Your Business Quick Tip Newsletter
Vol 21 No #221 -6th October 2022
Content
- Turn Outlook Contacts into Your CRM program
- Three Good Business Development Ideas
- Don’t Sheet. Categorise.
- Preview a File in Windows Explorer
1. Turn Outlook Contacts into Your CRM program
One of the least used functions in Outlook Contacts is Categories. This is a keyword or phrase that you can assign to a contact. In Gmail it’s called Groups. Better yet, you can assign multiple categories to each contact.
Categories are utterly brilliant because you can finely target specific people (clients, suppliers, prospects, distributors, different staff groups). By creating industry, occupation, interest, purchase, service categories, for example, all you need to do is sort by category.
When you have your slim (or fat) slice of targeted individuals together – you can then run a personalised email merge to the individuals within that category. Yes, that means if 15 people are assigned that category – you create 15 separate emails in one go instead of one copied to them all.
You’ll find categories in the Outlook Home Ribbon under the Tag menu. It’s the square with six colours. Click it open, select All Categories and then type in your own unique ones.
P.S. Don’t forget if you use xero http://www.xero.com you have the built-in function of Groups.
2. Three Good Business Development Ideas
- Why not create an annual recurring Task / To Do to enhance customer service or recurring sales? Does someone have an annual service with you? Something consumable? Or do you have their birthdate? When the day arrives, a prompt pops up reminding you. Then you can decide to act upon it or not -with an email, a phone call or letter.
- Create a recurring reminder/task to prompt you every few months to telephone for a hello and chat to important clients or business referrers.
- Always ask a new client how they heard about you / what directed them to you. When it’s a referral – always, always pick up the phone to thank the referee.
3. Don’t Sheet. Categorise
The last thing you want to do is work with an endless line up of columns or sheets in Excel or Google Sheets. In example, don’t set up separate columns for clients, prospects, old clients, suppliers. Or separate worksheets for location or products/services. Instead have one column called client type or one worksheet with a category called location.
This eliminates the need to use different worksheets or columns. With all the information on one sheet, you can sort or filter to get the exact information you want.
4. Preview a File in Windows Explorer
If you’ve upgraded to Windows 11, the preview pane for files might not be selected. Go to the view ribbon > select show >preview pane.
This will enable you to scroll through documents without opening them
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