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Relationship building in the B2B industry is a lot about personal interaction and so events, shows, and face-to-face meetings play a significant part in relationship building. However, 2020 was a different year. With the pandemic taking over the world, B2B companies re-evaluated their strategies and business models and found new ways to engage with clients and nurture prospects while maintaining a safe distance.

COVID-19, indeed, led to a lot of innovative thinking when it came to creating marketing and sales strategies. It showed the real value of building and maintaining strong B2B relationships for sustainable growth.

Here are a few lessons that 2020 has taught us in managing B2B relationships. You can use some of these lessons to build lasting relationships with your prospects and clients.
 

Engaging With Your Contacts Digitally Has Never Been More Important

Your brand needs to be in the news to keep your audience engaged. Companies do that by sharing updates in the press, by blogging and publishing content on industry trends, or by informing prospects and clients about new offerings or added features to an existing product. Companies have traditionally spent a significant part of their marketing budgets on offline media and events. 2020 has shown that not all PR needs to be done through print media. Social media and emails play a big role in lead engagement.

• • You can position yourself as an industry leader if you can build strong online communities and network with B2B leaders on professional networking sites and peer-to-peer review sites such as G2Crowd, Capterra, TrustRadius and others.
  • You can engage with B2B communities on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter by sharing videos, pictures, and creative content. When you post content gauge the response so that you can spot trends that will fuel your future content.
  • Mention the people or influencers who have helped to create or spread your content and add trending hashtags to your posts as this will improve your brand awareness.
  • You can share news in real-time on channels like Twitter, thus winning more followers – making you a brand to reckon with.
  • Use regular emails to follow up with existing clients and also prospects that are in the sales pipeline. Emails give you the chance to share valuable content and at regular frequency without bombarding the recipients with phone calls and giving nothing of value.

Connect Through Online Events

The pandemic put a halt to all major B2B events and the usual face-to-face interactions. However, it did not put a restriction on people to connect online and host virtual events. Webinars, live interactions, video conferencing, and other online events have shown us that events can still be held. In fact:

• • • Marketers found that online events meant being able to connect with a bigger global audience easily
    • It proved to be cost-effective as one did not have to spend on the venue, travel, lodging and other major costs associated with physical events.

Organize Your Leads In the CRM / Database

If you don’t have an organized database, it becomes difficult to follow up with important leads in a timely manner. So, take time out and:

• • Gather leads from all offline and online sources, whether that’s your phone’s address book, your website landing page forms, business cards or excel spreadsheets and save all the leads in your CRM. Scan all your physical business cards from events that you have attended in the past by using ScanBizCards – popular business card scanner app for iOS and Android phones. It’s a free to use app to easily scan contact information from business cards and export to a CSV file or directly to your CRM.
  • You can also generate new leads from your emails and add them to your CRM. ScanBizCards has an Email Signature Capture which will scan your emails and make suggestions for any new contact that it finds in your mailbox.
  • Tag all your contacts to segment them. This will help you with customer prospecting, segmenting, and allow you to design a more focused marketing strategy for the new year. Don’t forget to add all the relevant information about your leads such as notes that you have gathered during your interactions.
  • Remove all obsolete contacts and update your CRM contacts. This will help you during follow-up and also find where the best new business opportunities are for you.

Create Value

One of the greatest lessons that businesses can learn from 2020 is that whatever your business offering is, you should provide value. It is not just about launching something new or adding a new incremental feature to an existing product – if you want to reach out and appeal to more people, you need to know what they want and solve their critical business challenges. It is only when you address their needs that you will be able to build a string brand. Ask your sales reps, hence, to engage more to be able to:

• • Find out what are the most often asked questions about your offering and what are the issues being faced. When you have answers to these and address their issues you will be able to add value to your client’s business with your product.
  • Use various methods to educate your audience so that they can use your product to drive value. Host webinars, write blogs on use cases, have chatbots for live chats and focus on the overall customer experience delivery.

Looking Ahead at 2021 and Beyond

In the B2B industry, where relationships are important, you must develop a bond of trust with your clients and prospects. 2020 has been a disruptive year for most businesses across the globe and yet it has taught marketers both the importance of having a close bond with prospects and developing these bonds without any face-face interactions and physical events. The lessons we’ve learned are important takeaways that will help businesses to grow in the new year and also in the years to follow.

2020 was an unconventional year for a lot of businesses. New business models emerged and businesses that have managed to shift to the new norms have been very successful. Companies have gotten used to working increasingly over the internet. Video conferencing tools and collaboration platforms became indispensable, and the CRM became one of the most important tools for B2B sales and marketing teams.

The CRM system is no longer just a contact management tool that businesses use. It has much more to offer to various teams within an organization – sales, marketing, customer success, leadership and more.

As the new year approaches, it is time for businesses to put their CRM on track and make sure their customer data is updated and ready for Q1 2021. Here are our tips to get it right.
 

