Gathering Dust or Using Them Effectively?

So you've been business networking. What do you do with the business cards you collect?  Have you sorted them into an orderly fashion and filed them electronically or even better spoken to the person or people and set up a meeting?  

Perhaps this is one of the jobs you save for later but time to sort them never comes because you are too busy running your business. Rather than keep them in your drawer, or a pile on your desk what do you actually want to do with them.

When you collect the cards what are you intending to do with them? Are you intending to use them for networking in the future - do you want to use their services or are you going to use them for marketing purposes?  

Sophie, one of my client's had attended various networking events and had over 60 business cards from different sources.  When we met she asked me to sort them firstly into excel spreadsheets and then upload them to Insightly (her CRM - Customer Relationship Management software of choice). Once completed I uploaded them to Mailchimp (an email marketing platform), so that Sophie could tailor her marketing to the specific groups.   

For a small amount Sophie was able to maximise her time and target her marketing more appropriately.