Jim asked, “How can I make my business card more memorable?”

I responded, “People will remember what they choose, not what you select.

Start with what must be on your card:

• Your company logo & name
• Your name
• Your title
• Your honorifics (the alphabet stew after your name)
• Your street and on line address plus your e-mail
  
• Your telephone numbers (Phone, Mobile and 800)
• Your point of difference
  

All of those are important. The last is critical.  It is the reason people buy you and your product or service rather than the competition. It is the single reason they can and do keep your card. It is the unique distinction that you bring to solving their problems.

You find that way of presenting yourself by listening to what customers say about you, noting how they define their problems and your solutions. You listen to what they have to say and observe what makes them understand your unique approach.

For Jim I recommended a slight change on a memorable phrase in a testimonial. I told him,  “Call yourself the Business Transition Defogger.” At first he was uncomfortable with it. Not any more

Shell (a money coach) and I looked at years of comments and testimonials. We found that lots of the people she had helped talked about being knotted up inside about money. We positioned Shell as The Untangler. Now when she’s speaking she use as tangled ball of yarn to personify what she does for clients.

My consulting practice has come to focus more and more on contact management, sales force automation and strategic integration of new media and old. The difficulty with all those things is that companies and solopreneurs  keep buying software solutions. They have problems with implementation. The software doesn’t accommodate their need to get to trust with every customer.

The words “Trust-based Marketing that Builds Businesses, Careers and Lives of Joy On and Off-line” are part of my logo. They appear on my business card, letterhead, envelopes, labels, web site, packaging, ads…literally everything I publish. The final words are mine. But their genesis was customers and referral sources.

Those words will continue to appear on my cards.  But last week the phone rang with a referred customer who said, “I understand you start where the software stops…” Can you guess what is now handwritten on my cards?

It ain’t pretty but for me it’s a more memorable  business card.

You can learn more about about how I view marketing at www.JerryFletcher.com

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