Your Secretary/Treasurer is speaking!

17/10/10

One of the most important parts of our BNI meetings is the Secretary/Treasurer’s Visitor Statement. We all know it, ‘For the visitors here today, we welcome …’, but it is so often one of the most poorly executed parts of the meeting.

Why? To be honest I’m not sure.

I’ve heard, ‘it’s a hard sell’, ‘we sound desperate’, I feel uncomfortable saying it’, ‘it sounds a lot of money’, ‘I feel guilty asking for money’, and much more.

But, as I say, I just don’t get it! We are all members, so didn’t we all hear exactly the same thing? We can’t have thought any of those things, so why would anyone else?

However, this does lead me to two points, 1) if a Secretary/Treasurer can’t read the statement with confidence, maybe they are the wrong person for the job and 2) if they do read it, sounding desperate, like it’s a hard sell, making it sound like membership is not good value, that they could be affecting the conversion of your visitors into members.

Further, and I have to thank Ashley Winston (Palmdale Motors) for this, what are you, as a member, doing when the statement is being read? Again, unless you are paying attention to the Secretary/Treasurer, actually listening to them, looking at them, you could be adversely affecting the number of visitors that apply to join your chapter.

Little things done well can make a really big difference to the result of any action, so why take a chance with such an important part of our meeting?