Chapter 53
Electronic Filing System
To tap into your professional network, information about your contacts needs to be easily accessible. This requires an electronic filing system. Old-fashioned paper address books won't cut it in today's competitive world and nor do online social networking sites count as an actual professional database.
A client prided herself on her business-card filing system. She had hundreds of cards filed alphabetically in a leather-bound business-card book. I agreed that her system looked very impressive.
During a consulting session, she mentioned her plans to contact a certain fellow when the company was ready to open its next satellite office. It was a commendable plan, but when asked about the contact she couldn't remember his name, only the country where he lived. After flipping through pages of business cards, she found a card she thought might be his, but she wasn't sure.
If this client had been using an electronic filing system and had included all pertinent details in the notes section, she simply could have searched for her potential contact by referencing his country and the project name. In a matter of seconds, her computer would have produced a short list of people from his country who were associated with the project.
This client gets bonus points for making an effort to organize her business cards because often professionals will not organize them at all. It's normal for me to visit offices where I see stacks of business cards bound with ...
