Near Field Technology
Picture yourself at an upcoming trade show.
You look around your booth expecting the awkward dance of attendees adjusting their badges to the light and the back and forth of scanners focusing on those awkward barcodes. The clumsy lead-capture-shuffle is gone. Your sales teams are collecting leads in a graceful manner, like a Broadway play of Swan Lake. Attendee data is collected perfectly, tagged and routed to your sales team in seconds. It’s flawless and beautiful – and available today.
Near Field Communication (NFC) is an ‘edgy’ technology. Its possible applications are almost endless and, with so much of the population carrying around a mobile device, anyone can use it.
NFC will permeate every transaction, for business and customer trade shows, pushing coupons while customers shop or taking IDs at a restaurant. Busy moms at the supermarket won’t need to carry their credit cards. Teenagers going to a concert won’t need to print out their tickets. All you need is your mobile phone or tablet.
It’s easy to imagine NFC fitting in well in the lead retrieval marketplace. When lead retrieval is this automated, it empowers sales members to focus on what they do best – selling their product. NFC uses an obscure “tag” that contains a unique ID. Similar to a barcode, the tag is read when it is within a few inches of an NFC reader. These tags may be embedded on badges and ID cards or in bracelets, hats or apparel.
NFC has been in the technology pipeline for about a decade now but the general population doesn’t know its name quite yet. When NFC technology began picking up speed three years ago, Swedish research firm Berg Insight predicted that by 2017, there would be a whopping 2.1 billion NFC enabled devices (AKA: cell phones) popping up around the globe. This means that 48% of mobile phones sold in 2017 will have NFC capabilities.
What does this mean for the lead retrieval marketplace? It’s simple.
As more businesses begin using NFC-enabled devices, the tradeshow fishbowl and lead retrieval gets supercharged. Data flows easier, faster and more gets done. Technology becomes secondary to relationships… the way it was intended.
