How to Improve Sales Follow-ups from Business Card Leads

Arguably, you might think the shift toward digital is making business cards redundant. Perhaps the way people make use of business cards is what’s broken, but with millions printed each year, business cards are clearly still essential for exchanging contact information and capturing B2B leads.

The challenge is, unless you capture contact information instantly, the odds that you might lose it are always going to be high! A survey suggested that more than 80% of the business cards are lost or discarded before they get entered into a CRM or contact database. As such, sales follow-up with potential customers is often delayed or altogether forgotten, resulting in the lost business opportunity.

So what are some ways to avoid this loss and make use of the vital contact info that can otherwise easily fall through the cracks? Let’s find out!

Why do we exchange business cards? 

The primary goal with business cards is growing your network and getting new leads in your contact database. Whether you meet these prospects personally or at a large event or at a conference, your goal is to capture their contact info and make sure they remember you so your sales follow-up is meaningful and you have a higher chance of converting.

Of course, the most logical way to do that is to capture the lead’s contact information from their business card in a way that it’s accessible when you need it. Stacking up cards in your briefcase or wallet for later isn’t the best way to save your business card leads. If you really want to save your leads, you should be saving them where you can access them.

How you save leads from business cards is key

Saving your business card leads digitally, for example using a business card scanner and integrating it with a system that can keep your leads secure and accessible, will ensure more efficient sales follow-up. You can integrate your business card reader with a CRM or email marketing tool to send emails, score your leads, nurture them and so on.

This is where the challenge lies though. Getting business card data and contact information captured accurately, organized and uploaded into a CRM or email marketing software is cumbersome and time-consuming. According to a study, it takes on average 1.5 hours to save and export 50 business cards lead to CRM. It’s a big chore and that’s what makes people reluctant to do this exercise. But if you don’t do it, you run the risk of losing your leads, and potentially, revenue.

How you should NOT save business card leads 

Most teams and small businesses do not have a lot of time at hand to save business card leads due to the lack of tools to do it. And so what happens is that business cards pile up, some leads get lost, and most fail to convert because sales follow is too late.

Teams and business owners try to find ways to clean up their stacks of business cards by trying out various ways to scan and save cards with business card scanners. Some try entering contacts from cards manually into spreadsheets or directly into their CRM or contact database. All these methods are cumbersome and prone to errors. More importantly, it’s a loss of valuable time that should’ve been spent with your sales follow-ups.

So how can you save business card leads the right way?

Well, yes, there’s an app for it!

ScanBizCards is a free to download app available for iOS and Android smartphones. It lets you snap and save contact information from business cards and allows easy export to a variety of CRMs including Salesforce and others. You can also save business card leads on your phone’s address book or export as a CSV file to add to any CRM or email marketing system that you use. To save time, you can also submit your cards for human transcription.

The ScanBizCards app also doubles up as a conference badge scanner, allowing you to scan conference badges without the need to integrate with the event organizer’s back end systems.

Ultimately, the goal is timely sales follow up

Businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on setting up and attending meetings, organizing B2B events, exhibiting at conferences and tradeshows and so on. They meet with potential buyers, collect business cards and get their contact information. But if they cannot make use of the contact information gathered, what’s the point in going through all this?

The goal of networking and meeting with new prospects is to capture leads so you can follow-up and close. There are tools out there to help you do that, you just need to execute!