By Terry L. Brock
The whole point of Relationship Marketing is to connect with people where they are and meet their needs for profitable business. Having instant access to important contact and reference information is vital. Today’s mobile professional needs access to email, phone, cell numbers and that important tad bit of information about contacts. This information needs to be available on a laptop, a mobile Smartphone, iPhone or other portable device.
Well, I’m excited about a new device that is custom-designed to build your Relationship Marketing. It is the new CardScan for Mac. This tool can make money for you. I use it on my MacBook Pro and you can use their similar products on your computer.
To test this for you, I entered several business cards into my Mac with CardScan. The cards scanned rapidly in less than 5 seconds on average. Since business cards don’t follow a standard format there is always going to be a challenge reading them optically. However, I was able to do a quick visual scan and correct even the most egregious misreads within a few seconds. This is not bad, when you consider that these cards represent real people who are real important and can lead to generating real business.
CardScan has the ability to quickly scroll through business cards using their image view feature. This is a great tool to jog your memory about key people. It is similar to Leopard’s Coverflow. Imagine being in some distant hotel room trying to drum up business. Rather than carrying thousands of cards, you have the images, as well as parsed details, available with a few taps on your keyboard. This is great to connect with important people and strengthen relationships.
I was able to sync with Address Book and Microsoft Entourage quickly. I found that when I entered the card into CardScan, verified it and then selected Export to Address book, I had an immediate copy of it in Address Book and Entourage. Nice! Further, when synchronized with my iPhone all the newly entered data transferred for immediate availability. Total time for a new card from scan to available on my iPhone? About 3 minutes and that included updates on all my iPhone podcasts!
An area where CardScan disappoints is with groups. Group creation would be easier to target and segment contacts. This is more effective marketing. Instead, all contacts come into one large heap of names. Segmenting by groups would be most helpful. Hopefully the next version will allow this.
My system slowed considerably when I exported my Address Book (with 3,685 contacts). This impedes doing business and needs to be corrected whether this is a problem with my system or a bug in the new version.
Overall, this is not just a way to quickly scan your business cards. Yes, it does that extremely well. This tool is a serious way to increase business, organize your life and build your business not only in a tough economy, but any economy. A mobile professional who is serious about business would be short-changed without CardScan as a business-building tool.
(CardScan for Mac, $259.99, 1.800.640.6944, www.CardScan.com)
Building Business In A Tough Economy
That leads to a very important principle. Whatever technology you use, it is vital to stay in touch with important people. During tough economic times the average person will get depressed, have fear about the future and feel like all is lost.
The successful salesperson and business owner today has those same feelings. This is normal. However, the successful person goes beyond that and has the determination to acquire new skills, build new contacts and embrace a do whatever it takes to grow out of this mentality.
Be the successful person you know you can be. Yes, we’ll embrace new technologies as they come. But remember the solution is NOT in the technology. The solution is in your mindset and the attitude you have to learn, grow and get up when (not if) you fall down.
Acquire the necessary skills. Be willing to pay the extra time, money and effort it requires to learn and grow. The first step to success is having an indomitable spirit in the face of any challenge. That principle is needed today and will be in the future.
Terry Brock is an international marketing coach and columnist who helps businesses market more effectively, leveraging technology. He shows busy professionals how to squeeze more out of their days using time-honored rules and practical technology tools. He can be reached at 407-363-0505, by e-mail at terry@terrybrock.com or through his website at www.terrybrock.com.
