Digital business cards and how Stinto can enable Relationship Success for your team
By Niels Wee // 22nd of November 2024
The good old business card has remained the same over decades, while the rest of the world has seen leaps in utility and functionality. You can see this as a testament to the quality of print, and it truly is. Yet there are also significant downsides and missed opportunities that come with the traditional business card in contrast to digital business cards. In this article you’ll learn the potential of going digital, what you need to consider before finding your provider, and finally how Stinto enables ‘Relationship Success’ in your organisation.
Especially, if you want to improve your teams’ ability to create long-lasting relationships with prospects, clients and partners, you have good reason to look into digital business cards. Making the switch can help you form authentic and trusting relationships more easily. This in turn translates into increased customer lifetime, which is central to most successful businesses. Your organisation should therefore explore how a digital business card solution could boost your teams’ performance.
But what are digital business cards anyway and what advantages do they offer my employees and my company? This article will tell you. Welcome.
What are digital business cards?
A digital business card is easy to understand; it is a business card that has been digitised. What makes digital business cards exciting, however, are all the not-so-obvious options and benefits that naturally come with it. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s first take a closer look at what a digital business card entails and how it works.
A digital business card serves the same purpose as a traditional card. You use it to create connections and exchange contact information with new contacts you want to strike up a professional relationship with.
In most cases, the exchange starts either by the new contact scanning a QR code in the app/wallet or by you tapping an NFC card on their phone. The simplest solutions simply download your information to your new contacts phone, while other providers open up a business card with your picture and rich information in the browser of the recipient’s phone. Via the browser window you can quickly exchange contact data.
All digital business cards share some common advantages:
Beware of solutions that simply let your new contact save your information to the phonebook.
- It’ll be difficult for new contacts to remember your name, and therefore find you in their phonebook.
- You also need their information, so consider a solution that helps both you and your new contacts to exchange info and remember each other.
Flexibility and versatility
Most digital business cards are flexible and versatile, because you can always update your details anytime. It makes it effortless for you to be ready for any occasion.
Convenience and accessibility
The digital approach also makes it significantly easier for both you and your new contact to manage and utilize the exchanged information after your initial meeting. Unlike traditional cards that can be easily misplaced, digital contact details are securely stored and readily accessible. When compared to physical business cards, digital versions eliminate the need for manual data entry, saving time and reducing errors.
The greener choice
Many providers also boast that they are an environmentally better choice as you don’t need to order new cards each time you change jobs, adjust company branding, or get a new phone number. Instead, you can use the digital business card again and again.
Common use cases for digital business cards
Conferences and events
We all know how conferences and events are unique chances to encounter your next big client and build a unique bond. Using a digital business card that represents both you and your company, can help you in this case. A normal paper card says little about what you offer so it is hard to make a lasting impression. Connecting with your LinkedIn profile instead can be problematic too, if you think about it. It doesn’t have your direct contact details and you don’t really present yourself as a company employee. A digital card, on the other hand, is tailored to you as a company representative and has ready-to-use digital information for everyone’s benefit.
Find a provider that has a good quality business card scanner so you can quickly grab the information if your contact hands you a traditional card.
Digital business cards are not limited to real-life events. With links and QR codes, you can share your digital business card in video meeting chats, email signatures, profiles, calendar events and posts.
Existing customer, new contacts
The same goes for new people you meet through customer meetings. While you may be well connected to the primary customer contact, these meetings are your chance to get to know other people in the organisation. Too often we neglect to broaden our connections with important client organisations. So if the main contact leaves, you risk losing contact with the organisation as a whole.
Partnerships
Partnerships can mean a world of difference to your business. These relationships should, therefore, be attended to with the same level of intention like any other relationship. Having multiple access access points and relationships with several people in your partner organisation will be a valuable resource.
Recruitment
As your business grows you can dig into your network of relationships and find that person that left you with a good impression, and who you know will boost the team. Being able to contact them directly on the phone or email sends an invaluable signal, in contract to a chat message on a social platform. Similarly, if that one dream employee becomes available, they know where to reach you.
In short, any relationship that is valuable to your organisation should have access to you (and vice versa). Your contact information is the first step to establishing access and a potentially fruitful collaboration to the organisation as a whole. So be generous with connecting through your business card platform.
