Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today’s program! My name is Warren Stokes. I’m the host and presenter today, and I am truly delighted to share one of the most popular topics that we have ever produced here. It’s a continuation of a very successful webinar series and this one is called the seven secrets of Outlook. I hope you’ll get a lot of value from this and my goal is to make very good use of your time today.

The whole concept here is about taming your Outlook inbox, managing your time, and essentially being more productive. This demonstration and presentation relate to Outlook 2019 and Microsoft 365 environment, but many of the concepts do apply to older versions of Outlook. And, I’ll also cover some of the version differences here. So let’s get started!

I want to start with a question: did you ever wonder why some people get more done than others? Hmm, why might that be? Well, perhaps it’s because they’re more organized. I’m going to tell you a very quick story. When I was in high school I had a civics teacher. His name was Bernie Richter. He was very well known in the community as being a successful businessman as well as a teacher. One day we had a class and he was talking about some actual business things and he said, “Does anyone have any questions?” And I raise my hand and I say, “Mr. Richter, how does one become successful in business?” And he thought for a moment and he said, “well, it’s one thing.” He said, “Warren, all you have to do is do what you say you’re going to do no more and no less”. And that stuck with me for all these years. But one of the things that I found over the years was that it’s a great concept and a good goal.

But how do you do it? Well, that brings us to kind of the meat of the program today and I’m going to explain how to understand Outlook functions. That’s a key thing it might be a little more then deeper than you thought but it has a lot to do with managing your time gaining control of your inbox, which can be kind of a tiger that you wrestle with every day if you’re like me and thousands of millions of other people, but it’s about enhancing your productivity so you can get more done. And a little side bonus is probably being able to share some of these tips with your friends and maybe impress them! I’m going to spend just a little bit of time and we’re going to go fairly quickly through these concepts and then we’ll spend most of our time demonstrating how this works but understanding Outlook functions to get more organized. That’s a key concept that I love!

The magic of rules: you’ll be amazed if you start using conditional formatting. It’s a really powerful functionality that’s in Microsoft Outlook how to insert content from templates, and with the 365 environment that has even more capabilities than it used to. Quick steps; wow you’re going to love this if you don’t already use it. And how to transform things like emails into contacts transforming emails into tasks and appointments, just super easy.

So the first part that I wanted to spend just a minute on is understanding what Outlook is all about. Why is Outlook one of the most popular productivity tools in the world? If you look at the statistics, there are hundreds of millions of users. And one of the key things is email, but what is email? It’s really about communication. We use it every day and many of our life’s hours are consumed with email. Reading email replying to email dealing with email. And probably the second most common function of Outlook usage is just managing your time. I call it that because I don’t call it a calendar necessarily. That’s what it is, but it’s really about managing your time, and that’s a key thing in getting things done isn’t it? And you’ll see that it’s not just about meetings, it’s about blocking off time to do things that you want to get done. And speaking of getting things done, the task management in Outlook is really powerful. Not a lot of people use it when I talk to them, but if you start thinking about what that is that’s your to-do list. And you’re going to see how powerful that is especially when combined with locking off time on your calendar to get things done. And finally, you probably know Outlook contains a contact management database. Not robust, but I’m going to share at the end of this presentation a little bit about our CRM called Prophet CRM and I think you’ll find some value in that perhaps as well.

Before we jump into the presentation, I wanted to explain a little bit about the differences between the Outlook desktop version of Outlook 2019 and the Outlook desktop version of 2019 as it relates to 365. And as I go through the presentation I’ll show you a few examples of those. But here’s a concept for you or four concepts and when combined I think you’re going to be amazed at how it can help you tame your Outlook inbox.

