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There’s hardly any company in the B2B space that does not use business cards. Sales and marketing teams rely on business cards to exchange contact information. Especially after an event or a conference, there are thousands of business cards that get collected. However, stats show that more than 88% of the business cards never make it to the CRM. Reps might find it too cumbersome to type out all information into one single database, and so many a time, business cards get put into drawers and are forgotten about. This is a serious business challenge and there are apps that address this challenge in different ways.

Business cards are a very important source of lead generation. Using a business card scanner app to scan cards allows you to instantly and accurately save contact information on your phone’s address book, save the contacts in a digital format such as a CSV file, or export contacts directly to a CRM or email marketing system. There are many such apps on the market today. Which business card scanning app should you choose? The right approach to choosing the best app is to weigh all the features, benefits, costs and other critical factors such as security, reliability and customer support.
 

The Overall Market Landscape

Some of the popular business card scanner apps available on the apps marketplaces – Apple App Store and Google Play Store – are ScanBizCards, Abbey, Zero Keyboard, CamCard, SanSan, Evernote and a few others. While they all have their positives, there is a reason why ScanBizCards has consistently ranked above most others across different parameters.

• • Unlike ScanBizCards, users have said that Abbyy’s display is not too appealing. Also, its free trial version only allows 15 card scans.
  • CamCard saw a major setback early this year as the app was banned in certain markets. CamCard recognizes 17 languages while ScanBizCards supports over 22 different languages. Also, it doesn’t export the complete flat file of all entries into an Excel spreadsheet. CamCard recently launched it’s Salesforce integration but many of their users have said that it is not too user-friendly and not quite there yet.
  • Zero Keyboard is a nifty little app but very limited in terms of functionality and features. Many of the users have said that they would like for the app to let them create new accounts rather than to add a contact to an existing account. Still, a very user friendly app compared to others.
  • SanSan comed with some good features, but users have felt that the app is too expensive for what it offers and the camera’s auto-detection does not work well when the design and the fonts on the business cards are complicated. On the other hand, for such cards, ScanBizCards has a more reliable OCR to read characters and a human transcription service to ensure if the OCR misses something, the cards can be sent for a manual transcription.

Advantages of Using ScanBizCards

Captures Leads from Emails

ScanBizCards has additional features that make it one of the best business card scanning apps – there’s more to it than just a card scanner. One such feature is its Email Lead Capture capability. With this feature, you can automatically capture new contacts from your incoming emails. Once 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 newly available contacts that you’ve not added to your address book from the emails that you have received in the past 30 days. It will also suggest any contact updates that are available like, updated phone, email, a new designation, a new company and so on.

Blurry Cards Can Be Transcribed Using Human Transcription Service

The ScanBizCards app has a service called Human Transcription. All you need to do is to send the cards to the human transcription team and you will get a 100% accurate transcription. You will be given 100 free transcription credits for every user every year on the Enterprise account. The free account also comes with free credits and you can buy additional credits if you need through in-app purchasing.

• • This will help you when you have a huge backlog of cards at or after an event that you need to clear
  • Sometimes the scans are not perfect and turn out to be blurry. This could be due to poor lighting, shaky hands, or fonts that are not recognizable. In such cases, edits need to be made manually. The human transcription team does this work efficiently and quickly.
  • This team also provides additional information, such as a lead’s LinkedIn URL, the work phone number, and the company address wherever it is available.

Seamless Integration with CRMs and Email Marketing Platforms

ScanBizCards offers deep integration with leading CRMs including Salesforce and with popular email automation systems like Hubspot and Marketo.

• • You can export multiple cards simultaneously to Salesforce with options like batch export.
  • Enterprise users using the Salesforce CRM can assign new contacts to specified owners.
  • Other systems you can export to include SugarCRM, Evernote, and Constant Contact.
  • You can also save the cards to Excel CSV format for importing into third-party CRM systems.
  • You can attach contacts/scans to new or existing customer accounts.
  • With the latest update of ScanBizCards Lite and Premium apps for iOS, you can also connect your ScanBizCards app with Freshsales CRM and export your contacts directly.

Secure and Reliable to Use

ScanBizCards is a highly secure and reliable app to use. We are GDPR and CCPA compliant and we ensure users’ data privacy is a top priority.

ScanBizCards’s Enterprise edition uses the Salesforce cloud to store information and provides a comprehensive and flexible data security model to secure data at different levels and keeps your organization’s data protected from unauthorized access from outside your company and from inappropriate usage by your users (read more in detail here).

Other Advantages of Using ScanBizCards

• • Using the ‘Trade Show Mode’ saves time because just after the card has been scanned, this mode suggests those contacts that can be exported directly to Salesforce.
  • You can get a double-sided business card scan together with a 3D gallery view mode.
  • On the Enterprise Edition for Salesforce, you can allow your users different access controls using the Admin Panel, as you can custom control all the associated apps.

Final Thoughts

ScanBizCards, with all its features such as business card scanning, email lead capture and human transcription functionalities, is one of the most popular business card scanner apps for both Android and iPhones. Around 82,000 companies and close to 3 million app users use this app. It is, in fact, rated as one of the best B2B productivity apps on the Apple App Store and earned over 4.3 start ratings on Google Play Store.

B2B events, conferences, and tradeshows are one of the most important sources of B2B leads. In fact, on average, 60% of the companies’ total marketing budget is allocated to events. However, the 2019 pandemic brought this to a near halt. What can marketers then do to both – generate leads and also keep the relationships engaged in current times? Here are some of our recommendations.

