Synopsis

Because you give away a little bit of your reputation when you make a referral, trust is very important to the referral process. BNI can accelerate the process of developing trust between BNI members through regular 1-2-1s.

To be effective, a 1-2-1 needs to be both structured and social. The more you can find overlapping areas of professional and personal interest, the more successful your 1-2-1 is going to be. The Gains Exchange form (see below) is an effective tool for discovering these common interests.

As you can see from the graph below, there is a direct linear correlation between the number of 1-2-1s conducted and the number of referrals given and received. Those who do three or more 1-2-1s per month give and receive twice as many referrals as those who do one or fewer 1-2-1s in a month.

Listen to Episode 191 for a great example of how this works.

Do you have a story about how 1-2-1s have helped you get referrals? Share your story in the comments.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcript of Episode 472 –

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, California. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and the Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello, Ivan. How are you and where are you?

Ivan:

Well, I am actually home this week. I am in Austin, Texas trying to catch up on some of my writing. Today I am going to talk about, I think, a really interesting topic. It is based on some research that Beatrice Sparacino did recently. It is about 1-2-1s.

When you give a referral to someone, we have talked about this in the podcast before- when you give a referral to someone, you give a little of your reputation away. If it is a good referral, it enhances your reputation. If you give a bad referral, it hurts your reputation.

The referral process works most efficiently if you know, like and trust someone. Trust is particularly important. Therefore, referrals and trust tend to go hand in hand. Trust is important to the referral process. How do you expedite that within the context of networking? How can you move that along?

BNI can be, I think, an accelerator of the process, reducing the time required to build trust between individuals. One of the best ways to accelerate that trust is through regular 1-2-1s.

Research involving hundreds of BNI members in Europe was recently concluded by Beatrice as part of her thesis in Milan, Italy. She had a really interesting thesis, and over the next few months, I am going to be sharing some of the results of that. I have co-authored an article with her in SuccessNet. That is what I am talking about today, material from that article.

In here, there will be a graph. So if you are listening to this on iTunes, when you get a chance, go to bnipodcast.com so that you can see the graph that I am going to be talking about. I am going to post the graph up here.

What is key in conducting an effective 1-2-1 is that it needs to be both structured and social. It’s kind of interesting. You want it structured but you also want it to be social- a combination of a business discussion with enough personal information to allow both parties to get to know one another better.

If you continue the process, you will soon discover that this is the key to overlapping the areas of professional and personal interest. The more you can find overlapping areas of professional and personal interest, the more the 1-2-1 is going to me.

One of the BNI tools that we recommend you use to achieve this is the GAINS exch...