So if you do one of these four things when you get an inbound email: number one deal with it whatever it is, reply to it, you know create the task or whatever is associated with that; but the number one thing is to tame your inbox you got to do one of these four things: deal with it, delegate it (which means you know delegate it to others), delay it (which might be a valid tactic for some things), or delete it. Four things, and I think you’re going to be surprised if you take one of these four actions with every single email you’ll get. You’ll just be amazed how much it enhances your productivity, gives you more time in your day, and helps you get things done. So the power of the 4ds. Using color is awesome. I use it a lot. Not everyone relates to color as much as other folks, but I use color a lot in categories and emails in my calendar; even in my contacts. And it just gives you a visual flag of things, like what is this contact about. Are there clients? What are the categories on your calendar and how do those work and what do they mean? Color coding your tasks so you can see by maybe you want to prioritize them with color schemes so using color is a key thing. Which we’re going to get into in the magic of rules. One of my favorite things.

So the key thing in taming your inbox is managing that high volume. I get over 100 100 150 inbound emails every day, and I don’t know how I would possibly survive without actually using all these techniques here. But the power of rules lets you essentially auto route emails into certain folders based on certain criteria. So the magic of rules we’re going to cover and conditional formatting is a cool automated function that lets you do things like make emails pop out in bright colors or bold bold fonts that have certain keywords in the body or subject line and color-coding your calendar. The key thing about that is understanding where you’re spending your time. I mean come on that’s like one of the most important things in personal life for sure, but most importantly in a business where are you spending your time if you’re in sales. Are you spending your time generating revenue or having a bunch of internal meetings? So as you’ll see when we go through this I have ways to show you how to do that. So you can change the color and font of emails and auto-color your appointments and just essentially help you understand where you’re spending your time and kind of make the most important things pop out.

Now there’s a really valuable feature that’s been around for a long time: it’s called quick parts. And I talk to hundreds of people a month in my business and most of them don’t know about this particular feature called quick parts. It’s the ability to easily insert content into emails, but you can also insert content like meeting details into appointments and even create tasks with instructions from these little quick parts. They’re called their type of template. But now the 365 environment offers yet another way to use templates. The nice thing about these templates is they follow you around. If you’re familiar with 365 how if you’re logged in on your laptop, your desktop, your home computer, and you’re a 365 user all of the same information follows you around including these templates whereas quick parts are local phenomena. It’s kind of you know way to make them reproduce on other computers.

But this is a very nice feature of the 365 environments giving you templates for emails and such. By the way, they work with emails and appointments but for some reason, they don’t have a function for templates and tasks I don’t know why. Quick steps though we’re gonna jump into that here. I think maybe I’ll just do that first as we get into it because quick steps once you discover it’s about saving time and about eliminating repetitive actions. Doing things like you know creating a maybe there’s an email every time you get a new order you send it out to a group of people or this or that that’ll be the example I use but it could be anything meetings emails different types of actions. So that’s a powerful thing, the quick access toolbar most people know about, but I like to move it below the ribbon. I’ll show you how to do that. And then there’s the concept of transforming emails just to drag and drop. And so you can take an email and turn it into a contact or a task or even an appointment. And then I’m gonna at the end of the presentation today I’ll talk a little bit about Prophet CRM many of your our clients today maybe you’re a potential client but this is a very broad subject this Outlook containing your inbox it has right now over 1.6 million views on my youtube channel where we post these and you’ll find a lot of other Outlook related videos on that.

So I’m going to just switch gears. We’re going to go right into the calendar here let’s I was going to start with the calendar but let’s do let’s change the plan here let’s start with those what we call the quick steps. So we’re gonna do a little tutorial on quick steps right now on how to create them and what they’re all about. So quick steps are found right up here in your and by the way, whenever I want to emphasize something I’ll be using this little circular highlighter here so on the top of your ribbon and across the top you’ll this is the ribbon and Outlook if you don’t know that and you’ll see in the home ribbon you’ll see one of the things is quick steps. Now I’ve created quite a few because I use this a lot but I’ll show you a couple of examples and we’ll talk about how you know how they’re created. But let’s just say I wanted to create a sales meeting which I will do fairly frequently. Well, all I have to do is click this quick step that I’ve already created and look what happens. It creates the entire meeting invited to whoever you want by default the details of the meeting can be embedded in the notes area here. The title of it you can have the location. And it’s just literally one click after I’ve created this to create an action in this case a sales meeting. But here’s another one. Maybe I want to have a new customer, and I want you to know that there’s a repetitive email that I always do. I call it you know you can call it whatever you want but I got a new order email. Click click the button and it creates that email that I would be creating manually every time. Hopefully, I get a lot of orders so this one saves me a ton of time. Notice how it’s addressed to certain lists or people. The subject line is there, the content is there so you know you can still edit it but it clicks and I’m ready to you know to send that email or in the prior example you know to send that meeting request out.

