< Evernote Video Training Library

One of Evernote's most impressive features is the ability to transform the lead management process. Evernote's built in business card scanning features, integration with LinkedIn, and ability to automatically add a a contact to your phone contacts by simply scanning a card is transformative for how sales professionals manage business cards and leads. This webinar demonstrates Evernote's business card scanning features and illustrates three workflows case studies for using Evernote for your lead management. 

Video Highlights

Original Air Date: July 2014
Platform Demo: Evernote for iOS and Evernote for Android

[4:52] Evernote Business Cards feature
[13:18] Third party tools for scanning 
[14:50] Stacey's Canon scanner
[23:30] Workflow for managing business cards and converting into business with Evernote 
[39:09] Evernote Atlas feature
[41:29] Lead management template example

Transcript

Welcome to our second GetUntethered hangout. I am Stacey Harmon, and I’m here with Kristi Willis, my co-author of Untethered with Evernote: Tips and Workflows for Independent Entrepreneurs. You are joining us for our second edition of our GetUntethered hangouts and this time we're going to discuss some strategies for managing these stacks of business cards I'm guessing may or may not have on your desk. Can anyone identify with that? Kristi maybe?

We’re going to tackle them. We’re going to go paperless with our business cards and talk about lead management in Evernote today so before we can get into all that let me give you a little background. I am Stacey Harmon and I am principal of Harmon Enterprises and we help small businesses to go digital with their marketing and their workflows. Both Kristi and I are Evernote ambassadors and Evernote Business Certified Consultants so we love Evernote; we live and breathe Evernote; it’s essential to how we run our companies. We have a strong passion for it and enjoy discussing and moving forward not only our skills but also the skills of others who are also involved in that community. I like to refer to us as Evernotians. 

Having said that I'm going to pass over to Kristi to introduce herself. 

[Kristi] As Stacey mentioned my name is Kristi Willis, I am the owner of KW Solutions group and the co-author of Untethered with Evernote. We started these hangouts as a way to share best practices because reading in the book you don't necessarily get to ask questions and so that's what this is for. It’s also ever-evolving, so we want to show you some tips and tricks that may be new to you.

Today I’m going to kick off with a tutorial and then I'll pass it off to Stacey to talk about two workflows that you could use to manage your business cards and what that might look like. She has a couple really cool tricks that she uses, a couple that I had never thought of.

I love connecting with people at networking meetings and conferences but a lot of times this is what I would come home to. A stack of business cards, receipts… some things that I picked up along the way. And it just felt overwhelming; before I had Evernote, it would just sort of sit there in a stack needing to be dealt with and I didn't really know what to do with them. When Evernote added the business card feature it definitely made managing the business cards much easier because now I don't even bring those home with me. When I’m at the conference or right after the meeting, I deal with them, so that I don't have to that stock even at home on my desk. This is no longer part of my world, yay!

There are a couple different things to point out about the business card feature. Right now it is only available for iOS, and using the Evernote ScanSnap edition scanner only. We have heard that it is definitely in the works to make it to other devices particularly Android we know is in the works. What this feature allows you to do is it allows you to add cards using the camera in the business card setting. It connects to LinkedIn, so it will pull in that person's LinkedIn information, if they’re on LinkedIn. It also can connect to the contacts on your phone, so this is probably my favorite parts, because they don't have to worry about are they actually going to be in my address book when I go to make a phone call? I can add notes in details to the conversation. 

I'm actually mirroring my iPhone so I can walk through part of this. I am NOT going to walk us through the actual taking a picture up because that could make you a little dizzy. What I can do is when I have a business card I want to just put it on a nice flat surface, and then I'm going to go to my camera and go to the business card settings.

There is a trick. If you have a white card you want to put it on a dark background; if you have a dark card you want to put it on a white background. Evernote will warn you about that. One thing to note is that if there are crazy graphics on the card or has a very bizarre layout; the scanners aren’t going to pick it up. That's true any scanner. People who have really complex business cards are just really difficult to scan. If somebody hands you a very busy card, it's probably not going to do well. Most cards work pretty well.

I’m going to put it on that surface, and I don’t even have to press a button for it to take a picture. On the business card setting, it will look for the card and then when it finds it, it will snap the picture for you. If the card is glossy it will ask you to tilt the camera, which is nice. It gives you lots of hints on how to capture the best image. Once you've done that, it's going to create and note for that card and it's actually going to pull up as it's capturing. In this case if you have connected to LinkedIn, it’s going to pull in their name, title and company from LinkedIn. For me, instead of picking my main business, it picked up one the magazines I write for. It’s pulling that based of their LinkedIn profile email. So if they giving you a card with a different email than their LinkedIn profile it's not going to find that.

