Business Cards from Trade Show

[smay]

Several of my team are just back from a very successful trade show. They've got a pile of business cards from individuals we'd like to mailshot.

Do we enter these as leads or contacts?

In either case, we cannot capture the website information from their cards. Surely we don't have to enter each one as a contact/account pair?

[smay]

Please can anyone help with this? This must be a very common occurrence.

Thanks.

[mgaudette]

Hi,

In the end, it really depends on how you are using SugarCRM. I personally have three difference categories:

Targets = People that get our newsletters, but haven't shown interest yet
Leads - People who have shown interest after a cold call, or that contact us themselves. Usually it means that following-up is needed.
Contacts = When an opportunity develops and a quote goes out (or anything serious happens that point to a reasonable chance of getting a sale)

In your case, I would use leads since you've already talked to them and some follow-up is probably going to happen. In any case, the campaign mailing feature can be used with any target/leads/contact, so it really depends on how you use SugarCRM.

A best practice guide would be welcomed, because I struggled with this the first few weeks myself.

Mike

[kpit]

You could use the business card entry which allows a quick entry of the account information At the same time.

[stevec]

Sounds like leads are the way to go - promoting them to accounts/contacts when ready.

If you plan on getting a lot of cards, you could invest in a card scanner and software to generate an excel doc and import that.

[smay]

Many thanks for the suggestions - yes, a best practice guide would be extremely useful.

One issue I have with entering them as either leads or contacts is that the website information from the business card is not captured - this only resides at the account level, apparently. Unfortunately, entering the information as vcard's doesn't get round this. I even tried entering the information in Outlook and synching it to, then from Sugar - the website is lost.

Defining a custom field in, say, contacts for the website is a way round this, but this doesn't synch with Outlook, of course.

I can see the logic for Sugar's schema being designed in this way, but it doesn't seem to stand up to a real life usage requirement that must be very common (....or are we the only ones going to trade shows and doing follow-ups?!!!)