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Top 10 Mistakes made when using Outlook to manage your sales |
| Thousands of sales professionals and managers are using Outlook everyday to manage their contacts, appointments and reminders. Additionally, many have tweaked and customized Outlook to manage their sales opportunities. However, Outlook is designed by Microsoft as a Personal Information Manager (PIM) and is great as an email client and simple information manager. However, when you need a true contact manager or sales management system, there are some critical features missing in Outlook. Enclosed is a list of features that is missing: |
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- Can't track by companies: Outlook essentially treats each contact as separate entities. There is virtually no relationship between each contact even if they are from the same company. Viewing by company in Outlook is very limited.
- Keeping notes is very limited and cumbersome. No date or time stamped notes. Can’t search the notes. Very little relationship between the notes and the company or opportunity it belongs to. Notes can only be written for an individual contact.
- Can’t track opportunities: Can’t track deals, opportunities or prospects. If you want to know how many deals you think you are going to close in the next 60 days, it’s virtually impossible to do.
- Can’t share sales info: Because Outlook was not designed as a sales tool, sales team can’t use it to share sales information.
- Can’t forecast sales: Outlook doesn’t include the ability to forecast sales.
- No reporting mechanism: Running reports and analyzing activities within Outlook is virtually impossible.
- Can’t attach emails, meetings and tasks with opportunities: If you want to look at Outlook activities relating to a deal, you can’t. Outlook was not designed with the concept of tracking opportunities.
- Can’t send personalize emails: You can cc or bcc a group but you can’t send personalize emails to a group of people very easily.
- View reminders relating to an Opportunity: Outlook has a good auto reminders popup but you can’t relate those reminders to an opportunity.
- Can’t have centralized contacts without Exchange Server: If you want to have one centralize contact database, you need an Exchange Server to do it.
- Current category views are not very helpful: Even if you categorize your contacts, there is not much you can do with it inside of Outlook.
- Outlook is not very relational: You have to run many queries and open multiple windows to get emails, appointment or tasks relating to more than one person.
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Prophet Features |
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