investment of time | Dr. Ivan Misner®

Everyone who is in business wants to do well. Successful entrepreneurs and professionals understand the importance of a strong network to help their business grow. However, building a strong network is an investment of time – time to build relationships and time to educate fellow networkers about what you do and who are your best customers.

There is also the investment of time in ourselves; we need to be really clear about our own target market which will help us identify our Contact Spheres, and then help us to strategically develop our Power Team.

Target Markets

What is your target market? Most simply defined, it is the specific set of clients whose needs you are trying to meet with your business. Instead of trying to sell to everyone, focus on those people who have the greatest potential to need or desire your products and services. When you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being very little to anyone.

Many people struggle with identifying exactly what their target market is and are often too general when talking about it. A good starting point is to have a clear understanding of who your ideal customers are. Look at your past sales to identify the types of clients that are the best fit for what you want to do. Most businesses have a couple of specific target markets for the services or products they provide.

Contact Spheres

A Contact Sphere is a group of business professionals who have a symbiotic relationship. They are in compatible, non-competitive professions. For instance: event planner, caterer, photographer, florist, and travel agent. I recently talked with my good
friend Tom Fleming, who has been involved with BNI® since 1996, about Contact Spheres and Power Teams. He shared his definition of a Contact Sphere:
Those companies in non-competing industries that serve the exact same target market that you have, which means their client list is a list of potential customers for you, too.

Tom said he thinks that the concept of Contact Sphere is a noun. It’s that list of industries that don’t compete with you but serve that same target market. And a Power Team is that Contact Sphere in action. So, he thinks of Power Teams as a verb.

I also view them as concentric circles, where the Contact Sphere is all the potential people that you could be working with, and the Power Team is the people that you are actually working with.

Power Teams

A Power Team is a group of people that are in complimentary professions. They work with the same client without taking business away from each other. How do you build your Power Team? The first step is to get to know the people in your Contact Sphere and get to know their industries. Begin to build a mutually beneficial relationship with them. It’s important to find out as much as possible about these potential referral partners so that you can send them the type of business they are looking for. You can find a list of 10 questions to ask your Power Team partner here.

Successful Power Teams recognize that they need structure – preset meeting days, times, and locations – at least twice a month, with an agenda for the meeting. They have accountability and engagement, too. Are people showing up to the Power Team meeting and are they participating? Are they engaged in proactively generating referrals for other people on the Power Team? Effective Power Teams also have leadership and communication. Tom shares a link to a Power Team meeting agenda in BNI Podcast #775.

Start with defining a target market to be able to give your referral partners a mental picture of the best customer to refer to you. Then identify all of the professions and industries who share that target market, and who are not your competitors, to build your Contact Sphere. A Power Team is where you put the Contact Sphere to work. You work together with intention and commitment, to help each other by identifying referrals and connecting those referrals to fellow Power Team members.

Are you part of a Power Team? I’d love to hear your success stories.

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We all want sustainable growth in our business. The question is: where to begin? Success expert and author Brian Tracy said, “When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.”

We can do more than walk around with a hammer. I think we can be more strategic by identifying four ways to grow your business and examining the pros and cons of each.

Advertising

This is often the first place businesses go to drive growth, especially if they don’t know where else to start. There are numerous advertising options available including online, television, radio, print, newsletters, billboards, coupons and other promotions, bus benches, and even posting a business card on the local community bulletin board.

The Pros of Advertising

The potential to reach masses of people in a short time frame.
Very little work or effort because an expert is hired to do it.
It can generate a large volume of leads.
It can be targeted to specific demographics and to different geographic areas.

The Cons of Advertising

Potentially the most expensive way to grow a business.
If an advertising campaign is not strategically executed, it could have zero results.
Some statistics show that 80% of sales come after at least five impressions or contacts with potential customers. There needs to be a commitment to a long-term strategy with advertising campaigns.
Consumers are bombarded with ads, and it can be difficult to break through the clutter and capture their attention.

Public Relations

Public relations (PR) manages the message between a company or individual and the public. Good PR helps build visibility, boost credibility, and enhance the reputation of a brand or company through storytelling, and by promoting a company’s products and services. This is usually accomplished through press releases, feature stories on television news broadcasts, and/or articles in newspapers, magazines, or websites.

The Pros of PR

It is a cost-effective approach to building positive awareness about a brand.
PR is an efficient tool for building credibility, especially through media relations.
The third-party endorsement and support of a quality journalist who covers a story about your company can be invaluable.
Good PR can enhance and amplify other marketing efforts.

The Cons of PR

PR is generally about brand building. It is not about immediate sales.
It takes time to build relationships with both journalists and with the public. Public relations results are not instantaneous.
Measuring the results of any marketing initiative is critical. However, it is often difficult to evaluate the success of a PR campaign because it is not traditional marketing.

Cold Calling

About ninety-seven percent of salespeople don’t like to make cold calls. That means the remaining three percent who claim to like cold calling are either lying or are gluttons for punishment. If so many salespeople dislike cold calling, why do they continue to do it? Perhaps it is that cold calling may seem to be the most direct route to conceivable new business.

The Pros of Cold Calling

It allows someone to hone their skill of leaving the prefect voicemail message which will never be returned by most of the prospects being called.
Cold calling builds character, which is supposedly good for you.
If you make enough cold calls, someone will eventually take pity on you and just maybe buy something.

The Cons of Cold Calling

It’s a cold call.
It can take hundreds of cold calls before there are any signs of potential success.
There are hundreds of calls to follow up with.
Cold call recipients often reject the caller or just hang up on them.

Networking and Referrals

One of the best opportunities for new business comes in the form of a referral. A referral is the most qualified form of new opportunities and is also a compliment to you and your business. Think about it: there is often nothing to gain on the part of the person giving the referral except their desire to recognize how great you are by allowing you to take care of their family, friends, and business associates.

The Pros of Networking and Referrals

The closing ratio for referred clients is 300 – 700 percent higher than for cold call leads.
Referred customers stay four times longer than non-referred customers.
Clients from referrals buy 3-4 times more in the first year than those from other sources.
Referred customers are more likely to refer you to their family, friends, and co-workers in the future.

The Cons of Networking and Referrals

Quality referrals cannot be purchased. They must be earned with the investment of time and energy needed to develop deep business relationships.
Without a referral marketing system or strategy, referrals can be infrequent and random.
Profitable referral relationships take longer to develop because they are based on trust.

Now that you are familiar with the four ways to grow your business and understand the pros and cons for each, you can make an educated decision about what will work best for your business. It is likely that you will use (or already have used) a unique blend of all four of them. As a businessperson, I have used all of them at some point in my career.

My experience from more than three decades of growing and running a business is that referrals are the least costly form of business growth, and they typically produce better long-term results.

I invite you to share your experience and thoughts in the comment section.