Every time you meet a new contact, you probably exchange business cards. Companies spend hours and days designing business cards to make a statement and to aid in letting that company stand out amongst your contacts. According to VistaPrint.com, an online print-on-demand company, 67% of small businesses feel that business cards are their most important marketing tool. They are also a very important social tool, absolutely required for propriety in some cultures, helpful for remembering names and titles in every culture.

What do you do with these cards once you leave your meeting, trade show or event? Ensuring you have usable, accurate, complete contact information for all of your customers, prospects, leads and especially your network is the key. Create a contact list or database that has every possible piece of information for all of your contacts. Do you have a home email address, cell phone number or some way to reach your contact if he leaves his job? Staying in touch might mean a new sale for you, as you now have a new company to which you can sell.

You can also subscribe to a service that helps keep the contact information you have up to date. Many web services are available which will send out emails to your contacts to ensure that you have their most recent information. At the same time, some of these services will send your recent contact information to the people in your address book. Depending on the service you choose, you and your contacts may also be able to enter their previous email addresses to make reaching them even easier. Keeping contact information up to date also means keeping devices synchronized with the most current information.

Finally, let your marketing department help you. Share your leads and contacts with them so they can “prime the pump” and move your leads along in the process so you have less “marketing” to do and can focus on selling.

Why is keeping your contacts current so important?

First, devices have taken over our lives—from laptop computers to PDAs to cell phones and smartphones, they are everywhere and we rely on them on a daily basis. This fact is even more relevant for salespeople who have found it easier to do business from the road and in many cases do not even have a permanent office.

Second, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of ways to contact people. According to the NFO WorldGroup (now TNS Global), nearly 75 percent of consumers own multiple email addresses. Add that to the multitude of phone numbers, including cell phones, home phones, and work phones, and it is almost impossible to reach someone on the first try.

Third, contact information changes much more frequently today than it ever has in the past. Again, the NFO Group found that 41 percent of consumers had changed their email address in the past two years. Nearly one third of people intend to change jobs by the end of the year, and over 40% intend to leave their current position by the end of 2007 according to Careerbuilder.com.

Thanks to these developments as well as the growth of alternative communications vehicles, including email and Internet marketing, the marketing department also has a more difficult time finding your customers and prospects. Emails are often lost in junk folders or caught in spam filters, survey after survey indicates that banner advertising is only moderately effective, and mass media consumption is down in favor of much more fragmented and targeted media.

When the marketing department has a harder time reaching the target audience, sales people have to do more “marketing” work, introducing the company and its products, explaining the benefits and features, and finding the right people to call on in a given company.

By adapting to these new realities of both sales and marketing, you can improve your ability to close sales and reach the top of your profession without resorting to dramatic price breaks, special incentives, or other promotional activities that impact the bottom line.