Improving Your Outlook

I've provided a significant amount of information on the different features of Business Contact Manager in this chapter. However, information isn't much good if you can't apply it to your own business. This section explores several different business applications in which Business Contact Manager can help your business manage accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

The Box Salesman

BCM is designed for a single salesperson to manage accounts, contacts, and opportunities. A box salesperson might have 10 or 15 major accounts with 30 or 40 contacts spread over those accounts. In addition, the salesperson might be pursuing another 20 new opportunities some for existing accounts and some for new, potential accounts. Business Contact Manager can help manage the various accounts and ensure that salesperson does not neglect any obligations to current or future customers.

Our salesman, James, primarily sells laminated boxes to various wineries in the Napa valley. Wineries have very specific requirements. There are only 10 or 12 standard size boxes that hold 12 bottles of wine. So, when James first loads Business Contact Manager, he enters all his wine boxes into BCM's product catalog. After he has entered all of his boxes in the product catalog, his master product list will look similar to Figure 36.52.

Figure 36.52. A master product list for a wine box salesman.

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Now that James has entered all of his products, he could start entering his contacts, accounts, and opportunities. However, James has an Outlook programmer he can call to customize his forms. He has the programmer make the following changes:

  • Change the Territory drop-down list on the Account form to include the various wine growing regions of the Napa valley, including the following: Carneros, Rutherford, Stags Leap, Spring Mountain, and Yountville.

  • Change the label for the Profession drop-down list on the contact form to Business Unit and customize the values to include the following: Sales, Harvesting, Bottling, Vintner, Enologist, and Public Relations.

  • Add the following custom fields to the account form as check boxes: Sparkling Wine, Cabernet, Chardonnay, Zinfandel, and Late Harvest.

Because BCM stores data in an MSDE database, the Outlook developer James hired relies on the fact that the MSDE database has the capability to store data from any custom field placed on a BCM form. Using what is known as a wide table, a BCM database can store any data in a custom field created on a BCM form.

Now that James has customized BCM forms, he's ready to start entering his data. James enters accounts for the following wineries: Sterling Vineyards, Berringer, Carneros Creek, and Domain Carneros. For each account, James has five contacts: someone in marketing, someone in accounts payable, someone in production, someone in purchasing, and a representative at the winery's glass house.

James needs to make regular visits to the wineries he supplies to see what types of wine they'll be releasing each year. For example, in three months, Sterling Vineyards will be releasing its 2000 Cabernet in limited release. James creates a new opportunity for the 2000 Cabernet boxes. He then sets an appointment to meet with the marketing representative to show her some new designs for this release. He uses BCM to create an appointment with Sally, the marketing representative. When Sally approves the new designs (via email), James creates a new task to deliver samples to Sally in three weeks. Between the time the designs were approved and the delivery of the samples, James and Sally have multiple phone conversations about delivery dates and quantities. Because James is a very thorough sales representative, he documents all their phone conversations as they happen.

Two months later, when James ships the previously approved boxes to the winery, Sally calls to inform James that he shipped the wrong quantity. She ordered 5,000 boxes, but he shipped 6,000 boxes. Because James records all emails, documents, tasks, phone conversations, and business notes using BCM, he can run an Opportunity History report that lists every phone conversation and email he had with Sally discussing the product order. When he points out to Sally that they had a discussion three weeks ago about changing the order quantity, Sally realizes her mistake and a costly credit is avoided.

With Business Contact Manager, James can keep track of all his various accounts and ensure that he doesn't miss a delivery or forget to make a change to a design. Business Contact Manager helps James do his job efficiently.

Extracting More Information from Business Contact Manager

Business Contact Manager can provide you with a good deal of information about your various business contacts, accounts, and opportunities. For a sales representative such as James, running reports can be a vital part of managing his business. James needs to report to his boss, the vice president of sales, Brian. Brian likes reports. Brian has asked all his sales representatives to record a business note every time they entertain a contact. The subject of the business note should be the type of entertainment: a meal, sports event, or other event.

James prints various reports from Business Contact Manager on a monthly basis for Brian. He faxes the reports to the central office for Brian to review at his leisure. However, Brian really likes graphs. He wants to see a graphical representation of the number of sporting events each of his sales reps attends each month. So, James switches to the Business History folder. He can then copy the items he needs from the History folder to Excel. A few minutes later, after creating a Pivot Table and a Pivot Chart, James has the graph displayed in Figure 36.53. He can then fax or email this graph to Brian.

Figure 36.53. James can create complex Excel reports with graphs to pass on to his boss.

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To provide Brian with even more information, James can run any of the reports available in Business Contact Manager and save them as Word documents or Excel files. He can then email his reports directly to Brian back at the office.

Business Contact Manager enables James to manage his accounts and contacts, and to keep his Sales Manager up to date on his progress.



Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
ISBN: 0789729563
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 426

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