Networking 101: Why It’s Important to Keep Hold of Old Business Cards
With so much of our personal and business lives turning digital these days, it can be easy to disregard business cards as a thing of the past. But we think you’d be wrong – the business card is such an integral part of networking that it’s not going to be replaced anytime soon. However, likely what you will do after receiving a business card will be digital, for example storing an email address or phone number. But it’s the act of conversation and sharing business cards which is effective and cannot be replaced.
Be Memorable
A business card gives you the opportunity to be remembered when networking. If we were to simply swap information digitally, there is no personality to the digital storage and you could be easily forgotten. However, a memorable and creative business card can be all the difference. Not to mention the likelihood that if it’s kept in a wallet or pocket then it’s a reminder of your conversation when the person comes across it.
Collect an Army of Contacts
It’s not just about giving out your business card – keeping your own collection can be very useful, too. Whether they could be potential B2B clients or you think you could work together in some way or form a partnership, having a mass of contacts to hand is helpful in a multitude of situations. However, it’s not so helpful if you have to search through a huge file or box full of business cards to find the particular contact you are looking for.
Scanning Business Cards
So what should you do to make locating people and their contact details easier? It would take hours to manually input all the data into your mobile phone, laptop or email address book. That’s a lot of time wasted, especially if you haven’t established a proper relationship with half of these contacts just yet. The easy way to do it is with business card scanning.
It’s so fast and easy to capture the data on any kind of business card, and store it in the format of your choice. Whether that’s an Excel spreadsheet, Outlook address book or into a Salesforce database, it can all be done automatically thanks to Pearl Scan’s innovative scanning technology.
Of course, you can always choose to keep the physical business cards too. They have a personal touch, and may help you to put faces to names or remember certain personality traits or business credentials of each contact. But for ease of use, it’s definitely more efficient to have data stored digitally as well.
