Why Business Cards Don’t Work (And What to Do Instead to Get Clients)

Still passing out business cards like it’s 1995?

If you’re a new coach trying to get clients, here’s the hard truth: business cards aren’t the tool that’ll build your business. 

But there is something better—and it starts with how you talk about what you do.

In this episode, I’ll walk you through:

• Why business cards aren’t helping you get clients
• What to do instead to create real connection
• A better way to start conversations that lead to paying clients

🎁 BONUS: Grab my free 7-Step Checklist to Build a Coaching Biz That Gets Clients

💬 Want my 1:1 eyes on your coaching biz?
Apply to work together: https://coachwithclients.com/privatecoaching

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Paper Cards Fail
• 2:06 Networking Reality Check For Coaches
• 2:08 Show Intro And Host Promise
• 2:43 Four Reasons Cards Don’t Work
• 5:37 What To Do Instead
• 6:28 Craft A Memorable One Liner
• 7:46 Lead With Connection Not Credentials
• 8:47 Offer Value And Instant Follow-Up
• 10:02 Replace Cards With Digital Touchpoints
• 11:51 Plan Your Intentional Follow-Up
• 12:55 Use A Digital Card App Like Blinq
• 14:30 You Don’t Need More Cards You Need A Plan
• 15:26 Free Seven-Step Checklist Invitation

