Know your referral partners:
"A few months after joining BNI in 2006, I was getting increasingly frustrated about the amount of and quality of referrals I was giving, and I can tell you it was a source of distress! I really wanted to help the other members of BNI Collaborators grow their business and to be hugely successful. I attended the training on referrals where we reviewed the referral-reality curve, and it became clear that I was pretty much right on schedule. I relaxed and set to work on getting to know my partners.
Years later, I marveled at how well some people did at generating referrals, how bold they could be, and quickly they could generate high quality referrals. That just was not me.... The distress started to build again. Why was it taking me so long and so much work to generate quality referrals for my team? I was really starting to beat myself up on a regular basis. Then, we had a training called "Room Full of Referrals" in which we completed a behavioral style analysis that let us know a little bit more about ourselves. It turns out that I very strongly fell into the category known as a "nurturer". But what did that mean? It meant that, in order for me to give a referral, I have to know a lot about a person and their business. I probably need that from a potential customer to refer them as well. It's not a handicap, it's just a quality I have. I now understood why I had to invest more time than some others to get to the point of making that great referral. I had to trust and to feel trusted. What a freeing concept!!
There was a member of our chapter who was rapidly growing a business and was looking to meet investors for his startup. It is called Savvy Card, a web based business card, and they needed to have extra capital to pay workers to develop functions within the program. I really knew I wanted to help, since I thought it could be very viable. Anyone who knows David Etheredge can see he is a go-getter, and I suspected all I needed to do was get a relationship started and the rest would fall into place, but I just wasn't quite comfortable. As luck would have it, David's wife was having some headache issues, and as a clinical massage therapist, I had some skills that were likely to help her out. She was also David's business partner and did a lot of work with their company. I met with her weekly for about 3 months helping her to get better. She talked David into getting some work as well. During this time together I became more knowledgeable about them and their company.
It was just what I needed to fuel me into finding a great referral. I had a colleague at the time whose wife represented investors. I set up a dinner meeting, made some fabulous introductions, sat back and watched the magic!
It felt so great to see two parties get together and begin to work out a relationship that would eventually spawn over 3 million dollars worth of capital investment into David and Lisa's project. Savvy Card was on the run!
Over the last couple of years, whenever I am meeting with David and his staff he introduces me and says, "Remember how I said it all started with a massage therapist? This is the massage therapist"! It feels so great, knowing I had a hand in giving a referral that generated over $3M!!! It really feeds the nurturer in me! I'm so excited to help my team grow, I can't wait for the next relationship to lead to a multi-million dollar deal."
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