How to turn your BNI members into advocates on your behalf

Part 1 of 5

I was explaining what ‘influencer marketing’ was to somebody recently – about how you market to people (not necessarily your customers) who are able to influence the buying decisions of your customers – and he said it “sounds just like BNI, but on a larger scale”.

He was absolutely right, of course. ‘Influencer marketing’ is about stimulating word of mouth about your product or services, just like BNI… but on a bigger scale. It’s about finding the influencers in your market and turning them in to advocates.

Why?

Research tells us the average consumer nowadays is bombarded with more than 4,000 marketing messages a day. It’s impossible to process that information even if we wanted to, so we filter the information or simply block it out.

As a means of coping, we take shortcuts and a primary shortcut is to ask others we know, whose opinion and expertise we value, what or who they would recommend.

For example, my cousin Shane is a senior techie for IBM. When I have to make technology decisions, particularly around computers, guess who I ask for advice? Shane is an ‘influencer’ in my life. People like Shane are like gold to influencer marketers.

When somebody recommends you, they are already automatically establishing trust and credibility on your behalf.

Which means you might want to consider applying some of the techniques of influencer marketing to your BNI. After all, the people around your BNI table are ‘influencers’ because they are able to channel the buying decisions of people they refer to you.

In ‘influencer marketing’ we don’t sell to our influencers. Education is a more important part of the process. In your BNI, you can make it a bit more overt. You can educate your fellow BNI members to sell on your behalf.

Instead of standing up to do a 60 second which sells to your BNI members, change your 60 second to educate them to sell on your behalf. Think of yourself as a sales manager training your team of salespeople.

It means a complete change in the way you approach your ’60 seconds’.

Next week we’ll talk about some of the techniques that you can use to turn your BNI members into advocates on your behalf.