Speaker 1: 0:00

Donnie Boyvin serves as the CEO of Success Champion Networking and is the founder of the Badass Business Summit. He is a top podcaster and a five-time best-selling author. Motivated by a desire to transform the landscape of networking, donnie established a business-to-business networking group across North America. Now, with hundreds of members, they have created more than just a business. They've created a community and a support system. I'm excited to learn more about it and how Donnie sees business networking evolve in the modern age of AI. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Welcome to the show, donnie. How are you?

Speaker 2: 0:46

doing today. Ah, mike, this is awesome man. I'm looking forward to hanging out with you, Dude. I feel like we're almost like long-lost brothers that just could show up and get into conversations for hours, like we did when we first got here. So thanks for having me on, brother.

Speaker 1: 1:02

I think it has to do with both of us being vets. I think vets have this gift to gab with strangers because we're used to being strangers. A hundred percent Right. We go to foreign lands? Or do we meet?

Speaker 2: 1:11

we make instant friends with people, because that's the life you know like well, I think it's easier to make friends overseas than it is in the U S sometimes Well especially nowadays. Jeez.

Speaker 1: 1:22

We try to be white with a bald head and a cisgender Come on now. But we digress. No, there was literally one time I had to put a hat on in Chicago. It was there a couple of years ago and I was like I think I better put a hat on. It was a politically charged time of year, the whole nine yards and and I grew up in like East Oakland, san Francisco Bay area. That's, that's my, that's my. That's how I grew up, right, but nowadays I have no idea why we stay away from the city altogether.

Speaker 2: 1:59

It's just here in the country.

Speaker 1: 2:01

I moved to the country Yep, not country, just so, as my listeners know, they know that I'm not, not not on a farm boy anymore, but you are, I am, yes, you are, and you are the proprietor of a huge B2B network. What's, and give us the name of that again, it's the success champion, networking. And all right, tell us a little bit about this. I love the story behind it, so give the audience a little synopsis here.

Speaker 2: 2:28

Yeah, for sure. I never thought networking groups was going to be my business. I'm just kind of that guy that I thought most people who teach networking are just idiots. And the reason I say that is because it's networking, it's not rocket science, right.

Speaker 1: 2:48

But it is an art.

Speaker 2: 2:48

Donnie, and it is an art, for sure, but it's it's. I didn't fully understand that the way I look at networking didn't come naturally to a lot of people, right? So so, um, but my wife looked at me one day and said why don't you change how the world networks? And that changed my philosophy. Ok, now I'll teach networking Right, because I want to teach it from a different perspective.

Speaker 2: 3:09

But we launched the networking groups during the pandemic because we were watching everybody move online, and it took me two and a half years to build a legitimate online business, and people didn't have two and a half years, you know, beginning of the pandemic, they had 30 days to figure out how to stay in business.

Speaker 2: 3:24

So I was already running a successful sales training company and a podcast production company, so I didn't launch the groups because I needed extra revenue. I launched it to try and help as many people as possible, and from there, I just didn't understand how big of a gap there was in a marketplace for people who sell B2B. Is you, if you're a small, mid-sized company and you're trying to grow, uh, going to your local chambers not going to help you out? Going to a lot of networking events aren't going to help you out, though there's just not a lot of places you can go. If you're you're a under a hundred thousand dollar company selling into a million to 20 million dollar company, you know there's not a lot of places for you to go. Network that's a value. So we created that virtual environment and it took off and we've just been holding on to the ride.

Speaker 1: 4:12

So what I'm hearing is that there's an opportunity for the little guys that don't have that network at the enterprise level to actually get connected with some medium to enterprise level B2B companies. Yeah, that's amazing. So how does that work? Walk the listeners through. What's the experience on that?

Speaker 2: 4:32

Yeah. So if you think about it. So let's say you're a telecom, an MSP IT company, you may have a staff five to seven type people but when you go to networking, you're not selling B2C, so your clientele that you would traditionally, you know you're not selling B2C, so your clientele that you would traditionally sell to, they're not out networking. Like you're not going to see a CEO of a $4 million company at after hours, right, Just not going to happen. What you will run into, though, is other people who also sell to those size companies out there and about. So what we tell people is you don't network for referrals, you net because our referrals and introduction with a sales call attached. It's like you know, hey Bob, I've told Sally about your company. They know what you do, they're looking for your services, Really excited to talk, Right, so there's expected sales call and introduction just putting two good people together.

