posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Oct 23
The following is a paid review, but is completely my own opinion and is not at all influenced by being paid.
If you are an entrepreneur, or even if you just go to very many seminars, you amass many business cards, of which there is no good way to organize and sort in such a way as to be able to find the information when you need it. Besides just throwing them all in a shoebox, I’ve tried those little plastic insert pages where you can insert 12 cards or so and then put them in a 3-ring binder. That works fairly well, but I don’t take the binder with me when I travel, so if I run into someone who could use one of my contact’s services, I have to make myself a note and hopefully remember what it was all about when I get back home, then dig through the binder to find the information, then type it all out in an e-mail and send it.
What a pain!
Scan2Contacts gives another option to add to the shoebox and 3-ring binder solutions. I have seen other business-card scanners, and they all seem to do similar things, but Scan2Contacts is the first one I have seen that allows you to scan the card directly into Microsoft Outlook - which is a great benefit for the vast majority of companies who use Outlook as their email client.
Take a look at Scan2Contacts cute demo, which shows how the system works to get the info into Outlook (as well as illustrating the frustration of users before the scanning solution).
I’ve seen other scanners, and they work well, but if you use MS outlook, Scan2Contacts doesn’t look as if it can be beat for simple efficiency! Use it as a tool to increase your social capital!
Fair Winds,
Andrew
posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Apr 19
There’s a saying in aviation: “Keep the shiny side up!” Usually, it is said jokingly - often to a new student pilot or freshly minted private pilot. I imagine the saying may have started in early aviation when aircraft were not built to be as stable and trustworthy as they are today - when it was entirely possible that an inexperienced pilot could end up upside-down or in some other “interesting” attitude that would take a decent amount of skill to recover from. The belly of an airplane tends to get dirty more quickly than the “top” of the plane - hence the saying.
Here again, the metaphor to business is uncanny. Marketing is all about “keeping the shiny side up.” It’s about showing the benefits (NOT the features) of your product. I can talk all day about the higher powered engines and the fuel capacity increase on my newly designed model of aircraft, but that doesn’t mean you’ll understand that my new design will get you to your destination faster and without stopping for fuel.
Of course depending on how you market, speed and endurance could also be considered benefits. Benefits are different to different people. So the “shiny side” of your product can only be “kept up” if you know your customer (or potential customer) and if you use words that make the “shiny side” of your product valuable to them. If I am talking to a pilot, useful load, endurance, range, climb speed, etc. are benefits. If I am speaking to a small business owner looking for transportation, those are features. The coinciding benefits are “carrying more passengers” (useful load), “non-stop flights coast-to-coast” (endurance & range), and “spending less time in traffic at low altitudes and lower fuel burn” (climb speed). If you’ve been in an industry for a long time, it is hard to remember that not everyone speaks your language, so be careful!
As an example, a couple weeks ago, I bought some bottled water at the grocery store. It was the same bottle as any other water. The same size. The same water, essentially. But this company did something just a little different: they wrapped the caps with a plastic seal that matched the color of the bottle and prevented tampering. This is an example of a simple, inexpensive way to stand out from the crowd and add class to a commodity product. Talk about “keeping the shiny side up!”
How do you “keep the shiny side up” in your marketing? Leave a comment and let us know!
Fair Winds,
Andrew
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