Innovating the business card culture in a Smart Nation

"There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." This is a popular quote by Bruce Lee encouraging continuous improvement of one's self. There is a lot to learn from this quote for businesses in Singapore – first identify your strengths, embrace them, and then figure out how you can improve them.

Put yourself in an environment where those strengths can flourish and grow, and you are already contributing to both the business and your own improvement. Now imagine doing the same with the humble business card, create a resource from everyday business encounters and transform the way it works for your business.

For every business person, business card management had been a long-time problem with no solution that could be definitive. It is believed most business encounters actually may not bear fruit quickly or is an opportunity lost because of no dedicated follow-up. One might have expended a lot of effort to meet someone or just encountered someone by chance, but in the end you just exchanged business cards and left that card in your drawer and forgot about it.

It takes time and manual effort to save this information from the cards into one's database. It is evident that this is not feasible for many businesses and companies where business cards are often exchanged. Therefore, there is a demand for a systematic way of managing and storing them so that they can be effectively retrieved when required.

Singapore business hubs have a strong business card culture, which means business contact information is all the information people in a company have about other companies and people. The way a business card is handled is a large part of business decorum, and it makes sense that the information found on one is correspondingly important.

Yet, for all the importance placed on them, information in business contacts can still be under-utilised, with just one person in the team holding on to said information. This often ends up with the contact not working out either through a lack of follow-up or collaboration on one or the other party, which is a waste of opportunity. Here, then, are four ways you can maximise the potential in business cards, and hopefully score that important contact you've been trying to get for the longest time.

1. Be the business card 'wizard' in your organisation
Whether you are a B2B business trying to connect up the chain with a target client, or a venture looking to turn your stack of received business cards into potential investors, organising your business cards and effectively managing them helps realise the potential in sharing your business cards with your colleagues. Thereby, collaboratively sharing contact information across teams and geographies to unlock the hidden potential in your business card that can open up new business opportunity for others in the company to explore. On top of that, storing these connections ensures the retention of this information within your company, even if employees leave it.

2. Be innovative, digitise your contacts
Contact information is a precious asset and using it efficiently increases the productivity of individual employees and profitability for the company. Digitising of business cards helps companies reduce the risk of losing information and gives teams the advantage of utilising business contacts effectively, making it easier for them to retrieve information when needed, thus fulfilling the end objective of exchanging business cards.

3. Adopt cloud-based contact management solutions
Singapore is the biggest adopter of cloud-based business solutions with many jumping the bandwagon as the industry transitions to this new reality. Cloud-based contact management will prove to be a game-changer allowing companies of all sizes the convenience of doing business without making large investments and being highly scalable and accessible at the same time, particularly attracting the SMBs in Singapore that can benefit from such cloud-based contact management platform to increase their business prospects and making business cards work successfully for them.

4. Connect your business cards to other ICT services including CRM, SFA tools
Business innovators have come up with smart solutions that help manage contacts for businesses, and for individuals to be able to share the cards with their networks and across geographies, which enhances efficiency and greater business productivity. We are surrounded by many digital gadgets, and most of them are connected to the cloud or a network. Innovators change the way businesses and companies work by providing a better way of managing business cards.

This ability to seamlessly sync contacts making it compatible cross-platforms allows businesses to easily integrate their business card data onto their existing ICT services including CRM or SFA and other tools, giving them the ability to take advantage of a fully extensible platform of robust contact management and sharing capabilities.

As it seems, companies are increasingly looking to innovate with new times to stay current and not risk getting left behind. Therefore, taking Singapore's Smart Nation initiative seriously businesses can move confidently by making business cards work for them by digitising business contacts and storing them on the cloud to reduce the risk of losing information and giving them the advantage of utilising business contacts effectively across geographies and teams, because information will be available to every member of the company instead of being limited to one individual holding the card.