Speaker 2: 5:21

So, so when you're B2B, everything's a long play, right, Like you literally can't sell to the people you're networking with because they're not at a level that can buy. You know IT services and telecom services, software, right, so you network to get introduced to the people who have your ideal client base. So we created an environment where we bring all those people together that focus on particular industries, you know, like HR, manufacturing and the like, and we bring them together. So now they can actually strategize. How do we get into XYZ company? Or I just got into XYZ company. Who needs to go into that company? And it really opens a really cool dynamic. Then that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 6:09

So if just so, before I forget what's the website, if somebody wanted to check this out, Really easy.

Speaker 2: 6:14

successchampionnetworkingcom.

Speaker 1: 6:17

Successchampionnetworkingcom Beautiful. It probably comes up in the Google searches as well, which is awesome. So I want to dive into something you said earlier in the 2020. So I, most of the listeners know in 2019, I shut down my brick and mortar. End of 2018, actually, I shut down my brick and mortar creative agency 13,000 square foot facility in downtown Anchorage. I had a corner office. I looked over the mountains, it was a gorgeous place, but I was completely miserable. I went virtual and I can attest to the amount of time it takes to build an online company. Because that's what we did. I said you know what Done with this building. I'm done with having the brick and mortar. I'm going to figure out how to do my business online, and as a business consultant, I mean being a fractional CMO, that's. I mean you have to get in front of business owners and you know what. The hardest thing to do is get in their inbox. Yes, Right, and so, yes, I learned really quick how true your network is, your net worth.

Speaker 2: 7:23

And what?

Speaker 1: 7:23

you're talking about is not like the B&Is of the world. The business and I made my first million off of referrals through B&I. Right, but it's not scalable right. Unless you're in the B2C arena. And some of the services do really well there and Dr Ivan Meisner me and him actually know each other and I respect what he's done with it. But in the B2B world it's so much harder because you have to. There are multiple doors to the rooms you're trying to get into.

Speaker 2: 7:53

So many right.

Speaker 2: 7:55

So to that point I mean, like when you sell B2C, literally everybody can be your prospect, right, you know, if you're selling a house, you're selling like everybody can be your prospect. When you sell B2B, you have such a small market of people that you can actually sell to. Now you may be able to sell into, like manufacturing Well, of course there's millions of manufacturing companies out there, but getting access to those guys manufacturing companies, they're not out networking, you know, and the like. So you've got to, not only when you network, not only do, you got to be able to open doors for others, but you've got to be able to establish lifelong trust with people that they're going to literally vouch for you to talk to their clientele. That doesn't happen overnight, right, those relationships take time to develop. Oh, they do. And BNI has replaced.

Speaker 2: 8:48

I just hate the givers gain philosophy and here's why I think givers gain. And the same thing with Zig. Ziglar is helping enough people get what they want and you'll get what you want Philosophy. I love Zig, I think it's amazing, I think Ivan Meisner have a ton of respect for the guy, but those two philosophies have gotten people down this mindset of give, give, give, give, give and eventually some magical unicorn is going to show up and give you business, and so you, you get a lot of people that get burnt out.

Speaker 2: 9:16

They're like man, I just keep giving and I get nothing back. Or I mean, I don't know what the heck's going on. And I tell people you got to take from the network as well, you've got to take care of yourself. So you give, you give, you give, you take, and then you give again, right, right. And it's a cycle, a hundred percent. And you get this mindset of let me open up a bunch of doors for you so that I can then make a very specific ask of who I'd like to be introduced to. And it's not a tit for tat type thing, it's literally let's grow each other's business.

Speaker 1: 9:47

Right, exactly, I think finding the referral partners is so important, you know so, for like a fractional CMO, like I am and dealing with and I literally serve business to business, service based businesses, right, and so, like I, I am my own avatar, if you will. Right, I know what the pain points of getting businesses and I understand the marketing behind that whole in yards, but is not everybody's going give and then. So you got to take a little bit, and it reminded me of Gary Vee's social media strategy jab jab, jab hook, jab jab, jab hook which we've actually adopted into the B2B world a little bit of shorter rounds. We only do two jabs and a hook and because, if you don't, because of the fact that the sales cycles are usually so much longer, if you wait longer to ask, you're going to have to wait even longer to get right and so you have to ask more, I think in B2B even though there's a hundred you got to ask more.

Speaker 2: 10:59

Yeah, no, I agree with that. It's you know, when you're selling B2B, people are used to six month year long sales cycles. Right, you know right, because it's a big sale most times. I mean, if you're going to redo your entire phone systems, that's a big sale, right. If you're going to have custom software built, that's a big sale, you know so. So if you don't start asking early in the game, right, then all you're doing is elongating the entire process. I 100% agree with that.