Ensure All Offline Data Is In the CRM

Companies spend thousands of dollars on their CRM, but a lot of the data still continues to remain siloed and unrecorded. With sales teams working remotely, it is all the more important now to centralize all of your customer and prospect data in the CRM system. Business cards, emails and spreadsheets often contain valuable leads that never make it to the CRM. Having all contact information in one centralized CRM will help you to follow up with prospects more easily and quickly, creating more opportunities for growth. Don’t try doing this task manually though. It can get very cumbersome and time-consuming. Use a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards to scan contact information from business cards and export the data directly to your CRM or email marketing platform such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, Hubspot, Marketo and many more.

If you use lead capture tools and landing pages for lead-capture on your website, make sure it’s integrated with your CRM so all of the leads you capture online are saved in the CRM.

Tag Contacts and Score Leads

With every new meeting with a prospect make sure to capture all the critical information about them. The information you collect should not be lost in the pages of your notepad or in spreadsheet but should be added to the CRM as it can lead to important analyses in the future, as well as help with appropriate segmentation and profiling of the lead. Your CRM should contain all the important information about your leads such as phone, email, job title, social media profiles and so on. You should also score your leads, tag them, assign them to lead owners with action items and so on.

The CRM also provides key insights about your own operations for making decisions. For instance, when talking to your prospects, the sales or business development reps are the first point of contact. The information they collect can give a lot of good actionable insights such as:

• • Which of your products/services/features is the most popular
  • What are the most common issues and queries regarding your various offering

Add New Leads from Your Emails to Your CRM

There are billions of B2B emails exchanged each year. 40 is the average number of emails per day a person sends for business purposes. Company mailboxes are a goldmine of potential leads that often never get added in the CRM.

You can discover new leads from your emails. ScanBizCards has an Email Signature Capture feature that lets you automatically find new contacts and contact update from your email exchanges. Once you connect your email for Signature Capture, it scans your emails in the last 30 days to suggest any new contact that it finds. It will also give suggestions from any new emails that you receive. The app currently supports email providers like Microsoft, Exchange, and Google. Adding these new leads to your CRM would mean new leads to nurture and to try to convert.
 

De-clutter the CRM

Before you start the new year, your CRM should be organized, with all outdated contacts updated and the redundant ones removed.

• Organize your contacts and identify leads that are most and least likely to convert.
• Some fields in the CRM might no longer be useful to you. Remove them and clean up the database.
• Arrange information in such a way that all the critical info is reflected at the top of search.
• Remove all duplicate data and update the information that needs to be updated.

Review Opportunities

An organized CRM means more ease in finding new opportunities – both in terms of leads and in terms of new partnerships.

Leads

Get in touch with prospects with whom you have not engaged for a long time. Find out how they are, what their current needs post-lockdown are, what events might trigger their interest and so on. You can assign leads to different teams after you have tagged all the leads as active and inactive.

Partnerships

Getting your CRM organized can also help you to find new business opportunities within your partners ecosystem. For instance, if you have a mobile app offering and your leads database has marketing agencies and software vendors, you can explore opportunities for integrations, sponsorships, joint-webinars, co-branding and much more. You can reach out to them and look for partnerships to deliver more holistic solutions to clients.
 

Train the Sales Team

While you are cleaning and organizing your CRM, schedule training sessions for those who are still not adept with its functioning or are new joiners. Tell them about the impotence of prompt follow-ups and about maintaining an organized CRM.
 

Concluding

Having a huge contact database will not get you the right ROI and help you to grow your business. You need to make the best use of your leads and your CRM’s capability. So, start organizing and decluttering your CRM. Have a smashing start to 2021!

When it comes to connecting with clients and prospects, email has retained the spot as a key medium of communication for many B2B companies. Despite the argument that email is dead, there are now
over 5.5 billion active email accounts worldwide and that number is increasing every year.

Emails give organizations the ability to both, share concise information, and have detailed conversations through group and 1:1 exchanges or cadences. There are several other reasons why emails are important in B2B marketing and communications. Read on as we discuss some of the benefits of emails in B2B marketing and why emails are important in B2B marketing communications.
 

Addressing Long Sales Cycles

With B2C products or services, purchase decisions are often immediate and are often based on emotions. This is not so much the case in the B2B space where:

• • Sales cycles are longer as the buying decision is critical for the client’s business
  • There multiple buying decision makers and influencers
  • Where leads need to be kept constantly engaged and nurtured down the funnel
  • The purchase-decision is tied to an ROI as products/services are usually of a higher monetary value

With such kinds of purchases, marketers have to spend a lot of time finding out the needs of the prospect and how to address that in creating relevant content that talks of utility, ROI and others. This is where emails come into play, giving the marketer the perfect platform to communicate with their leads. You can design custom emails for your prospects, thus ensuring that your brand is on top of their mind when they finally make the decision to purchase.
 

