Over the past two weeks, I've been sharing the key activities I've seen in 15 years as a BNI director, that create the most consistent and high quality referrals. There are 3 key activities. The first one is to have strategic, focused BBIs. The second is to let all your contacts know that you're in BNI.

Here's the third.

1. Think about your referral partners for 7 days

The greatest privilege of BNI is we meet weekly. The value of a weekly meeting lies in the fact that every 7 days you see your referral partners. You connect with each other, educate each other and deepen relationships. But our number one asset can also become our greatest bottleneck. How?

Our weekly meeting only allows enough time to report our progress to each other – it's not our activity time. Let me explain; the weekly BNI meeting gives us the forum to report to our referral partners what we hope to accomplish in the next week (infomercials) and what we have done in the past week ("I have" portion) for the group. The doing actually happens in the 7 days between each meeting. That's when we talk to people, create referrals and connect our BNI colleagues to opportunities. It's what we do through the week that we report on at the meeting.

To have something to report means we must think about our BNI colleagues all the time, especially the 7 days between BNI meetings. Sometimes, when we're very busy, we leave our BNI meeting and don't have a chance to think about our members again until we're on our way to next week's meeting. As a long term success strategy, this won't achieve the referral activity we're hoping for – both giving and getting.

Word of mouth marketing works all the time. Let's find a way to make it a habit to think about our BNI members every day, so we don't miss opportunities for them.

Who will you think about today?

For how-to info, click here.

Changing the way the world does business™

*Networking Nuggets is a regular series of networking tips written by BNI franchise owner, Christel Wintels.