 If it matches, then it will pull up that contact information. It also pulls in their photo from their LinkedIn profiles. One of the things I love about this is notice at the top… I hate getting caught without a business card, but it happens on occasion, if I take a picture of the person's card, and then in turn just hit that “email my contact info” at the top and it will send them my information in return. So if you get caught without a card you can still share your information easily. You do that with “email my contact info.” Once its done it'll create this great note in Evernote, and I can add my notes below. It actually takes a picture the card and adds it to the note as well.

 Notice that because I am connected on LinkedIn I could go click on that view profile to see that. This makes a really great place that I can add other information and over time as I have different conversations with this person, I can add additional notes to that. I love to add the conference I met them at or the meeting, or the key things they work on, all those keywords that would make it easy for me to find this person later. So let me just show you a little bit… I have a screen for this and the PowerPoint… I’m going to show you on my iPhone. Where you would set this up on your iPhone…

To set up my business card features I want to click the gear in Evernote, and then I want to tap the General tab and I'm going to go down to the camera settings; and when I do that at the bottom of that list are the business cards settings. This is where you can see I can connect to LinkedIn. As long as I add my LinkedIn connection it will be able to search through there's. I can determine my contact info. This is where I can go in and ad all of my details for when I email that to other people.

[Stacey] Kristi, while you’re on that screen, one of the points that is really important, notice at the bottom, you can add URL’s and social profiles. If connecting on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook are important to how you mange your leads, in my case it is, those are good details that you can get in front of a business contact right away and this is where you would set that up.

[Kristi] For me I don't at use a Facebook page for my business. My Facebook page is personal so I have not added that. I did add Twitter though. I can also choose on here what notebook I want my contact to be automatically added to. I can all always add them later, but might default notebook for that which I use is Contacts. I can also auto-tag my contacts. As much as I love tags, in this case have not done that. And I can have it saved to my contacts; so it's going to save to my contacts on my phone, which for me I have synchronized with my G-mail contacts. The great thing about this is I don't have to go to Evernote to find their email address or phone number it's going to automatically be in my contacts which is great.

For the follow-up options, when I add a card, it will pop up if I have it on always show, it will pop up and ask me I want to connect to them on LinkedIn, it will ask if I want to email my contact information. That's just a really great reminder about how else you want connect to this person, et cetera. You'll notice that the bottom of that screen, it has the card scanning tips where it shows you how to tilt the camera and such. I use a lot of these different features so that it's a really robust experience for me. 

[Stacey] Will you show them swiping to the “business card feature”? That’s an important detail. 

[Kristi] When you get to the camera, you're going to land on whatever you used last… so if I was doing a post-it note last I am going to swipe all the way to the right to get to the business card and you can tell it's looking for a card. As soon as it was to find one it would snap that picture for me. 

If you don't have an iPhone you are not left out! There are several third-party tools for Android, and there are also third-party tools for iPhone if you're trying to do you other types of scanning as well not just business cards. CanScanner is a particularly popular one, there's also DroidScan and ScanBot. If you don't want to be bothered with getting all of your business cards entered, or maybe you have a huge stack that you’d like somebody else to help you with, there’s a service call ShoeBox that the web app that will help process business cards for you. From the hardware side there are a number of scanners that have built in business card scanning to Evernote. In addition to you the Evernote ScanSnap scanner edition, there are other Fujitsu ScanSnap that scan business cards really well to Evernote and simultaneously will build a document that you can import into your contacts.

You still get that integration between Evernote and Contacts. You also can work with several Doxie scanner that work well with Evernote, as well as Canon scanners and I think Stacey has a Canon scanner she'd like to talk a little bit about.

[Stacey] I’d just like to point out this graphic shows how different scanners that have the particular business card feature where there’s an area that’s designed specifically for business cards. Before I started using the iOS app, I found my Canon to be really useful in getting my cards scanned. It was a different approach to getting the data still into Evernote. It didn't have the LinkedIn integration but it digitized my business cards and got rid of the stack of paper cards.

I like this one because it’s actually mobile, so I take the Canon Scanner with me. It’s the solution that I tend to use and a good alternate as an extension. If you have a stack at home, or you don’t have access to an iOS device. I also want to mention it that the iOS functionality we expect Evernote to be bringing to the Android as well.

[Kristi] Now we’re going to check the Q&A. We’ve got a couple of questions. We did have one question about “what are ways for people who are non-iOS and again, there are a number scanners, as Stacey was talking about, the Canon Scanner. I have a small, portable Fujitsu again great when you're going to a conference because I could scan receipts and business cards and everything when I'm in the hotel room in my down time. Really like, particularly for a long trip to be able to have that portable scanner to take with you. 

