5 Services to Help Simplify Contact Management

By: Michael | Published: June 3, 2010 | Filed under: About small businesses, Small Business Advice, Small Business Tools

Small business owners who are effectively networking with other business professionals are often acquiring a plethora of contacts. When you combine this with all of your current clients, former clients, leads, etc, it can become a lot to manage. Let’s explore some services that are available to help simplify managing all of your contacts.

Business Card Handling Services:

Both of these services handle business card management. They’re painless to use and can help you save a lot of time managing your contacts. With each of them, you simply take the business cards that you acquire and send them to the service. You can physically send them in, or snap an image with your cell phone’s camera and email them in. Each of these services will receive your cards, scan the data, and convert the data to an easy to manage CSV format.

• Showboxed: We covered how to use ShoeBoxed in our past post about how to utilize their service to handle your receipts. Shoeboxed can also scan business cards and enter all the data from them into a CSV. The genius behind this is that, like with receipts, they will give you an image of the card, as well as convert the data on it to text. While this may not seem important, it is great in the event you wrote notes on the card. Shoeboxed is structured as a monthly package. You determine how many cards (and receipts) are going to send in and pick a package accordingly. They have plans that start at just $9.95 per month for up to 50 scans.

• Cloud Contacts: Cloud Contacts is very similar to what Shoeboxed offers. The primary difference is they don’t offer monthly solutions. You can simply use Cloud Contacts when you need cards scanned. Cloud Contacts will pick up your business cards if you live or work in NYC and are having over 300 scanned. They also take all of the guess work out of ordering. When you place an order and you’re not sure how many cards you have, they will let you know and give your the option to adjust your order accordingly. The only downside of this solution when compared with Shoeboxed, is the pricing. Scanning 100 cards will set you back $29.95, or $0.30 per card, on their lowest plan. The lowest plan Shoeboxed offers, would let your scan your cards for $0.20 each.

Web Based Contact Managers.

Once you’ve scanned all of your contacts, you have a few options about how to manage them. Ideally, keeping them online will help ensure that you can access them from anywhere you are. There are many affordable and free solutions that will help you do just that.

• Google Spreadsheets: Since each of the card scanning solutions will provide you with the data in a CSV, you can easily store this file in Google Documents and access it from anywhere. A quick search will help you find any record that you are seeking with ease. Sharing access to the spreadsheet is painless and requires only a few clicks. This is a really simple, free solution to get your contacts online, but there are plenty of others.

• High Rise HQ: High Rise is a very simple, easy to use contact manager. It makes it easy to record notes on each contact and leave yourself simple indicators about when to follow up with them, if nessecary. The biggest benefit of High Rise is the ease of use. It’s practically “so easy, a caveman can so it.” It is completely free to store up to 250 contacts with 2 users, but if you need more space they offer paid plans from $24 per month.

• Batch Books: Batch Books is a little more elaborate than High Rise. It offers some powerful capabilities such as their unique “Super Tags.” Super Tags allow you to add fields to certain type of contacts and then sort by those fields. Interesting enough, more power doesn’t come with a higher price tag. They offer plans that start at just $9.95 per month to manage unlimited contacts. It certainly gives High Rise a run for the money, but both are terrific solutions.

Keeping your contacts organized can help streamline your small business. Better follow-up communications will result in more sales. When you are aware of who you need to contact, when you need to follow up with them, and have all of their information handy, you can be assured that your better organization will pay off!