Generating New Leads

Email marketing is still one of the most reliable and cost-effective ways to generate qualified leads. Emails work effectively at different stages of the sales lifecycle, right from prospecting to nurturing and aftersales. The success of your email campaigns will largely depend on the quality of your prospect data – email accuracy, intent of subscribers, and other factors such as timing when following up, content quality and so on.

Our popular business card scanning app, ScanBizCards, not only helps to scan business cards which can then be added to a centralized database for email marketing and more, but also helps to find new leads from emails.

The Email Capture feature of this app helps you to connect your mailbox account for capturing leads from emails and exporting to popular CRMs and email automation platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot, marketo and more. When you connect the app, it will give you suggestions whenever it gets a new contact from your emails or email chains.
 

Sending Customised Messages

When you are designing emails, don’t rely on a single templated email to send to all prospects in bulk. Once your database of leads has been segmented, you should keep separate emails ready for each group. Such customization will make the leads feel more valued as it will address their needs more specifically than a generic email would. Customization is one of the biggest benefits of email marketing. When campaigns are tailor-made based on a specific buyer persona, the leads can be nurtured better. This improves the chances of more positive responses from leads and increases the chances of conversions.

As B2B purchases are based on logic, leads usually seek to know detailed information about your offering. Emails are a sure shot way to keep them informed and also to set you apart from the rest. Emails can share information like:

• • Why your offering is better than the competition’s – adding testimonials from social media and review sites like G2 and so on
  • New offerings and product launches
  • The current trends in the market where you can get creative by adding graphs and infographics
  • A set of FAQs compiled based on the most often asked questions
  • Detailed analysis of issues and queries that clients and prospects might have related to your product or service
  • Guides on how to use your product/service in their industry, for their use case and so on

Allowing Prompt Follow-ups

Emails can be a great way to do prompt follow-ups with leads.

• • Often hundreds of new leads are gathered at events and conferences but not all are equally qualified. It is a good practice to follow-up with leads promptly after the show is over – usually in 24-48 hours. This is where emails come in handy. A simple “It was good to meet you” mail will start the engagement with the prospect. Since emails stay in the inbox, the brand recall is more than if you were to simply make a phone call, which can be forgotten about.
  • If you have just had a fruitful meeting with a prospect where there is a high chance of a conversion, then you should follow up soon after the meeting. Sending an email thanking them for their time and talking of your offering in detail will egg the lead towards a purchase.

Dealing With Multiple Decision-makers

B2B purchase is not always about one individual buying your product but about the affirmation of a number of departments in an organization. For instance, when it comes to purchasing software for an organization, it’s not just the IT team’;s decision but also the end user team (design, marketing, sales, project management and so on). Hence, you will find that you have to convince many influencers for a purchase to happen. Emails help because it allows you to send information based on what the person in a particular department is looking is for – right from pricing, benefits, features, and others.
 

Inexpensive and Less Time Consuming

Inexpensive

Most forms of marketing methods come with a high cost like, say, sidplay advertising cost, location cost, photoshoot, printing cost, and others. In comparison, email marketing is the most inexpensive marketing method which can target a wide audience with a much higher ROI.

• • You can easily carry out surveys and gather data.
  • It is easy to send traffic to your website, thus improving your SEO without having to spend much money.
  • Email marketing campaigns will help you to easily qualify your leads and if you lead scoring you can track your leads who open your emails and click on the CTAs in them, etc.

Less Time Consuming

• There are many software tools that make measuring the effectiveness of an email campaign easy and the analysis doesn’t take up much time.
• Designing an email and launching a campaign doesn’t take up too much time. Once you have relevant content you can launch the campaign.
• From the point of view of the leads, too, emails take up less time. Since it can be read at any time at their own convenience, it does not waste their time. It thus, allows you to engage with prospects without disrupting their busy schedules or invading their privacy.

Summing up

Yes, in the modern world social media marketing, private chat groups and other forms of digital marketing have gained a lot of popularity but email marketing continues to be a very important channel in the B2B space. When you launch your email campaign, do remember this – the smartphone has become the key to marketing. Hence, when you create your emails, check them for multiple email hosts like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo! and also across various devices and screen sizes. This way, your prospects will be able to easily read your emails, no matter what screen they are viewing it on.

Whether you’re attending an event or trade show or a meeting, exchanging business cards creates a connection and helps people remember each other’s brand. Being such an important aspect of branding, business cards carry the important task of making a good first impression.

Your business card should not only be an introduction to your brand but also be a representation of what you do. The design plays a key part in that, More importantly, it carries contact information and that determines how people can get in touch with you. However, since the space available on a typical business card is limited, you need to think about the design and the layout so that all the necessary information is on it, and it looks professional and appealing.

