How to Hunt and Find Business Success
Being a business owner means you’re innovative and competitive. In order to grow your business, you need to routinely track your numbers on things like sales, growth projections, and return on investments. Those are all important skills to master.
Among the many tasks you may be working on is how to excel at connecting with people while making the best use of your time and money. Network marketing with local business leaders is a great option to consider for this purpose.
Hunting for Business Success
Commerce Connections is a networking group that combines the best aspects of friendly competition with business education and building lasting relationships. With these tools, you’ll be prepared to hunt for success as a business leader.
How do they do this? They created a system known as VENATOR – which is Latin for “hunter”. Members use the VENATOR metrics weekly to track:
Visitors
Education
New Members
Attendance
Thank Yous
One to Ones
Referrals
With convenient online and app options, it’s easy to track and measure your “hunting” skills.
Visitors
When you bring a visitor – another business owner - to a meeting, you help that person connect with businesses in your group and vice versa. Members earn points for each visitor.
Education
When you read a book, listen to a podcast, or go to a seminar that involves networking or your specific industry, you are improving yourself as a business leader and community member. Members earn points for personal and professional educational activities.
New Members
Commerce Connections is a one-seat-per-industry group. We grow and strengthen our connections when members invite someone new to join our group. Members earn a point for each new member they invited to the group.
Attendance
Members earn points just by attending weekly meetings. We invite you to Come. Share. Grow! It's that simple.
Thank Yous
Networking is about referring qualified leads to other businesses and getting warm leads from them as well. When another member has referred business to you and you've made that sale, you can thank the person who referred the new customer. For this metric, we track the dollar value of the sales amount. This can include a recurring sale or a single sale.
One-To-Ones
Scheduling a one-to-one meeting with a Commerce Connections member is a great way to earn VENATOR points. These meetings are a chance to learn about them and their business, so you know how to be a good referral partner.
They will ask you about your business as well to know who is a good referral customer for your business. There's no required time; however, most one-to-ones last around an hour and can be done over coffee, lunch, or at your office.
Referrals
Referrals are the result of a productive one-to-one meeting. It’s where you build the “know, like, trust” factor that allows you to feel confident in referring friends, family, and your customers to them.
We track both “inside” and “outside” referrals in our system. If you refer yourself to another member in the group, that's considered an inside referral. If you refer anyone else to another member, that's an outside referral.
How to measure business growth
Members earn points for referrals…which often come from one-to-one meetings…that lead to thank yous for closed business. More importantly, members are generating new business leads and new connections for future business.
By attending weekly meetings, members are learning about other businesses and getting tips on how to improve or succeed in their own business. This leads them to want to invite other businesses to the group who would be a good fit. Visitors regularly comment on how much they enjoy their visits, appreciate how warmly they were welcomed, and can visit three times before deciding to become a new member.
VENATOR – by measuring our efforts, our sales, and our commitment to each other, we succeed individually and collectively.
Recognizing business success
Our members are submitting their business accomplishments weekly to find out who will win the coveted “Member of the Month” recognition and trophy. The winner receives additional attention through our Facebook posts and in our weekly email newsletter. This friendly competitive event pushes our members to try harder and take steps that will improve their business goals.
If you’re interested in hunting for and find success for your business, consider joining our Commerce Connections networking group. We meet Wednesday mornings from 7:30 – 9:00 am at a location near you. We’d love to show you how we’re making a positive difference in the lives of our members, their businesses, and our local communities! Schedule a visit, today!