So the concept of this is pretty simple but you do have to have a little understanding of how it works. So if you go up here into the quick steps it’s not intuitive but the bottom arrow with the little line above it gives you various options. It’ll give you the entire list of the quick steps that you’ve created but I’ll show you the quick steps because that’ll show you how to create these. Essentially what happens here is that each one of these has been created and I’ll click edit on my let’s just say that new order email to show you how it works. When you create a new quick step which is just clicking new you give it a name. And you would expand show options usually but the two is just like the address of what’s due if I click the two you can see it brings up my global address book in Outlook or you can just type in an email. Again we’re creating one that’s repetitive so I have a distribution list here. You can flag it with importance or various other flags that are part of Outlook. You can give it importance. You know high importance, normal low of course you know I usually send mine with high importance because I’m so important and then you put your content here in the text. You can also make it a quick tooltip which just creates a shortcut if you click and ctrl shift s or whatever it’ll create that same thing for you not having to go up to the ribbon. So again how that was created is if I just go up to my menu here and I just say a new quick step. And then you have some items here that you can generate like a new email all right so that creates the basic email content and just as I explained before you fill out those little boxes and it’ll show up in your list this is so awesome. I’m going to show you one more time you know how I would use this. I’m going to say I want to create a new sales meeting. Click there. It is awesome. I could still do other things to it but that’s a huge time saver. So that’s what we call the quick steps in Outlook.

So let’s talk a little bit about using color to get more organized and I’m going to start with the calendar. Using color to get more organized conceptually I wanted to kind of add some detail to this all my items here are color-coded. And I just finished a couple of those so I’ll mark those complete. Those are my tasks. So a couple of things first of all how to layout your screens here. You’ll notice I keep my task list in my to-do bar on the right of my calendar because they work hand in hand. Now at the bottom, you have your navigation of mail calendar people tasks and you could just click on you know tasks and it’ll bring me to that same view. But again I combined it. How did I do that? I just went up here to view my ribbon and I just put my to-do bar. If I remove it I’ll show you if I want to add my to-do bar to the right of the calendar. I go to my calendar view and I just add tasks to my bar over here. Pretty simple.

Another little thing that I get a lot of questions about is because by default Outlook will come with what’s called compact navigation, okay and that turns it into these little icons. Looking at the lower left of my computer I don’t know I can see that’s an envelope. I guess that’s mail. There’s a little square with some dots in it. Maybe that’s I don’t know a couple of people you know there’s a little checkbox but what do those mean. Maybe I’m old-fashioned but I like to have the words spelled out so I can easily see them. So there are three little dots here by these little icons. What you do to change that is you click on them and go to navigation options and I just unchecked compact navigation and voila now it says mail calendar people and tasks. Much more understandable.

One other little thing about that is you can add you can define how many items you want to display there. So maybe I want to add things like my notes to that okay so I can move that up the number of items to display five so I’m just changing that. So now I’ve got notes in here which as you may know are the sticky notes which are a cool thing a new thing in Outlook they’re just sticky notes. So mail calendar people whatever you want down here and all again all I’m doing is I’m selecting to remove the compact navigation. But that’s up to you. Maybe you like the little pictures; I don’t. I like to go to the regular words spelled out.