Speaker 1: 11:29

Yeah, I was just on the phone earlier today and the gentleman just got we have a CRM that we offer at Buzzworthy Marketing and we were talking about his company and did he have a CRM? And he's like, I just signed on for this thing called Zoho.

Speaker 1: 11:43

I have a visceral effect reaction when I hear that word Zoho, it's like I said, I spent eight months trying to make Zoho work because of the price point. It made sense for the SMB. But the problem is, is it just too discombobulated the way? They have too many loose ends to it so to actually make it work as a cohesive CRM? So I warned him, but then I also put in my CRM that is all in one and don't have to do any of that stuff. In six months I'm going to talk to him and say, hey, how's that Zoho going? Cause they signed up for the year, right, they suck you in for that year.

Speaker 2: 12:18

So I think a lot of software could be argued that we and we've got a program that we use and I'm not going to say their name because I don't want to prop them up, uh, uh, but we, we've. We've jam-packed our business into this program because there's no software yet out there that'll handle what we need to have done. So we're getting ready to start working on building on our own custom software. But I think most times companies, software in particular spends too much time trying to be all things to all people, right, right, and they start adding a little bit of this there, a lot of a little of this here. And you know, if you look at a big company like a salesforce, when you're talking sale, you know crms, they've innovated so much that the little guys can't even use it anymore. Oh, no, yeah I.

Speaker 1: 13:00

I just had one of my clients, a fractional cfo using a hubspot, spending a thousand dollars on the hubot and I'm like whoa, like that, you're not.

Speaker 1: 13:09

One, he's not using all the things there. And two, it is extremely convoluted on how to actually use it. Like it is made so that marketers can use it, not the user can use it, and so when we built ours, that was like one of the things we're're like. It has to be drag and drop, no code, easy click and play. And it has to be scalable, because we have people who start, you know, at the six fig, low six figures and by the time they get to multi-seven, the last thing they want to do is change their crm. Yeah, all the data is there and it is a pain in the butt to change the serum. So we made a scalable, easy to use uh, crm, our stuff.

Speaker 1: 13:46

But we're not talking about that today. We're talking about the fact that networking has changed since COVID. Right, even now that we can get we digress. So even now that we can get out and talk to people face-to-face people. I just moved from Illinois to Virginia and now I'm trying to find places to go network face-to-face in Richmond, virginia, right, capital, there should be plenty of places. So I go to meetup right. There's like seven meetups for business networking. Three of them are for brand new companies and like micro businesses, which are not going to be my ideal client.

Speaker 1: 14:24

And then three of the last four are all virtual. Yep there was only one face to face. They only meet every six weeks.

Speaker 2: 14:32

Well and so. So one of the things that we found when we created the groups is that there's no point in driving, so we talked about this earlier. I'm 35 to 45 minutes into downtown Fort Worth, texas. So if I got to go to a meeting in Fort Worth, I'm losing half a damn day. So there's no point. And yes, I can work the phone, but I can sit here and do back to back meetings all day long and get so much more accomplished versus trying to work a phone while I'm driving and calling and alike. So you're extremely successful. People don't have time to take the time out of their day.

Speaker 2: 15:16

So, this is why we decided we're going to stay virtual. Now, all of our chapters. They do a monthly happy hour because you're never going to replace a handshake and hug Right? Just something about flesh on flesh? Yeah, exactly, all of our chapters. They do a monthly happy hour because you're never going to replace a handshake and a hug. Just something about flesh on flesh? Yeah, exactly. So every chapter does their own happy hour. In some areas we have multiple chapters. They combine together to do a big happy hour and it's really really cool. And then we do summits. So we've got the Badass Business Summit coming up here in September, so that's coming through. We have a ton of other. We have the Champion Summit that we take around the US and do that as well, just to bring people together. When you're running a successful business, that drive into town. It just kills a lot of momentum.

Speaker 1: 15:59

It does, it does Again, like you said, that handshake and a hug, man, it goes a long way when you talk about connecting right and not everybody's good on the screen and if I have to see the the, the headboard of one more person's bedroom, I mean, come on, guys, if we're going to do this virtual thing. Let's go ahead and commit to at least a blank wall behind you, Okay.

Speaker 2: 16:22

Something, something, something. That's part of the reason I went so crazy with all my setup is you know, everything you do tells a story, right, you know? And? And what a lot of people don't think about is what story do they actually want to have told? And if you talk about gary vee earlier, if you look at gary vee, I mean his shelves and everything tell a story about his childhood and the things he grew up around and like what. There was a funny episode that somebody sent me and once upon a time some of his staff were sneaking things onto his shelves so they could get brand promotions and stuff. So he had to re-clear his shelf and make a company real rule that nobody can touch his shelves. Yeah, easter eggs, easter eggs, right there.

