Summary: Synopsis Special guest Mike Roberts, Executive Director of BNI New Hampshire, Â joins Dr. Misner today to talk about the difference between Power Teams and Contact Spheres. Dr. Misner first coined the term "Contact Sphere" in 1994. BNI members have wanted to take that idea further, which led to the creation of Power Teams. A Contact Sphere is a group of symbiotic professions who have a good opportunity to provide referrals to each other. A Power Team is a group of individuals who have actively committed to generate business for each other. The fourth edition of The World's Best-Known Marketing Secret addresses this difference on page 155. The Power Team is contained within the Contact Sphere. Â Only BNI members for whom you can regularly generate business (and vice versa) should be on your Power Team. Recommendations for a Successful Power Team Meet with your Power Team weekly, or at minimum every other week. Have a chairperson for the meeting. Have each member describe a good referral. Brainstorm ways to get others in the Power Team involved in each project. An effective Power Team generates more referrals for the rest of the chapter as well as for its own members. Brought to you by Networking Now. Complete Transcript of BNI Podcast Episode 272 - 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? I hear you have a guest today. Ivan: I certainly do. We are going to be talking about power teams and contact spheres. Particularly, we want to talk about the difference between the two and what they are and why they are so important to BNI. My guest is an Executive Director of BNI who has over the years also become a personal friend, Mike Roberts. Mike is retired from the Salem, New Hampshire Fire Department. He was Deputy Firechief. In 1998, he became involved as a BNI member when he was operating a business, a finance company, later. Since that time, he has become the Executive Director for the New Hampshire region. In May 2001, Mike along with his wife, Debbie, who is also an Executive Director, now expanded to Maine and western Massachusetts, the adjacent area of Orlando and Jacksonville, FL, which probably aren't that adjacent, but I think a lot of people from the East Coast go back and forth during the cold time of the year. Mike oversees about 130 chapters. He has over 2800 members. He sits on the Founders Circle of BNI. He is a National Training Director and currently serves as the Training Manager for the BNIConnect project. Mike is very engaged in BNI. We are very lucky to have you, Mike, as an Executive Director and Trainer in the organization. Welcome to the podcast. Mike: Thank you very much. Ivan: We are going to talk about something very interesting today, at least for me. That's contact spheres and power teams. I came up with the phrase âcontact sphereâ back in 1994 in the first edition of World's Best Known Marketing Secret. So what do you see as the difference between a power team and a contact sphere? Mike: Over the years, people have taken contact spheres and wanted to do something more than a contact shpere was really designed to do. So they came up, probably 18 years ago, with the term âpower teamsâ. The difference between contact spheres and power teams over the years has been kind of gray and shadowed and confusing to some people. Some regions and some chapters actually treat them as the same and they are not. They are totally different. A contact sphere is a non-symbiotic group of people or professions that could easily provide referrals for each other. Ivan: I think you have symbiotic professions that can work together.