Transcript

Michelle Kuei: 0:00

Are you still carrying your stack of business card like it's 2008? In this episode, I'm going to break down why handling out your card is not the best way as you think it is, and what to do instead to make meaningful connections that will actually lead you to your paying client. And we're talking about visibility, real conversation, and how to leave lasting impression that goes way beyond just a piece of paper that probably gets tossed by the end of the event. Whether you're networking in person or online, you're going to leave this episode with three smarter, simpler ways to get remembered and also to be followed up with. Alright, coaches, you know that awkward moment when someone hands you their business card and you immediately shuffle into your bag, never get seen again, or you go home and toss it right into the trash. Now, what if someone does that to your business card? The one that you spend hundreds of dollars to print it, and not to mention hours of precious time on Canva just to try to design it. And all that is gone within split second and still no paying clients. If that's what you've been doing to make connections in your coaching business, we need to talk. Hey coach, welcome to Make It Visible Podcast. I'm Michelle Kwei, your visibility marketing coach, and I help female life coaches to get seen in all the right places, attract happy paying clients, and build a coaching business that actually feels good to run. Even if you are still trying to figure things out. Each week I'm giving you visibility tips, simple marketing strategies, and showing you how to create the kind of content that connects with your audience so that you can stand out, build your authority, and attract clients who's already feeling like a yes before they jump onto your discovery call. So grab a notebook, pour yourself a favorite drink, and that's make your coaching business visible. So I recently had the pleasure of keynote speaking for the American Business Women Association. And as a life coach who had built her coaching business entirely remotely, I gotta say I was surprised by how many business cards I have collected. If you are a life coach and you're attending networking events, hoping to make some connection that we either get you client before you leave the event or have a referral, this episode is for you. Here are the top four reasons why your paper business cards don't actually work. Reason number one is a very passive. If you think about the way that we're handling these business cards, you go and attend an event and you can like hold on to them, and probably by the time you get home, you're exhausted, you're tired. So you're unlikely to actually go through your business card, even though some of you might be filing them and maybe you're reaching out to them, but you can't possibly reach out to every single person who hands you a business card, and that takes a lot of time to sit down and process them, and your time is precious. That's a passive activity that we did back in the days where technology wasn't the way that we see today. You're in the modern days now, there's a better way of doing this. And reason number two that's why they don't work is because people forget who you are. Now, how many of us have a business card that doesn't have a picture on there and it doesn't really say anything special about where did I meet this person? Now, if you're a pro, you might turn that person's business car around and you might write maybe a note like where do we meet or what conversation we had. That's a pro level of how you handle these business cards. The majority of the coaches that I work with, they are beginner, they're intermediate, and they have no idea of what to do with these business cards besides just the fact that maybe I need to send an email to them. So people forget who you are, and which is why they don't even care that they met you at this event. Life just got too busy and they move on. Reason number three is they get tossed, they get lost, and they get forgotten. Once you toss it into your bag, chances are it's gonna take you months or maybe even years to realize, oh, I there's a business car in here. I wonder who this is from. And then you have to go back to the internet, you have to look up that person. You kind of vaguely remember, oh yeah, I met this person at a networking event. And by then, if that person's business still exists, then you might have the luck of finding that business. Otherwise, that connection was lost and people probably don't even remember who you are. Reason number four of why these paper business cards don't work is they don't spark any real conversation. It's kind of like a digital flyer that you pass it out and just hoping that people will remember. But reality is the conversation is going to spark memory. Something that's memorable, something that you said that stood out for them, that is going to get remembered, not the business card that you pass it out during an event. You're sitting there and you're wondering, okay, Michelle, these four things that don't work, and maybe business card is no longer the things that I need to do in networking event, and God forbid, I just printed another hundred or two hundred of them. What do I do? Here are the things that I would suggest, and that they would actually work better based on my experience of attending conferences, networking events, and building my own life coaching business. One is you want to have a simple one-line introduction about who you are, who you help, how people will remember, and also have a picture on your business card. That's a pro level. You need to have a picture on your business card, not your logo. Nobody cares about the logo. We want to know who this business card belongs to, and maybe a lot of us will remember the faces rather than the name. So put a picture on your paper business card and that includes a one-liner introduction. Now, if you need help putting that one-liner, I help who doing what so they can have the results. Let me know. Comment down below. I'll reach out to you and we can set up a call or I can share some exercise with you to help you to narrow that down. The second thing that's going to work is you want to lead it with a connection and not so much your credential. Maybe it's a question, an empowering question, or maybe it's a quote, maybe it's a short story, maybe it's a one-line thing that really stands you apart from all these other cards. Think of a creative way of how people can remember. Uh, whether it's visual storytelling or it's through the words, through the quotes. I remember one of my versions of my business card, I actually had my own quote behind the business card because it actually came out from my book, perfectly normal. So I took out a quote and I put it on the back of my business card. Also, in the front, I have a picture of myself, and next to it, I have my title, I help who with what so that they can have this type of outcome. So those are the two things that's going to work. And these have to do with pretty much the basics, right? How you design your business card if you choose to hand them out. Now, the third way of that work is to reach out to that person and just say, Hey, I would love to send you a quick resource that could help you to accomplish X, Y, and Z, right? This has nothing to do with handing out your business