I now have hundreds of the things! Here is a picture of my desk a few months ago before I came up with my system. What do you do with all the business cards you've collected over time?
You need a system
I'm pleased to say I've now got a system. Michael E. Gerber would be very proud of me! As soon as I get back to my office from a meeting I take out the business cards from my jacket pocket and place them on my desk in front of my keyboard. I then open my Sharepoint contact list and add all the details from each one into the relevant contact list.This synchs with my Outlook contacts which in turn syncs with my iPhone so I only have to add the information once and I have the details where I need them.
In the case of those people who have asked for more information and help with domain names I ask them for permission to add them to my mailing list and all those I also add into MailChimp.*
Now you don't need to use an Intranet Sharepoint system from TWG Systems like I do. You might use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool such as ACT! or Salesforce or HighRise. But even starting out with a simple Excel spreadsheet is better that nothing at all.
Easy to stay & get in touch
You need a contact database so you can keep in touch with your contacts. So you can keep those people who have asked, in touch with your products and services and news. So you can keep in touch with those contacts who might become suppliers of yours. Imagine if one afternoon you need to get in touch with one of those contacts who's card is amoungst the hundreds spread over your desk, or in your drawer. How will you find their contact details? If you've entered them in a database one quick search and you've got all the relevant details to hand.
So start adding your contact's details into a system today.
*MailChimp is an amazing Email Marketing tool and it's free for up to 1,000 contacts! It is brilliant for small business owners. I will be writing a seperate blog post on MailChimp in the next couple of weeks.
4 comments:
Great question. For the ones I meet who want to stay in contact, or want to know what I've got to say ongoing for e-marketing etc, then I always add them in straight away. I have a fab app on my iPhone called CamCard, that takes a picture of the business card, 'scans' it, then adds all the contact details into the relevant editable fields, then adds straight to the contact directory. Nice and easy and saves lots of time.
These, as you say, then get added to Mailchimp too where relevant.
I love the article (which of course I would as TWG Systems supplied the SharePoint CRM)!
But it is totally right - starting or running a business without a sensible policy for contact management is not good. Any system of tracking potential clients, customers, suppliers is essential - our SharePoint system is concise way of doing so why not use ours!
Many Thanks Dickie!
Thanks Andrew, tracking potential clients and keeping in touch with existing customers. It's priceless.
Thanks Richard,
Love the iPhone CamCard idea.
I used to use a different one BC CardReader I think, but the problem I had was that very often the date captured by the reader was wrong. It would mis-read an s as a 5 and an e as a 3 and add in weird punctuation marks, so by the time I'd gone in and manually editted the info, it was just as quick to add it by hand!!
I'll check out CamCard and see if it's better.
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