How to convert prospects into hot leads in 60 seconds 

You’re at a _________________________ (trade show, conference, business meeting, fill in the blank) where one of a few prospects hands you their business card.

You know that in order to turn prospects into hot leads you need to follow-up with them. Soon, which means you have to …

1. enter their contact info into your address book, so you can email or call them later
2. put their business card into your (physical or digital) Rolodex, so you can find it
3. create a reminder in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, so you remember to follow-up with them
4. send them a LinkedIn invitation

… but who has time for all that, especially if you’re meeting a couple of new prospects.

Then you look at the card and notice, that is only has the prospects company name and website, a ‘info@’ email address and a phone number, but nothing else. You’re gonna tell me that you remember the name of all the prospects you met at the event, if you wait to enter their data until that evening?

Make your prospecting bullet proof

What if there was a way, where you could have the business card scanned and read by an app? That would be pretty cool. How about an app that could go and find the missing info (name, job title, personal email address, …) automatically? Now we’re talkin’, right? What if all this info is entered into your address book with a simple click? Still not good enough? What else would you like it to do? Make a LinkedIn connection? Schedule the CRM reminder? Put the business card into your Rolodex?

I’d pay good money for the ability to go back to the office and have all that happen automatically – you can’t get much better than that, right?

Hang on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, it’s even better than that. I’d like to introduce you to Scannable, Evernote‘s smart scanning app. Not only does it do all this (well almost all of it), but it does it in real-time.

Back to that business card you got handed to you by one of the new prospects you were talking to. Just this time you pull out your smart phone, launch Scannable and you’re pretty much done. The app finds the card in front of the phone, scans it, reads the information, goes to LinkedIn, pulls the missing information from the prospects LinkedIn profile, and places all the info into the right fields of your address book, which you can save in your address book and Evernote with a simple click. All this takes about 60 seconds and remember all you did was launch an app and hold the card in front of your phone’s camera.

While Scannable does all of this, I can go on chatting with the prospects, learning more about how I can help them create great visual content for the project they’re working on. I finish the conversation with one simple question “Would you mind, if I’d send you a LinkedIn request?” and thanks to Scannable, I can do that as they say “Sure, why not.”

Oh, I forgot to mention the price of this service, although by now you’d agree that it will save you not only time, but also convert your prospects into hot leads (which is a little hard to put a price on): it’s free. I know, right?

[nextpage title=”Watch Scannable do this in real time on the video on page 2″]

A quick IFTTT (If This Then That) recipe takes care of setting the reminder to follow-up in my CRM, which then automatically syncs the business card info stored in Evernote with the correct lead record in SalesForce – the CRM of choice for me. Finally a Zap from Zapier shoots a quick SMS to my phone.

SalesForce and EverNote are the heart of my online productivity puzzle and using this automation makes a huge difference in being remembered and that guy that forgets to follow-up with the prospects he’s just met. Hey, if you don’t contact them, they will forget you as soon as they turn around. Out of sight – out of mind. Remember? Or did you already forget …

See how Scannable reads a business card, looks up missing data in LinkedIn, sends the Linkedin invitation, creates a new contact in iOS Contacts (which triggers the IFTTT recipe btw) and finally save the information in Evernote, which will link this note to the SalesForce record automatically. Remember you are watching this in real-time:

https://youtu.be/O8M9tVqOsuw