Stop Collecting Business Cards. Build an Audience
12touches.com, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Every seasoned IT sales professional has a drawer, a spreadsheet, or a CRM full of contacts collected over years - business cards from conferences, badge scans from trade shows, connections from a dozen jobs and campaigns. It feels like an asset. It mostly isn't. Those contacts decay quietly the moment you file them away: people change roles, switch companies, and forget who you are. A name in a database you never touch is not a relationship. It's a fossil.
Business cards, badge scans, purchased lists, and paid advertising share one flaw: none of them compound. Contacts decay the moment they're filed, and ad reach vanishes when the spend stops - you rented the audience and own nothing afterward.
A newsletter audience behaves in the opposite way, accumulating subscribers who persist and deepen their relationship with you issue after issue.
For an individual seller this is close to career-defining, because it replaces total dependence on channels you don't control with owned, permission-based distribution that appreciates the longer you hold it.
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