If you’re not going to need thousands of business cards yet, try designing your own business cards using some of these free tools. Nowadays, there are many free tools that are available online to help you to design your business card. We will list our favorite 6 for you.
 

1. Adobe Spark Post

With Adobe Spark Post you can create beautiful business cards that will help your brand to stand out. With this business card maker’s easy-to-use interface you can customize every aspect of the card so as to create a unique brand identity for yourself. It allows you to add imagery and your brand logo as well as choose a color that goes with your brand image.
 

2. Free Business Card Maker

If you are planning to create your own business card without the help of a designer, then Shopify’s Free Business Card Maker is a tool that will help you to create business cards easily and quickly. Using this tool you can create business cards that look both professional and elegant. All you need to do is to add details like your name, email, website, and address. For greater branding, you can also add your logo. Shopify will then email you the generated design which you can download and print right away.
 

3. Logaster

Logaster is a free business card design software that will design multiple logo designs for you quickly. You can choose the option that you like best and use it on your business card. It also gives you various templates to choose from as well as allow you to customize the design of the card. Once done you can save it and download your business card which is ready for printing. The software has a paid version with advanced features, however, the light version of the app is free.
 

4. PsPrint

Hiring a graphic designer to create business cards isn’t always feasible. One free tool that will help you create professional-quality business cards is PsPrint. This tool has business card design templates that are professional and can be customized. All you need to do is to add images, borders, objects together with the text. The cards can be printed on premium paper stocks with superior-quality soy-based inks. Clients have vouched for their quality, color accuracy, and competitive pricing.
 

5. Canva

Canva is a popular tool used by many small businesses to create business cards for free. The best part about designing business cards using Canva is that you don’t need to be an expert designer. Its drag-and-drop business card maker will help you design a card without any hassle. You can select from the given layouts that have been created by professional designers or generate your own design from scratch. Given the amount of choice that this tool offers, it might take some time to build the design but the final product is well with the effort. Once you have designed the business card you can download the same and print it. You can use Canva Print to print your cards. For this, you have three paper options to choose from – standard, premium, and deluxe. The final product will get delivered to you in 3-5 days’ time.
 

6. Business Card Maker

The Business Card Maker tool will help you to easily design your business card for free. You don’t need to install any extra software and can use the tool on your web browser itself. It has a number of colorful layouts. Once you have selected your layout you can add your company’s logo and resize and move text boxes. When you are happy with the result you can save your file. The tool creates the business card in a PDF format that you can print anywhere or even share on social media.
 

Make Sure To Save All Your Business Card Leads

Business cards will always remain an important part of your branding strategy. So, when designing a business card you must make it unique such that it reflects what your business stands for. With these free online business card maker tools, you are sure to design the perfect one for yourself.

A well designed business card, however, must be put to best use. As you exchange business cards with prospects, you are generating leads. But if the business cards you have collected lie in a drawer or are forgotten about in card folders, you lose important contact information and potential revenue opportunity. ScanBizCards, a popular business card scanning app, is the best tool to digitize business card information and easily export it to CRMs for maximum lead generation. It uses OCR to scan the contact information from all business cards, which is then uploaded into the CRM. Having all information in one centralized database is sure to make your follow ups and sales prospecting faster, accurate and more efficient.

The B2B industry depends majorly on events to generate leads. However, if you are not following these simple tricks, you might be losing out on prospective leads, and in turn the opportunity to grow your business. To generate high-quality leads, you need to have a well laid out event marketing strategy put together with a focus on customer engagement and conversion.

Most of us in the event marketing industry are still unsure when physical B2B events will resume fully. So a lot of the companies are now turning to virtual events. With 2020 past us and 2021 round the corner, what should businesses do to face the new and altered dynamics of organizing and attending B2B events?

Here are 5 tips that you should follow to maximize your lead generation at events in 2021.
 

1. Understand Your Target Audience

When planning your event, it is important to understand who your target audience is. This will help you to promote your event more effectively, thus making your investments worth it and increasing your chances of higher conversions. In order to do this effectively:

• • Know the type of audience you want to attract and build your target persona list. For instance, their job department, title, company, location and others
  • Go through all the marketing collateral and customise / personalize it to so that it is most appealing to the attendees
  • Know what your prospects are looking for, their business challenges, and include your solutions to address their challenges in your promotional content

In 2021, when it comes to hosting physical events over online events, personalization is all the more important as events will most likely be done at a smaller scale and targeting prospects only in a certain region and target market. Hence, the better that you know your audience, the better you will be able to plan your small-scale events.
 

2. Have an Easy Event Registration Process

The easier your registration process is, the more users would want to fill in the forms. This will lead to greater attendance. In this regard, there are two factors to take into consideration.

• • If you have a form that takes a long time to fill in with a lot of information that needs to be written/typed, there are chances that you will lose potential qualified leads.
  • If the page takes long to load or is not built to be viewed on smartphones then you can lose prospects.

