Forbole helps BNI members to do better referrals

(中文看此) Our co-founder Kwun Yeung has presented our minimum viable product on weekly BNI meeting.

In fact, as a referral social network based on blockchain, one of our motivations is to help people to do better referrals. Let’s start with our name Forbole, which is a portmanteau of English “for” and Chinese “Bó Lè” (“伯樂”). Bó Lè was the legendary inventor of equine physiognomy, which is a technique to “judge a horse’s qualities from appearance”. In Modern Standard Chinese, Bó Lè figuratively means “good judge of (especially hidden) talent” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Le).

I am a beneficiary of the power of referral. I always want to do better referrals for others, no matter this is a sales lead or a career opportunity.

I am a true believer in “Givers Gain” mindset, which is coined by Dr. Ivan Misner, the founder of a famous business networking organization BNI. After over 30 years of expansion, BNI is now an organization with over 220,000 members in 70+ regions worldwide. In fact, I have known about BNI and Givers Gain since I started my digital marketing business in 2009, as my partner Kwun Yeung has been a BNI member since that time. I have also tried to start a new BNI chapter in 2015 in Qianhai, Shenzhen.

One of the most amazing parts of BNI is its well designed and structured agenda in their weekly meeting (yeah, the famous 7am weekly breakfast meeting). One of the sections is for members to announce their endorsements, recommendations and business referrals for other members. Due to our own experience in BNI, we would like to improve this section and help BNI members to do better by recording all these contributions made by members on our blockchain.

We have observed for years. People tend to focus more on the number of referrals, not the quality of referrals. This mindset will ruin the intention of why we need a referral networking environment in the first place. From time to time, people won’t care about the conversion of the referrals they have made. Low quality referrals are killing the members’ business by wasting their time, which is nonrenewable.

Not to mention there are people using Givers Gain as a sword to blame others. Some even abuse this concept and seek free services or other benefits from members who really care about Givers Gain.

While Forbole is not exclusive for BNI members, we believe we provide some extra values for BNI members to perform better:

• Forbole will calculate a “contribution score” for individual user based on his/her overall contributions (those endorsements, recommendations and referrals made for other members). This provides a higher visibility of how people are doing referrals: members really need to provide high quality referral for others that can convert, instead of a mere contact method which is not much better than a cold call.
• Forbole helps non-BNI members to understand better the power of BNI and hence have more interest to visit or even join BNI.
• Forbole helps existing BNI members to get back in touch with ex-BNI members and guests (the non-members who have visited BNI meetings as guests).
• Forbole helps existing BNI members to explore a wider and deeper “friends of member” relationship.

We hope that Forbole can help more people to practice and strengthen the Givers Gain mindset. We also aim to help BNI members to acquire more suitable members to their BNI chapters.

Originally published at www.forbole.com on March 21, 2018.