Business cards have long been the standard for networking and establishing professional relationships, but over time they tend to clutter up offices and workspaces. Very soon, important contacts are misplaced or unreachable, and as a result, their entire purpose is lost when people digitize your business cards
While organizers, rolodexes, and other devices came in handy to deal with such problems, the truth is, even they can just as easily be misplaced. If your business depends on contacts, or business cards, it can face an existential crisis if one fine day you find your office robbed, and the rolodex missing.
With this, better practices for managing business cards, and digitizing them so that they are always accessible via the cloud is critical for businesses big and small. In this article, we dive deep into this topic, to help you better manage, organize, and safeguard business cards for a clutter-free workspace.
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Sort & Organize
The first step, as always, is to sort and organize your business cards instead of having them lay in an organized heap that you have to sort through each time you want to find something.
This need not be too sophisticated, and even manual organization works wonders when done right. Sorting and organizing can be based on name, company, industry, or anything else that works for you and helps save time.
Even if you plan on digitizing your business cards, the first step is to sort and organize them into manageable piles, and manual tools such as rolodexes should work just as well in this regard.
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Start Scanning
Once everything is in order you can start scanning your cards in order to digitize your business cards, with several apps that make this a breeze.
There are few apps that merely take photographs, before enhancing and storing them for optimal use, and others that have optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities, which make it easier to extract and store them in a more usable format.
Having the details in a textual format makes it easier to export them into CRMs, contact books, and more, as opposed to scrolling through numerous digital copies of business cards.
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Use A Cloud Based CRM
A CRM solution is the rolodex of the 21st Century, and you can give it substantial superpowers by ensuring that it is hosted on the cloud, and is interoperable.
Imagine everything pertaining to a contact in one place, not just their names and contact details, but the conversations you’ve had with them, transactions, orders, and more. This is what you get with a robust CRM solution.
As a result, beautiful business card designs that forced receivers to take notice are on their last leg, and will likely be a relic of the past by the time we are done with this decade.
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Dispose Unnecessary Business Cards
Once you are done with the sorting, scanning, and digitizing, you will still be left with a lot of unnecessary physical business cards, and it’s probably best to get rid of them, to make your workspace clean and clutter free.
Even if you plan on hanging on to physical business cards, make sure to identify and get rid of the ones that are no longer necessary. This includes people or businesses that you no longer deal with, and have no plans of ever dealing with in the future.
Make sure to shred before throwing them out, so that it isn’t seen as disrespect by those who’ve issued them, or come across them. If not, you can also consider recycling the paper, provided that the card has been printed on recyclable paper.
Final Words
Business cards stand to add a lot more value when they are digitized, stored securely on the cloud, and are easily searchable and accessible. This makes digitization essential, not just to declutter and organize your workspace, but to drive much needed efficiencies during the normal course of business.