San Francisco Chamber of Commerce
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Business Alliance SF Chamber Article – Business Alliance Program Written by Ian J. Blei, President of Up & Running Consulting Services Chair of Business Alliance Group III. Business Alliance Increases Closed Business Dollars from $80,000 per year to $500,000 per year in only five years!
Business Alliance: Past, Present, and Future
In 1995, the Business Alliance Program was a "leads exchange" program designed to help people network and hopefully get some business in the process. There were four groups with an average of 20 or so people in each. The program worked as well as any other leads exchange program, closing an average of $80,000 per year between the four groups.
Around that time, some of us started talking about making the program more effective. We didn’t want to settle with being as good as other groups – we wanted to be spectacular. As the program is facilitated by an egalitarian volunteer leadership, we began our "re-engineering revolution" by becoming that leadership. Note to the reader: in this program you can manifest the change you want to see!
The new leadership set about finding out and implementing strategies to improve Business Alliance the way you improve any business; through communication and relationships.
First we listened to what people really wanted to get out of the program. People didn’t just want leads. Leads were only a means to an end. People wanted to build their businesses, and that takes more than leads.
You need to be able to talk about your business comfortably and confidently in different settings and situations. You need a support group to help you accomplish that. And rather than working with leads of varying degrees of frostiness, when you get to really know someone, you get nice hot referrals.
The focus needed to shift toward Personal Development and Relationship Building, and away from the old, more common forms of Leads Exchange Program. To do this, we needed the support of the Chamber in trusting that if we built the relationships, the leads would come. The Chamber was completely supportive and shared our vision enthusiastically.
With that support, we went about leading our groups in building their confidence, skills, and facilitating relationship-oriented networking. Rather than demanding that people supply "x" number of leads per meeting (which primarily results in a high volume of low quality leads) we started teaching members about "Virtual Organizations" and strategic alliances.
Marianne McCall of Marianne’s Flowers, who has participated for a record 24 consecutive semesters, agrees: "I love the way Business Alliance has evolved over the years from a ‘dictatorial, demanding leads’ point of view - no matter what the quality - to one of relationship building in whatever depth possible…With the old system cold leads would be ‘coughed up’ some of them as useless as reading listings in the Yellow Pages, just to make an impression."
Rather than look at each other as competitors, we started seeing how much more we could accomplish as allies. After all, the program is called Business Alliance. People started getting to know each other more than ever before, and started sharing business more and more. As each semester passed, more people built "virtual organizations" of group members, expanded their circles, and both the closed-dollars and closed-lead ratio statistics started a dramatic climb.
Over the last year or so, we have been closing an average of half a million dollars, up from that $80 thousand five years ago. By any standards, that’s phenomenal growth, and we’re not done yet. As we become more comfortable and seasoned in our approach, the growth continues. Continuity and stability have become the ground on which the new relationships can add, and we have no idea how far this program will take us. What we do know is that we have the power to make it what we need and want, and that makes it a responsive program that works!
Business Alliance …The Hottest Leads Club in Town Prospective members are encouraged to attend a meeting as a guest.
For more information call 415-352-8803 or sign up as a guest online
Yes – Put me on the wait list for Business Alliance click here
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