Networking is the most cost effective method of marketing your business. While other forms of effective marketing cost thousands of dollars a month, a good network with multiple meetings to attend will generally be only a few thousand dollars a year. The return for a business owner who refines their networking skills will be between 3 to 10 times what they spent each year. They also received many other benefits of attending the groups. Friends were made, meals were enjoyed, skills were learned, money was saved on services bought through the network, and mistakes were missed because of knowledge that was gained. The value of these benefits outside of the sales made, can easily exceed $10,000 annually. It should also be noted that 80% of all businesses fail in their first 5 years and according to an article published in Forbes, 80% of new businesses also do zero networking. This is the missing key for many entrepreneurs.

You should be doing both. Networking is a great option for lead generation, but it serves productive business owners better. Business networking helps to get referrals, knowledge, and community. But referrals are shared more freely with business owners that are working hard. Whether you're in your first year of business, or your fifth year, there are a multitude of outreach strategies available to you. CIBN members are expected to be generating leads from a variety of sources. It is crucial that every member contributes, and we are better equipped to share referrals when we have other lead streams.

CIBN offers a lot and demands little. We do not have mandatory attendance, or referral quotas. We teach business owners how to network at a high level, but we don't demand your time. We've priced our membership to serve you. It is a supplement to your other networking groups. We are focused on development, and bringing people together. We are an international group, that helps you reach beyond your own city. CIBN is designed, from its core, to be member serving. We spend a significant amount of money to bring our members new connections every week, and we work together to grow our businesses.

All networking can be beneficial, but CIBN is designed to highlight your voice. We want you to build a community around your business, and we want to help you leverage it. In our meetings you will get more speaking time, less boring presentations, and value driven content. We are active learners who are obsessed with innovation. We work hard to build our businesses together and we know that success is a culture.

Everyone should be working on developing their skills. You may be a master networker, but that skill is useless if no one else is. At CIBN we have built high level networking into our core. Our weekly online club SMART Networking Club is designed to imbue high level networking practices into our community on a weekly basis. Our book, SMART Networking: the $150,000 method, is included with every level of membership. This is because we need everyone on our community to preform at a high level. Productive business networking is a community endeavor and we have the resources to get any hardworking business owner caught up.

Many business owners struggle to make a sale. Sometimes it is a fear of selling, or perhaps we are an introvert. Maybe we don't want to feel "salesy." Often though, people simply lack having a real sales process. This leads to winging it, but as our Founder Kerry George always says, "Winging it is for KFC. Winging it is not a sales process." We cannot tell what we did right when we get it right, and we can't tell what we need to improve if we are winging it.

No amount of leads will help you, if you cannot sell. Your networking will not work if you can't sell. You will go out of business, if you cannot sell.

Networking provides warmed up leads in the form of referrals, but if our ability to close a sale is wanting, then 100 leads will not help you. Many people are focusing social media campaigns or creating a lead funnels before they have created a sales process that closes deals. One marketing project after another will fail if the the business owner does not know how to sell. We need to focus on selling and fix the sales process first.

This is why CIBN Connect offers a very effective Sales Training Level of membership where Members can create scripts for their pitches, their one-on-ones, their sales presentations, and their follow-ups. They can practice on each other, set goals and work together to reach their objectives.

While many sales training courses start at $5000 you will find our very effective sales methods to also be very affordable. Starting at only $177/mth we often begin seeing results within three to six months depending on each Members ability to apply the information. Members can go up and down in their Membership at any time, just by giving us notice in advance of their next payment.