Five best-kept secrets about Outlook

Now that you know the basic functionality of the professional communication giant that hides behind the simple name Outlook, it’s time for us to unveil some tricks that can make the life of a busy person surprisingly easier.

1. Business Contact Manager
BCM is a powerful add-on to Outlook that allows any businessperson manage their business contacts and marketing campaigns, monitor sales people’s and campaigns’ performances, give order to one’s business opportunities and try out other ways to increase work efficiency.

Nick and I highly recommend trying Business Contact Manager and we will be writing more about BCM’s features and usefulness in later posts.

2. Synchronization with smartphones
If your phone runs on Windows Mobile, is an iPhone by Apple or any of the Blackberrys, we’ve got excellent news for your contacts and calendars. Outlooks allows for easy synchronization between these phones and its own calendars and contacts. I personally recommend backing up this data in Outlook for the sake of future business opportunities, meetings and sound sleep not missed in the possible case of data loss either on your computer or your phone.

3. Phone call documentation
Something that is not widely used, yet can be extremely useful for salespeople and many others, is the logging of calls in Outlook. If you use a land phone for plenty of business calls, try connecting it to your computer. Once you do that, you can use a headset to make calls directly out of your Outlook’s contacts. A log for transcribing information about a call will be automatically created each time you pick up your headset.

4. Searching your archives
Whenever Nick talks about the e-mail client inside Outlook, he takes the time to explain the importance of sorting one’s mailbox, deleting the unnecessary out of it and archiving the rest. After that’s done, he says, finding an old e-mail becomes easier with the search function within the program. It looks like a white strip with gray text at the top of your list of e-mails. Simply click on it and use it as you would use Google. If a message offers you to download an update for this function, do take the time to do that. The search will likely become faster that way.

5. Find your 20% of efforts that bring 80% of results
Evidence shows that for most workers, roughly only 20% of their work brings 80% of the results they see. This is called the Pareto rule, or the 80-20 rule, and it means that most business professionals spend about 80% of their time on highly inefficient tasks. Luckily, you can change that ratio for you with the simple help of Outlook tasks and the more advanced help of the Business Contact Manager. The way to go is to increase your usage of task priorities. Prioritizing will allow you to concentrate on what is actually important and not getting distracted by unnecessary chores. Once you have mastered that, you can turn to BCM for an extra efficiency push in the shape of monitoring the results of any marketing campaigns that you undertake.
Analyzing one’s sales channels is a more complicated, yet enormously more precise way to cut out on unnecessary labor and expenses, thus concentrating on that which actually brings the results you seek. We are enthusiastic about elaborating on this topic in our later writings.

Those are some basic tips on using the communication client inside the Microsoft Office Suite. We hope that you find the information that we provide for you helpful. Like always, we look forward to hearing your comments, questions and requests. Please do not forget to subscribe, because there is more great advice about small business administration coming this week.