To The Next Level
The Value of a Visitor
How to grow your chapter through visitors.
by Mikael Espenkrona, National Director of Training, BNI Sweden

Every member knows that having many visitors at meetings generates more energy and tempo. It is this type of meeting that sells BNI to visitors. When this happens, you have a larger pool of referrers to tap into.

So, how do you attract visitors to your meetings so that, in turn, your BNI chapter grows—and your business grows?

Every sales process has two steps:

1. First contact.
2. Final decision.

The first step is the most difficult since too few businesses today know who their next customer is going to be. Not to mention there is a lot of prep time involved—it's the most time consuming step in the whole sales process. For most, the very first contact usually only confirms whether there is going to be a next step. That's it!

Think of all the time you'd save every week if you concluded step 1 at your BNI meeting, when you have the opportunity to meet with 6-8 potential new customers (visitors) at the same time. Consider the value of personal introductions made for you by your chapter colleagues to each visitor. And imagine the follow-up call to get you close to step 2, "We met at the BNI meeting..."

Rounding Up Visitors
Getting your visitors to a chapter meeting is easier than you might think. Every team has an enormous commercial value for visitors: personal introductions to 25-40 professional businesspeople at the same time! And all is done in the first 15 minutes of the agenda, the Open Networking part of the meeting.

Challenge your chapter to bring visitors every week by reminding them that they will weekly make more money and save loads of time. When deciding what type of visitors match your chapter best, consider these ideas:

1. Ask the 10-minute speaker whom they want in the room.
2. Use one-on-one meetings to gauge the top three most wanted business categories.
3. Start by inviting those with whom you are closest. They all have interesting jobs, and they all want to save time and make new contacts for themselves.

Once you have identified whom you want to ask, use these tips to make sure they attend a BNI chapter meeting:

1. Don't invite them to a BNI meeting. Invite them to meet your best business contacts, 25-40 at the same time.
2. Give them the commercial values: personal introduction, everyone wants to meet them, and everyone will want their business card.
3. Don't push them about membership. The meeting will sell BNI to the right persons; you don't have to.

Increasing the amount of visitors will not only save you and your visitors time and give you all more business, it will also grow your chapter.