Study | Dr. Ivan Misner®

I recently co-authored an article about the return on investment (ROI) of membership in BNI (the organization I founded back in 1985). My readers here may find some of the results interesting:

The average amount of business gained from referrals in the last 12 months was $37,055. When asked about further orders they had received as the multiplier effect of participation, members were able to think of, on average, an additional $17,668 per year of membership.

Combining closed business in the last 12 months with the average value of 2^ndand 3^rd generation referrals in a year showed the true value of a seat as $54,720 per year. On average, members who were involved in the group for 7 years generated $383,038 since they joined, thereby underpinning the lifetime value of participation.

An associate of mine is conducting an independent study regarding ROI for any networking organization. He will share some of the results with me and I will publish them here on my blog. Please take a few moments to take the short survey (it will only take 3 or 4 minutes).

*** Take the SURVEY HERE ***

After you take the survey, post a message here with any questions that YOU would like to see in a future survey that I’m doing or recommending (like this one).

I was recently contacted by a reporter from a major U.S. national newspaper who said:

“I was wondering if you might be able to point me in the direction of some research that says that many people don’t like networking? I see that concept cited all over the web, but I can’t find anyone who has actually conducted a survey or done some sort of study to back it up.”

I sent her the chart in this blog, which comes from the research I did for the book: Business Networking And Sex, (not what you think). She was very surprised by these results. She said that she had always heard that people didn’t like to network and so she assumed it was true.

As you can see in the graph, over 57% of the respondents were comfortable or loved to network! Only 37% or just somewhat comfortable networking and less than 6% were uncomfortable or did not like networking. This is substantially different than the impression the news reporter had about the process.

I think there may be two reasons why she may have believed that most people don’t like to network.

The “proximity effect.” People tend to take on some of the beliefs of people that they hang out with. Newspaper writers ‘tend’ to be around other writers and editors. They generally do not hang out with sales people and entrepreneurs. However, it is the small business person that is out there selling and networking. The writer is writing about people she doesn’t tend to be with all the time and may get a point of view about networking from other people – not entrepreneurs.
The “I’m better at this than others effect.” One of the things we learned in doing the research for this book was that most people think “they” are better at networking than “other” people. This tends to create a belief that other people may not like it because they surely are awkward and poor at it (more to come on a future blog about this topic).

The bottom line is that the majority of business people do like to network or are somewhat comfortable networking. It is a powerful way to generate business and it sure is a whole lot more interesting than cold-calling!

How about you – do you hate to network, love to network, or something in between???