Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, recently blogged about Why It’s Time to (Finally) Ditch business cards.
I’m with you Ryan. It’s 2015, shouldn’t we have a more viable solution for exchanging contact information than a piece of cardstock paper?
With rapidly growing LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook connections that span beyond personal contacts, why do we still use business cards? They waste paper and get thrown away within a few days of collection.
But is there a hidden value within these little pieces of paper? Ask any marketing or sales person that attends quarterly trade shows and they’ll tell you the hidden treasure of business cards is the face-to-face interaction that comes along with the business card exchange.
According to the Trade Show News Network, 99% of marketers found a unique value in the trade shows they attended that they did not get from other marketing mediums. These trade shows, conventions and conferences are powerful lead generators that increase brand awareness for businesses.
And having a business card in hand adds significant value to exhibitors who talk with prospects at these shows.
Could you imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone while staring at your smartphone screen trying to capture a decision maker’s contact information? No, I didn’t think so.
But having that business card later in the day to input into a CRM and start a sales cycle offers new business potential.
At Vision-e, our users of eContacts, a business card scanning solution for Salesforce, prove that the business card is not dead, but still being used… and often. Business professionals are tired of collecting them, so they use their phone to snap a picture and leverage technology to increase their communication and sales.
Enter eContacts. With unlimited Optical Character Recognition, this application uploads prospect data on business cards to Salesforce in seconds — no manual typing required. From there, sales managers attending a trade show or conference can easily start marketing to their new prospect almost immediately.
While we wish there was an easier solution to this process, a mobile application that eliminates business cards just has not taken off yet. While we wait for that day, you can find out more about Vision-e and our eContacts business card solution here: http://bit.ly/1SxHPLn
Originally published at www.linkedin.com.
