Ivan R. Misner's Blog, page 122

5 Pointers on Giving Referrals

Since business referrals are the principal tools and the valued currency of networking, you should make sure that yours are both timely and appropriate.  Here are five important points to consider in giving a good referral: 1. Listen for needs from the people you meet.  When you meet someone who expresses a need, tell her you know a person whose business can provide the product or service she’s looking for.  Tell her about your business experience, if any, with that person.  Give her the business card of the person you’re referring, and ask for hers. 2. Ask whether it is ...

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The 2 Key Factors of Success

In this video, I talk about the two factors that I firmly believe are what make people successful in any situation–hard work and good choices.  The truth is, you can’t achieve success without both of these things. People talk all the time about the necessity of hard work when it comes to success and though they’re one hundred percent correct about the importance of hard work, I’ve seen people work hard for decades and still not achieve the results they want because they consistently undermine themselves by making bad choices. Think about one of your more important goals–are the choices ...

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Should Your Target Market Dictate the Networking Groups You Join?

The truth is, if you choose a networking group that focuses entirely on your target market, chances are you’ll be in a group of people who are a lot like you.  Sounds like a good thing, you say?  Well, it’s not.  A group that consists of a whole lot of people like you tends to hang out together in other settings and is likely to have a lot of the same contacts as you.  This limits the size of your network, and the diversity as well.  It’s good to have some people like you in  your group, of course, but ...

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Networking Faux Pas Video Series: Abusing the Relationship

This is the first post of a series of video blogs I’ll be doing on networking faux pas.  The faux pas I talk about in this video is what I call “abusing the relationship.”  I tell the story of a woman who used her relationship with another networker in a way that was very wrong and even somewhat deceptive. Over the next couple of months, I’m going to do videos from time to time on some of the most egregious faux pas I’ve seen over the years when it comes to networking. I’d love to hear your reaction to this ...

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What Wind Sprints Taught Me about the Fundamentals of Success

I learned an important lesson about the fundamentals of success while playing football many years ago.  We had a fairly good team my junior year of high school and most of the players on the team were juniors.  The following year the team had mostly seniors, and we had some pretty high expectations for the season.  A situation like this can make one over-confident, and that’s exactly how we were at the beginning of my senior year. When the season started, we experienced that brutal rite of passage for all football teams known as “Hell Week.”  It’s called Hell Week ...

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Making a Difference in Someone’s Life

There are little ways and big ways of making a difference in someone’s life.  More likely than not, there’s someone you can immediately call to mind who has impacted you and really made a difference in your life, whether it happened recently or even back during your formative years. There are definitely certain individuals in my life who have made a big difference for me and in this five minute video, I tell the story of how one of these people in specific really made a positive impact on my life back in high school and helped shape me into ...

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Training Referral Sources to Generate Referrals for You

If you interact with your clients, customers, referral sources, and contacts with a referral mind-set, show them that you are a giver, help others, and continually and strategically give referrals, you’re modeling the behavior you want others to exhibit toward you.  By itself, however, that’s not enough to train them to give you referrals. Contacts who are not involved in your strong-contact network may not be aware of what is involved  in the kind of true referral networking that you are conducting.  Often you will have to coach them as you go, letting them know exactly what you are doing, ...

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Keeping the “Fun” in the Fundamentals

When it comes to business, having fun is something that’s almost never talked about–it’s almost like people think fun and business are two completely unrelated, and mutually exclusive things.  However, I don’t share that opinion at all.  I definitely think it’s important to have fun in business; in fact, over time I’ve learned that having fun is something businesses and networking groups alike need to do in order to truly enjoy lasting success. In this video, I talk about how important it is to keep the “fun” in the fundamentals.  To sum it up, if you don’t have fun, it’s ...

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The “Everything Your Business Needs” Online Event: April 1st-5th

I’m excited to announce that during April 1st-5th, I am going to be participating in an online event called “Everything Your Business Needs” and I’ll be one of over twenty business experts presenting on an array of topics and areas of business that are important for every business owner to educate themselves in. This short video, put together by the event organizer, Jarrett Gucci of Dynasty Web Solutions (who also happens to be the person I have to thank for designing the BusinessNetworking.com website and getting this blog up and running) explains the ins and outs of the event and ...

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Coin-operated Networking vs. Givers Gain ®

Are you using coin-operated networking? In this short video, I discuss coin-operated networking vs. Givers Gain networking and I explain why the transactional process (I will give you this, now you have to give me that) doesn’t work because there is always a scorecard. The value of the referrals may also be the different — think of the monetary value for two referrals to a florist vs. two referrals to a realtor. If you try to use coin-operated networking, it will absolutely, categorically fail.  To get maximum results from your networking efforts, it is imperative to understand the full concept ...

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