While designing the registration form, it is vital to design it such that you are able to gather all the information that you need. For instance, it might be important for you to ask about the attendees’ organization and email, but you could leave out asking for the company website URL as it can be found from the organization name and email domain.
 

3. Have a Robust Follow-up Strategy Pre and Post Event

Pre-event follow up is an essential component of lead generation at events. For this you can:

• • Have a live chat option on your event page. With this, you can engage and answer all questions from the prospects and increase the chances of their attendance. Also, most live chat tools capture visitor email IDs. When you have this data you can add it to the centralized database and use it to follow up both pre and post the event.
  • Pre-event curiosity can be piqued through social media and also through websites like Quora. Here, you can give more information about your brand and product and answer various B2B questions that the audience ask. The more visible you become on this site, the more the audience would be interested in attending your event when you announce one.

Having a proper post-event follow up plan is equally critical in generating qualified leads from events. A prompt follow-up makes the prospects see that they are valued and thus warm up to the idea of buying from you. For this, integrate your registration process with your CRM so that no contact data is lost. This is where the contact management software,

Whether it’s pre event or post event marketing – ScanBizCards our business card scanner app, will dome in handy. With this app installed on your phone, you can take pictures of all business cards and conference badges with a simple click. Once this is done, the app saves the scanned data and all information can be easily exported to the CRM.
 

4. Be Open to Hosting Virtual Events

Maximizing B2B lead generation in 2021 means you need to be open to hosting vital events. While economies are opening up and events are being planned, it is still low and still at a smaller scale. On the other hand, if you host a virtual event, trade shows, product launches, and others you would have access to a wider audience, thus increasing your chances of getting more prospective clients. This would also help:

• • To reduce expenses on hospitality. At a time when budgets are tight for many organizations, online events thus come as a boon
  • Get important stakeholders who have not been able to attend your events due to the lockdown, would now be able to attend the shows in person

To host an online event that attracts the audience you should have:

• • Great content
  • Not an extremely long event as that would not hold their attention
  • Interactive discussions
  • Easily downloadable resources
  • An exciting backdrop
  • Freebies like e-books as this would loop in greater participation

5. Engage With Attendees

Events and shows are not only about attendance, but it is also about the interaction your attendees had with you. Only when engagement is high can you expect to have more closures. Even now, when you might be hosting the event online, you should use technology such that you are able to have discussions and talks with your prospective buyers. For this you can:

• • Reach out to attendees after the event on a one-on-one basis
  • Use screen sharing to make the event more meaningful
  • Allow prospects to speak and listen to them carefully so that you can offer useful solutions
  • Pause during webinars just to address queries and concerns
  • Find out which time would suit the prospects most before you schedule an event

Concluding Thoughts

Events are time-consuming and an expensive method of generating leads. Hence, setting your KPIs from before will help you to measure your ROI once the event is over. To reap the maximum benefit from the event and generate the most number of leads, follow these suggestions and you are sure to see a positive impact on your sales pipeline after the event.

You had a fruitful discussion with a prospect and even sent over a business proposal after a series of emails and phone calls. However, does that mean that the deal is closed? You’ll just wait for them to respond? No – your work does not end here. People get busy, have different stakeholders to take buy-ins from, and have to make a well-informed decision on behalf of their business.

It takes a lot of persistence, patience, and effort to close a B2B deal. If follow-ups are not done right, it can cost companies millions of dollars’ worth of revenue in lost opportunity. A study by Forbes showed that organizations waste up to 71% of their leads due to poor follow-ups. In today’s world where competition is stiff and choices available to prospects are varied, timely, and effective sales follow-ups are of utmost importance in order to close more deals in less time.

Read on as we discuss why timely follow-ups are key to closing more deals, and how companies can do it right.

Build Trust

Closing a deal and trust-building go hand in hand. Only if you manage to establish a good rapport with your lead and help them to feel comfortable, will they warm up to the idea of buying from you. This is especially true during meetings at B2B events where hundreds of people meet for the first time and are trying to create a lasting impression. Even cold calls and meetings, whether virtual or in-person, have similar dynamics.

• • When you meet a prospect, whether privately or at a mass event, the most important thing to do is to get their contact information. This is often done in the form of exchanging business cards or if you’re meeting online, by exchanging contact info through email. Once you have captured your prospects’ contact information instantly and accurately, the follow-up process becomes a lot easier as you can reach out to them directly.
  • When your prospects are still in the consideration stage, i.e., ‘I am considering if I should buy’ phase, if you maintain contact with them with timely follow-ups, patiently answer all their queries, and sort out their issues, they will feel that you really value them. This improves your chances of conversion and helps you win a client that will stick around.

