Not on my letterhead!

16/1/10

I hear many reasons for not wanting to take part in chapter launches, big visitor days and posting out invitation letters. Asking some members to send out forty letters, is like asking them to run across burning coals naked, judging by the reaction you get. Then, after I am told that they could write a better letter, they add ‘… and don’t think I’m putting a BNI letter on my company's letterhead!’

I really find this attitude very hard to understand. Why wouldn’t any business want to have forty prospective customers see their company letterhead? - a letterhead that is well designed, tells the person what that company does, and is signed by someone looking for new business.

I guess that is why we are all in BNI - new business.

Just this week I was having a One2One with a fairly new member of my chapter, and we were talking about how important visitors are to a healthy chapter, and how to invite them. He said that his aim was to post out five letters each week and, naturally, I asked him how things were going.

Pulling a sheet of paper out of the filing tray on his desk, he said far better than he had expected. He had a visitor for the next meeting - great! - but, even better, was that he had quoted on a job. The business that he had posted his letter to, on his company letterhead, read who the invitation was from and needed his service. And, the best part, he would never have mailed the company had it not been for his BNI inviting.

Every invitation letter you send out, on your company letterhead, may not lead to a visitor for your chapter, but it may just result in business for you. It certainly can’t hurt you.

So, my message to you is this: if you don’t like sending out invitation letters, BNI is all about marketing your business, so use BNI as an excuse and send out as many invitation letters as you can. You never know, you might even earn yourself a BNI Gold Badge!