WHAT YOU NEED TO BE DOING WITH BUSINESS CARDS

Do you have a stack of biz cards in your drawer?

You meet interesting new contacts with possible opportunities and pop their card in your wallet/handbag...but then what? Where do these cards go? What do you do with them?

It’s pretty pointless having them hang around in your handbag or desk drawer. The point of handing out cards is to connect, strike up a conversation, see if you can help each other out.

If you ensure you have a process for business cards like other sales and admin activities your business has, then you will start to build a good network and make use of the connections you are making offline at networking events, conferences, and meetings.

When you exchange business cards, make sure you have a specific place for them inside of your wallet/purse or laptop bag. This will help to get the procedure started and help the next step.

Next you need to download a pretty amazing free bit of software called CamCard! This is a card reader app that scans the card using your phone's camera. Not only does it take an image of the biz card to store in your phone, it has OCR technology (optical character recognition if we’re going to get technical) that recognises the letters and numbers and turns them into inputted text – hey presto!

Instructions and tips

• Go to your Play Store or downloads feature on your phone and download Camcard – it looks like this:

• Create yourself a free account with an email address and secure password.
• Confirm the email from Camcard and sign into the app.
• You are now you are ready to get scanning!
• Press the blue camera button in the bottom centre of the app.
• Hold the phone about 20cm away from the business card lying flat down and line it up with the dotted lines you will see on your phone’s screen.
• Take a picture the way you normally do and KEEP HOLDING IT THERE for a few seconds afterwards (otherwise you will end up with blank fields/boxes).
• Check the information has been scanned correctly, if the software has made any errors you can tap and type the way you do for any text boxes.

If you need to add more fields click on Add field and add your relevant data. (A field is a name for a data type eg name, address, email are all called “fields”.

Add a Note about your contact eg where you met or what opportunities might exist! Click on the three dots at the top right of a saved business card contact. Click on Note, then Create new Memo then choose a Normal Memo or a Contact log.

The contact log is really useful as it tracks and records who you have spoken to and when so you can use this to really get organised with your leads.

The Normal Memo can include voice clips, images and files if you need – great for when you are on the go or in the car and want to use audio instead.

Think about if you would like to sync your contact with your phone contact list or Google contacts. You can sync your phone in the ‘Me’ section then Settings then Account and Sync.

Camcard works really well with Google contacts. You can download the contact database to a spreadsheet and this can then feed into your CRM system/sales pipeline. More information on this in my next blog!

You can categorise your contacts by creating ‘Groups’. Click on ‘Cards’ section then click Group then Create new group.

Suggestions for groups:

1. Industry peer
2. Suppliers
3. VIPs
4. Leads
5. Collaborations
6. Referrals

Congrats, you have created a digital contact to actually DO things with :)

Process

1. Receive business card
2. Store in the same place with other cards until you can scan
3. Scan weekly using Camcard (or upgrade your Camcard account and have an assistant do this)
4. Sync to contacts
5. Send an initial email to the contact to explain any further action – newsletter, subscribe etc

You can also see www.camcard.com for more information on their products and privacy/security policy.

Please remember to ensure you are complying with GDPR regulations and ask individuals for permission to add them to mailing lists and not to send unnecessary, irrelevant or excessive information. Never pass on personal details to any unauthorised third parties.