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:
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- 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:
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- 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.