I used to leave networking events with a stack of business cards that sat on my desk for two weeks before I did anything with them. And then by the time I got around to entering them, I'd forgotten why I even wanted to talk to half these people. The card just said “VP of Operations” with no context for what we'd actually discussed.
This resulted in a lot of wasted effort. For an introvert like me, networking events are akin to Olympic level workouts. It takes a lot of prep time and I'm drained by the end of it. But, the problem of forgetting why I engaged with a particular person went away once I stopped treating card entry as a data task and started treating it as an extraction task. Here's the workout I run after every networking meeting now.
Turning a Stack of Cards Into a CRM-Ready List Takes Four Steps
Take a photo of the business cards.
Upload them into your favorite AI for extraction and data normalization.
Have the AI turn them into a CSV file.
Upload the CSV of new contacts into your CRM.
That's the whole pipeline. No manual typing, no squinting at someone's handwriting on the back of a card, no half-finished spreadsheet. The AI handles the tedious part (reading fonts, splitting names from titles, standardizing phone formats) and I get a clean import in the time it takes to walk back to my car. What that CRM actually looks like on the back end varies a lot depending on the industry you're in, but the card-to-CSV pipeline feeds into any of them the same way.
Loading Contacts Into a CRM Doesn't Mean the Job Is Done
Getting people into the CRM is step one. If they sit there untouched, I've just built a more organized version of the business card pile. So the follow-up has to happen the same day, ideally before I lose the thread of the conversation.
Once loaded into your CRM, schedule follow-up emails.
Send a simple “nice to connect” and drop your contact information.
If you remember something specific, like their industry or preferred tech stack, drop that in there too.
Create a custom CRM field to find them later.
That last step is the one people skip, and it's the one that actually pays off six months later.
A Custom Field Turns a Contact List Into a Referral Engine
I have a field called “Refer When.” It holds things like “Azure DevOps” or “Graphic Design.” So when a client asks if I know anyone who does branding work, or someone mentions they're stuck migrating a pipeline to Azure DevOps, I'm not relying on memory. I search the field and the right contact comes up, even if I met them eight months ago and haven't spoken since.
“Refer When” field examples: Azure DevOps Graphic Design
This is the difference between a CRM as a contact archive and a CRM as a working tool. The archive version just proves you met someone. The working version tells you what to do with that relationship the next time it's relevant. If your current setup only ever does the former, that's usually the real symptom behind wondering whether it's time to dump your CRM instead of just adding another field to it.
If you're building this out in Super Easy CRM, custom fields like “Refer When” take about thirty seconds to set up and they're searchable from day one, so there's no reason to wait until you have a “real” system for organizing referrals. Set the field up now, before the next stack of cards lands on your desk.
