Whether at meetings, conferences or other networking events, you may collect dozens of business cards and other nuggets of useful information. How do you keep everyone’s information organized, so you can use it to grow your business?

 

A number of apps make adding and organizing business contacts easy. Some can sync with customer relationship management (CRM) tools your business already uses, while others may even serve as a preliminary CRM tool before you invest in a more advanced CRM platform.

 

Here are four business contact management apps worth checking out:

 

CamCard

Available for free or around $5 per month (premium version) to individuals, CamCard lets you use your smartphone or tablet’s camera to snap a photo of business cards and create a digital version. Text recognition software then automatically pulls the person’s contact information—including phone number and email address—and creates a new entry in your phone’s contact list. It also can be synced with your contact lists in Gmail, Microsoft Exchange and other places. A business version of CamCard with more features, such as integration with customer relationship management software, is also available starting at $5 per user per month; it requires a minimum of three users.

 

Cloze

With business plans starting at $252 per user annually, Cloze automatically compiles contact, biographical and interaction information from various sources—including your email, social media connections, electronic address books and computer files—to create a master profile of each contact. It uses artificial intelligence to determine your most important contacts and helps organize your email inbox, prioritizing messages from the most important people. It also keeps notes on your meetings and email correspondence with each person and can prompt you to follow up with someone. It’s essentially a customer-relationship management tool, but without all of the data entry.

 

CircleBack

Another free app, CircleBack makes it quick and easy to create new contacts and keep their information up to date. You can use your phone to scan and automatically transfer information from business cards into your address book. It also takes information from email signature lines to create new contacts and cross-references your contact lists in Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce and Exchange to ensure your contact information stays accurate and to weed out duplicate contacts. You can also create custom groups to keep your contacts better organized.

 

A2Z Contacts

Once you’ve created contacts—whether through your email program or on your smartphone—you may need a way to organize and group them efficiently. Free to download with a $1.99 lifetime use fee, A2Z Contacts is an app for Apple iOS iPhones and iPads that lets you create groups of contacts. For example, you might create a group around employees of a particular company or around a certain type of customer or prospect. You can also send group texts and emails and sort your contacts in various ways.

 

How well you manage your business contacts can make or break your success, so it’s worth looking into tech tools that can make the job easier.

Print this article