In my series on my business plan for 2009 I talked about how one of my goals was to develop new friendships.

You might be wondering, why?

First of all I think we sometimes don’t want new friends because we maybe got hurt by old friends.  So we keep our friendships to a minimum.  At least I know I sometimes get like that.

Remember network marketing can also be called relationship marketing.  So think about those “relationships”.

That means you need to work on developing new friends.  You don’t want to simply target these new friends for your business though.  You want to actually BE a friend.  You want to GIVE to them.

One thing I did to meet new people was to get out locally and meet new business people.  I joined a BNI group.  BNI is a group that is designed to help other business people with referrals. One of the main tennets of BNI is that “giver’s gain”.  In BNI you give referrals to others.  You participate in the group.  Maybe you bring coffee/breakfast to your group meeting.  Maybe you go meet some of your other group members one on one to learn about their business.  You learn to look for ways to help other people.

As soon as I started to do this in my BNI group I began to get referrals back.  You see the people had learned to trust me and we had developed relationships.  I was giving out referrals. I was assisting the group by sending out welcome cards to visitors and new members.  I was sending invitations to the open house.  I was becoming an active member of the group.  When the other members saw this they began to trust me with their referrals, but it took awhile to build that trust.

So that’s what I mean by making new friends.  I mean looking at these relationships as friendships not simply business connections.  You would go out of your way to assist a friend. You would probably not go out of your way to assist a business connection you just met at a chamber luncheon.    By building relationships you grow stronger bonds.  If that business connection had gone out of his way to help you, if he had show genuine interest in you, your family, your business… then you’re much more likely to go to extremes to help that person.

Do you agree or disagree?

- Ben Fitts

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