Keep the cards

Mark Lee of Book Mark Lee wrote to me recently about him starting up in business.

"As I mentioned however I did have 3,500 email addresses to notify when I started in business. To be fair this was not wholly down to networking. Probably about 2500 names had been collated from business cards over the years. I was actually surprised it wasn’t more but I guess the rest must all still be in the CRM systems of firms I used to work with. The remainder of the names were captured by the email management software I use. It went looking for email addresses in my outlook in/sent boxes and also picked up addresses in the cc box of emails sent to me – so I didn’t know everyone I initially emailed. I provided an opt-out which was used extensively initially. I’m now still emailing c2600 people each month.

How did I get such an extensive list? By keeping business cards and following up after meeting people. When I started up by myself I paid my teenage daughter to copy all the relevant info into my home office pc from the hundreds of business cards I had collected. Am I pleased I kept all the cards and did not reply on my firm’s CRM system – you bet!

Learn from Mark you start-up business people.