The Three Phases of Networking

I love spring as it’s such a wonderful time to be outside, enjoy the weather and maybe even plant a garden. I remember my father would always have a garden behind our home in Newberry. The tomatoes and other vegetables he grew kept him busy and us fed with fresh-picked goodness. This reminds me of networking. What we do is a lot like gardening or farming. We aren’t hunting to kill prey – instead, we are planting seeds.

Now, I didn’t exactly understand this when I first joined BNI. I expected to submit my application, pay the dues, and then check my bank account for an exact return rather quickly. What I later discovered is that networking doesn’t exactly work that way. What we do here is build relationships and plant seeds. Instead of an immediate return on investment, networking takes time.
Dr. Ivan Misner, the founder of BNI, has explained how networking works and it’s a brilliant and simple way to get more from your membership. He calls this VCP. It kinda works like a funnel.

The Three Phases of Networking: The VCP Process
The key concept in referral marketing is relationships. Referral marketing works because these relationships work both ways: they benefit both parties,” explained Dr. Ivan Misner wrote on his blog.
As relationships grow, they are fed by mutual trust and shared benefits, they evolve through three phases: visibility, credibility, and profitability. We call this evolution the VCP Process®.

The VCP Process describes the process of creation, growth, and strengthening of business, professional, and personal relationships; it is useful for assessing the status of a relationship and where it fits in the process of getting referrals. When fully realized, such a relationship is mutually rewarding and thus self-perpetuating. You can listen to more about this on these 2 podcasts…Episode 677: How to Build Your VCP on ZoomEpisode 580: Keeping the VCP Process ALIVE

Let’s talk for just a minute about the steps of VCP and what this means….

Visibility

“The first phase of growing a relationship is visibility: you and another individual become aware of each other. In business terms, a potential source of referrals or a potential customer becomes aware of the nature of your business – perhaps because of your public relations and advertising efforts, or perhaps through someone you both know. This person may observe you in the act of conducting business or relating with the people around you. The two of you begin to communicate and establish links – perhaps a question or two over the phone about product availability. You may become personally acquainted and work on a first-name basis, but you know little about each other. A combination of many such relationships forms a casual-contact network, a sort of de facto association based on one or more shared interests,” said Dr. Misner.

“The visibility phase is important because it creates recognition and awareness. The greater your visibility, the more widely known you will be, the more information you will obtain about others, the more opportunities you will be exposed to, and the greater will be your chances of being accepted by other individuals or groups as someone to whom they can or should refer business. Visibility must be actively maintained and developed; without it, you cannot move on to the next level, credibility.

Credibility

Credibility is the quality of being reliable, worthy of confidence. Once you and your new acquaintance begin to form expectations of each other – and the expectations are fulfilled – your relationship can enter the credibility stage. If each person is confident of gaining satisfaction from the relationship, then it will continue to strengthen.

Credibility grows when appointments are kept, promises are acted upon, facts are verified, services are rendered. The old saying that results speak louder than words is true. This is very important. Failure to live up to expectations – to keep both explicit and implicit promises – can kill a budding relationship before it breaks through the ground and can create visibility of a kind you don’t want.
To determine how credible you are, people often turn to third parties. They ask someone they know who has known you longer, perhaps done business with you. Will she vouch for you? Are you honest? Are your products and services effective? Are you someone who can be counted on in a crunch?

Profitability

The mature relationship, whether business or personal, can be defined in terms of its “profitability.” Is it mutually rewarding? Do both partners gain satisfaction from it? Does it maintain itself by providing benefits to both? If it doesn’t profit both partners to keep it going, it probably will not endure.

The time it takes to pass through the phases of a developing relationship is highly variable. It’s not always easy to determine when profitability has been achieved – a week? a month? one year? In a time of urgent need, you and a client may proceed from visibility to credibility overnight. The same is true of profitability; it may happen quickly, or it may take years – most likely, somewhere in between. It depends on the frequency and quality of the contacts, and especially on the desire of both parties to move the relationship forward.
Shortsightedness can impede full development of the relationship. Perhaps you’re a customer who has done business with a certain vendor off and on for several months, but to save pennies you keep hunting around for the lowest price, ignoring the value this vendor provides in terms of service, hours, goodwill, and reliability. Are you really profiting from the relationship, or are you stunting its growth? Perhaps if you gave this vendor all your business, you could work out terms that would benefit both of you. Profitability is not found by bargain hunting. It must be cultivated, and, like farming, it takes patience.

Visibility and credibility are important in the relationship-building stages of the referral marketing process. But when you have established an effective referral-generation system, you will have entered the profitability stage of your relationships with many people – the people who send you referrals and the customers you recruit as a result.,” wrote Ivan Misner.