card. You might have a card, you might have a QR code that has maybe it's a resource that you have put together and you're handling that out instead, which means that you're offering a value and a follow-up. What you say would be something like, I love to send you, let's say you had a conversation with someone at the networking event, and you can say something around the fact that I love to send you a quick reference that would help you to stay more organized, for example. And that person during your conversation, that person might say, Well, yeah, sure, I know I love to take a look at it. So you send that person that link, or just get that person to jump onto your email right away. It's much better way of making that connection, possibly a referral in the future, or that person might just be your ideal client, and that is your handshake right there when you're networking. All right. So we talked about the three things that would make it better. You need to have a one-line introduction about who you are, what you help, right? And you want to lead it with connection. So ask great questions. When you're out there and you're networking with people, ask great questions. What do you do? What are some of the challenges that you're seeing, you're here from your experience, from your field, and share your story, like how you got inspired into the field that you choose, into the niche that you choose, or why you became a coach. And the last thing you wanted to talk about is once you understand what that person is seeing, or the challenges that person is experiencing, you want to kind of offer a value of, hey, love to send you a quick resource that might be able to help you moving forward. And those are just the three simple steps that you can do during a networking event or any conferences that you attend and meeting strangers who might potentially be your ideal client. So, what to do instead of handling out your car? So we talked about the three uh kind of like conversational starter. So, what are some of the things that you can do instead of handling out your car? One is that you can take out your phone and just simply say, that's connect on LinkedIn, or let me follow you on Instagram right now, right? And so you make that connection right there on the spot. Or you can have something I typically do is I said, I got a free guide that might help you. Do you want me to text it over to you, or would you like me to email that to you? So right there on the spot, you're making that instant connection that you're not going to lose that connection whatsoever, right? It's not going to the trash. Now, once you get them onto your email list or you get them onto your social, you wanted to remember to send them a message, right? To follow up with the intention. You can send a voicemail, uh reference, or a calendar to say, hey, you know, I would love to invite you to a coffee date with me so that you can continue this conversation further. So, in other words, before you walked into a networking event, just with your hundreds of business cards, you want to have an intention of what do I want to walk away from this event? Do I want to make more business connections? Do I want to actually get a client? Do I have a resource? Do I want to build my email list? What is it that you want to get and walk away from this event? After the event, you want to follow it up with intentions. So sending a voice note or sending an email to thank everybody for making that connection with you, right? You gotta be intentional in terms of your follow-up. Now, one of my favorite things to do is to download this digital app on my mobile phone. So instead of handing out paper business card, I carry a digital app on my phone before I go to the event. So I will make sure to update all my links, all my email, my contact. And this way, by the time you get to the event, you can simply take out your phone and you can share the digital version of it directly to the person's phone and become a contact. Once that you become a contact, you can actually take it a step further on that digital app. You can take a quick note of how did I meet this person, what conversation I had, and what is my intention and what do I want to do in terms of the next step. Maybe their ideal client, maybe their possible referral partner. You can simply make a note right there on your app when you sit down. One of my personal favorite digital apps is something called Blink B L I N Q, and you can find it on most of your mobile device in the App Store. You can download it. There's a free version and there's a pay version. So it's called Blink B L I N Q. Now, most coaches struggle to get paying clients, not because they don't have every intention to make that connection. A lot of you are going out there and you're making yourself visible. But these are the kind of things that no one ever told you, right? When you're so busy getting trained for clients. So before you spend hundreds of dollars printing out business cards and passing them out like water, hoping that one of these business cards will actually get you clients. I gotta tell you, my friend, there's a better way of doing this and putting yourself out there. I know you're working hard to put yourself out there, but this is not a great way of getting you the paying clients and having that referral partner. And the thing is, you don't need another business card. What you need is a plan, a plan that you can put it together, walking with the intention, show up purposely so that you can get more paying clients and consistent paying clients coming into your business. And that is the reason why I created the seven-step checklist to build a coaching business that gets client. It's a very simple seven-step roadmap. And this is my framework when I work one-on-one with my clients. It is a very simple roadmap that shows you exactly what every profitable coaching business needs and where you might be missing the mark. So it takes you through the exercises, not just a checklist. They actually have exercises where you can reflect on to see exactly where you are on this path of getting paying clients, whether you're just trained for clients or you're actually ready for clients. And it's also going to show you what to fix first because a lot of time we're sitting there, we're feeling so overwhelmed because there's so much thing to do. So you're not even quite sure, like something's broken, but I don't know what. So you'll know exactly what to fix first and finally get clear on having the direction of how to attract your client. There's a link in the description down below to grab your copy. It's totally free and it's going to save you months of confusion. So go get a coach. Your client is out there, and that's help them find you. Thank you for listening to Make It Visible Podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support for your coaching business, head over to elevate lifecoaching.org and see how we can partner together to turn your passion into a profitable business. I help female coaches launch and scale their coaching business faster than ever without wasting time and money, filling the gaps in your marketing strategies, creating a simple and easy to follow system so you can accelerate on the path of coaching business that you love to wake up to. Head over to elevatelifecoaching.org and grab a free strategy out of today.