Getting the best out of Trade Shows

A substantiate amount of marketing dollars are spent on trade fairs and it is imperative to make each trade fair count. Bric APP is used extensively in trade shows to get the best ROI from each event

Basic essentials of a trade fair

Branding :

Branding plays a very important role in attracting foot falls and top of mind recall. Ensure that you are equipped with all the marketing collaterals like kiosks, standees, pamphlets, etc

Attract, Engage & Connect :

Effective branding & scouts with pamphlets can attract foot falls to the kiosk and every one of them may be a potential customer. A crisp opening discussion, followed by an interest enquiry and lead capture of the prospect would be a good start.

Lead capture :

The popular and quickest way would be to collect business cards.Though there are lead capture forms and APPS to enter customer information manually, the visitors may not take time to fill all the details or provide the same for a manual capture.Hence, collecting business cards will be the quickest option.

Converting business card data :

Bric APP is an extremely useful tool to scan business cards to contacts. You can either use the mobile APP, to instantly capture cards that are collected or use the Bulk scan service if there are large volume of cards and scanning them one by one can be tedious task.

Follow up & communication :

Once the business cards are accurately converted, then a follow up email or a brochure would be the most appropriate thing to do.You can export the business cards to Outlook or as an Excel CSV from Bric  APP's web account and use the data points to send out the mailer.

All discussions, follow up points and other tags can also be captured against each card for future reference on the Bric APP account.

Happy Selling !

Business card scanner machines - Do they really solve the problem ?

Scenario 1 : large organization with a distributed salesforce and heavy influx of business cards which are suppoused to get scanned weekly through the office card scanner, but the Math doesn't add up ..   WHY ?

Scenario 2 : The sales team has returned from a trade fair with a large stack of cards and a tearing hurry to email the clients, and a card scanner is purchased.What seemed like 500 cards seems to return just 500 cards . .WHY ?

Scenario 3 : Katie the temp manages the office card scanner and each person has to wait their turn and be nice to Katie till she scans the cards of Senior Mgt and then obliges . .  But the wait is indefinite . . WHY ?

So Why does a card scanner fail in each scenario ? Lets find out.

Accuracy : The card scanners use a technology called OCR and no matter how accurate or evolved the software can be, it can never read all the cards accurately. 

This is because the layout, style of font, back ground colour varies from business card to card and there is never a standard template.

Human intervention : Due to the reason above, every card needs to be reviewed before it is saved. An email ID or name that gets mis-spelled can become redundant data and so the reviewer ends up spending time on all the cards scanned.

Time : Despite all the ergonomics, the average engagement with a card takes about 2.20 minutes from inserting the card, conversion and the review.

To scan 100 cards, it takes about 3 man hours, something that makes the user lose interest quickly

Portability : Cards are received at events, trade fairs, meetings etc. In each instance the sales person has to wait till they come back to office to scan the cards. 

Most of the business card scanners need to be connected to a PC with a software installed for it to function optimally.This is another major setback for quickly converting cards to contacts.

Cloud back up & Integrations : While some of the card scanners do offer integrations off late, most of the card scanners predominantly focus on reading cards and converting it to an excel.

The user has to download CSV files from here and upload to to other CRM software or contact folders.

Wear & tear : Like any other machine, the card scanner is subject to wear and tear too, though this may not be a major deterrent from an overall perspective, it does have a shelf life that can't be fixed.

So if a business card scanner machine is not effective, what is the solution ?

Bric APP is an one stop solution to all of the above, whether you want to scan cards one by one or multiple cards together as bulk.

Bric APP uses human transcription to accurately convert the cards and minimises the need to review data and at the same time facilitates quick scanning of all the cards.

 The cards will get processed at our back end and get updated back to the mobile & web APP within a few minutes.

Bric APP exports data to Salesforce, MS Outlook, Zoho, Hubspot and Google contacts as well as an Excel CSV.

Bric APP's bulk scan service facilitates users to send multiple images of business cards grouped together as a JPG or PDF file and we will crop and process these images as single records.

