How do I turn a stack of business cards into genuine contacts?

We bet you have a stack of business cards and you’re wondering what to do with them?

Every time you go to a property networking event you add to the pile and make a mental note to work out how to make sense of them. The problem is you have a lot of potentially great leads in the stack, but you’ve got no way of working out which ones need your attention.

So you’re haphazardly working through the cards, wasting time trying to convert leads that should have never made their way into your pipeline in the first place.

We’ve leveraged the power of a CRM to address these common challenges using Insightly CRM to help us convert leads to contacts faster.

The qualifying of a person’s details is key, as these are used in the CRM to create a personalised message, which means our networking skills are smarter and more effective.

We use CRM to convert a business card (a lead) into a useful contact that will add value to our business, through a process called contact management and a three-step qualification pipeline:

Capture, Qualify and Convert.

How are we going to transfer the details from a physical business card into a digital format that can be accessed from all your devices?

We use a cost and time efficient method that involves technology and a VA (virtual assistant). Insightly CRM provides a free app for scanning cards. The scans are automatically sent to the Insightly support team for transfer into your CRM. Depending on your paid licence you have either 15 or 25 scans per month; once we exceed our monthly scan limit our VA can input the rest.

Qualifying is working out whether a person is of any use to you. At this stage, they are all currently ‘leads’ (we call this noise, as we don’t yet know whether they are of any use to our business).

We need to make sure that they are worthy of becoming a contact, e.g. they ‘qualify’, and to do that we use repeatable steps – a pipeline workflow.

For example:

We send them an email to qualify their interest and organise a call, which may then lead to a meeting. During this process, you will be ‘qualifying’ whether they are a genuinely useful contact.

CRMs enable you to easily convert a lead into a contact. All the information captured about the ‘lead’ is pulled together and converted into a contact, with all the information connected to them captured in one place.

A CRM is built for ‘capturing’ information.

Rather than having contacts lurking everywhere – your pockets, bags, desk drawer, phone etc. a CRM can hold all this information in one central place.

A CRM is your ‘one version of the truth’ – your default destination for gathering intelligence in your business.

No longer will you have to rummage around to locate the details of that really useful guy that knows about CRM for Property, or the woman who is interested in investing in your next deal – their details will be in your CRM, available on all your devices whenever you need them.

Configuring a CRM can take time that most of us don’t have. We will set up your contact management workflow, so you don’t have to, and because we streamline it from end to end, when we show you how to use it you can hit the ground running!

About the author

Steven Lai is a property investor, founder of Super Developments and creator of CRM for Property Success. He is a CRM expert with over 12 years commercial experience of managing sales teams.

Join the CRM for Property Success Facebook Group to ask him anything (about CRM, property or 80's trivia!).