For any event let’s go back to the calendar and talk a little bit about color-coding. I digress a bit, let’s see here. Well, first you can manually color code things like appointments. You create an appointment and you can use Outlook categories like I could say project time or prepare for a meeting or what have you trained and I could create a meeting like that at any time I want and then it’s color-coded as you can see here in that kind of magenta color. But there’s more fun and cooler way to color code meetings and here’s how that works. It’s a form of conditional formatting. So I want to stop, pause for a minute and explain why I’m color-coding these things so I can see where I’m spending my time working. Website content is something that I do sales calls, internal meetings, webinars, and things like that. So rather than having to manually color code them, I’ll show you what it would look like.

So if I just here’s an example of how it’s done then I’ll show you how it works. If I type in the subject line sales call in an appointment that I’m creating and save it automatically colored it bright green which is my rev my revenue color is now not bad. Okay, how did I do that? Well, what I did is I went up to view when I’m in my calendar I go to view which is up in your ribbon. I go view settings and I do conditional formatting. By the way, you’ll get the recording of this. And I already have one called a sales call. But let’s just say I had one called, let’s add a new one and we’ll give it a new color and we’ll call this one a webinar. I’m just going to do an automated color coding for a webinar and maybe let’s make that one a nice oh let’s do that kind of a blue color right there. So now I have to assign the condition I created and give it a name webinar but the condition is whenever the term webinar in this case is in the subject field it’s going to color code that appoints that bright blue automatically. Now you know you could notice that you can search for the words in the subject and nodes or using other fields here or even by attendees and things like that. But to do it simply I’m going to just create one called ‘webinar’ and if the webinar is in the subject field you’ll see that it will automatically create it as a bright blue appointment meeting or appointment on your calendar and I’m going to put that right in here. I’ll just say today’s webinar today save and close. Bright blue! So this is how you would automate the color-coding of your calendar. Pretty cool!

So you can also color-code tasks. You can see many of my tasks are color-coded. They have a meaning to me. Purple is the follow-up. I can manually do this. I can add others or you can have more than one color code on your tasks or appointments and things like that. So you can also color-code tasks. Again same idea where are you spending your time following up, making you know follow-ups on sales or whatever. So that you can visually get an idea of where you’re spending your time and in the case of tasks where you plan to spend your tasks.

Now I’m going to come to share with you a very important concept. Are you ready? Here’s an important concept: why are there both calendars and tasks? Some people say well if I have a task I just put it on my calendar. I can’t say that that’s wrong. But here’s the idea: the calendar is used to block off time to do things. Sometimes it’s meetings that’s what a lot of people think of your calendar as. Other times it’s to do something. But you see tasks have a unique property in that they persist when I go into next week or next month the calendar is all changed. I’m not looking at what I’m if I was using it to block you know task-oriented calendars see what I’m supposed to do. But the tasks persist and by the way, if they turn red it means you’re late on that task. Just a little tip for you there if you get a whole bunch of red tasks you know you got to get caught up. Just a little business tip for you there. So that’s how calendars and tasks work together.

The concept of color can be used in a lot of different areas. One of them would be to color code your contacts. And how that’s done is you can open any contacts. And I’m just going to do a little search for a little keyword in here so I can show some of my demo contacts here. All right and I’m just by the way that’s just a little search function all of these contacts here, by the way, have the word Madagascar in them somewhere that’s just a little bonus tip there but I could take any of these contacts and color code it. So this one I could see as a client I could add another one if I want client in services area save and close. So you can use color-coding in contacts as well and those are called categories in Outlook. And by the way, while I’m in here you can also see them if you change your view in your contacts by the way to a list view. You can also put the categories in your list view just to kind of get organized around those. Now by the way a little sidebar on how to get coins into your Outlook contacts works with actually any Outlook list view. But how I get these in here is I just hover over one of the top column headers and I right-click and I use the field chooser. And these are things where I can I’ll move that up here a little bit you can, first of all, navigate between frequently used fields all fields miscellaneous fields email fields, or whatever. But I’ll just show you an example of one. So I can say a car phone that’s a funny one that must have come from the 80s. You know home phone maybe I want to put that in there you just drag and drop it up there. And that that puts it in your column you can make it wider and that sort of thing so the idea of color-coding categories works throughout Prophet throughout Outlook. I’m going to get into Prophet later but so you can color-code your calendar you can color-code your tasks. And those are a couple of the most common and your contacts are the most common things that you would use for color-coding.

