Wish You Were Here!

We are running a visitor inviting campaign at BNI Elmbridge at the moment which involves every member bringing in five postcards. For our chapter of 36 members, 180 postcards will be sent out inviting business people to our meeting. That just has to be good.

Now there’s a poor way of doing postcards and a good way of doing them but what I like about the ‘five postcards’ is that every member can take part and, even with the little extra time needed to do them correctly, they will only take about 30 minutes to put together.

So, I guess what you are thinking is, how do you do them correctly?

The answer to that is simple – they need to be addressed to a named person; so not ‘The Manager’ or similar, not just the company name, but, for example, to ‘Steve Smith’. The other thing that needs to be done is to record their phone number and/or their email address so that the postcards can be followed up. By simply contacting the person invited a few days after your postcards are delivered will massively increase the results of the campaign.

Another great thing about postcard inviting is that BNI supply the postcards and your chapter will even stick the stamps on for you. How good is that!

Okay, now we get to the big one. Who to invite?

This is something that really stresses a lot of members but I can never understand why. Ask me to find a referral or someone to invite to Elmbridge and I would go for the visitor every single time. Why? Because I can control who I invite but I can’t always find a referral.

So, who do I invite? Well, I guess they fall into three groups; people I know (a good place to look for these people are in your mobile - these will give you your best success rate), names from business cards that I have collected in my travels and, if all else fails, Google.

Google is the least successful but can get you some great visitors (and members). Remember you need to find a name, so here are a few tips to help make things easier for you.

First, choose a category to invite; a good starting point is a business you would like in your Power Team. Then search whatever that business is and your chapter’s location. For example in my case it might be – bookkeeper Hersham.

The contact details, address, phone and email are usually pretty simple to find, as most sites have a ‘Contact Us’ page. But if I can’t find this information in a couple of clicks I move on to the next possible business.

A name can be more difficult to find, and this is where you will spend the most time, but can usually be found in either the ‘About Us’, ‘History’, ‘Staff’, ‘Testimonial’ pages or of course in the name of the company. Another place to check is in the blog if they write one.

Some types of business, as a whole, seem to hide the names of their people while others are very open. So, if you have chosen a category where after a few different sites you’ve not found a person’s name move on to another category.

The other great thing about Google is that you can search for people to invite, anytime, anyplace, anywhere. I once put together a list of people to invite when I had a few minutes spare on a trip in Japan.

In all you shouldn’t have to spend more than about 30 minutes writing your five postcards and it’s a great contribution to your chapter.

The main thing is not to see inviting as a chore but more a way of increasing your business.