For a rapidly growing organisation, optimal management of business contacts is critical for maximising revenue. Here’s how Sansan’s business card scanning and contact management solution helped SuperSteam to better manage its customer and supplier leads.

SuperSteam Asia Pacific Pte Ltd is a leading wholesale distributor of professional cleaning products in Singapore. The company offers a complete selection of machines, cleaning supplies and chemicals that are used extensively in airports, hospitals, shopping malls, hotels, factories and other commercial establishments.

Founded in 2002 by two fresh graduates from Nanyang Technological University, SuperSteam started off as a one-product company and swiftly built its way up one customer at a time. It has grown to be a 71-member business and boasts a wide range of cleaning equipment as well as a large client portfolio.

Keeping on top of an expanding contact base

As the company began to expand, it was able to effectively organise the details of existing clients and suppliers using its own ERP systems. However, co-founder & CEO Dylan Terntzer realised that there was no handy tool to collate and utilise the information about prospective customers or suppliers.

“We would have business cards of prospective clients stacked on our tables, but almost always lost track of them,” said Terntzer.

Aware that the disorderly management of cards could result in the loss of potential business deals, Terntzer actively looked out for a business card management solution that could help him and his employees better organise them.

The search for the right solution

Terntzer then chanced upon Sansan through a Facebook post, and in December 2017 signed up to test and understand the features it offered. The major draw of Sansan for Terntzer was its simplicity, accuracy and ease of use. The cloud-based solution allowed the company to effortlessly organise its prospective and existing client contacts into a convenient digital database.

“With the mere click of a button, all the business cards were now at our fingertips,” stated Terntzer.
SuperSteam’s employees were particularly impressed by the fact that with Sansan’s physical scanner, they could scan over 50 cards per minute. The sales and marketing personnel could also scan business cards on the go by using the Sansan mobile app.

This has been especially useful for SuperSteam while hosting exhibitions.

“We tend to get a lot of visitors during exhibitions, and we used to key in their business card details manually,” Terntzer noted. “But now, with Sansan, we can instantly scan these cards and send follow-up emails right away.”

Optimising operational efficiency

Beyond just digitising a contact’s business card, Sansan also provides value-added features such as adding tags, notes and reports for individual contacts. For instance, the ability to include remarks in the database along with the business card has helped SuperSteam’s employees engage more proactively with their prospects.

Sansan also offers an integrated bulk email function that allows SuperSteam to send out personalised emails to its contacts.

“When we recently moved to our new office, we found this feature to be very useful as we were able to instantly update our contacts on our new address with just one email blast,” Terntzer explained.

Sharing contact information in real time

Another benefit for SuperSteam has been Sansan’s ability to share contacts among employees. Now, instead of the business cards being possessed by individual employees, they are stored in a centralised digital database. This way, everybody in the company has access to all current and potential clients, and employees do not need to chase down the contacts endlessly by themselves, improving both efficiency and communication.

“With Sansan, my employees just need to do a simple search and see if that contact already exists on the system,” said Terntzer.

With the Sansan smartphone app, Terntzer himself is able to instantly share contacts he meets with his purchasing or marketing departments by using the internal messaging function. This way, even if he is busy attending an exhibition in another country, they can quickly follow up with that contact. This has contributed to reducing the operational downtime and enhancing the efficiency of his company’s staff.

The fact that Sansan’s Corporate Plan accommodates many more employee accounts prompted SuperSteam to opt for it in February 2018.

Sansan’s role in SuperSteam’s success

Terntzer strongly believes that optimal management of business cards is critical for growth. This is why he views Sansan as an integral part of his company’s modus operandi.

“Sansan’s solution has not only helped to expand our business relationships with existing clients, but has also offered us the convenience to easily tap into prospects and source fresh business from them,” said Terntzer.

With the adoption of Sansan, Supersteam’s operations are now more agile, and their employees more proactive.

“Once businesses use Sansan, they will see an enhancement in their operational efficiency and employee productivity, so I would definitely recommend it to them,” concluded Terntzer.