Resolve Issues on Time

Even if prospects have asked you some key questions during the sales process, it is likely that they would have more queries as they go down the sales funnel. However, there are times when prospects do not reach out to get clarification. In such situations, there is always a chance that the conversion may not happen and the lead may back out at the last minute. However, if you’re in touch with the prospect regularly and follow up early and often, you will know about their level of interest, doubts and address any questions they have. Resolving would-be client issues timely is sure to help you close more deals.

Find Opportunities to Generate New Leads 

Timely follow-ups will help you to generate more leads.

• • If you have just closed a deal or are in the process of signing up a new account, you should stay in touch with your customer or prospect and keep them engaged. It’s common for sales reps to lose connection with their prospects the moment the lead moves down the funnel.
  • Connect with them on professional networks such as LinkedIn so you can prospect similar people in their network who can be potential buyers.
  • You don’t have to ask for a referral right away, but if they feel warmed up enough to you, there are chances that they will give you more leads from those in their network who might be looking for your product/service offering.

With the ScanBizCards app, you can save all contact information in one centralized database such as your CRM or email automation system. Your follow-ups will not only become more efficient but you will also be able to find out your ICP or ‘ideal customer profile’ with key data points such as job title, LinkedIn profiles, company location, etc.

Avoid Being Pushy with Prospects

Sending a quick intro note always goes a long way in building the initial touchpoint. But if you think that you can start your follow-ups first thing in the morning in the hope that a deal will be closed by the end of the day, then think again. Prospects are likely to need adequate time and understanding before making a purchase decision in a B2B scenario.

• • It is important for you to not only know the preferred mode of communication but also the best time to reach out to your leads.
  • Constant follow-ups can become irritating. Hence, strategize when you will engage with the lead and also always have something relevant to talk to them about. Offer value with each touchpoint.
  • Sometimes follow-ups after office hours in a more casual environment can go a long way in building rapport. When you talk business in a more relaxed manner it will help you to build a bond with them.

Upsell or Make Repeat Business

A research done by the Harvard Business Review showed that acquiring a new client can cost 5-25 times more than upselling to an existing client. Hence, if you are in constant touch with your existing clients, and follow up regularly with them, you will open up the chances of a second sale. The honeymoon phase is when you have just closed a deal. During this time your new client will be in an exciting phase. Use this time to your advantage.

• • Start with a thank-you email or a phone call.
  • Check-in on the client to see that he/she is satisfied with the product.
  • Keep in touch and share important information like emerging market trends, new product or feature launches available on your product and so on.

With time you will get to know more about the client and the needs that still exist in their business that you can address. This will help you to offer your product or service in new ways, thus leading to a second-time purchase.

Always Be Closing!

There are times when a sales rep is great at selling the brand but may fail when it comes to closing the deal as they are unable to do timely follow-ups. Know the importance of time when it comes to a sales follow-up and never miss out on an opportunity with your prospects and clients. Nurturing, after all, is the key to closing more deals.

We update the ScanBizCards app as often as possible to make it faster and more reliable for you.

Here are a couple of enhancements you’ll find with the latest update:

– Security Enhancement

– Enhanced Signature Capture Feature

– Minor bug fixes

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We change our smartphone quite frequently, and each time we switch to a new device, the contacts in our address book get carried forward. So, you might not realize but you could be carrying contacts in your address book that are a decade old. Not to forget the innumerable duplicate contacts that the address book often has due to syncing of different email accounts and contact information from various social media profiles. Yes, you can ignore the chaotic state of your address book and just find your contacts by searching carefully each time, but what if some of the contacts have become redundant?

If you’re a marketer, a sales rep, a business owner, or in any professional career where keeping in touch with prospects and clients is of utmost importance, you should clean up your address book from time to time. Keeping your contacts updated and accurate will help you to easily get in touch with your connections easily, and manage your B2B relationships with greater efficiency.

Here are 5 easy steps that you can use to clean up your smartphone’s address book.
 

1. Use an App to Get Notified for Contact Updates

There might be times when a contact in your address book updates their information (such as number, company, job title, location and so on) but you are not aware of it. This will make the information that you have obsolete. This happens very frequently nowadays and there’s really no way to be able to keep track of such changes.

There are many free and paid apps on the Apple App store and Google Play store that you can use to overcome this challenge.

CircleBack, a free to download address book manager app for iOS and Android smartphones lets you manage your contacts automatically. It easily connects with Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail, and MSN to keep all your contacts in one place, up-to-date and duplicates free. It suggests updates if a contact in your address book has updated their information such as designation, company, phone number, and so on.
 

2. Remove Duplicate Entries

If you go through your contact list, you are likely to find the same person’s name in multiple places – one carrying their number, another their email address, one holding details of their social media handles and so on – creating duplicate entries for the same contact. You can merge all these into one entry manually but if you have a few hundred or thousands contacts on your phone, that’s going to be one heck of a job! However, you can use an app to do that automatically:

• • Try using apps such as Cleanup Duplicate Contacts. It is a popular contact manager app for iOS phones. It lets you check approximately 5,000 contacts in under 45 seconds.
  • If you are using an Android phone then you can use the Google Contacts app. You can go to contacts.google.com from your Google account to 1) Merge Duplicates, and 2) Keep contacts up to date.

