How long do business cards from trade show or networking event sit on your desk?
Zoho business card scanner is a free mobile app solution that speeds this process up, and allows you to confidently hand it off to others.
Imagine a day or two after the event having all the information in the CRM ready to be reported on with tasks/emails all setup.
Old Way
You take cards at the event, and at the time you believe you will remember everything.
Later you remember most, but there are always a few you forget.
Veterans write a brief line or two on the front or back of the card to help recall important information.
After the event you have a pile of cards as well as all the other work that did not get done because you were at the event.
If you hand this off to someone else you end up playing match the cards to the CRM records due to errors that always occur.
New Way with Zoho Business Card Scanner
A) You hand off your cards to your assistant.
B) You scan the cards yourself while at the event or right after the event because it is so easy.
Below are the steps
Log into Zoho CRM from Zoho Business Card Scanner app.
Scan the card and take picture of the back if needed.
Enter a few key fields and make some corrections. You can skip this step and do it later.
Hit save button and the information is instantly in your CRM.
Then repeat.
The best part is all this information will be stored as new records in your CRM.
That includes the front and back picture of the card stored as an attachment to the Lead record.
Usually, you find out about the errors when you are sending the email or clicking on the link.
With this solution there is no more hunting for the card you just click the attachment.
Tips
In Zoho Business Card Scanner settings turn on Trigger CRM Workflow if you have any workflows like create task for new Leads.
In settings change the Default Cloud Service to Zoho CRM Lead even if you don’t use the Leads Module.
Reason is that it is way easier to correct or update everything in one place rather than two places like Contacts and Accounts.
Yes you will need to make corrections, however the OCR optical character recognition does a pretty good job.
There are also many fields you want to fill in that are not captured on the card like Lead Source, Lead Status etc.
Much easier to do this in a spreadsheet rather than going record by record in the CRM.
Zoho Spreadsheet View
Zoho has you covered. You can edit up to 100 records at a time in a their Zoho Sheet View.
Create standard view call it Trade Show View with the fields you want to check and a filter based on when the Leads were created.
Then when viewing this Trade Show View click the 3 dots top right and select Zoho Sheet View.
Make any changes you want in the Zoho Sheet View spreadsheet and they are all saved into the CRM.
This app is so easy to use that you will actually use it.
Oh, forgot to mention that this also scans QR Badges.
Watch How it Works
Download It
The iPhone reviews are better than the Android reviews.
I suggest you ignore the reviews and try this for yourself.
It is not perfect, but if you follow the above tips it is way better than the alternative.
Hope you found this article helpful.
Please let me know your experience with this app.