Speaker 1: 17:00

I love it. Product placement Product placement Come on, gary, you should appreciate this. Come on All right. Now, if somebody has been thinking, one of our listeners might be thinking how do I get you have your network? And that's great, but what if they're not in B2B right and they want to take advantage of the internet to virtually network? Where are some other places we could look for those who might do you know of any? For the yeah, so.

Speaker 2: 17:34

So b2c alignable is amazing to go to. Okay, um, uh, there's a a lot of Facebook groups that are really, really, really active. Um, I tell everybody, just vet the group. So any Facebook group you go into sit in for seven days and don't say a word. Just see what happened until you can figure it out. Um, there's, uh, linkedin groups are still dead. Um, they're not, yeah, they're not working at all.

Speaker 1: 18:02

Still hang out there.

Speaker 2: 18:06

No, linkedin doesn't want them to work. So I had a guy named kevin hunter explain this to me. So linkedin is the only social media platform that doesn't make money off of your information. So facebook does, instagram does, right, everybody else makes money off of your information. Linkedin makes money off of subscriptions, so from sales navigator premium, so they're you know, they're whatever like a four or $8 billion company, I forget and it's all from subscriptions. So with the group, yeah, and ads, right, but it's still primarily subscriptions, more even than with the NAD. Yet. But what they they found is the groups get you around the subscriptions because once you're in the groups, you can send messages to anybody in there, so you can literally get connected to people and there's no need for the subscriptions. So that's when they came to that realization. After microsoft bought them out, that's when they nuked the groups to make a revenue.

Speaker 2: 19:02

Play, oh shoot microsoft, yep damn you bill gates you and your fake meat anyway.

Speaker 1: 19:12

Um, all right, so somebody's getting getting started. What are some like? Give us like a one or two like magical tips of getting started with online networking. If, like, this is a new play for you, you don't know how to start, or at least make sure that you're not in that giver seat too long, and then you're actually have that cycle we were talking about earlier.

Speaker 2: 19:34

Yeah, so the reason people don't get referrals or introductions is either a they're a jerk. B people think that they're going to sell anybody. They introduce them to. C freaking people have no idea what the heck you do for a living or the fourth one is people just don't like you, right? I mean I was sorry.

Speaker 2: 19:57

The fourth one is you don't ask, right, right. So what happens for most times is people can also not get referrals because people don't know how to refer you. They don't know how to open the door for you. So the biggest thing you've got to be able to do is get away from the stupid jingles with the songs on the end and all that stuff. There's no relevance there. It does not work. And if you do B2C, it probably works In a B2B game.

Speaker 2: 20:21

Your job is to get the people you're meeting and talking to and get them to understand who your best referral partners would be. So if I sell MSP IT, then telecom and websites are people I probably can do a lot of work with. If I'm doing fractional, other fractionals are great people for me to meet. So instead of saying I'm a fractional CMO and I'm looking for companies between two and $4 million, blah, blah, blah, you say I'm a fractional CMO and I'd actually like to meet other fractionals, I'd actually like to meet some PR firms. You know people that you can automatically build these synergistic relationships with and watch how quickly people on the screen you're talking to go oh, I got a guy, I know somebody, because we're networking with those people and we can make those introductions all day long. Then it's about leveraging those introductions to actually get the referrals. So that's the biggest one is quit talking about your end user client and start talking about who can be your actual referral synergy partners and watch what really happens to your business.

Speaker 2: 21:25

Two quit carrying business cards if you're out freaking in public. Business cards are irrelevant in this day and age. You don't need them. If there's somebody you meet and you want to connect with them, literally look at the person and ask for their cell phone number and say, hey, give me your cell phone, I'll text you all my information. There's nothing more powerful on this planet than somebody's cell phone number, right? We sign up for emails all the time. We'll give dump numbers and dump addresses and all this stuff, but you always give your real cell phone. If there's somebody that wants your information and you don't really want to connect with that person, pull open your LinkedIn app, click on the search bar no-transcript.

Speaker 2: 22:25

Do us a favor and take a screenshot. Share it on social media. Tag me and Michael in it. If we see it, we'll come, comment and engage. Having my own shows, I know how hard it is to grow an audience. So tagging us in a post, anything like lets the world know, or lets Michael know, that this is the kind of stuff that you're into, the kind of content you want to listen to. You show him some love. He'll come show you some love. If I see it, I'll come show you some love too. So thanks for having me on, brother.