Organize Your Business Cards to Supercharge Your Networking

Business cards are one of the most powerful networking tools on the planet – and one of the most abused and underused. Most people go to networking events and just collect a bunch of business cards that never get contacted.

This is a terrible system. If you don’t have a good system for organizing your business cards, you’re flushing money and contacts down the drain.

==> Rule #1: Write on Your Business Cards

Whenever you meet someone new, write some notes on the back of the business card. For example, if you get a business card from a graphic designer, write “Knows tech execs, may be good for networking, also great designer for Fred, brown hair, tall.”

Next time you look through your business cards and come across that card, all you need to do is turn it over and read your notes. You’ll instantly know who it is and what your next to-do is regarding that card.

==> Contact Them within 48 Hours of Meeting

Even if you don’t have anything you want to do with them yet, always follow up within 48 hours.

Even if your follow up is something as simple as “Ben, it was great meeting you last night – Let me know if you ever need help with X.”

This opens the dialogue and opens a channel of communication. Later, when you want to make real meaningful contact, they’ll remember who you are.

==> File All Your Business Cards

People often don’t file business cards the same way that they file other important papers. Something about the small size of the business card makes it seem somehow less important.

It’s not. Filing business cards is just as important as filing any other crucial business document.

File your business cards by networking event, by category of services or by how you’d like to connect with them in the future. Go through these cards every couple weeks to see if there are people you’d like to connect with.

==> Throw Away Cards You’ll Never Contact

People often feel guilty about throwing business cards away. It feels rude, as if you were disrespecting someone else’s business or a potential connection.

The reality is, if there’s a card that you’re never going to contact, it doesn’t make a difference whether it’s in your drawer or your trash can.

Having cards you’ll never contact in your business card pile makes it a lot harder to figure out which cards are actually valuable.

Getting in the habit of writing on your cards, contacting people quickly, sorting your cards and tossing the ones you’ll never use is one of the most valuable business habits you could develop. This is how you meet potential clients, investors, employers, employees and partners.

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Trade shows are expensive to participate in, and so you need to really make sure you get the most bang for your buck.

Setting up a prize drawing in the ways we have suggested offers two benefits.  It gives you concrete leads to build your business, and it offers you the opportunity to award the prizes at the show or after the show at a later date when you can call people and let them know they’ve won.

Make sure to not let this information go to waste.  Use the information you’ve collected to send out information about promotions and new products. Don’t just do a one and done, after the trade show, but maintain regular contact, at least once a quarter, to keep people up to date on what you are doing.

The easiest way to do this is of course with an email list, and leading them to a special url with a special offer. Remember, it often takes 17 exposures to a brand before recognition sets in, let alone someone making a purchasing decision.

With a bit of time and effort, and the cost of the better prizes (which you can usually get inexpensively if you buy in bulk, or get commission on if you join an affiliate program and buy through your own link), you can have fun and generate valuable leads at the same time.

Just keep in mind that not everyone will want to play, and not everyone will be a true customer, since there are always going to be people who will just go for the freebies. And of course, there will be the people who are more intent on getting YOU as THEIR customer, than being yours!

Whether you choose to host a drawing or ask your attendees to play a game, giving away prizes is a great way to introduce new people to your products and gain future customers.

How to Perk Up Trade Shows -  Prizes 3

The other great way to find people to donate prizes to is to have a drawing or sweepstakes.  Each person invited is encouraged to enter the drawing by throwing in their business card (have blank slips of paper at the ready with pens too for all those people who forgot their business cards, or simply ran out) and the first, second, and third names drawn each receive a prize.

Of course if you have more prizes to award, then you can continue to draw and donate prizes as you go.  In most cases, as we said, they should be prizes of your products and services, and have an estimated value.

A drawing is also an easy way to generate leads if you do it cleverly. Instead of having people simply put their name on a piece of paper, they can actually fill out a pre-set postcard.

Consider asking for the following information:

- Name

- Address

Make sure all your contact information and url is on the postcard. you might even want to give them a special url so you can gauge how successful the follow up is, or to entice them with a special attendees-only offer or discount.

The only disadvantage of this plan is you will have to enter the data in your database before you mail the card, and it will cost postage to do so.

Also, Name and Address are important, but there is other information you might want to collect from your prospects, including,

- Phone number
- Email address
- Title

- If they are interested in becoming an affiliate and earning commissions selling your products

One great way to make direct sales parties and trade shows memorable and fun is to donate prizes to a few choice guests.

However, you don’t want to break the bank by giving away too many goodies, and you do want to use the prize giveaway as a lead generation tool.

In which case, make sure you are giving away items that are related to your company, with the occasional ‘big ticket’ item like an Ipod or DVD player to make the prize giveaway more enticing.

Yes, MORE enticing, because believe it or not, it’s actually often difficult to find people to donate prizes to! Many people are traveling away from home and don’t want to lug stuff. You might also want to stipulate that they have to be in the building at the time of the giveaway to pick up their item (though if you want to collect more business cards and leads, you can offer to mail it if it is not too large and won’t cost too much to do so.

In this article, we are going to cover how to find people to donate prizes to fairly, and still have fun.

Starting Up Your Effective New Marketing Campaign 6

One other way to get the most bang for your buck is to ask your practice audience you are performing your business presentations in front of if they might be interested in helping you, in exchange for a commission, of course.