Let’s get into the magic of rules let’s do that. Okay, so the idea behind the rules is that it auto routes emails into certain folders. One of the things that I use it for could be very simple I want something that if it’s a request for a quote I want to automatically be routed to be routed in there. So how do you set this up? First, I’ll show you a rule that’s been set up then maybe yeah we’ll do another one too. So up here in your ribbon in the home part of the ribbon one of the options is rules so I’ll just go into where it says manage rules. In a moment we’ll create one. So I’m going to click manage rules and I’ll show you a couple of rules that are set up already. As you can see here I have rules for automatic replies. I don’t want them junking up my inbox. I have rules for you to know emails from certain people or various things like that. I’ll use this automatic reply one and so we’ll click change the rule so you can see how it looks. So once you’ve set up a rule you can see that I’ve checked the box that says that the rule has to do with specific words in the subject. Okay and down here you can see that the word that I chose or it’s any number of words is an automatic reply. So if an automatic reply is in the subject line, what happens is it goes to the folder and moves it to the folder called automatic replies which I have over here on the left because I don’t want to do a lot of emails so I don’t want automatic replies to be just junked up my inbox. So that’s an example of how a role looks once it’s finished.

Why don’t we create a new role? Okay so let’s create a new rule. This rule is going to be called a request for a quote so I am going in here and sorry I’m going to go into rules and I want to create a rule. And we’re going to call that request for a quote. That’s the rule name and since I’m going to use that I’ll just copy it into my clipboard. And all I want is if the subject contains requests for quotes. I want it to do certain things now. It might be to play a selected sound, it might be displaying it in an alert or it might be to hear my main point is to move the item into a folder. And I have a folder called ‘request for quotes’. Okay so I just created the rule and you can see it right there. So now I’ve created the rule that says any email with the request for quote in the subject line is going to be routed to that folder which I have over here in my favorites. So I click ok. Now the option of running the rule now might as well be it’ll apply that rule to any emails in your inbox that are already there. Since I had that rule running there are none but you get the idea. So now what I’m going to do is I’m going to send an email to myself from another email account here and you’ll see what happens. So I have an email composed in one of my Outlook accounts and it’s an email. Okay, it’s from Elon Musk from Tesla and he’s asking for requests for a quote that’s in the subject line. So I’m going to send that to myself and here in a moment, it’s going to show up in my inbox. It’s not in my inbox. Where is it going to go? Over in the request for a quote. As soon as it shows up we’ll see in a moment so one of them is right there you can see. And by the way when you see the little bold numbers that means you have a new item in there. So I just got a new request for a quote. Wow, that is awesome! All right so a request for a quote comes in. It’s routed to that folder which I keep in my favorites. If you don’t know how to put things in your favorites you just pick any folder right click and say add to favorites. That just puts them right up here no matter where you are in your folder list. Those are my favorite ones so they are used often.

