Summary: Synopsis Cindy Mount Managing Director of BNI Ont. GTA Plus joins Dr. Misner to remind listeners of the importance attendance plays in the VCP process. If you donât show up at meetings, you donât have visibility with your fellow BNI members. If your attendance is poor, you canât build trust with them. You seem unreliable and lose credibility. As for profitability, you can sell or educate an empty room. Your BNI chapter is your sales team. You want them to show up for you; they need you to show up for them. Brought to you by Networking Now. Complete Transcript of BNI Podcast Episode 261 - Priscilla: Hello everyone and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the net for networking downloadables. I am Priscilla Rice, and I am coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, CA. I am joined on the phone today by the Founder and Chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello Ivan. How are you and where are you? Ivan: Hi Priscilla. This week, I am in Fort Meyers, FL. I am speaking to an event put on by the Referral Institute, where we have many BNI members attending. We are doing a presentation on the gender book this week. It's great to go around and visit the BNI members. It's really the fun part of my job doing what I am doing this week. Priscilla: That's great. Who do you have as a guest today? Ivan: I have a guest, yes, and the topic for today as you said, is the art of being there but the subtitle is why attendance is so important to BNI. I have as a guest today Cindy Mount. Cindy started her business back in 1995. She discovered BNI in 1998. It helped her out so much that she decided she wanted to go on a mission of educating others about the benefit of BNI. She is now so connected to the organization that she is a director in the greater Toronto area as well as the Director for BNI Ontario Central East. She was nominated for Toronto Women of Influence 2011 and has really been recognized as a member of Stanford sufu. Cindy also has 18 year old twins. Now, they are auditioning, Cindy, for TV commercials. Is that right? Cindy: That's me. Ivan: You're auditioning for TV commercials. That's nice. We love having you as part of the BNI family and we appreciate having you on this podcast. Today you want to talk about the art of being there. It's about attendance, and there are 3 topics that you want to discuss: visibility, credibility and you can't sell or educate to an empty room. So let's start with the first one. Visibility. Cindy: I can get very passionate about attendance within chapters because I believe, like Woody Allen said, that 90% of success is showing up. Visibility within your chapter is the first element or first component of VCP. Visibility, credibility, profitability. If you are not at the meeting you are not visible. It's just simple as that. If you are not visible, you are not reminding your chapter that you are available, that you are reliable and most important, think of all the opportunity that you are missing with your visitors and guests that day. If you are not there and the seat is empty, they don't even know you exist. As an example, we had a member of a chapter who was floating in and out. He eventually left and the seat was open but he was floating in and out of the chapter to the degree that members didn't even realize that he was an actual member. They were giving referrals to someone in a different chapter in his own seat. Why? Because his attendance was so poor. If you are not visible, you are not going to get the business. It is just as simple as that. Ivan: By the way, I agree completely. I like to tell members how many of you have ever gotten a haircut over the phone? It's one of those things where you have to be present for. I think referral marketing and building relationships is the same. The second one is was credibility. Talk about that. Cindy: In terms of credibility,
