Content

• Steps
• Tips
• Warnings

Contact information is simply irreplaceable for business cooperation and business communication. When you receive a business card with contact information, take the trouble to ensure that it ends up in a place where you can easily find it as soon as the need arises. It doesn't matter if you own your own business or just move around a lot in business circles, putting things in order in the business cards you receive can help you find the right people much faster, which in turn can provide you with higher sales and more money in your pockets. Here are some ideas for how these same business cards can be stored in an organized way.

Steps

1. 1 Take a look at the business card immediately after you receive it. Reading a business card carefully and immediately after receiving it is a great way to remember the owner's name along with their face. The application form and degree are also usually written on a business card, so here's another clue that will tell you who it is and what he / she does.
2. 2 Have a place to put your business cards after you receive them. If you take a bag or notebook with you to meetings, then set aside a place in them where you can put the received business cards. Wherever you decide to put them, in no case put them among your sheets of notes or do not put them in your pocket - there they will definitely be lost or washed with your things.
3. 3 Store people's contact information on your computer. When returning from a business lunch, trade fair, or meeting, immediately put all the business cards you receive in a safe place. A desk drawer or other place that other people don't usually look into is ideal. As soon as you have time, take out all the business cards gathered in your desk drawer and enter all the contact information from them in Outlook, Excel, Access or even just Word.
4. 4 Create a "Notes" column in each file dedicated to one business card. Fill in any information that is not on the business card itself: what this person does, what information or promising cooperation he outlined for you, when you met, etc.
5. 5 Create a business contact classification. Divide them into excellent ones, more or less potential ones, and ones that you hardly ever need. To do this, you can use numbering, where 1 is to mark valuable contacts, 2 - possible, and 3 - those with which you are unlikely to still deal. You can also use color coding: green for valuable business contacts, yellow for potential contacts, and red for hopeless ones, respectively. Choose a convenient and memorable option for you, which will allow you to better remember the contact information of your partners.
6. 6 Arrange your partners' contact information so that you can easily find it later. It can be arranged alphabetically by the first letter of the person's last name or by the first letter of the company name; by the first letter of the city where you met this person (if you travel often); or the industry in which the person works. Thus, you can simply enter the information about the desired person that you remember into the search bar, and the computer will give you a list of contacts that meet the specified search parameters.
   • Many special computer programs, the purpose of which is to create a database of your contacts, can sort your contacts in any way you want and make them easy to find if you suddenly remember only a few keywords to search for. If you use one of these programs, you will save a lot of time manually sorting business cards with data.
7. 7 Store business cards in the good old fashioned way. Place them in an address filing cabinet or business card holder, available from office supply stores.
   • This old-fashioned way of storing contact information, even if it is just a stack of business cards, tied with an elastic band, is a good insurance policy for your electronic storage on your computer.
   • You will have to decide how you prefer to sort your business cards: by name, company name, etc.
8. 8 As soon as you receive a business card from someone, immediately (within a few days) write down on the back of it the place where you met that person. So you will definitely not forget it. It is also better to write down briefly on the back of what you talked about so that later, when you need to contact this person, you can remind him or her where you met, ask how the children are doing, or recall anything you discussed. at the first meeting.
9. 9 Ready.

Tips

• If you receive a lot of business cards, then consider purchasing software that will allow you to sort and store them. There are business card scanners, as well as programs that can read, recognize, and select the information you need from a paper business card. They can save you a tremendous amount of labor manually typing this information into your computer.
• If you need to know more about your business partners than just their names and phone numbers, then look for software that allows you to store and manage large amounts of information about customers or partners.
• Begin to act quickly if you promised something to your new acquaintances or if someone is interested in you and your cause.
• Don't let raw business cards accumulate. Sort them and enter the data into your computer at least once a week before you completely forget who you met and why.

Warnings

• If you store all the contact information of customers or partners on your computer, remember to make regular backups in case your computer breaks down or the hard drive crashes. Make a backup copy of your information automatic, if possible.