In other words, they have already sat through the elevator speech and the presentation, perhaps several times. It might be only a few short steps more to actually train them. In fact, some of your family and friends might have similar skills, and be happy to have the opportunity, and an additional income and business they can take a proprietary interest in without having to start their own business from scratch themselves.

Make it fun for them and promise you’ll be a good coach and sales representative. Let them know what’s in it for them too, commission, samples, or discounts on products if you are enlisting them as another affiliate for the program you have signed up for.

You might also consider bartering with them, their help, in exchange for yours with their core business, or some other assistance. For example, if this person does a lot of traveling anyway, and can hand out your materials at trade shows as long as he or she is there, you can offer to look after their garden while they are away at the show.

Find out if they have a website, and do mutual linking, or even better, round robin linking, in which anyone with similar businesses links to you, but not directly, rather, in a circle, so the links count for more than mere reciprocal links.

It is almost guaranteed that there are other consultants and business people with similar interests right in your own community. Take an ad out in the local pennysaver paper and set up a presentation at your house or a local school or church center, and see who turns up.

Some might be customers, others trying to sell their own stuff, but a third group might genuinely interested in your products and be willing to sign on as a sales rep on commission in order to earn a little additional income during these financially tough times.

Make sure you have sales material with your url on it, and even better, a unique url for them, so that you can see how much traffic is being generated from certain urls, in other words, certain helpers or affiliates.
Track this, and you can then consider offering them a better deal, the more traffic and paying customers or leads they are generating.

It may take a little creative thinking to get people to start acting as spokespersons for your new company. However, once the ball is rolling and you’ve educated your potential people and given them the right sales collateral to use, hopefully you will all get into the mindset of looking for opportunities everywhere, and always being armed with information to pass along to anyone who might want more information.

Following these simple marketing rules will get your new business or affiliate business well on its way to attaining your financial goals without breaking the bank or exhausting yourself.

Your Corporate Presentation

As we said in the last section of this series of articles, be prepared to rehearse our 30 second intro and your corporate powerpoint presentation.

And you will need to rehearse often, until you are able to do the 30 second speech and core presentation without any pauses, ums, or ramblings.

So who can your audience be?

One of the most obvious places to start is with your relatives.  Heck, they’re family, right?  If you can’t pass muster with them, you will be eaten alive in public.

Friends, former work colleagues and associates you trust if you are going into business for yourself might be other places you might look.

You might also consider an informal gathering at your house and invite the neighbors. Tell them that you are going into business for yourself, and see if they are willing to take part in a demo, or willing to have a look at the website online and give you some feedback.

Email the url of your site to people as well, and pay attention to any criticism you get. That they are even bothering to give you any feedback is very useful, so pay attention, even if you feel like your blood is going to boil.

Remember, don’t take it personally. It is just business. But since over 65% of new businesses fail within the first five years, the ostrich school of management is not the one you want to adopt. Face problems head on, and be proactive.

After all, you’re investing a lot of time, even if not a lot of money, to get this off the ground, so make sure that no matter how many dollars or how many minutes you spend, you get a real return on your investment.

Your Company Presentations

Now that you have developed, tested and tracked your most effective sales pitches, and developed your collateral sales materials, you need to do your first sales presentations, in person, and through PowerPoint. You will also need to practice them, in order to come off polished and clear.

Firstly, you need to practice introducing yourself and your company or enterprise. This is your elevator speech, as it were. You have 30 seconds to say what you sell, and what the key benefits are.

As for Powerpoint presentations, we like Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule: no more then 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font so people can read it.

If you are afraid you might run out of things to talk about, have a couple of slides spare at the end of your presentation that show the products, give screen shots of the website, and so on, to show your most successful strategies or projects to date.

Otherwise, be prepared to take questions, and answer tough ones.

Next, be prepared to rehearse, and rehearse often, until you are able to do the 30 second speech and core presentation without any pauses, ums, or ramblings.

In our next articles, we will give you ideas on how to get even more bang for your marketing time with your 30 second elevator speech and presentation.

Your Company Website

It does not have to be fancy, but DO get one up there ASAP once you have decided to either go into business for yourself, or have decided to become an affiliate selling products you are genuinely interested in on behalf of other companies.

The key thing is to get the url up so it will start to propagate on the web. Make sure your basic contact information is there, and start putting up your sales materials as you develop them, paying special attention to keywords.

We have discussed how to get websites up quickly in other articles, so it is enough to say for now that you want something you can change quickly, and organize and re-organize easily, which is why WordPress blogs can be such a great type of website to set up.

Once you have your site up, you can start using it for lead generation, offering a free special report or some other giveaway of value which they are interested in enough to be willing to part with their email address.

This is a particularly crucial step for anyone who wishes to be an affiliate. Sure, you are hoping for sales at the back end, and the retailer to pay you for the products that are sold, but a qualified list is also worth money to you personally.

You can marketing to those people on an ongoing basis, so that even if they are not interested in your first offer, or whatever marketing message they see at the retailer’s site, you will have a chance to communicate with them to refine your sales pitches.

Even more important is what we mentioned above, the art of pre-selling.  You are generating the sizzle prior to them ever clicking over. So hopefully, if the site is highly-converting, professional one, the sale will be that much easier.

Or, you might think you can do better than the material they are using. In which case, hone the marketing message you think your audience will really respond to, and then test and track it.  You have little to lose except some time and effort. And everything to gain if you manage to boost sales and revenue.