How to roll out digital business cards across a company

Rolling out digital business cards across a company comes down to eight decisions, made in roughly this order: the brand template, who can edit what, how you load your people, how you group them, which cards they get, where contacts go, what happens when someone leaves, and how you will know it is working. Get the first two right and the rest is mostly admin.

This playbook walks through each step, with the choices most companies face and the trade-offs behind them. It is written for whoever owns the rollout, whether that is marketing, sales operations, HR or IT.

01Before you start: agree the goal

Companies switch to digital business cards for different reasons, and the reason shapes the setup. If the goal is brand consistency, you will lock most of the profile. If it is lead capture for sales teams, you will care most about contact forms and CRM sync. If it is cost and waste, the priority is a card pool you can reuse when people leave.

Write the goal down in one sentence and share it with the people who will sign off. It will settle most arguments later about what employees should be able to change. Everything below is available on the Nexus Teams plan, but the same decisions apply whichever provider you choose.

1. 1

   Pick a brand template

   One design for the whole company, with logo, colours and company details.

2. 2

   Decide access rules

   What the company controls, what needs approval and what employees edit freely.

3. 3

   Import the roster

   Load names, roles and emails from a spreadsheet, or sync them from your directory with SCIM.

4. 4

   Set up departments and managers

   Group people and give managers the right level of oversight.

5. 5

   Order cards into a pool

   Choose materials, then assign each card to a person.

6. 6

   Connect your CRM

   Send new contacts to HubSpot, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive or monday.com automatically.

7. 7

   Plan offboarding

   Cards return to the pool and contacts stay with the company.

8. 8

   Measure with team analytics

   Track taps, views, saves and new contacts by person and department.

021. Pick a brand template

Start with the design, because everything else hangs off it. Choose a template that fits your brand, then set your logo, cover image, colours, fonts, company name, website, address and any links everyone should share, such as your main site or a company brochure as a PDF. Nexus has 36 templates, including designs that match the physical card finishes, and every colour and font can be adjusted.

Once you are happy, lock the brand. Locked fields cannot be changed by employees, which keeps every profile looking like it came from the same company. If you operate in more than one language, set up the template in each. Profiles can be in English or Arabic, and Arabic lays out right to left.

032. Decide access rules

This is the decision that most affects how the rollout feels to employees. For each part of the profile, you choose one of three levels.

Most companies start from one of three patterns. In the company-controlled pattern, admins manage everything and employees simply see their profile and numbers. In the shared pattern, employees keep their own photo and phone number up to date, job titles and links go through approval, and the brand stays locked. In the self-managed pattern, employees run their own profile and only the brand is locked.

You can set a company-wide policy and then override it for individuals. A sales director might be allowed to edit their own links freely while the rest of the team needs approval. Decide who gets notified, too: employees can be told when the company changes their profile, and managers can be told when an employee changes theirs.

Lock the brand, free the personal details, and approve the things people outside the company will judge you on.

043. Import the roster, or sync it from your directory

Typing in a hundred profiles by hand is slow and error-prone. Export a spreadsheet from your HR system or directory with one row per person: name, email, job title, department, and phone number if you have it. Import it, review the preview for mistakes, and each person gets a profile built on the company template with their details filled in.

Single sign-on and SCIM directory sync

If your company runs an identity provider, connect it before launch. Single sign-on through SAML or OpenID Connect lets people sign in with their work account (Okta and Microsoft Entra, or Google Workspace through SAML), and you can require two-step verification. SCIM directory sync keeps the roster current from the directory itself: joiners appear without a spreadsheet, and deactivating someone in the directory runs offboarding automatically.

054. Set up departments and managers

Departments let you organise people and delegate. Group employees by team, office or region, then assign a manager to each department. You decide what managers can do for their people: edit certain parts of their profiles, configure their cards, view or manage their contacts, see their analytics, and approve changes.

Delegation matters most in larger companies. A regional sales manager who can approve a new job title for their own team takes a lot of small requests off the central admin.

065. Order cards into a pool and assign them

Rather than buying cards person by person, order them for the company. They arrive in a card pool, and you assign each card to an employee from the dashboard. If a card is lost, you block it and assign a replacement. If someone changes role, you can reassign. The card keeps a history of who held it.

Many companies mix materials by role. Metal for leadership and client-facing staff, wood for teams that want something warmer, and full-colour PVC for the wider company because it carries your exact brand artwork. The cards page shows every finish.

076. Connect your CRM

Every time someone fills in a lead form or uses Exchange to send their details back, that contact should land where your sales team already works. Nexus syncs new contacts natively to HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive and monday.com, connects to Zapier and Make, and can send signed webhooks to your own systems. Contacts also collect in a shared team list, and you can export them as CSV at any time.

Decide who can see contacts before launch. Some companies let employees manage their own contacts; others give them view-only access and keep management with sales operations.

Give reps more ways to capture and follow up

• Paper card scanner: a rep photographs a paper card someone hands them and it becomes a contact, Arabic and English cards included.
• Lead enrichment: looks up a contact's company and role on the public web, with sources, before the follow-up.
• Booking card: prospects book a meeting from the rep's profile through Calendly, Cal.com, HubSpot Meetings, Microsoft Bookings and others. Meetings booked through Cal.com, or Calendly on a paid Calendly plan, appear in Nexus and the person is added to contacts.

The scanner and enrichment use credits. Teams includes 30 a seat each month, pooled for the company, and extra packs never expire, so decide who can use them and set a budget for events. The sales teams page shows how they fit a typical week.

087. Plan offboarding before you need it

The moment a paper card system fails is when someone leaves. Their cards are still in circulation, pointing at an old email address, and the contacts they gathered leave with them. With a managed rollout, offboarding is a few clicks: the person's access ends, their cards return to the pool for the next hire, and the contacts they collected stay with the company. If you use SCIM directory sync, deactivating the person in your directory starts all of this automatically.

Their company profile is archived rather than deleted. You can forward its public link to a colleague, so anyone who taps an old card reaches someone who can help, or show a simple page saying the person is no longer with the company.

098. Measure with team analytics

Team analytics show taps, profile views, QR scans, contact saves, link clicks and new contacts, for the whole company, each department and each person, along with a city-level map of where profiles were viewed. There are no tracking cookies and no IP addresses stored.

Use the numbers to spot problems as much as successes. A team with very few taps after a trade show might not have activated their cards. A profile with plenty of views but no saves might need a clearer Save contact button or a better photo.

10Launch checklist

Hand cards out at a team meeting rather than leaving them on desks. Show people how to activate the card, how to tap it on a phone, and where to find their contacts. Ten minutes together saves weeks of reminders. Security and legal teams usually want to review the platform before launch, so share the security overview early.