BNI Elevate is a networking community organized to help our members make more money through structured collaboration and referrals.
Today’s make more money money moment is a little long, but every bullet point is really important so please pay close attention.
And I’m wearing my Santa hat today because I’m celebrating the gift that keeps giving, my membership at Elevate.
You know every month, I give you my advanced networking tactics at our elevator accelerator meeting so you can make more money.
This week is your annual reminder on reporting more money as Closed Business to Elevate.
The simple answer is that you should be reporting all closed business that resulted from your membership in Elevate.
And here’s an easy way to think about it…
Someone here at Elevate is going to take action and throw a pebble into our money lake, and the waves it creates will ripple on forever, and you need to report every one of those ripples as closed business credited to Elevate.
That pebble might be inviting a visitor, making a direct referral, getting a referral of a referral, or could even be an idea that helps you make more money.
And this is a critical concept because if you aren’t counting everything you will definitely undervalue your membership.
In my case, I report over $1 million in closed business every year, but only 10% of that are from direct referrals in the past year.
If I didn’t track all of the variations of how Elevate has helped me, I might think my membership is a 100,000 dollar membership instead of a million dollar membership.
So here are some of the easy scenarios where you can credit Elevate:
Alex Cohen asked me to build her website. That’s a member to member referral and closed business.
Simone Assboeck referred me to an ecommerce company. That’s a direct referral and closed business.
Amy Noelle brought a visitor to this meeting from NYU. They contacted me after the meeting for help with their website but without an intro from Amy.
However she still gets credit for that closed business because the pebble she threw in the money lake was inviting a guest to this meeting.
That NYU person referred me to 10 other departments at NYU, so Amy received credit for all of the closed business from each of these 10 referrals of referrals.
And because of the extensive work we’ve done for NYU, the University of California Davis contacted us and we secured that project, again this is credited to Amy because her NYU visitor pebble keeps on rippling.
A former member, Matias, introduced me to his wife, Marlana, and we built a website for her company. So I went to our website’s visitor database and found out that Simone invited Matias to Elevate, so Simone gets credit for this third tier closed business.
Then Marlana introduced me to Jo at Rescue.org for a project, so Simone gets credit for that fourth tier referral too.
Last year, former member Helen Todd asked me to build her new website, but I couldn’t credit her, so I checked the former member database, and saw that she was invited to Elevate by Mike Nerenberg, so Mike gets credit for all of that closed business.
Last year, I asked all of you to leave reviews for me on UpCity, and you moved me to the top 1% in the USA with that effort, so all the projects I get from UpCity are now credited to Elevate because I would not have gotten those clients without your reviews.
A couple of years ago, I received a lead from my website that required a high level Brand Strategist and I didn’t have one. Seth introduced me to a Brand Strategist who worked with me in the sales process to close that deal. I could not have closed the deal without this person, so while Seth didn’t introduce me to the client; he introduced me to someone that made that sale possible, and received credit for that closed business.
So when do we use BNI Other? After you examine every possibility of how a member at Elevate should be credited for a piece of closed business, and you can’t make a connection with a member, but it’s somehow related to BNI, then use the BNI Other designation.
Here’s an example: I went to another BNI meeting, and connected with a member of that chapter for a website project. That’s closed business as BNI Other because no member at Elevate created that opportunity.
Again, the simple answer is to record all closed business that you can trace back to your membership in Elevate or BNI, be it a direct referral or some other way.
If you ever have any questions about this, or require further coaching, please let me know.
Now get out there and make more money … and then record it!