Another example of that maybe I’d want to create a rule like this I’ll create a rule. And well actually I’m going to edit the rule because I think I have that one already. Let’s see here oh no read later so that would be a good one. Okay so I’m going to create a rule called read later and this might be kind of funny. I’m going to create a new rule called read later and you’ll see how this works. Read later and the subject doesn’t contain read later it’s but I’m going to say it’s from somebody. Right so I could change the to or the from and here’s the funny thing I could make a rule that says if an email is coming from my boss it goes automatically into the read later folder. There’s a little humor for you. All right so we’re gonna do another fun one. We’re gonna say we want any email that comes in that has the word invoice in the subject line okay and I’m going to do that with another email here I want it to be colored a certain way in my inbox. So let’s see if we can just do that. So let’s say I’m going to send it to myself again from my other account and I’m going to put it in. By the way, I’ll just show you what I’m doing over here. I’m just creating that email from my web account here, a new invoice, please review it or whatever it’s just you know whatever is in the content of that email and I’m going to send it to myself here in just a moment. But what we’re going to do first is we’re going to create a very cool thing called a conditional format for inbound emails. So I go up in my in up above my inbox here to view right here to the view ribbon and I’m going to create a new setting. So you click the view settings and I go here. What pops up is a window. You can do several things but in this case, I want conditional formatting and so what I want to do is add one and I’m going to title it invoice. It’s just the name of the conditional formatting that I’ve set up. I’m going to call it invoice and but I want that font to be big bold and maybe some other color like maroon why not. Okay, so I’ve set what the font is going to look like when it pops into my inbox. You’re going to love this. Now the condition is to search for the word invoice in the subject field but you could choose other things. So I’m just going to click ok and ok. So now here I am in my inbox and I’m going to send that email that says a new invoice. Okay I just sent it and what’ll happen is live webinars you never know but what happens is when I get that email let’s just make sure I get that new email in here it will be when it does come in it will be covered colored bright blue. Now I’m going to show you an example of that or magenta in that case so I get emails all the time that are web leads so I have a folder called web leads and I’ve set that up for them. All right and right in here so when I get a new web lead it’s colored bright green for color money right pretty cool. I’m going to look at my chat questions here. All right yeah I do have quite a Rolodex in my calendar in my Outlook. So notice how all these emails are colored bright green they’re in a different font so when I get them in my inbox they’re automatically colored with that awesome color. So I’m going to go in and show you the one that just came in with the invoice. Here it came into my inbox and this was covered colored right with you know magenta bold. And I just want anything that has an invoice on it to be colored a very unique color super duper if you ask me. This is one of the fun things that you can do. Anyway, making you color inbound emails in different ways is quick action. You know we don’t waste time understanding the important stuff that’s coming in and so forth.

So let’s keep moving here. We probably got another 10 minutes and by the way, you can chat questions thanks Bryce for the comment about my Rolodex. There was the magic of rules and changing the font automatically in emails. And so let’s talk about a fun thing that’s the ability to insert content into emails and appointments and things like that. So I’m just going to show you a little simple trick. I’m just going to create a new email and I’m going to use the oldest one first. It’s well worn but not like I said earlier. Not everyone knows about this. I’m going to say, Bill. I’m going to send an email to Bill and I might have sent this email 100 times. So maybe what I want to do is just create a little blurb. I have one called blurb. Look at the word blurb and it puts that content in the email automatically. Oh my gosh, that is so cool! And now I can send this to you know Bill and let’s just say Bill Pitt. Okay there created the email, sent it off to bill and it was that easy. Now how did I do that? Well, I’ll go back and we’ll kind of do it again. Let’s say I had some content I will grab some content from right just here okay alrighty then okay I got an email here that’s this quote request. All right so maybe you send repetitive emails. So here’s how you create those quick parts. Real easy you have to start with it one time. So you put your content into an email blank, you highlight it then you go up to insert go-to quick parts. Right here go down to save the selection to the quick part gallery and give it a name and I’m going to say this one is a quote that’s the name of the quick part. Okay like I want to quote on something now I can activate it by just starting to type in the word quote notice it’s predicting it send me a quote. Ridiculously cool if you ask me!

Now a lot of you might know that that one but in Outlook 365 there’s another feature called templates. These as I mentioned earlier follow you around. Quick parts do not, they’re local phenomena; they work only on the machine you put them on and without a lot of gyrations to get them transferred onto others and trust me you don’t want to try that it takes about an i.t person with a Ph.D. to get it done. So if you want to have these things follow a route follow you around you just use templates. It’s right up here it’ll be right in your ribbon. If it’s not we’ll talk a little bit about how to customize your ribbon in a moment and you just click on that little icon and there are your templates. So I’ve got some templates in here and so I use this all the time by the way and especially if I’m traveling or have you know jumping from one computer to another I just put my templates in here. So there you have it I can create a block of the content of any link well actually there is a limit. I don’t know off the top of my head what the exact limit of the characters is but I ran into it once. So quick parts don’t seem to have that limit or at least it’s much bigger but see that’s a pretty big block of content there it’s a whole giant email and so that’s using templates. Now how do you create a template you just get some text you go over here you got to scroll down to your bottom and where it says plus template. A little plus sign always means add now and I’ll call this one called banks 2. Okay put the content in there save and I’m not sure why probably a copy of that but anyway that’s how you would create a template in an email if you have 365.

