What do you do with the business cards you collect? I throw mine right in the trash; well, first I enter them into salesforce.com, and then I toss them. In my sales training workshops I often ask the attendees how many people keep their cards. It’s amazing how many do. I think they are seen as some sort of trophy. Despite the electronic filing systems, iPhone card scanners, and Vcard technology, people like hard-copy cards.
If you’re like most, you bring home a stack from each event or trade show, sit them on your desk by the phone, and when there’s nothing else to do, you flip through them, like a stack of prized baseball cards, dreaming about business opportunity. Deep down, you admit to yourself that these people won’t remember you if you call them right now. They probably threw your card in the trash when they returned from the meeting. But these cards represent opportunity, and the higher up these people are, the more prized these cards become. The question is, what will you do with them, to turn them into business?
© 2012, David Stelzl
High Tech Business Growth 
The CardMunch app from LinkedIN as proven a valuable tool for entering these. It also allows you to automatically expand your LInkedIN network with minimal effort through its auto-invite feature.
Thanks AJ – I agree, but even with automation, people struggle to throw them away simply because they have a hard time managing the follow up process…do you have an app to set a meeting with someone who doesn’t necessarily have a need?