3. Have One Cloud-based Address Book

You may own multiple email addresses that use different email services. However, if you want to keep your address book clean, you should use a consolidated address book where you can add all your phone numbers and email addresses from all your accounts. You can use a CSV file or vCard file to export the contact information from the other email service providers. While picking where you want to sync all the information, it is advisable to use Google’s address book as you would be able to easily sync a Google account with almost any phone. Also, a Google account contains features like suggesting contact updates when someone from your list who also uses Gmail updates the information. If you are using an Android operating system, your contacts are most likely to already be in a Gmail account. However, iPhone users might have the data in different places and so might have to check in Settings for the Contacts’ list, and thereafter sync it.
 

4. Organize Your Contacts Functionally

A typical address book will have the same types of contacts:

1. 1.  Work: colleagues, former colleagues, clients, prospects, leads, vendors and so on
   2.  Personal: family, friends, neighbour, acquaintance and so on
   3.  Emergency and other important contacts: your doctor, lawyer, babysitter, mechanic, favorite pizzeria and so on

Organize your contacts in folders when you back-up or sync and prioritize them in a way that the most important ones, irrespective of their category, remain easy to access. For example, if you work at Amazon, you can save all your colleagues’ numbers with the common prefix “Amazon” so it’s easy to find in search.
 

5. Clean-up Manually

There would be occasions when duplicates won’t get spotted through an app due to technical limitations or permissions. Or, there might be contacts that you don’t know or those which you know for sure have become obsolete. Clean-up such information manually from time to time.
 

To Conclude

Gone are the days when we had to memorize a phone number. In fact the days when we had to manually clean up or update our contacts are also past us! There are apps to help us do that. With the right apps on your smartphone, you can make best use of your contacts.

Our smartphones can maintain a record of hundreds or thousands of contacts. However, over time, when the entries get disorganized and outdated, our productivity gets affected. So use these methods to keep our address book clean and up-to-date at all times.

Couple of new updates coming next month on ScanBizCards

We’re thrilled about our new updates and improvements coming on the ScanBizCards app next month.

Here’s what’s coming up

1. 1. 1. Email Signature Capture: Email Signature Capture will be available for Google Mail and Outlook mailbox.
      2. Direct Export to Salesforce: ScanBizCards Pro users will now be able to make unlimited contact exports to Salesforce (earlier restricted to 7 business cards).

What is Email Signature Capture

By setting up an email signature capture on your ScanBizCards app, you can find new contacts and update existing ones automatically. Simply connect your email account for signature capture and save or update contacts on your address book. You can also export the saved contacts to Salesforce directly from email signatures.

How to connect email accounts for signature capture on your ScanBizCards app

1. 1. Tap on the “Email Capture” button on ScanBizCards app home screen.
   2. Tap on ‘Connect an email’ button and select your email service provider connection i.e., Microsoft, Exchange, or Google.

Once your account is connected, the app will begin by scanning all of the contacts from email signatures in the emails you’ve received in the last 30 days, and will suggest available new contacts and contact updates.

With signature capture now activated, ScanBizCards will continue to automatically find new contacts and contact updates from email signatures.

To review your captured signatures before saving, tap on the Email Capture button on your ScanBizCards app home screen.

By default, the list will show you signatures captured from all of your connected accounts (Gmail, Exchange, and Microsoft). You can tap on the All Signatures drop-down at the top of your screen to filter the list by each connected email account.

If you want to connect additional accounts, simply tap on All Signatures from the drop down button, tap on the Email Capture button, then tap on Add Email.

How to export contacts from ScanBizCards to Salesforce

Here is how you can export your scanned contact cards into an external CRM.
Note: All options are not available for all devices

iPhone

For exporting in BULK

• From the main screen of your app, tap Total Contacts and then choose a folder to view
• Tap the Actions icon (Three Dots) in the bottom left corner
• Tap Export to…
• Select and export to one of the following options: Excel, Salesforce, SugarCRM.
• You’ll then have the ability to select multiple cards before linking to your CRM account or export your Excel file through an email.

For exporting individually

• From the main screen of your app, tap Total Contacts, then choose a folder to view and select the card you wish to export
• Tap the blue Actions icon (Three Dots) in the bottom left corner
• Tap Forward / Export to …
• Select and export to one of the following options: Email Card, Salesforce, SugarCRM, Evernote, Constant Contact.
• You’ll then be asked to link to your CRM account or finish composing your email.

Android

For exporting in BULK

From the main screen of your app, tap Total Contacts, then choose a folder to view

• Tap the Actions button in the bottom right corner and choose Export to.
• Select the contact cards you want to export to and then tap on the Export to button at the bottom to export contacts to Salesforce or Excel.