Keep in Touch Virtually

Many B2B organizations have already begun to take their shows, events, and conferences online. This will not only deepen existing relationships but also create opportunities for generating leads from across the globe. After all, prospects can be anywhere and when the events are in the digital world, people who find your product or service relevant can join in – no matter what part of the globe they are in. You can:

• Look for opportunities for a speaker’s slot at a popular conference so that you can promote your organization
• Network more, post questions, share trends, reply to queries on groups, and others on professional sites like LinkedIn so that your existing relationships start to recognize you are an industry leader
• Hold video-conferencing sessions with smaller groups where your face and the faces of the participants can be seen. This builds a bond and shows you’re genuinely interested in your clients. Al
  so, this will give you the chance to address their issues and queries in greater depth
• Host webinars where you discuss topics that are trending and are interesting
• Use chatbots on your website. This will not only help in improving the engagement but you will also be able to gather more data which will help you to analyze buying insights better

Connect with the Prospects From Previous Events

If you have been using the popular business card scanner app, ScanBizCards, you would already have a comprehensive lead database where all information about your clients is stored. You can use this to get in touch with your prospects and clients casually. After all, the pandemic has taught businesses a big lesson – everything is not just about profits and growth; people matter. These interactions should not be about business but more to find out what they are doing if their families are fine, and if your organization could help them in any way.

• You should get in touch with your relationships from time to time in a casual manner.
• You can share pictures of how your employees are working from home, the ways that you are helping your staff during this difficult time, and any online fun events that you might have hosted for your employees. You could even ask your team to write/blog about their experiences. When these are shared on social media, clients and prospects are able to identify with your brand better.

When clients get to talk to you in a casual manner, they would not only bond better with you, but they would also begin to associate your business as one that comes with the human touch. Also, when you hold such conversations, often you will get to know a lot more about the buyer, which will help you when, say, you devise your marketing strategy or plan a new product offering.

Clean Up Records of Your Contacts

You might have a comprehensive database of contacts. However, there may be leads or your sleeping clients who you haven’t touched base with for a long time. Don’t just forget about them. Try and re-establish contact with them. They may be interested in your offering now more than ever (if your offering is even more relevant in the current times). Always make sure to keep your leads database updated in case some of the contact information has changed. For example, their designation, or even where they work. Either way, you will get their latest information which you should update in your records accordingly.

CircleBack is a great free app that lets you do that very accurately and you can keep your contact records updated both on your iOS and on your Android phones.

If you find that there is important data that is unavailable, you can conduct survey campaigns to collect such information.

Encourage Your Team To Be Your Brand Advocates

You should encourage everyone to be brand advocates for your product/service. Not just your sales and marketing teams, but other teams such as tech, IT, and human resources can also share your company’s social media posts, blogs, etc. in their network to maximize outreach and spread the word about how you are working as a brand with your customers and employees.

Focus on Value and Not on Price

If you want to build on your B2B relationship, then you should focus on what value-added services you are offering rather than on the price. This should get reflected in your marketing message and in the way you position your product/service. For instance, focus on why your offering would solve the client’s challenges. Added to this:

• Never try to hard-sell a new offering or even an existing one to your clients
• If your clients have a low response to your customer survey emails or are giving you negative feedback about your product or brand or a certain feature, not addressing their concern could mean that you might lose the client and goodwill in the market. Get in touch with such clients and address their pain points, together with telling why your product would be of value to them and what you can do to overcome limitations.

Concluding Thoughts

A lot of businesses have continued to grow despite the pandemic because they have stayed focused on quality and relevance. However, many businesses have become irrelevant and perished. Tactics that worked in the past might not work in current times. So, focus on only those segments that come with the best potential for conversion. More importantly, now is when you should focus on your existing clientele even more and help them face the current challenges. Show them that your brand comes with a soul. Your business might be growing slowly now, but keep your focus on your B2B relationships. After all, customer retention is what will fuel your organization’s growth engine.

If you’re in B2B sales and marketing, you already know the value of contacts and relationships. Companies are constantly trying to retain existing customers and get more clients. An updated and accurate B2B contact list is the most essential element in enabling them to do that.

Companies find new leads and contacts from many sources such as business cards, emails, website landing pages and social media. Data from such diverse sources can add up hundreds of thousands of contacts in the CRM each year. Individuals, especially on client facing teams, can also have several hundreds or thousands of contacts stored in their phone’s address books or the company databases assigned to them. Over time, data can become disorganized, outdated, and redundant in the form of duplicates and so on. This can potentially cost companies millions of dollars in terms of lost sales opportunities.

An up-to-date contact list makes the task of following up and contacting prospects and clients more efficient. Hence, the need to keep the database clean and organized is paramount. In this blog, we will discuss how, using five simple hacks, you can make the cleaning up process easier for yourself.
 

1.  Capture Every Lead

Leads are generated in different ways – from business cards, emails, inbound traffic, phone conversations and more. Always make it a point to capture each and every lead and store the information in your database. Having all contacts in one centralized database will help you to follow-up with leads promptly, segment them for accurate targeting, design customized follow-up emails for optimal messaging, score the leads for better forecasting and so on.

• • Thousands of business cards are collected at meetings and events such as conferences and tradeshows. More often than not, are not followed up with as they do not get uploaded in the CRM timely. This is where a business card scanner app like ScanBIzCards comes in handy. It lets you scan business cards and save the contact information on or into your phone’s address book or export in the CRM like Salesforce directly or through a CSV file, or in the email marketing system such as Hubspt, Marketo and more.
  • New leads can be generated through emails. For instance, by using the Email Capture feature of the ScanBizCards app, you can discover new leads automatically. Once you connect your mailbox account with the app, it will suggest new available contacts from all your incoming emails in the past 30 days. As more emails come in, it will continue to discover additional new contacts. Added to this, it also suggests any updates to the existing information of a contact that might already be there in your database.
  • After you have had a phone conversation with a lead, it is likely that you would have gotten additional information about the lead like their email ID, alternate number or direct dial or any other info. Instead of letting this information stay in some notepad where you might have jotted it down, always make sure to add it to the centralized database so that all details stay in one place.