The cards can be scanned from a flat bed scanner or from a mobile phone grouping multiple cards together.

This service is ideal if you have accumulated 100s' of cards over a period of time or from a trade fair and scanning them one by one on the mobile APP can be laborious.

Bric APP is available on Android & IOS with a personal version and an enterprise version available for sales teams to scan business cards into a master directory of the company. 

         Bric APP scanning is accurate, fast and great value for money  . .  . 

Bric APP for IOS - Releasing shortly

            The much-awaited business card scanner APP for 2018

   Bric business card scanner for IOS is finally completing closed beta testing and should be available on the APP store by mid-February. A big thanks to all our early subscribers and customers who paid in advance for the patience.

What to expect in the first version :

   The business card scanner will work slightly different from the Android version, we have done away with the OCR option as we found no value in that as all our active Android users use the transcription option. The card scanner will hence have a single camera interface to capture pictures.

   The business card organizer feature helps sort all the contacts according to name, company or recent scans and helps to sync data to the iPhone address book and Google contacts. Scanning business cards to Salesforce and Office 365 will be available in the next version.

  You can also export business cards as excel either from the mobile APP or the web dashboard as CSV or Xls files, this is an easy fix to upload cards to other CRM or contact folders.

  Users can use the notes option to capture important information about the cardholder and also use this as a tag to search contacts.

  The IOS APP is also backed with a web interface and the scanned business cards can be accessed from both the APP & the web interface.

  The other options like Call / SMS / Email from the APP, bulk export & sync options are all part of this release. The scanned business cards can be shared with colleagues & friends as URL / VCF files through SMS & Email.

Why Bric APP for IOS ?

   If you are looking for a business card scanner that has an accuracy of  ~ 99%, fast scanning and transcription charges as low as 7 ¢ per card, then look no further than Bric APP. All you need to do is scan business cards continuously till you exhaust your stack and forget about it. The scanned business cards will get accurately transcribed and updated back to the contact folders with a cloud back up.

                   Sign up to avail 100 cards of free transcription

Bric Enterprise - Customised Business Card Management Software

Business card scanners / APPS are an important tool for most organizations to effectively manage customer contacts, leads etc.The requirement may vary from one company to the other however the common practice is either to purchase a business card scanner machine which has its own limitations or purchase Business card scanner APPs through a subscription model.

The disadvantage of a subscription model is that it lacks flexibility or customisations which may be a critical requirement for mid-size/large enterprises.The other disadvantage is the fact that the data resides on the service provider's server which may be a point of concern for some organizations if their internal policies' or the jurisdictions in which they operate do not permit that.

Bric Enterprise is a perfect solution for the above, where the entire business card management software which includes a Mobile APP, Web-APP & a transcription dashboard is customised according to the organization's needs and hosted on the company's server or on a private cloud.The solution works exactly like the Bric Business version with integrations to Salesforce, Office 365, Google etc along with other customisations if any.

Bric Enterprise is a one-time software purchase with AMC arrangements and covers all incremental updates for a defined period.

Sign up on Bric Enterprise to enquire & get your own customised software. 

Bric bulk scan - Fastest way to scan 100s' of business cards

             Easy Conversion of  business cards to contacts 

Capturing business cards one by one on a card scanner APP or a business card scanner machine can be a laborious activity if you are left with heaps of business cards and when that keeps piling up with each trade fair/exhibition.

Bric APP's bulk scan service digitizes business cards scanned as PDF sheets / JPG images into accurate data.

You can scan biz cards ( multiple cards ) from a flatbed scanner and send them across as PDF files, we will crop, process and transcribe the data into individual records accurately.

These records are securely backed up and can be accessed on both PC & mobile APP. You can export business cards as Excel CSV, sync cards to salesforce, Outlook, Zoho, Hubspot as well as Google contacts. 

The bulk scan service can also be used to scan cards from different branches etc with a different account and a master database.

You can also scan incremental cards from the enterprise version of the APP

We have helped companies scan from 500 cards to 9000 cards through our service.

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