Business cards – I won’t leave home without it.
During my recent trip to Asia, I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of my colleagues that I would normally speak to only through email or by phone. Remember, I went to five cities in Asia in a matter of two weeks. Our biggest office was in Shanghai and they treat you like a king (well queen for me – he-he!)
One thing I neglected to do was carry a lot of business cards with me. I only took a handful since I thought I would only be meeting with the top executives from Asia Pacific. I was promoting a product that we launched recently and they needed training in order to sell the product to their customers. It was such a great trip and meeting all sorts of people was a treat during that trip.
I am not sure if it’s customary but when I met these people during my training sessions, each one would come up to me and give me their business cards. They give it to you with the imprint facing you and with both hands. After a couple of them traded business cards with me, I picked up the trait. I would generally start my training by introducing myself and would go around handing my business card to the people present.
The one thing that I admired about our overseas offices, each one had a business card of their own. Comparing them to the staff that works in our U.S. offices, if you are not in the management level, you don’t get one. I think it’s a great loss because business cards open a lot of doors for people. I collected about 150 business cards during that trip. I ran out of business cards to hand out. I realized that it is important to carry more than enough for a trip such as that. For a person not good with names, their business cards helped me associate their faces to their cards.
Lesson learned. Next time – I won’t leave home without it.
The lesson you learned is a great one. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I could’ve handed a card to someone only to realize I didn’t have a single one on me.
Business cards are the most used, but underutilized marketing tool out there. The problem I’ve seen most is the use of a bad template or a very bad design. There are numerous companies out there like http://www.mind2print.com that offer business card templates and business cards design services.
I guess the first lesson learned is to always have your business cards with you. Second lesson learned is to have a clean and professional business card.
Steve S.
http://www.mind2print.com