2. Regularly Check for Updates

Contact information of prospects can change. For instance, their designation, the office location, their phone number, and others. Having dated information means you will be unable to reach out to the prospects or follow up with them. Hence, it is of utmost importance that you regularly check for updates, thus always keeping your B2B contacts up to date.

CircleBack is one such app that can help you to keep your contacts updated and free from any duplicate entries. It is a professional address book manager for both iOS and Android phones. You can sync your mailboxes like Office 365, and Outlook.com with this app. Once done, this app will auto-update any information when contacts in your address book edit their information. The best part is it’s free to use.
 

3. Keep Your Contact Database Free from Duplicate Entries

It’s very common for the address book to have several duplicate contacts or entries that are redundant. This makes it difficult to get the contact details easily and quickly. A cleaned up list, on the other hand, means accurately and efficiently generating qualified leads with far lesser data entry. Removal of duplicate entries is not a difficult task.

• • If your contacts are all in Google’s address book, you can merge them by clicking Duplicates. You will then be given those contacts that Google feels are duplicates. You can use the Merge button to combine each of the pairs into one contact.
  • You can also use a mobile app to do this directly on your phone. CleanUp Duplicates is one of the best productivity apps that helps to deduplicate the address book. Once done, you can then import all the data into your CRM. With this app you can:
    • Quickly check for duplicates. It can check 5,000 contacts in only 45 seconds
    • Choose your merge level
    • Prevent any data loss as it always syncs data only after taking a back up

4. Always Backup Contacts in the CRM

Always keep your contacts backed up in the CRM. This is because a lot of information can be generated from social media channels in the form of signals, such as funding, new hiring, new product launches and so on. There are many tools and resources to capture such updates (funding rounds, firmographics, technogra[hics and so on).. All such information should be recorded in the CRM software. For example, if you do a contact search on LinkedIn you should add all the contacts and their associated information in your CRM. When all the contact information is up to date in your CRM you will be able to analyze customers and prospects better and draw greater insights about them. For instance:

• • What your opportunity pipeline is
  • Which one of your prospects could convert to become a client in the current quarter
  • What your marketing strategy should be and so on

5. Keep your Subscribers List Updated and Clean

You should keep your list of subscribers updated and clean. You can do this by:

• • Including email, preferences and opt-in/out option in the email footer
  • Inviting your audience asking them to subscribe to receive regular emails and newsletters from you. This helps because only the real owner of an email will be able to click on the link, thus reducing spam complaints. By doing this, you will also avoid adding incorrectly typed email addresses to your list
  • Keeping in regular touch with the subscribers of your newsletters and marketing campaign emails. The rule of thumb is to send them an email once every four to six weeks. However, not all want to hear all the time. So, you should create groups based on interest levels and the frequency of your emails should be designed accordingly
  • Allowing them to unsubscribe easily. The emails should have a button, which on clicking, they can unsubscribe from receiving emails from you.

Summary

Simply building up a large B2B contact list in your database is not enough. Yes, having a comprehensive list will help you to generate leads. However, with time, contacts become obsolete and irrelevant. So, if you want to be highly productive and maximize your chances of conversions, always keep your contact database up to date. With these tips this work is sure to become quicker and simpler for you.

Business cards are no longer physical data files. With the right software tools, contact data on paper business cards can easily be moved to the cloud for you to access any time, anywhere digitally.

If you follow the right practices when collecting business cards and saving your data, you can turn this data into millions of dollars worth of sales opportunities.

So what are these best practices that you should keep in mind when collecting business cards? Read on to know more.
 

1. Create Groups and Segment Your Business Card Leads

When you are going into a B2B event or a meeting where you know you will be collecting numerous business cards, define different categories where you would put a particular prospect when collecting their business card, that is, their contact information. This is basically prospecting or segmenting your ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles). This way, you would not be collecting and storing any and every card without an attribution. You will be scoring your leads based on the parameters you outline for segmenting them before you follow up with them. Your criteria can be:

• • Leads that meet in your ICPs and you can add to your top of sales funnel right away.
  • Leads that are not quite at the buying stage or are more in the consideration stage.
  • Potential partners or referral networks for your brand/product offering e.g., influencers, resellers and so on.
  • Vendors who you might want to purchase a product/service from and so on.

This will also help you at a later stage when you are sending follow up emails to all those you have exchanged business cards with. For example, you can prioritize follow ups with your top of the funnel leads.
 

2. Always Save the Leads Digitally

Many sales teams make the mistake of collecting business cards and putting them away in a fishbowl at their booth, or in their pockets or folders that they carry with them at vents or meetings. Often, these business cards are forgotten or lost and never make it to the CRM for timely follow ups.

Business cards are an important source of lead generation – companies and sales people organize and attend events and meetings to get these leads. Hence, the moment you get a business card, the information should get added to your centralized database such as a CRM or email marketing platform.

The best way to do this is to install a business card scanner app on your smartphone like ScanBizCards. It’s free, easy to use, and stays in your pocket, unlike physical card readers that are clunky and can cost quite a bit.

This app scans business cards so you save the contacts on your phone’s address book and upload them into your company’s centralized database. You can add tags and notes specific to the leads on the database. This will help you when you are sending the follow up emails or make a call.

 

3. Capture all Information

Capture Information From Both Sides

Often a business card has information printed on both the front and the back. While capturing information using a business card scanner, one does tend to forget about the latter. Always remember to flip the card to check if any relevant information is written there.

Don’t Let Language Be a Barrier

Often at international events you’ll come across business cards in different languages. Don’t discard such cards or lose your leads in translation! This is where a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards comes handy as it can scan cards in over 20 languages. Also, when you use this app, if you find that the scan of the card to be blurry – you can get it manually transcribed.
 