Now I mentioned earlier that I was going to explain a few differences of what’s different between the desktop version of Outlook, the desktop version of Outlook with 365, and then the web app 365. Well, it turns out that Outlook 360 Outlook 2019 is the same as Outlook 2019 with 365. It’s just you don’t have to buy the 365 packages you still get the same product. Web apps are different. I’m going to don’t know if you’re a Microsoft you know web app fan don’t take me wrong I’m just going to talk about limitations and there are a couple of things you can do with the web app that you can’t do with the desktop. First of all, with the web app, you don’t need Outlook desktop so that’s kind of cool might have a device like an iPad or something where you don’t have your version of Outlook on it so that works nicely and it provides a lot of the function even categorizing most of the basic functions you know searching and all of that is available right through the Outlook web app. I’m not in the Outlook web app I was in the other one but the same idea; here I am in my Outlook web app and now what doesn’t it do okay well there are about 100 things it doesn’t do. You notice there are no rules there are no view options there are very few options to decide what you want to do. So so what if though there’s we look at some things that it does have let’s say that you get an email oh let me first show you what let’s say I get an email from someone and I wanted to make marketers go to junk. I could do a couple of things. Outlook desktop has that you can block this never block the sender block sender never block the domain or make it a junk email. Oh by the way junk email options shows you this is very important you can decide how you want to handle junk email but in the Microsoft 365 web app there’s a different one there’s a different little ad there are a couple of little added features to it. See that little three buttons you’re in an email it’s up on the right more actions. Now there’s a bunch of things but I especially like the security option because you can not just mark it as junk which you put in your dr folder but you could mark it as phishing and it’ll ask you if you want to report it. I don’t want to report this bullet poor soul but I could block it. But the main thing I’m showing you is that you can mark it as fishing and report it and that helps you know get those fishing pirates down back to their planet they came from hopefully. All right so that’s just a little sidebar on the differences of the versions here.

All right so we’re wrapping up here getting close. I wanted to talk briefly about transforming. I had a question about documentation. I’ll get to that in a moment. Transforming inbound emails into different things. So let’s just say I get an email from someone and I wanted to create a contact from it. Let’s just do that. You might know that it’s just a drag and drop. This will also segue us a little bit into Prophet CRM and how that interrelates but there’s a drag and drop function in Outlook which is pretty useful. So you just drag your email over down over the people folder and let go and then this is where Prophet CRM if you’re a Prophet CRM user or looking at it will come in. So Prophet adds a duplicate detector to that drag and drop function if you’re using it in Outlook and it checks to see if that contact already exists and if it does you wouldn’t want to create it again. So in this case Anthony Hopkins already exists this is the Prophet CRM duplicate checker. In that case, I could just open that contact from that where it said an existing match was found. But if you didn’t click create New contact it’s warning me again now you’re going to ask what about signature pricing. Well, I prefer just doing it manually because automated signature parks, partially parsing easy for me to say, are about 60% accurate, we found. We do have a product like that we’re developing again which would be a little better but all I’m doing is you can copy-paste or just drag things from like the signature line up into the to the area that you want it and you’ve created a new contact in about 10 seconds from an inbound email. Plus if stuff was in the signature line you could add it the email itself is still retained in the contact voila. Pretty nice time saver there too.
Now maybe you wanted to create a task to follow up on this email. Very very apropos when it comes to managing your Outlook inbox and taming your inboxes. So one of the things you do remember is to deal with it, delegate it, delete it or delay it. Well in this case I’m going to deal with it by creating a task with that email. I just drag it over my task folder and look at it and create the task with the subject line on it and all I have to do now is give it a due date and maybe a reminder time optional. All right, categorize it if you want and I’ve just created that task and now you’ll see that task that I created right here from my inbound email. So creating tasks is super easy. And one final thing is that you can create appointments from inbound emails. Let’s say I wanted to create a meeting to review this invoice. I get it. I just drag it over my calendar and it creates a new invoice meeting. I can add other things to invite people and so on and that new invoice meeting will now be maybe a follow-up item and I’ll make it for later in the day and maybe it’s a really big invoice we have to spend an hour on it there you go there’s that. So drag and drop can also create from an inbound email it can also create a meeting on your calendar. Pretty awesome!

