TIP: To make your marketing more effective, target promotional material to customers who have purchased the same or similar products. For example, a pet store owner who is going to have a cat food sale could send promotional material to any of his customers who previously purchased cat supplies. You can use Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Office Outlook 2003 to generate a report that displays opportunities by products.

Using time wisely may be one of the best indicators of business success - and one of the most elusive. After all, just imagine how organized you and your team could be - if only you had the time to get organized!

Here's the good news: Getting better organized to handle your customer contacts is easier than you think, given advances in contact management software. For instance, the new Microsoft Business Contact Manager (BCM) for Office Outlook 2003 is almost like having your own personal marketing assistant.

Check out six powerful ways you and your employees can use BCM to become more efficient - and more successful:

1. Keep all of your important customer data in one central location. With BCM you can link all kinds of useful information about your customers, including e-mail messages, notes, appointments and tasks, to your contacts and sales opportunity records. That way, when you've got a customer on the phone, you're always just one click away from the activity histories and associated data that can help you make the sale.
2. Manage leads and prospects throughout the sales cycle. When you organize your marketing information in Business Contact Manager, you can run preformatted reports to help you more accurately forecast sales. BCM allows you to track key information, including revenue potential, probability of closing and expected close date.
3. Prioritize your work effectively. Spend your time on your most promising prospects by tracking the status of sales efforts. With BCM you can sort and filter data to get the information you need to make informed decisions about your sales activities. You can also export the results to a Word document or Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.
4. Get quick access to product and pricing information. If you've ever been on a sales call and become totally frustrated because you couldn't find your current price list, you'll understand the benefit of BCM. You can create quotes quickly and accurately because you always have up-to-date pricing information at your fingertips. You can also use BCM to create quotes for special services or calculate product discounts.
5. Target promotional materials to specific customers. If you know that customers who bought one of your products are likely to be interested in a new product you have to offer, you can use BCM to generate a report that displays opportunities by products. Filtering the report allows you to view a list of customers who have purchased from you in the past. And in that same report, you can also see the details on where to send the promotional materials to the targeted customers.
6. Send personalised newsletters to customers in a specific geographic area. If you want to do a mailing to customers in a specific region, you can sort Accounts and Business Contacts by location in BCM and then use Mail Merge in Microsoft Word to send the newsletters.

BCM's Familiar Look and Feel
It is one thing to see the advantages you can gain from a program like BCM - but you may wonder if you really have time to learn how to use such a feature-rich tool. The good news here is that with BCM you are working within Outlook 2003, which your team probably already uses and is comfortable with. That means you should be able to get up and running on BCM quickly.

But see for yourself by following the simple steps you would take to manually create an Opportunity record in BCM. "Opportunity" in this case refers to a chance to sell your products or services to an account. The Opportunity records are where information about the opportunity is stored, including:

• Information you import or manually input on an Opportunity form
• Linked records
• History items

Creating an Opportunity Record

1. On the Standard toolbar, click the arrow next to New, and then click Opportunity.
2. Type the applicable information on the Opportunity. (To get assistance entering information, click Business Contact Manager Help on the Help menu on the form.)
3. Click Save and Close.

Note: When creating multiple records, click Save and New to save your current information and open an additional form.

Once you have created Opportunity records, you can use the tracking and report features in BCM to help you prioritize your sales information, track your sales process and customer interactions and forecast your sales. You'll also want to link an Opportunity record to either an Account or Business Contact record. That way, as you move through the sales cycle, you can view and update each stage of the opportunity. You can also create progress reports or sort your opportunities to determine which customers need your attention most.

If you're wondering if you can really afford the time it will take to get you and your team organized - ask yourself if you can afford not to.