4. Respond Promptly

When you have all the data saved accurately and available readily, you can send a well-drafted, personalized follow up email after the event. In fact, you should drop a line soon after you have collected the business card – a greeting note – to the person you’ve just saved on your address book contacts. It shows your sincerity and genuine interest in taking the discussion forward. However, keep this mail short and just say that it was a nice meeting and you look forward to discussing more in the near future. You could add your LinkedIn profile in your signature which will help you to connect with the prospect on the professional social media site. If the lead is genuinely interested in your offering, the connection will occur soon.
 

5. Present Business Cards Professionally

Presenting your business card professionally goes a long way in creating a positive impact.

• • Know where you have kept your card box so that you don’t have to rummage through a pile. Also, avoid keeping cards in your wallet as they might get creased there.
  • When someone hands you a business card, don’t scribble anything on it. Keep an organizer with you where you can write down all notes. Similarly, when you hand over your card to a prospect, don’t write anything on it unless the person specifically asks you to write on the card.
  • Give a card that is clean and not crumpled in any way.
  • Make sure that your card has all your contact information updated and printed neatly and not one where your old information has been crossed off and the new one been handwritten beside it.

When someone hands you their business card:

• • Always try to say something positive about it. It could be about the company logo or the design.
  • Put the card away in a card holder and not just stuff it into your trouser pocket. That looks very unprofessional. Soon afterward, scan it and save it on your phone’s address book.

Concluding

You may be impeccably dressed, have a firm handshake, and know all about your company and the product, but if you fail at the best practices of exchanging business cards, then your interaction will not necessarily be an impactful one. Little things can make or break your chances of converting a lead into a new account. So follow these tips, and you are sure to win.

People in the B2B space with customer facing roles gather hundreds of business cards every year. In any small to mid-sized organization, if you add up all the business cards collected by sales reps across different territories each year, the number can easily go up to a thousand or more. For enterprise businesses, the number could run into a few thousand. Too often, business cards accumulate into a pile. Keying in contact information from paper cards into an Excel sheet or CRM system is a tedious, and a boring task. It’s also prone to errors. However, this should still get done. Otherwise what’s the point in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on events and meetings if you don’t capture the leads?

Business cards are not simply about professionally exchanging contact information, but they are a source of new leads and help to grow the contact database. If you’ve collected your business card leads and immediately saved them on a digital file, such as your phone’s address book or a CSV/Excel file, they can be added to an email marketing database, followed-up with in a timely manner, nurtured with new product offerings and promo offers and so on. You can potentially convert them into new clients faster.

So how can paper business cards act as your lead generation engine? Read on!
 

Create a Centralized Leads Database by Saving Your Business Cards Digitally

Business card scanning apps like ScanBizCards help you to scan your cards with the click of a button. All the contact information can be saved on your address book and directly uploaded into a centralized database such as a CRM or email marketing system. With all data in one place, it becomes easy for teams to get in touch with prospects, thereby identifying qualified leads more quickly.

With ScanBizCards, a popular business card scanner app, you can use your phone’s camera to scan physical cards. The information is then saved into your phone’s address book or exported to popular CRMs like Salesforce, Constant Contact and more or email marketing systems like Hubspot, Marketo and others. Enterprise users using Salesforce can do many org level things like assign new contacts or leads to specified owners and much more – allowing teams/reps to follow-up with new leads more easily. As the app can scan in 20 different international languages, no data from any business card ever goes to waste, even when you’re attending international events.
 

Know About Your Leads and their Brand

You’ll find business cards that can describe a person or the brand they represent. As you collect business cards, the style, font and quality of business cards the brand uses is a great way to analyze whether the contact fits the targeted buyer persona that you have created for your product offering. If these match, you would know that the likelihood of them being interested in your product/service is going to be higher. It would then make sense to prioritize and treat this as a qualified lead and follow up promptly.
 

Connect With Your Prospects Through Social Media

A lot of people and companies now put their social media accounts information on their business cards in addition to their phone numbers and email address. Getting access to these means:

• • You have more ways of reaching the contact and following them to learn about them when direct emails and phone calls do not elicit responses.
  • If you’ve connected with them, try to engage them. If they like or share your product / brand’s stories on social media, it’ll spread in their network. They can be an influencer for your product/service.
  • You would get access to people in the contact’s network – thus increasing your pool of new leads with similar interests.

Also, it is worthwhile to have the Facebook page and the Twitter handle of your organization mentioned on your business card as well – especially those in the SaaS / tech industry. This is because, often, nowadays, people connect and engage in a more casual, yet trustworthy way using social media rather than through the more traditional means of emails and calls.
 

Use ScanBizCards to Find Leads from Business Cards In New Ways

Transcribe Cards to Generate Additional Information

The ScanBizCards app has the Human Transcription feature using which you can get business cards manually transcribed by the transcription team. This helps save leads fast and with 100% accuracy as you can:

• • Transcribe stacks of cards that you may have gathered from events and haven’t had the time to upload into your database
  • Transcribe business card scans that are not easy to understand. After all, OCR is never perfect and shaky hands or poor lighting or hard to read fonts can make the scan tough to convert to text

Most importantly, this service helps to find additional contact information as the transcription team will give additional information about contacts such as their LinkedIn URL, work phone, business email, and company address wherever it’s available. So if you don’t have luck getting a response from email, you would have other means to follow up with this new lead.
 

Find New Leads in Email Signature Blocks

Business cards contain main contact details, usually an email ID. Teams use this email address to start following-up with the leads. However, often these email threads have new emails hidden in them (e.g., other people in CC). These new leads should be captured. ScanBizCards has an Email Capture feature where you can connect your mailbox account for email lead capture. Once connected, the app will give you suggestions when any new contacts from your emails or email chains appear. This will enhance your database and give you new leads to nurture.
 

Create New Sales Opportunities From Business Cards

Business cards are a storehouse of information. If you can productively and effectively use this information to generate qualified leads, many of which can be turned into paying clients. Key is proper follow-ups and nurturing. If you have several ways to capture and contact prospects, that becomes easier.

