Residential Real EstateTurning Business Cards Into Business
Look in almost any desk drawer and you"ll likely find them - a collection
of business cards that have been saved with the very best of intentions.
We dutifully collect cards from potential clients and customers at
every opportunity, often scribbling short reminder notes on the back.
At the time, we are absolutely committed to entering these potentially
profitable contacts into our contact managers for follow up in the
near future.
Still, countless desk drawers contain stacks of missed opportunities,
representing a potential fortune in lost sales and commissions. Someday
we"ll clean out our desks and dispose of these old cards, but an odd
combination of guilt and hope will prevent most from disposing of
these "lost business" cards anytime soon.
However, there are a growing number of desks (occupied by the technology
enabled) that are devoid of such a card collection. The owners of
most of these empty drawers likely use a simple product know simply
as CardScan, from Corex Technologies.
At first glance, purchasing a $250 device capable of scanning nothing
more than business cards might seem just a bit unnecessary. After
ten minutes of actual use you will likely see things from a much different
perspective.
I personally tested the CardScan "Executive" model and was amazed
by the efficiency of this high tech tool.
Installation of the scanner and related card-recognition software
was both simple and quick, but what came next made me wonder how I
had lived without such a wonder for so long.
Grabbing ten cards from my own personal desk drawer, I found the unit
could scan them just about as fast as I could feed them into this
smartly designed unit. After scanning, CardScan"s software then "reads"
the cards and inserts the data into their desktop software, which
is designed to look very much like a standard index-card file. Total
time to scan ten business cards was less than two minutes.
I then spent another two or three minutes double-checking the accuracy
of CardScan"s recognition software, correcting some simple errors
and moving the data around just a bit. This is the real wizardry of
the CardScan product as it does a truly remarkable job of figuring
out which lines of a scanned card contain the contact"s name, company,
phone number, address, email, and so on.
While some mistakes are made, particularly with excessively graphical
and "over-designed" cards, moving the information around within the
software is infinitely faster than typing the same information by
hand.
Many business users might be perfectly satisfied using this software
to store, organize and retrieve contacts. However, those with professional
contact managers such as ACT!, Goldmine, (and quite a few others)
will gleefully appreciate CardScan"s ability to quickly and accurately
export these new business prospects into their existing databases.
In my case, CardScan efficiently added these ten new contacts into
ACT!, and did so in less than 60 seconds.
In order to evaluate the true value of this technology, I simply need
to think of all of the business contacts I will make in the future,
and then envision my two options:
I can continue to collect business cards from prospects, and then
either manually type each one into my database, or add them to the
growing collection in my desk drawer.
Alternatively, I can return from an appointment, business meeting
or social event with a handful of cards and have them scanned, analyzed
and automatically inserted into my contact manager within five or
six minutes.
While the first option spares me the roughly $250 investment, it doesn"t
take much calculation to realize that using CardScan"s technology
will add up to substantially more than this in future business. This
being the very reason I would ask someone for their business card
in the first place.