We have a question from Ranny Welton, he’s using an iPhone 5s and 7.12 and when he goes to settings/camera he doesn’t see at the very bottom it should have a business card setting. When I go into my settings and General > Camera, Business Card should be located down at the bottom of the camera list. So let me know if you're still not seeing that but that's where it should be located.

[Stacey] Evernote has some of those setting a few screens in. By the way, too, they do shift the workflow on that sometimes. These are kind of the general locations for where they're located at this moment in time.

Thank you for demo, Kristi. Let's take this to the next stage, which is we know the basics… Kristi has demoed our options for iOS and given Android users as well as desktop users some options for getting cards and contacts into Evernote. So we’re paperless with our business cards now, right? So now what we want to do is move onto “what's the workflow?” How we manage these cards and leads and can bring in the business, you know what is Evernote’s roll in that? How can this be applied to business building? Kristi and I cover this in Chapter four of our book, Untethered with Evernote, and we’re going to go through some of the case studies and build upon them and give you some additional use cases  that I actually utilize and so that you can see how you can apply that to you.

Kristi also wrote a great post I get on the GetUntethered blog. She reiterated as well as expanded on some of the things we covered. What I want to do is walk you through how I would manage a lead that I'm starting with the business card. Using a process that Kristi just showed you.

Before I show you the workflow, I want to show you some of my settings because they impact how I do my workflows. You’ve got to make sure that you, under business cards, which Kristi showed you on the next like you can see that my particular settings show that I created a business cards notebook so that all of my scans from the field go directly into that notebook. I have the save to contacts set also. I'm connected to LinkedIn and I have made sure that my contact information is what I want. 

Here's a case study: this is a real case study… it happened two weeks ago and it resulted in closed business for me. This is how I use the technology to support that. I’m out at happy hour with some friends and somebody that is part of our group and I struck up a conversation, I was clear that there was some business need there that I can help him with, and he gave me his card to follow-up. So I took the card, scanned it using the process Kristi demonstrated earlier right there at a restaurant. What I did is immediately saved the note, and this little screen came up that allowed me to e-mail my contact information, connect on LinkedIn, immediately. From the bar where we are introduced, he accepted my request and it saved his contact information directly to my phone so I had it right there in addition, it emailed him, the LinkedIn request he got on his phone while we were standing there and it was pretty like… he was impressed!

He said “You just sent me a LinkedIn request!” It got his attention, right? So I'm already setting the stage for helping him with his digital because the way that I have connected with him. And I have his information in my phone, I didn't type a thing it happened instantaneously. Then I also chose to email him my contact information so the next slide should show that, and what it did, here's where you can get a visual for what that contact information that I personally control in my settings… it got sent to him and it looks like the image on the left. It might be a little small but you can see that it sends a picture of me, it says it was nice to meet you! In my case I sent you the Facebook page for my business, for Kristi, it’s not part of her business development but it certainly is part of mine. He received it immediately. I can tell you when I do this they respond. Here's an example of him replying to me the next day. It started that conversation and all this was just as a result me scanning his card, not typing any of it. I've already made sure that he had all my information. So again this is what the outcome is that gets sent to the client and s you can see it is very visual, its got active hyperlinks in it, it makes sure the person can connect with you and that you send their contact information right away.

The next slide then shows that we did connect on LinkedIn, he became a first-degree connection and as I mentioned that happened right away when we were sitting still in each other’s presence. Now we’re first-degree connections on LinkedIn. Then the next thing is what's happening with my workflow in Evernote. So Evernote not at my desktop is becoming part of my workflow process. This person was automatically added into my business cards notebook. This is a working example of how that looks just to give you an example earlier but here I went ahead and added some notes to the contacts about what he needs, where I met him, who I was with, what's the date that I met him… so I was able to add some context to it so that I would be more astute when I followed up with him. Now he's in my business cards and I've got those notes right there. Again I still am at the bar in his presence I haven't done anything except scan his card from my phone and make a couple of notes.

The next part of my process is now that I’m back at my office, I want to actually follow up with him. So I'm going to actually move this contact from my business cards notebook which is where it was auto-filed by Evernote, I’m going to move it into a Leads notebook. My theory here is, if I have a lot of business cards they might not all be leads, but they are all contacts I want to keep. I let Evernote auto-file everything into my business cards notebook, then I move those that I want to follow up with into the Leads notebook. In my particular case, we cover this in chapter four of the book, I actually use a naming convention on the notes. So I moved and transferred this business card auto-generated note from Evernote into a leads folder and I added a tag, of sorts, through naming conventions called “active” because this is somebody that I want to follow up with work with. You can create a workflow, maybe you have leads, active or ones you’re following up on… maybe “dead” means archived. Now I’m here with an “active” lead, and at this point I’m going to start doing some research about him and start actively pursuing the business.