So follow our tips and tell us if you have used any other way to generate leads from your stack of business cards.

Generating qualified leads or MQLs is the first step to increasing the number of sales opportunities or SQLs / SALs, and thus, the sales revenue for your organization. ScanBizCards is made for marketing and sales teams to help them do just that.

Available in three versions – free, premium, and enterprise managed package for Salesforce – the ScanBizCards app is one of the best business card scanning apps on the market today. It helps you easily and accurately capture and export business card and mailbox leads.

Here are four ways you can do it.

1. Scan Business Cards and Export to CRM

ScanBizCards is one of the most popular business cards reader apps on the market today. You can easily scan your physical business cards – which still remains one of the most popular ways of exchanging contacts at B2B events and meetings. The app offers unlimited business card scans. You can easily snap photos of business cards with your smartphone. The contact information from cards is scanned by the app using OCR technology. The contacts can be saved on the phone’s address book or exported to a centralized database system such a CRM or email marketing system (Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo and many others).

• • It is able to scan cards in over 20 different international languages including German, French, Italian, and Greek.
  • Enterprise users using Salesforce can assign new contacts or leads to specified owners and much more. This is useful because it helps you to segment the contacts after which you can send personalized emails to them.

Export Contacts to CRMs on ScanBizCards from ScanBizCards on Vimeo.
 

2. Find New Leads in Email Signature Blocks

ScanBizCards has an Email Capture feature that allows you to capture potential new leads from your incoming emails. By setting up email signature capture, you can connect your Microsoft Exchange or Google business account to your ScanBizCards app. Once your mailbox account is connected with the app, ScanBizCards will suggest new available contacts from your incoming emails in the past 30 days. Once set up, the app continues to discover additional new contacts that are available from new incoming emails of people that aren’t added to your address book contacts. It also suggests any new contact updates that are available such as updated job title, number, company and so on wherever it’s available.

Email Signature Capture on ScanBizCards from ScanBizCards on Vimeo.

 

3. Find Additional Contact Info With Human Transcription Service

The ScanBizCards app has an in-app feature called Human Transcription service. This feature is ideal when you are scanning multiple cards at an event or clearing your backlog of cards. You can badge scan multiple cards and send it to the ScanBizCards human transcription team for a 100% accurate transcription.

• • We know OCR is never perfect. Poor lighting, shaky hands, different fonts – sometimes business card scans are blurry and you need to manually make some edits before saving the contact. Such cards can be sent to be transcribed manually and the contact data is uploaded to your CRM or account.
  • Manual transcription saves a lot of time when you are at an event and have a lot of cards to scan but little time or have a backlog of cards the data of which need to be uploaded quickly onto the system.

Other than transcribing scanned cards, the human transcription team also provides additional information, such as the contact’s LinkedIn URL, work phone, business email, and company address wherever it’s available.

 

4. Scan Conference Badges

Integrated with Salesforce CRM the ScanBIzCards app not only helps to scan business cards but it scans conference badges as well.

The ScanBizCards app doubles as a conference badge scanner. The best part is there is no QR code integration required with the back-end systems of event organizers. This is most useful at tradeshows and events where people visiting your booth have some of their contact information on their conference badges – such as name and company, but critical info such as email, phone and so on is missing. All your booth visitors are potential leads and losing out on such valuable data would mean giving up on potential clients. Thus, a quick scan of the badges means that no information gets lost. Scanned badges are sent to the ScanBizCards transcription team. Once done, all contact data like email ID, phone number, address of the organization, and others get uploaded to the database system.

Event Badge Scanning on ScanBizCards from ScanBizCards on Vimeo.
 

Summing up

ScanBizCards which supports third-party services such as Evernote, and is available both for iPhone and Android users, is indeed one of the best business card scanners today. Try it and you will know how quickly you can scan your physical cards and get contacts from emails to generate new qualified leads.

The Ministry of Information & Technology in India has just banned several apps in India including CamCard – Business Card Reader, CamCard Business, CamCard for Salesforce, and CamOCR.

We only want to talk about this news because some of these apps (CamCard – Business Card Reader and CamCard for Salesforce) compete in the same marketplace as ScanBizCards.

For many years, ScanBizcards has retained one of the top spots in the business card scanner category. ScanBizCards has consistently ranked as one of the top 10 productivity apps on Apple iTunes, and has an average of 4.5 rating on Google Play Store.

It has consistently remained the top featured app on Salesforce Appexchange.

Now, if you Google search “scanbizcards alternatives”, CamCard is usually seen in the top results. But now with the app banned in India, what does it mean for users – not just in India but around the world? Is CamCard really the best alternative to ScanBizCards?

Before we talk about security, we want to talk about the user experience itself. Here’s a very recent email we got from a prospect.

 

So how does ScanBizCards for Salesforce manage its users’ privacy and security?

We are GDPR and CCPA compliant and we ensure users’ data privacy is a top priority. Our users’ data is completely secure when using ScanBizCards.

ScanBizCards uses the Salesforce cloud to store information. Salesforce provides a comprehensive and flexible data security model to secure data at different levels. So, your data is always secure and protected from unauthorized access from outside your company and from inappropriate usage by your users.

The ScanBizCards managed package for enterprise users is strictly compliant with data protection and privacy regulations required in collecting and processing its customers’ data. ScanBizCards lets its enterprise users remain in full control of their data by providing the capability to manage how the data from scanned cards is saved on the ScanBizCards mobile app (read more in detail here).
 

The choice is simple!

So if you want a secure, robust and user friendly way to maximize lead generation from business cards and email exchanges, you have an easy choice to make!

BONUS: We’re helping the B2B sales and marketing community during the current times. We’re offering 3 months free on our annual license. Get a demo or set up your trial, if you and your team like it, sign up and get 3 months free on your annual subscription.

