Sensible networking - from business card to contact
You know it all too well. As a participant or exhibitor, you are faced with the challenge after every major event or trade fair: you have made contacts, exchanged business cards and want to contact potential customers or partners again afterwards. How do you keep track of the flood of business cards and not lose contact?
Keeping an overview
The bulk of your work often comes after a trade fair or event in which you have participated or exhibited. Summing up, reviewing the contacts you have made and starting to follow up. There are several solutions with the right CRM software to help you keep an overview and minimise the time and effort required for follow-up.
The preparation
With the "Event Meeting" function, you can plan and arrange meetings for every contact and every event in advance. You can then complete these in the follow-up or directly on your smartphone in the app.
This means you always have an overview of what you have agreed with which customer or potential contact at which event. You can also create additional tasks, give them a due date and assign them to the relevant colleagues if required.
Directly at the event or at the trade fair
You can use an app to scan business cards on site during the event and use your smartphone to automatically create the new contacts in your CRM system. This means that no business card or contact is lost from the event to your desk or forgotten due to a lack of time. In addition, you are so efficient that you have more time for your actual activity, the follow-up. You can do this completely individually or standardised and personalised with a process via the CRM so that you really do reach every contact.
The phase afterwards
Of course, you can also look through your collected business cards the day after the event and enter the desired contacts in the desktop version of your CRM or import an Excel list of all contacts. If you have also stored the event or trade fair in the system, simply save this as a contact source for the respective contact. This allows you to see exactly how many and which contacts you met at which event in the follow-up. At the end of the year, you and your superiors will know in just a few clicks exactly which events and trade fairs are paying off and which are not.
In the next step, you can also use this overview to refer to the event in the respective follow-up calls or emails and make it easier for you to get started with potential sales talks. You or your company's marketing department can also prepare targeted mailings for the contacts made at a particular event.
Our conclusion
Events have become an integral part of business networking, but the high costs and effort involved require efficient planning and tracking in order to maximise the actual benefits.
Participating in events costs both money and time. You travel to the event, set up a stand, make contacts and have to find out which contact is really worthwhile. This is where your CRM can support you. You can quickly, flexibly and effectively make a note of who you spoke to and about what on the spot and can then start an efficient follow-up.
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