Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Supercharging Your Sales with Business Contact Manager

In This Chapter

• Understanding the Business Contact Manager screen

• Adding contacts, accounts, and opportunities

• Checking reports

Outlook is probably the world's second most popular business tool (right behind the ever‐popular paycheck), because it's so good at dealing with all the little details of your daily work life. But as powerful as it is, Outlook has some limitations when it comes to connecting those details and using that information to move your business forward.

To help remedy that problem, Microsoft offers an add‐on program for Outlook called Business Contact Manager. It's free if you buy Microsoft Office Professional and certain other bundles of Microsoft Office products.

Microsoft Office is offered in at least seven different bundles, so you need to make sure that your bundle includes Business Contact Manager if that interests you.

Understanding the Outlook Business Contact Manager

The purpose of Business Contact Manager is to organize and present your business information strategically, in a way that reflects the big picture. Where do you want your business to go? Outlook alone is a good tactical tool, but Business Contact Manager helps you look farther down the road.

The best reason for using Business Contact Manager is to manage a sales process, the system of keeping track of prospects to whom you might want to sell something. That means tracking the companies for whom they work, all the efforts you make on ...