Get full-featured 14-day free trial, no credit card required: https://www.scanbizcards.com/free-14-day-trial/

CRM software can reduce the time taken to perform several manual tasks – leading to better sales performance, improved decision making, faster sales lifecycles, and of course, more deals and revenue.

Getting your leads in the CRM timely and accurately is most critical to get the right ROI from your CRM. The more streamlined your process to feed leads in the CRM is, the more efficient your pipeline management will be.

In this blog, we’ve shared tips on how you can add more qualified leads in your CRM, faster.
 

Getting More Leads in Your CRM

Capture Leads from Business Cards

Events and shows will provide you with a lot of business cards which can be potential leads. However, more than 80 percent of these business cards are never followed up with as they never get uploaded to the CRM. A business card scanner app like ScanBizCards helps to scan contacts from business cards into the CRM system directly or through a CSV file. By using this app on your smartphone, uploading contacts is faster and 100% accurate. Simply scan and save your contacts on your address book or export to your CRM or email marketing system (Salesforce, ConstantContact, Hubspot and others). Having all of your leads and contact details in one centralized database will help you to:

• • Follow up quickly
  • Score the leads
  • Design customised emails based on the segmentation
  • Add leads to a workflow or automated cadence
  • Schedule reminders for follow up emails and so on

One of our clients using SalesIntel RevDriver ScanBizCard with Salesforce CRM saw a 5 fold increase in event lead capture with over 1200 leads captured just in six months of adopting ScanBizCards.

Remove Duplicate Leads

The address book of a sales rep will typically have thousands of contacts and there are often many entries that are duplicate and redundant. Using an app like CleanUp Duplicates, one of the best productivity apps for deduplicating address book contacts, will help you to remove duplicates fast. This app, for instance, is able to check 5,000 contacts in 45 seconds! Added to this, you can choose your merge level and you don’t ever lose any data as it always takes a back up before data syncing begins. Once all the contact data has been deduplicated you can import it into your CRM. Having a cleaned up list will help you to follow up accurately and faster – helping to generate qualified leads with far less data entry. You can get the premium version of this app at a nominal cost of $0.99.

Keep Contacts Organized

An app like CircleBack, which is a professional address book manager for both iOS and Android phones will help to keep the contacts in your address book both up-to-date and free from duplicate entries. For instance, you can easily sync your mailboxes like Office 365, and Outlook.com with this app. Also, when a contact in your address book edits their information like the phone number, company, title, email, location, and others, this app will auto update the new information. When contact information stays organized, it is easy to identify qualified leads with greater efficiency.

Integrate Your CRM to Generate Potential Leads

Integrate With Social Media

High quality leads can be generated from social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and others. Social platforms give you the opportunity to post surveys. It will also help you find out information like:

• • The preferences, spending habits, tastes, and other habits of the audience
  • What your audience is saying about your brand and how your competition is attracting prospects
  • What kind of content is trending and is most relevant to your prospects’ likes and dislikes

All the information can be recorded into a CRM software. For example, by using the appropriate CRM integrations with social channels, you will be able to pull perspective leads from social media interactions into your database. Say, if you login to LinkedIn, do a contact search and then pull all the generated contacts into your CRM, together with the name of their company, their designation, their location, then you would have generated a lot of new leads quickly and efficiently. From here, you can analyse feedback, issues, and others. This will help you to create content and design campaigns that will resonate better with your audience, thus leading to lead generation.

Integrate With Email Contacts

If you have a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards on your smartphone you will be able to easily find, verify, and import all email addresses into your CRM. Finding such emails means you would have generated a large number of new leads who can become protective clients.

Integrate With the Landing Page

Design engaging landing pages and web forms. Use them to capture contact details of prospects like their email, telephone number, location, and others. All this information can then be automatically transferred into your CRM for nurturing.

To create a landing page that will help you to generate leads, not only do you have to make the page design impactful, you have to pay attention to the form – the most important aspect of this page. For this:

• • Ask for information that is really required
  • Use buttons and checkboxes instead of making the visitors fill lengthy forms
  • Offer value in exchange of filling out the form, like a free e-book that they can download
  • The mobile view of your form should be optimized

Capture Leads With Google Chrome Extensions

Google chrome extensions such as SalesIntel RevDriver or Lusha can help you find B2B contacts and export to Salesforce. You can install the chrome extension on your browser and every website or LinkedIn page you visit can be your source for new leads.
 

Use CRM Data for Better Customer Analysis

Once all the contact information is in one place, you will be able to generate more customer insights.

• • You will be able to analyze which contacts could actually be classified as a potential client, when is the best time to contact them and which are the best mediums to use to reach out to them.
  • With a CRM, you can use the segmentation feature to find out what your opportunity pipeline really looks like and accordingly design your marketing campaign.
  • Track the leads generated to see where each is in the sales funnel together with the addition of notes like, say, their queries.
  • Use the CRM to generate reports which can be used to analyze which leads may be fast-tracked in the sales process
  • Some CRMs have the feature of an auto dialler. With this, you can select a number of contacts and the dialler will auto call them in sequence, thus increasing the number of leads who can be called in a shorter period of time

Summing up

There are popular CRMs like Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqoa, Nimble and many others that offer great functionality like lead scoring, automation, attribution and much more. But what you get from your CRM depends on what you feed into it. Use some of the above tips to save accurate and quality leads in your CRM and get the most out of your CRM investment.

Do you use any of the apps, CRMs or methods we just described? Let us know in the comments section!

It’s fair to say that the smartphone is pretty much our lifeline now. If you’re part of a sales or marketing team, the smartphone is one of the most powerful tools you have.

We use our smartphones to schedule meetings, talk to prospects, set reminders, send emails on the go, to make calls, of course, and do plenty of other jobs – the list is quite a long one. What you can do with your smartphone depends on how you set it up. With the right mobile marketing tactics, and the right apps installed on it, sales and marketing teams can truly make the smartphone an important lead generation tool. Want to know how? Read on.
 