For exporting individually

• From the main screen of your app, tap Total Contacts, then choose a folder to view and select the card you wish to export
• Tap the Card Actions button in the bottom right corner
• Tap Forward/Export to…
• Select and export to one of the options: Email Card, Salesforce, SugarCRM.
• You’ll then be asked to link to your Salesforce CRM account

Smartphones today have become an important tool for generating leads. With the right mobile apps installed on your phone, you can use your smartphone to maximize your productivity and not only keep in touch with existing clients but also tap new prospects, on the go. Here are the 5 must-have apps for your smartphone to generate more B2B leads.
 

1. ScanBizCards

One of the best business card scanner apps on the market, ScanBizCards is a must-have app for your smartphone. With the help of Optical Character Recognition, this app lets you quickly scan business cards and conference badges and the contact data can be directly exported to a CRM. The app integrates with leading CRMs like Salesforce and email automation systems like Hubspot and Marketo. The Human Transcription feature of the app can be used for manual transcriptions when you have to scan cards in bulk or to transcribe if the scans turn out blurry. This app acts as an important lead capture tool as well with additional features such as Email Lead Capture.

• • By using the Email Lead Capture feature you can capture new contacts from your incoming emails. After you set up your mailbox such as Gmail, Office 365, and Outlook and connect your business email on the app for email signature capture the app will suggest new contacts that it finds in your emails that you have received in the past 30 days if they are not present in your address book.
  • When the contact information of a lead gets updated, the app suggests such updates. For example, a new email address, a new organization, and so on.

Check our ScanBizCards for iOS and Android
 

2. CircleBack

CircleBack is a contact management software app for both iOS and Android phones. It acts as a professional address book organizer by easily connecting with Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail, and MSN. This app, hence, keeps all your contacts in one place and it keeps your address book up-to-date and free from duplicate entries. Over and above this, you can use this app to generate more B2B leads as well.

• • The app can capture email signatures, thus helping to find new contacts.
  • It updates contact information in your address book like, say, designation, company, phone number, and so on whenever a contact in your address book updates the information. When such an update happens, you will be notified about it.

While using this app, you don’t have to worry about any data getting lost as it takes a backup of all contact information before syncing it with the address book.

Check our CircleBack for iOS and Android
 

3. CleanUp Duplicates

Cleanup Duplicate Contacts for iOS is a popular contact manager app that helps to de-duplicate contacts efficiently and quickly, thus giving error-free results on different sources like Gmail and iCloud. This app can, in fact, check approximately 5,000 contacts in 45 seconds. The more organized and free from duplicates your address books stays, the more easily you will be able to find information about your leads, thus helping you to contact them quickly. Even though this app autoruns, you will be able to stay in control of the merge levels. Before it begins to scan the information of your contacts, you can choose the merge level to a complete or a partial match. Duplicates are checked for based on this choice after which you can remove the duplicate entries. There is no need to worry about any data loss though as it always creates a backup of your address book before checking for duplicate entries. The premium version of the app is not free. However, you can analyze your address book and get a full preview of how efficiently the app works before you decide on an upgrade.

Check our CleanUp Duplicates for iOS
 

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional social media channel that both iOS and Android users can download onto their smartphones. It is used by B2B organizations extensively for lead generation and also to connect with the leaders of the industry that they operate in. This channel helps to know about the trends that are emerging in the market, find influencers, and to network. By writing on trending topics and by commenting on articles written by others, you will be able to grow your circle, thus finding new leads and also improving on your brand awareness.

Check our LinkedIn for iOS and Android
 

5. Drift Mobile

The Drift Mobile App, available to both iOS and Android device users, is an excellent way to engage with prospects/clients. The ‘My Conversations’ tab can be used to view and manage your conversations. You can use filters here as well if you want to view only certain conversation threads. For example, Closed are the conversations that have been archived while Pending are those that are still in process. You can send a calendar entry, attach images and files, and so on in these conversations. This app acts as an important tool to generate more B2B leads because:

• • With this app, you will be able to schedule demos and solve queries and issues of prospects in real-time. This gives a better customer experience, Thus, it helps to bring down the follow-up time, hence accelerating the sales cycles.
  • By using this app you no longer have to get information about a site visitor by making him fill in a form. You can use the app to access customer profiles. When you click at the top of the conversation you will be able to view the person’s name and all other information. You can even segment the prospects by adding tags and updating their CQL score

Check our Drift for iOS and Android
 

‘Tap’ into the Potential of Your Smartphone

Sales and marketing teams nowadays are depending more and more on various mobile apps to generate new leads. With interactive interfaces and ease of use, these apps are surely helping to grow the sales funnel, to engage with the audience better, and also leading to improved conversions. With the above 5 apps, you are sure to add to your prospect list and thus improve your sales performance.