Growing Membership in Your Contact Sphere February 1, 2007
Posted by wnelson in BNI.add a comment
A contact sphere is an informal business alliance with other non-competing business professionals whose clients have similar needs. Together, they offer their clients a complete one-stop package of goods and services.
How you form these contact spheres is, first, to think about what occupations fit best with yours to satisfy your clients’ complete needs. Think about your clients’ purchasing. What purchases do they make that complement your products and services? For instance, if you are an optometrist, you discover help issues like diabetes and high blood pressure in your examinations. So an alliance with a general practitioner would be a good move. In fact, if you pick a physician in a medical building, the physician can bring in his contacts! Patients with need supplies, too. For instance if you write a prescription for an antibiotic for an eye infection, they have to get that filled. Contact wearers need solutions. They go to pharmacies for these needs. So a pharmacist makes a good partner.
The search doesn’t end with clients, however. You can find viable partners within your supplier base too. For instance, your computer system person can work within the group – GP’s and pharmacists need computer systems. And I bet that when they install a system in an office building, many times, someone complains that they are having a hard time seeing the screen.
Unless your contact sphere is intact, then this would be the #1 priority and at contact sphere meetings, this should be discussed. After you identify candidate occupations by looking at clients’ needs and at suppliers, next you go hunting. First, put together a list of people each of you knows. Create a plan. Discuss the benefits of working together in your group versus “going it alone.” Divide the list of candidates between you and put together a script discussing the benefits with prospects. Have the candidates out to lunch with your contact sphere or go to their offices in pairs. Networking events make great venues for the hunt. If you have a core group already and need more, then go together to networking events. For your network groups in which you have members, create a “bounty” for the members not in your contact sphere – a reward for bringing the target occupations into the group.
Working as a team, you can recruit a great contact sphere and all will benefit.
