Make Your Mark - Connect

Eventbrite - is a brilliant new online tool to manage event registrations, invites, contact lists etc. Everyone has started using it because it's just so good.

When you get a website, list a phone number.

Even if its a mobile, or an automated answer message, people want to talk to people. Proper Talking is the best.

Adam is our Regional Development Agencies chap, which basically means he looks after lots of local people. In addition to having the coolest trainers in the world, and being an ex-chef, he has some extremely wise tips on getting the little things right from his Dad (who in Adam's words "recently retired, but ran his own manufacturing/automotive business for 30 odd years").

Here we go:

On first impressions:

"With some of the potential clients I visited we would have meetings in a scruffy storeroom or canteen, and then they would offer me a cup of tea in a plastic cup from a vending machine. Before giving it to me, they would immediately apologies for it probably tasting awful! This always amazed me, as the first dialogue I had with them would involve them apologising for their service (or lack of it). It leaves you with an impression ‘If this is how they treat their customers – how will they treat my product?"

On getting the personal touch:

"After meeting a client, be they old or new,  I would write down their details in a book, everything about them which I learnt – their interests, their hobbies, where they came from, their birthday, which football team they supported, where they went on holiday. It may sound a bit freaky, but being able to add a personal touch here and there within meetings or on the phone enabled me to build many really strong relationships with clients who gave me repeat business time and again.”

The humble 3" x 2" business card is an inevitable and unavoidable accessory to anyone involved in any kind of business or enterprise.

In the 6/7 years of my careers so far, I've been given hundreds of these little slices of card, and have kept only a handful.

In my first business we spent a very long time getting the designs right, we had individual photos on the back of our cards, they were laid out simply, and were bright and attractive.

However, at that point we had the time and the money to do this, but this is not always the case.

When I moved on to become a freelancer, for a while I didn't have business cards. I hadn't got any funding to pay for train travel to visit clients,  I didn't want to 'waste' money on bits of paper to throw away and I didn't want to waste time on making them.

On my lack of cards, Dave Taylor has this to say: 

"Explain this one to me: four people paid the money and spent the time to come to a weekend conference about online business success, but had to write their name and contact info on a piece of scratch paper because they "didn't have any business cards yet." That's no excuse at all, in my eyes. You can pop into somewhere like Kinko's or use an online service and get a small box of even the most rudimentary business cards for $20. Everyone in business should have an up-to-date business card. Everyone. Yes, even you."

Dave Taylor - Best Practises in Business Card Design

I certainly paid the price when, for the first 3 months, I had no clients calling me back. I probably lost thousands of pounds of potential revenue, all for not spending a tiny amount of money.

Scott Ginsberg has a series of really interesting insights into making business cards successful, the image on the right is taken from that article.

Get yourself to one of these websites and get yourself some cards. You can even get 250 cards for £12.99 which is a worthwhile investment, and one I wish I'd done from the very start!