All right we’re going to wrap up. We try to keep these to about 45 minutes we’re going to wrap up by showing a little bit about Prophet CRM. And really what Prophet CRM is a way to help you you know manage all of your time but very important in business manager contacts and other things. So Prophet CRM is pretty nice. It works right with Outlook; it just basically adds functionality to Outlook. So if I have Prophet I have a more robust contact manager; it’s one of the main things that kind of as a starting point Prophet offers to people. And if you’re a Prophet user I’m sure you already know about this but I’ll show you a couple of things and kind of enhance some of those things we just talked about. Maybe I want to create a task with a contact. It’s easy to create a task and it’s to call Jose here and I want to make it do today. I’m showing you this for a reason. It’s because what the Prophet will do is it’ll now show that task that I created here on my task list. And I’ll just go into my calendar here for a moment so I created it in Prophet but it is on my task list in Outlook. But another thing is that you can start tracking activities with these very very easily so I can see all the tasks created with the contact. Just a contact-centric view of all the Outlook functions. I can see any emails that I’ve ever sent to Jose. Here let me pick Hillary. I’ve had a few more with Hillary there you go. So these emails are sent to that person right or received from that person as the case may be. So in this case I’ll do Anthony because I’ve had a lot of emails with Anthony. So you can see from these cases they’re all you know here’s the emails from Anthony, emails to Anthony, and so on; so that’s one of the primary functions that Prophet CRM adds.

But another very useful thing to show you two more things and we’ll call it a wrap. One of them is just to add notes. Now you or your administrator should have the Prophet be able to make predefined customized entries to this for your team. So maybe you want one of them to be a cold call so you don’t have to type it in love to voicemail things like that. Many of you already know about it if you’re an existing Prophet user but those also roll up into various types of reports. And finally, we can combine a few things that we learned in this Outlook section to here where we have a function called group email. Now Prophet does integrate right out of the box with Mailchimp and we have constant contact integration, a new one coming out but there’s also a group email function built right into Prophet. So I could say just sending a group email to that list creates a recipient list. I could personalize it. I could give it an importance and when I create an email you’ll see that I’m going to use quick parts here. All right my blurb.

There’s another thing in Outlook and you can create a quick part if it’s a little quicker for you can sometimes you have to make your window a little wider you can put your signature in this. For example my main signature. All right so now I’m ready to send that. When I click send everyone gets a personalized Outlook email from me too to the recipient. They’re pretty awesome. And the main thing about that is they do not look like ads that you know somebody sent you that have the little square x’s and stuff. And did you know, almost all of these real mass emails get sucked into either your junk folder or this dreaded other folder because they detect all of this sort of masked stuff? So when they get sent through Prophet as you may know they are just like I do webinars this way a lot to my clients they’re just an email I sent to everyone but every person gets a personalized email from me to them.

Hey, we made it through in about 45 minutes today! So I would really really super authentically like to thank everybody for investing so much time to take a look at this webinar and if you’re watching the video thank you for that. I’m going to post this for about 30 seconds but you all know where to reach me I’m easy to find you can just go to avidian.com our company website or you can reach out to our customer service anytime or I’m easy to reach feel free to contact me if I can help you in any way. Hey, I want you all to have a good rest of the day. Be safe and we’ll talk to you again soon! Thank you!