GAINS Exchange | Dr. Ivan Misner®

Successful business networkers know that if you want referral partners to learn about the value of your products or services, you must spend time learning about the value of theirs. I believe that the best way to do this is in a personal meeting. Master networkers meet with each other regularly to gain a better understanding of each other’s businesses.

It’s an easy invite that goes something like this: “Juan, I’d like to be able to refer more business to you, and to do that, I need a deeper understanding of what your company does and how you operate. Could we get together next week to talk about it?”

Although you don’t explicitly say so, Juan understands that he will be learning about your business at the same time. I realize that it is not always easy to know how confident your contacts are in referring you to the people they know. By having a personal meeting with them, you show interest in helping them grow their business. In the spirit of Givers Gain® which is based on the Law of Reciprocity, they will be interested in helping to grow your business, too.

Trust is a Major Factor

In business networking, trust is a major factor in giving and receiving referrals. As I often say, it’s not what you know or who you know, but how well you know each other that counts. In our digital, fast-paced world, having an actual conversation with another person can feel daunting sometimes, and we may even feel that we’ve forgotten how to do it.

Which is why we have the GAINS exchange in BNI®; it is a fantastic way to begin to earn trust with your fellow members and referral partners. When you have a one-to-one meeting with someone that you’ve networked with, it is important to begin building the foundation of the business relationship in an effective way. GAINS is the perfect way to do that. You learn about each other’s Goals, Accomplishments, Interests, Networks, and Skills – both personal and professional, which leads to deeper, stronger relationships and mutually beneficial referral partnerships.

Do YOU Invest Time for Learning About Others?

You may want to ask yourself this question: Am I being realistic about the amount of time it will take for me, based on my profession, to gain the critical level of confidence?

These are some questions that may be helpful to determine your answer.

Do I make regular educational and stimulating presentations to my fellow networkers about the value I provide to my clients?
Am I doing business with members of my networking group so I am able to give them dynamic testimonials, which makes it likely that they will do the same for me?
Do I regularly meet with my networking colleagues to learn about their businesses so I can confidently refer my own contacts to them?

When you can endorse the quality of services or products that a networking partner offers, which increases other people’s confidence in them — your partner will most likely be disposed to return the favor. Testimonials from one or two of your networking partners may lead to a much larger and more valuable referral from another member of your group who was waiting for more evidence before taking a risk on you.

By following these simple suggestions and investing the time to learn about others, you will be well on your way to building trusted relationships and getting referrals from networking partners.

How has investing YOUR time to learn about others helped you in your business networking?

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Many people think that networking consists only of talking about business and exchanging cards. That is a misconception, which is definitely part of it. However, it is not all of it.

In a networking group, you want to talk about more than just business with your fellow members. A referral relationship is more than, “I do business, you do business, let’s do business.” A much better approach is to find common ground on a personal level, make connections with other people, then talk about each other’s businesses.

The longer I’ve been involved in networking, the more I’ve seen the power of personal interests in making connections with potential referral partners. Successful networking is about building personal relationships. If you remove the personal part from the equation, you limit the amount of business that can happen.

The GAINS Exchange

Years ago, I developed the GAINS Exchange for BNI® members. The acronym stands for Goals, Accomplishments, Interests, Networks, and Skills. The idea is to have people share personal and professional information about themselves in those five areas to find overlapping interests or activities. For instance, if you and I have a common goal of completing a marathon, that gives us something more to talk about. We share both a goal and an interest, which opens the door to an engaging conversation and strengthens our connection.

In one BNI chapter I worked with when I was testing this out, there were two participants who had known each other for more than a year but had never done business with each other and really hadn’t made any connection at all. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other; their businesses were very different, and they didn’t seem to have anything in common. They did not want to do the GAINS Exchange together. However, once they did, they found that they were both coaches for their sons’ soccer/football teams. They quickly became close friends and started helping each other conduct certain aspects of the soccer practices and shared coaching techniques.

Guess what? Within a few months after they started interacting on a personal level, they started passing business to each other. That’s right – they began referring business to each other. Two guys who had barely spoken to each other for a year because they had so little in common, ended up doing business with each other because they built a relationship over soccer, over football. Who would have thought that? I certainly didn’t, and yet when I saw the results, I knew that this was an essential business technique for people to build their business by referral.

Using GAINS Effectively

I recommend that BNI members use the GAINS Exchange every time they have a One-to-One meeting with fellow members. It is most effective to take turns – I talk about my Interests, both personal and professional, and then YOU talk about your Interests. Then I talk about my Accomplishments, and you tell me about yours, and so on. By doing it back and forth, you each have the opportunity to ask questions that allow you to discover your common interests. This is the foundation for a successful, mutually beneficial business relationship.

During your first One-to-One with another member, you may want to start with Interests first, which are often the beginnings of a relationship.
It’s okay to go out of order, as long as you each get to talk about all five of the GAINS topics.

Keep in mind that your GAINS Exchange information will need to be updated a few times each year. When one of your Goals becomes an Accomplishment, it needs to be noted. If you learn to speak Spanish, add it to your Skills section. Joining a Rotary Club is another Network on your GAINS profile. The most successful networkers meet with their fellow chapter members more than once, allowing them to find out what’s new.

Goals are how we help one another. It’s much easier to give referrals to someone when you know what they are trying to achieve
Knowing someone else’s Accomplishments lets you build their credibility.
Interests help us find common ground and build rapport.
Discovering each other’s different Networks lets us connect one another to diverse professionals.
Skills provide more credibility and open doors to doing business.

Business networking really is much more than simply telling someone what you do for work. It’s all about referrals. The goal is to build relationships with people that you know and trust. When you know and trust them, you are going to have the comfort to refer them to others and they will do the same for you.

By talking about more than just business with our potential referral partners, we find common, non-business interests that endear us to the other person. We move beyond salesperson and become a friend.

I’d like to hear from you. How has talking about more than just business helped you build your professional relationships?

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