How marketing teams can leverage the smartphone

Optimizing your landing pages for mobile lead capture

With users increasingly using mobiles for browsing, it’s essential to build your landing pages for a great mobile experience. By ensuring your website pages are responsive and optimized for mobile devices, you’ll be able to generate more qualified leads, faster. Simple designs work best when it comes to designing pages for mobiles.

• • When you have a simple design and clear CTAs, the pages load easily on mobile devices. Quick loading ensured a lower bounce rate.
  • Avoid designs that complicate the touch functionality as users with chubby or unstable hands might find your site a tad tough to use. Optimize your pages for ease of use.
  • Depending how you get user consent, you can use location data from GPS and header information to auto-fill lead information as much as is possible.

Generating leads using pay-per-call and SMS marketing

There are two ways that are very unique to a phone through which leads can be captured quickly.

• • Using pay-per-call can help you to generate leads automatically. This can be done by forwarding qualified calls to the IVR or to an inbound sales team. Setting up a pay-per-call campaign is not very difficult as there are many vendors who provide this service. Make sure your phone number on the website and Google business listing is clickable.
  • SMS marketing campaigns are another great way to generate mobile-driven leads. While not all of your prospects will fill in an online form right away, you can do regular follow-ups directly.

Building a native app for quicker access to customer information

A native app is installed directly on the smartphone and, based on the nature of the app, it can even work without any internet connectivity. Native apps are built for iOS and Android phones and hence deliver a great experience to users across different operating systems. The advantage with native apps is that these apps can extract a lot of information about your prospects – like the email ID and phone number and more – directly into the app. This creates key data streams for companies and brings down the time that a user would otherwise take to fill in and submit a form.

Optimizing for local search

Marketers are increasingly focused on capturing buyer internet through micro-moments. A prospect can have a sudden need for information or a service while driving, in a meeting, or simply walking on the road! With thorough preparedness, a company can turn these miscor moments into a conversion, quick revenue, or at least, capture new data points leading to greater awareness about the ideal client profile. Lead generation today is thus not only about who the prospective buyers are, but also knowing where they are, and thus positioning your brand in those locations and searches.

Mobile phones, with the help of RFID and app technology, help organizations to connect with potential clients within a particular radius of their location.

Using Clear and Simple Calls-to-Action to get more inbound leads

, always think about the end user experience and how your users will see your CTAs appearing on different mobile devices such as iPhones, Android phones, iPads and tablets. Find the right balance between visually appealing and distinct CTAs so the content is not too distracting on the small mobile screen. Make sure the text or image of your CTA is clear, concise and easily readable.

Responding to prospects’ inquiries on the go

Even if your clients are in different parts of the world and in different time zones, when they have a query, they expect a quick TAT. Hence, you need to be present round the clock for them. This is where a smartphone acts as a powerful tool because it will help you to respond to their inquiries or issues without actually having to sit in office to take calls or reply to emails etc. With increased customer satisfaction, you will thus be building on your brand’s equity.and speeding up the sales cycle.

Another popular channel where marketers interact with prospects is social media. Having popular social media apps on your smartphone, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, will be of great help to you – you can engage with the audience on the go. The more you engage and keep in touch, the more your prospects will remember your brand – thus helping in generating new qualified leads.
 

How sales teams can leverage the smartphone

Using lead capture apps to get more leads

Events, shows, conferences, meetings – all lead to collection of hundreds of business cards. You’d be surprised that more than 80 percent of these business cards gather dust in drawers and are forgotten and are never followed up with because they never make it to the CRM. With a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards on your smartphone, all of your contact information from business cards is easily saved. The app scans the contact information which is then saved on your address book or exported to a CRM or email marketing system.

Having the contact details of all leads in one place will help you because now making calls and sending emails becomes quicker, you will know where each lead is in the sales funnel, and also be able to add notes about each lead which can come to use at a later date. With this app you will also be able to capture contacts from your incoming emails which can be exported to popular CRMs such as Salesforce, Hubspot, and many more.

Removing duplicate contacts and cleaning up your address book

A sales rep will have thousands of contacts on the address book. Often, a lot of these contacts have duplicate entries. It is an extremely time-consuming task to check for duplicates in an address book. Using apps such as the CleanUp Duplicates app you can easily deduplicate contacts without any errors. With the ability to check around 5,000 contacts in 45 seconds, it is indeed one of the best productivity apps for the iPhone and iPad. A must-have app for sales teams.

• • You can choose the merge level on the app – right from a complete matching to a variety of partial matching.
  • Once the app checks for duplicates you can remove them from your address book.
  • Since the app creates a backup of your address book before cleaning, you can rest assured that no date will get lost.

The premium version of the app comes at a nominal cost of $0.99. You can analyze your address book and get a full preview of duplicates for free before you decide to upgrade.

Keeping your contact information organized

Keeping your address book both up-to-date and free from duplicate entries will help to keep all your contact information organized. Using a professional address book manager, such as the CircleBack app for iOS and Android phones will help you to do this effortlessly. With this app you can also capture contacts from email signatures.

• • You can connect various mailboxes like Office 365, Outlook.com on the app.
  • Before it begins to sync the address book, it takes a backup of all contacts. Hence, no data is lost while using this app.
  • When a contact in your address book makes a change to their contact info (such as job title, company, location, email or phone) the app updates you automatically that a new contact update is available.

Summing up

Sales is no longer about sitting inside offices and talking to leads for hours at a stretch, a smartphone is now the tool that helps to generate leads and also to make sales. After all, sales is so much about interpersonal relationships. Use your smartphone as a powerful sales tool, and accomplish more.