To clarify, one of the reasons I like naming conventions as part of my lead workflow process, and naming conventions are a big part of my system, because when I sort multiple notes by title and by alphabetical order it will group everything that is like together. Some people my choose to do a tag search, for me I like to sort by title and I have all my actives grouped together and you can see all my dead leads there, all still within the Lead notebook. It provides some context for me that really works for how I go forward in my business. 

An option, and this is again described in the book as well, is that you could actually make this even more detailed. So in addition to the naming convention that shows the status of the lead, you can actually add a date to it and if you're going to do that I recommend using year/month/date format again so that when you sort it puts things by date that is relevant to you. So you have all the older stuff for say, 2012, then by 2013, 2014, etc. When talking leads, recency tends to matter. Or you know when you were speaking with somebody and you can group things around dates. Sometimes I slack off in adding the date because the way my particular business works, but if you have many leads and time sensitive nature is very important, consider adding a date to your naming convention it will help again and that sort and help keep organized with the hottest prospects that you can follow up with.

Another option, which would accomplish exactly the same thing is that but for those of you that are tag centric, you can actually track the status. She’s doing the same thing in a different deployment and a different workflow. She is tracking through tags, creating one like you can see on the right with the same names, “active,” “dead,” etc. And then you can just update the tag as you go through the various processes for you. So my process is renaming the subject line with the new status, Kristi’s is replacing the tag with a new updated tag that represents the status.

[Kristi] Stacey has defined notebooks for where she's putting leads and contacts and I am our work is different and so I am more likely to put the contact information with the topic area that I'm working with or with the organization that I'm working with and then I use the tags so that regardless of what notebook it’s in, I can pull my active leads from there. So my use of tags versus naming conventions is about how I store across notebooks verses Stacey has very defined notebooks where she's putting those leads. That approach lends itself to a different tactic.

[Stacey] So depending on what your workflow solution is then you can see how applying one or the other might work better for you. I'd like to mention that for both solutions you could create search shortcuts that will allow you to find and retrieve the status that your most interested in working with.

A couple other options and you might consider using some other features of Evernote. One is Reminders, if you want to the reminders featured that you see on the left in order to help ping you proactively when you need to follow up that could become an important part of your workflow. You can either make it specific or in a week, tomorrow, etc. Then additionally, if you have a lot of leads you want to manage using the table of contents feature can really be functional to create a roster of leads. This may be very functional for you if you have maybe a sales assistant or somebody who's making calls for you and you want to make notes or create a roster of leads. There are some options here for you to consider deploying into your workflow again depending on how many leads you have and how many people you working. These are some tools that Evernote has to improve your workflow there.

Back to my workflows, now we’re at the phase where I have Alan in my workflow, I’ve created a note that is an active note and now I'm doing some research. I have started to generate e-mails, I’m garnering materials for him so that I can appropriately quote him and I’ve been collecting all of these items and you can see here that I'm able in a variety of ways, I have a variety of mediums here, I am putting those things into Evernote and you can see that I'm forwarding emails, I'm adding .pdfs of my estimate that I sent to him and then I’m taking these individual notes and I'm merging them into one note. I'm still, in this particular case, managing all my communication and creating a history of my lead generation and business generation activities in one note that's being managed in my Leads notebook. I'm using the merge feature of Evernote to consolidate those into one note. The thing to keep in mind is this is really very discretionary, at some point I get the inkling that this is going to convert to some real business for me. 

At that point, I'm choosing to create a notebook specifically for this client. I start to then use this is as a collaboration space for dealing with him amongst my team and as part of my project management and workflow, which again is another topic we go into detail in in the book. That’s when I start with a business card, and how I take it from lead to client and how it moves through my system. There’s a little detail that I want to show you. I often will have an opportunity to meet people when I’m at conference, and I’ve now gone to the phase where, this is and example from South by Southwest… so I had this cool Pebble watch and Pebble has an integration with Evernote, I thought wow, that’s kind of meet. Then I was at the Evernote developers party and I met the marketing manager for the Pebble watch… so I actually scanned her card at the party and then I wanted follow up with her after the fact but I couldn't remember her name. I remembered we’d met, I remember where we met… I knew she worked for Pebble, and I wanted to send a message and tell her it was nice to meet her in addition to the auto-generate email that she got because the process from the scan.