Now that we have covered the most obvious benefits and use cases, we can dive into how Stinto can add value to you as a user and the company as such.
Relationship Success with Stinto
From countless customer interviews, we discovered that the problem you are having is not so much about paper versus digital business cards. While the initial contact data exchange is important, the real issue is establishing durable relationships between your customers and your organisation.
The most important component in a strong and long-lasting relationship is trust. The hard thing with trust is that it must be earned by listening and demonstrating that we remember what was said the next time we talk with them. All to often we fail to do this.
We firmly believe that the relationship-building your employees do every day is a missed opportunity for your organisations to leverage. Relationships take time to develop, yet hardly any companies have considered if they have the right tools to enable their people and business to build and sustain these all-important relationships.
At Stinto we have taken this opportunity to maximise the benefits for both the organisation and you as the end-user. So while we are a digital business card and networking app, Stinto could be a key driver for your organisation in achieving Relationship Success.
5 benefits for you
- Control your company narrative better and can make a great impression
- You have the option to include PDFs, videos and other marketing material directly on your beautiful business card, so you can show your new contacts what you are all about.
- Great experience for your contact
- Make life easy for your contact by initiating a digital exchange of data so she get your data where she’ll remember you.
- And yes; you can connect with everyone – they don’t need the Stinto app themselves.
- Business card scanner
- If you meet someone who hands you a traditional business card, you can simply snap a shot with our business card scanner and get their info into Stinto that way.
- Note-taking is easier
- If you meet a lot of people and have rich conversations you’ll likely have trouble remembering all the details. But with our voice-to-text note feature, you can record the key points and your thoughts in an instant.
- This will help you follow up with contacts in a precise and meaningful way after the meeting.
- Integration to your systems
- The burden of getting the contact data into your internal systems like your CRM, is also lifted. We can integrate into your CRM so that new contacts in Stinto, including updates to existing contacts, are automatically updated in your CRM or other system.
- That’s right, no more manual typing.
All this means that you can go out and build rapport with people with greater confidence and develop a network of longer-lasting relationships.
If your team or company uses Stinto, you can unlock even more potential. So, what’s in it for your organisation?
Here’s how Stinto helps your organisation achieve Relationship Success.
5 benefits for your organisation
- Build relationships with prospects and clients across teams
- Demonstrate to your customers that they are important to you by collecting warm data with “voice-to-text” notes to remember what they tell you and see how your customer-facing teams are enabled to deepen the relationships for the long haul.
- Never leave your customers feeling forgotten despite being passed on to a new account manager, since the new manager has easy access to all relevant historical info at her fingertips
- Share insights to stay ahead of the competition.
- With CRM integration, customer-facing teams can share valuable customer data and insights to build effective strategies and improve sales.
- Free up time for more productive tasks
- With our 100% digital process for handling contact data, employees won’t need to manually enter business-critical information into the CRM. Contrast this to bugging down your employees with manual data entry and note writing.
- Preserve sales leads
- Hold on to valuable contacts even after your top salespeople leave the company – the contacts are already in your CRM – not stuck in LinkedIn or on a personal device.
- Minimise data decay
- As more of your customers create a free business card profile on Stinto, your company will, over time, experience the powerful force of self-updating contact data in your CRM. Avoid losing sales opportunities and reduce the need for manual updating.
How to get started
Never rush to select your digital card platform. Instead, look at what is important for your company’s situation. Try to answer these questions:
- Do you know if how you are currently networking, is working?
- How important is relationship building to your business model, and how effective are your current processes?
- Is your team spending excessive time on manual data entry and system updates related to customer information? Could this time be spent in a more valuable way?
- Do you believe that the quality of client relationships could be a deciding factor in winning and keeping business over your competitors?
Mind you, these are all leading questions. But if you feel these are areas where your organisation can improve, you are not alone. If so it would make sense to have a closer look at how you can better achieve Relationship Success across your organisation.
With Stinto you can setup your company account in an instant and you don’t need to enter credit card details upfront. You can even set up all the free employee accounts you need, to test out the core functionality. And once you are ready to integrate the relevant employee profiles with your CRM or other systems you can always upgrade in minutes. This way you don’t run any risk of committing money to something that is not right for you and your company.
Be sure to check out the video with Robin Daniels here