We’re now in the second half of 2020. The pandemic has certainly resulted in changes in the behavior of customers, and impacted most businesses in some way or the other in terms of sales, revenues, human resources and more. It has made companies think about what they can do to deal with uncertainties in their business and the ecosystem surrounding them. For instance, marketers have been making changes to their marketing budgets and re-evaluating their approaches and channels through which they reach out to their audience — whether in B2B or B2C scenarios.

The way the world is today is different, and there is no particular “the best way” to deal with the new normal. The need of the hour is to use insights and data to develop new, cost-effective, and creative strategies that take into consideration the new norms of changed spending habits, social distancing, working from home and so on.

So, what are the lessons for sales and marketing teams and how can they learn from 2020 so far to prepare themselves to grow their business and stay competitive? Read on, as we share our perspective.
 

1. Quickly Develop New Marketing Strategies, and Products / Services to Support Them

The greatest lesson to be learned is to be both reactive and proactive.

• • As customers’ behavior keeps evolving, marketers must develop new strategies that meet the customers’ expectations.
  • Trends can be hard to predict and you won’t know it all until you’re right in the middle of it. Marketers need to be quick to identify emerging trends, detect irregularities, and also know when a particular trend is on the decline.
  • As their companies’ brand representatives, marketers must be quick to realize that a certain change needs to be brought in, and must act quickly – agility is the need of the hour.

SalesIntel, a B2B contact data intelligence company quickly adapted to the changes in the market and came up with a solution that truly solves its clients’ challenge in current times. The company now offers remote work location data to meet the current need of the market.

We at ScanBizCards are helping our clients with new ways to generate B2B leads, especially because of the impact the pandemic has had on the B2B events industry, limiting opportunities for lead generation from marketing events. We have optimized features such as Email Signature Capture and Human Transcription – allowing our users to discover new leads from their email threads, and clear their backlogs of business cards leads though bulk scan and export, keeping the CRM updated. We get great feedback from our users on how they’re able to manage their leads and close more deals.

This is the time when you should focus on developing your brand image for the long run – right from your email campaigns through which you target your prospects, to analyzing your content and your advertising, to how you will better engage those who visit your website.

• • With limited opportunities for physical networking, meetings, events and so on, sales and marketing teams are increasingly relying on digital channels such as email marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, and digital advertising. Companies now allocate more of their marketing spend on the digital channels.
  • Whether it’s B2B or B2C markets, with more time at hand while staying at home, your prospects are wanting to discover new and exciting brands. Hence, positioning yourself ahead of competition and creating a distinct value proposition is now all the more important to stay relevant. This might mean making changes in your offerings, pricing, and so on. It is also a great time to do sustainable branding. For instance, Starbucks in the USA has been serving free coffee to front-line COVID responders. Salesforce has been helping businesses throughout the pandemic with productivity solutions tailored to meet the current needs of businesses.

 

2. Build the Right Story to Tell

At a time like this, when you can reach out to them with positivity and reassurance, if you choose to remain silent or not alter the message that you are communicating to the audience, then you will surely be losing out on sales. This is when you need to be attentive to the customers’ needs and be sensitive to their demands. The story that you thus tell them needs to be entertaining, truthful and yet an emotional one.

• • Instead of trying to hard sell with your message, try the soft sell approach as the former can get you labelled as aggressive. Also, you should focus on the right ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) rather than trying to sell your product to companies or individuals who currently don’t fit the criteria. A buyer is one who has the need, buying intent, and the budget for what you offer and is actively searching for that product.
  • If you are taking steps to protect the health of your employees, then add that to your marketing message. Let customers know that you care for the well being of everyone.
  • Be flexible with your customers. For instance, don’t penalize them in case of delayed payments, offer attractive deals and refunds, and others. This will give out the message that you are here to reassure them, thus helping to build a stronger sales funnel and better brand value.

In an exceptional situation such as this, brands that make customers feel assured and safe do well and stay relevant in the minds of the consumers.
 

3. Think Creatively — More Than Ever Now

Many businesses experienced a slow down during the pandemic. If you have too, now is when you need to experiment with new tools, new ways of advertising, and new types of content. These don’t need to be expensive but it might mean that you will have to train your staff into thinking differently. For example:

• • A study done by GlobalWebIndex revealed people are listening to more podcasts.
  • Now that events and shows are few, webinars have been steadily gaining popularity.
  • You should also reach out to your customers informally. With gatherings and events still not happening, many are starving for engagement and connection. So, the more you reach out to your prospects, the more you will be building on a relationship with them in the long run. For example, the Zoom video conferencing app has become quite popular lately.

4. Keep Your CRM and Contact Database Updated

You are probably still unable to meet all prospects during this pandemic. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t keep in touch with them. Have a centralized database where the contact details of all your prospects are stored. This will help you to know who needs to be reached out to, where each is in the sales funnel, which mode of communication does each prefer, and others. For example:

• • Make sure all your leads are correct and up-to-date. Use software tools such as CircleBack, Salesforce, ScanBizCards, Hubspot and others to stay on top of your leads.
  • Make sure you follow CRM best practices such as data quality, lead scoring, contact data deduplication and so on.

5. Collaborate with Others

You may be a big brand, but that does not mean that you are infallible. You may also be a small brand, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot be relevant and deliver value. Things have changed and most businesses are looking at ways to adapt to the new normal. One such way is to develop a collaborative approach. This could involve collaborations with other brands, PR companies, e-commerce platforms, your existing clients, and others. For example, CRM companies are doing joint webinars with other complimentary service and product companies in the ecosystem such as agencies, digital advertising platforms, and so on.
 

Summarizing

The impact of COVID-19 is not here to stay forever – business will resume, and things will get back to normal. However, it may still take time for things to be just the way they were before 2020. So, don’t get impatient if conversions are not happening quickly. Mental toughness is what the current situation demands. Hence, stay optimistic and keep following the right methods to build on your brand equity.