This is a cool feature I want you to be aware of. You can view it on the desktop as well as the mobile app. On the left hand side, you can click on Atlas and because I took picture of her card from the field, it actually documented where we met and I'm able to click on the map and pull up her business card note that Evernote created when I scanned it. Obviously that led me to find her name. So if you ever had an example where you remember where you met somebody that you just can't remember their name, if you're actually using this business card feature its going to pull up and geo-locate your notes that you created at certain locations.

I found that actually really useful, it’s one of those things that I didn't know I needed until I needed it, and now I use it a lot. A great power user tip that supplements your use of the business card scanning feature.

[Kristi] This made a huge difference when I go to a conference because I don't take the picture of the card while I’m at the meeting but when I'm back at my hotel room I have gotten in the best practice of taking the pictures while I'm in that city because again, I may not remember their name but I'm remember that I met them in Chicago or San Francisco or Boston at that conference. It really helps me be able to narrow that down. 

[Stacey] Let's move on to the next case study which I think also happens… so it's not that all of my leads are met out in the field and I have business cards that I can take a picture of, so often will get a phone call or an email from somebody while I’m sitting at my computer and that starts a lead generation process as well. In this case, and here's a process that I kind of marry with the business card process and its if I don't have a business card. The first thing is I have a lead template that is kept in my lead notebook, and I pin it to the top, you can see there's a little reminder set there on that template, we have this in the book as well, and it's really just a table that lists some of the key fields of information that I want to capture when I talk to somebody.

I work with people all over the country so knowing what time zone they’re in is useful so that I know when to follow up with them! I have this table and then I just use the move and copy note feature of Evernote. Evernote has a Copy to Notebook feature, so you can create this template, then you can easily duplicate a note by copying it to any notebook that you want. If I get a call it comes in and I copy that lead template to the lead notebook, then I start doing some data entry into there based around my research on my phone call or hand-written notes. 

We covered in the last hangout, as well, one of the great features of Evernote is that you can scan and photograph handwritten notes, and quite often I’ll marry this template with a little note about something that I’ve written while I was on a phone call or on a cocktail napkin that is related to the lead.

This is an example, I work a lot with real estate agents of how a Real Estate agent could use the same process. We’ve got a lead template at the top talks about and what they're interested and maybe you can marry that with an image or a picture from the property, then you can use checklists and call logs to kind of date and keep track of all of the to-dos and conversations that are documenting the lead management process with your clients. This again, also was in the book and gives you an example of how you can use templates to manage your lead process.

[Kristi] You know I really like the lead template, when I don’t have the business card that's been really helpful tool that I gained from Stacey because I was just throwing information up at the top there wasn't a lot of consistency so having that lead temple has been really helpful for me. Having the tags to be able to track those active leads has been fantastic, that fits really well into my system. Being able to use Evernote in general to keep that information and then be able to logically, as the next step, turn that into the project's beginning.  That natural transition for me is once somebody signs on I am creating a notebook for that client or project. I've already got that starting place with them. Because I work with an assistant, it’s easy for her to find the information without us having to share contacts. If she needs to do any follow-up all that information is right there which is wonderful. 

[Stacey] That is the next point I really want to discuss is that it sets the stage for effective collaboration, which Evernote is really great for. If you have any questions, please start queing them up. We’re going to take the remainder of time to go through those questions.

[Kristi] One of the things we didn't mention is the business card feature is fabulous for capturing that contact info for people that you meet and you and I are not in excessively heavy contact driven roles. Were I to be in that kind of work, I would want to take this integration one more level up, which is the integration that Evernote has with Salesforce. I can take it from a business card, turn it into an active lead with Salesforce and really be able to have a very dynamic way to do that. With that you have typically multiple people who are calling in to customers or clients but I think that sort of integration is the next step from here for people in a multi-person office that's very lead driven.

We do have a resource page for the book that is available on GetUntethered.com. You can subscribe there. We really encourage you to use the #GetUntethered to stay inside the conversation with us. Our next hangout will be discussing Kristi’s and my different workflows for managing tasks with Evernote. We will be discussing some great third party tools, as well.

[Kristi] We’re going to specifically discussing one third party took that I have begun using called Azendoo. It integrated with Evernote and you can do both task and project management.

[Stacey] Please feel free to reach out to us; we are both Evernote Business Certified Consultants. If you need help getting things started in your workflow, please feel free to contact either one of us.

[Kristi] We do have one quick question before we wrap up about if we know when the business card feature will be available for Android. We do not have a specific date on that, but we have heard that it is in development and we hope to see it sooner rather than later.