If you are constantly giving referrals to someone in another chapter, then it makes sense for you to develop a reciprocal referral relationship with someone in your chapter. Be very powerful to develop your contact sphere because obviously you have connections in your business that need the services of someone else. So get those people into your chapter. If they're not in your chapter, search for people in your region and even in your wider community who might be members of BI. And you can use BI Connect in order to search for them, or you can also use your regional website because there's a Find a Member service on your regional website that enables you to look for people only in your region. And if you are not a BI member but are listening to this, first of all, thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. And I'd like to share with you that BI members are loyal. They look for BI members to provide services. So if you provide great services and you want to be known by all of the members in our area, whether it be Sydney Northeast or Fort Lauderdale, Florida, or Madrid, Spain, if you're listening to this and you provide an exceptional service, wouldn't it be great to have great people recommending your business to their clients so that you grow your business? And that's why we do join B I. So the topic today was all about the complexity and benefits of being part of the BI network. It's a fantastic place to be, and once you teach people what to look for in markets, how to identify that there's a need, in other words, training them how to find referrals for you, you'll see that BI is really powerful. So I'm gonna finish with this. I'm gonna remind all of our members, your goal every week in your weekly presentation is not to share with your fellow members what you do and how you do it. That's called a commercial. And we don't need to do commercials to our fellow members. What we want to do is teach them who we want to meet, how to identify them, and what to say to those people in order to make the referrals happen. Yes, indeed, every week you want to teach your fellow members how to give you referrals, not teaching them what you do. So important for you to remember that. It's the epiphany of the year. It's 2024's epiphany for Wendy. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. I hope that you've enjoyed this. I'm about to start the music at the end of my podcast, and I just love to brag about it a little bit. Not only am I playing guitar on this track, but it was written by my very good friend Ben Little, and it's called 20 Hours of Texas. I hope you enjoy it. Have a great day. See you soon. Bye.