The Story of The Graveyard Box of Business Cards

Once upon a time, there was an entrepreneur who started a business. She got right to work marketing her business by attending every business networking event.

In less than a year, she was getting known. She would meet prospects who expressed interest in her services. At these events, she did what she thought she should do and gave out her business cards (even if people didn’t ask for it) and asked for a business card.

Before she knew it, she was busy. She was busy marketing, networking and figuring out the latest and greatest marketing tactic.

After all of this hard work and a few clients sprinkled in, she sat down at her desk one day and saw it. It was a box. In the box were all of the business cards she collected from her networking and marketing.

This box contained an assortment of potential prospects, possible referral sources, and maybe even clients. Then, a thought hit her like a ton of bricks.
Lost opportunities.

She became completely overwhelmed at the thought of what to do with all of these business cards. Then, she heard of creating a lead generation system. So, she made a leap and purchased the latest autoresponder system.

She thought why don’t I just add every business card that I collected to an email list!

Simple fix, right?

Nope.

What she quickly learned is that she annoyed a lot of people by adding them to a list without their permission. Instead of nurturing the relationships, she alienated the very people she was trying to get to know.

Realizing she didn’t know what she’ didn’t know, she got mentored. It paid off abundantly.

When she added a sales team to the mix, she again mapped out the sales process, understood how her lead generation system fit into the mix, and grew her profits each year.

The morale of the story is this: Keep relationships in mind when creating your systems. Systems give you leverage when used the right way.

To learn more about automated and integrated Lead Generation Systems that nurture long-term relationships, register to receive the on-demand replay of my complimentary webinar, Automatic Lead Generation 24/7.