Managing Your Business with Outlook

About This Book

In this book, I show you how to organize yourself, your team, and your busi¬ness by creating procedures for goals control, communication through e-mail, sales control, marketing activities, tasks, and information sharing. You dis-cover how to use Outlook to help you change attitudes and achieve balance in your life.

How can software solve attitude problems, you ask? Well, using the Reminder feature can help employees remember to deliver a task on time. Sharing a task folder with your boss paves the way to negotiating the tasks you should do first. Using e-mail rules to filter out and expose behaviors helps to elimi¬nate unnecessary messages before they’re even written. All these actions can reduce your anxiety and improve your attitude toward your goals.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized into six parts. The chapters within each part cover specific topics in detail. You can read each chapter without having to read the chapters before it, which is helpful if you have better things to do with your time. You can even just read sections within a chapter without reading the entire chapter. I may occasionally refer you to somewhere else in the book for more detail or background information on a particular subject.

Each part covers a major area of managing your business by using Outlook. The following sections summarize what you find in each part:

Part I: Managing Any Business

Managing a business includes simple things that make it successful, not includ¬ing the sales and financial aspects. Businesses of all kinds share common issues revolving around employee relations, planning, and training. But before you organize your business, you have to organize yourself. Remembering to accomplish your tasks by their deadlines, arriving at meetings on time, super¬vising your team, and defining and achieving your goals are all areas in which Outlook can help you get organized.
Part II: Managing Contact Information

Some people think that all you need to know about a customer is a name, phone number, and e-mail address. The Outlook Contacts list allows you to fill in the most complete contact record ever imagined. These records can become your customer profiles. You can easily customize Outlook forms and contacts according to your business needs.

In addition, the Business Contact Manager (BCM) is a free add-in that comes with the Office Small Business and Professional edition. BCM includes Account and Business Contact forms designed to control your sales and marketing activities. You can use BCM without any customization. Version 2.0 allows you to share the same customer base among your team members and custom create reports and lists.

Part III: Handling Communication and Collaboration

Are you tired of receiving so many joke messages? The Zen of Inbox Management shows you how to change your Inbox parking lot into a tollgate. The e-nanny helps you organize your Inbox fast, and the e-office cleaner helps you automate a daily deep-cleaning routine. Avoiding fraud and junk mail is not only a matter of building a firewall, but also involves becoming wise.

Collaborative work becomes smooth when everybody uses the Calendar’s invitation feature and task requests. Sharing the Calendar and Tasks list helps the team work with fewer interruptions. You can also easily shorten meeting setup time, without additional e-mail and phone calls, when your team uses the Calendar and you check the Next Available Time in the team’s schedule. Other tips in this part can change your concept of meeting planning and trav¬eling and working externally.

Part IV: Controlling Business Processes

In this part, you find out how to create a telemarketing campaign, including how to configure the Contacts list for automatic dialing. You also discover how to refine your customer list by using filters and create direct-mail cam¬paigns with a handy direct-mail checklist. In addition, you use Outlook’s map¬ping and Journal features.

Part V: The Part of Tens

Here, you find tips for increasing your free time and managing your sales and marketing activities. You also find ways to streamline and safeguard your data.

Part VI: Appendixes

Because this book explains how to configure Outlook specifically for business purposes, it includes instructions for using the Calendar, Tasks list, Contacts list, and the Journal. Appendix E even shows you how to move from Outlook Express to Outlook 2003.
Read Comments To Download