Microsoft Outlook as a CRM? YES! (Well, sort of ...) Features and Strategies for "Low Level" CRM...

Hi everybody, Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. Hey, today I wanted to discuss an interesting question that sometimes comes up after, especially I do my more in-depth Microsoft Outlook classes with some of my corporate, university, governmental clients. The question comes up and say, well, you know, with everything you've just shown, Could we use this as a workable CRM tool? To which my answer is yes. Well, sort of. All right, so let's dive in and talk about this today in my newest video, because CRMs— let's talk about some of the key features. I'm going to make myself a little smaller here so that I can show this information. It's way more than just email, phone, fax. Text messaging. Um, and what CRM actually is, is a software tool that allows you to effectively track client and customer communications and interactions, plan for future prospect, client, and customer interactions, um, set up some automations that allow you to do a lot of these things without having to recreate the wheel every time. And maybe over time even build a pretty robust data file on the prospect or client or customer so that you can perform and build the relationship over time. And of course you're hoping that it's going to integrate with the other tools that you use, like your email, your calendar, and of course your documents and files. So, so these are all the things that would make a basic CRM tool. And what's interesting about it is when I do my sessions for my clients on Outlook, I think you could potentially use Outlook to do a lot of this, but it would probably only work if you have outstanding habits and routines and you have a lot of consistency in the way that you exercise this information. Like starting right off the bat, let's sort of talk about how I would put this all together and use it to use Outlook as a low-level CRM. Now I'm going to make a little disclaimer right here. What I'm showing you here, per what you see on this slide, requires you to be really good at all of these habits and routines. And so if you're not that good with the details, you might want to consider upgrading to the actual CRM tools that are going to help you with setting up all of this tracking and information management and automation, etc., because that's what they're built for. See, in order for you to do this with Outlook, you're going to have to sort of do it a little bit manually, and that might be the thing that could hurt your performance because you're not great at the habits and routines and consistency. So, you know, take a look at it. But, you know, obviously, first thing you want to do is get initial contact information. Well, of course, Microsoft Outlook can do that. Let's look at my Sample B sample contact that I created, playing around with a little pen and marker here. This guy looks a little bit shady from like 1914 or something. But what you want to do is capture their information as best you can. You know, all of the information that you can fill in, at least on page 1, so that you've got a pretty good information set whenever you need to contact this person. And yes, of course, with the Outlook.com app on your device and the 365 account, all of this can be on your phone in that app. Uh, you got your little business card here. Notice the import of the picture. Um, one of the things I recommend you do when you're making new contacts is, especially if you're good at faces but not names, Maybe go out, see if you can have a LinkedIn profile or Facebook profile or something else you can find and do a little snip and get their picture into their contact. That'll help you with remembering who the person is. And then what you can do, like, let's say that this person initially followed up with me on the phone and we discussed some training options. So I'm tracking that we had that discussion. And then I want to track right here. Notice this is the notes area. You can track a lot of info here. And notice that, so we spoke by phone, then had a reply. He was, had an interest in Outlook. And then below, here's an actual copy of the email that this guy sent me. Yeah, he doesn't look familiar at all. But he sent me the email, and then one of the things that I'm going to do up here is I'm going to put up, what do I need to do next? Well, I need to follow up on possible dates for that staff event. And notice right here, I put down, I'm going to put that in tasks. I could also say send invite for new meeting, and then that would be in parentheses calendar. But the key thing you're going to want to do is build this information profile. Now let's say after you do that initial email and you bring it over— by the way, I did another video about how you can drag and drop your emails to task, calendar, and contact to create new task, calendar, and contact items from your emails. You might want to watch that video. I'll put the links to several videos in the bottom here so that you can go watch how you can do all the little pieces of this. But the key point is, let's say you got your email information in here. Maybe you don't need to have every single email that you've sent in here because of course Outlook has a file cabinet and inside the file cabinet, notice this, I could have made a folder under clients. Now notice I actually have two different levels of clients. We'll talk about that more a little bit later. Active clients, dormant clients. I also have sort of the same thing under my prospects, hot prospects and cold prospects. And you'll see these are drop arrows. So I got like an entire list of current clients that are active as well as another set of clients that I've done work with in the past, but we're not doing anything right now. I've also got the same thing for prospects that have indicated, you know, they're very interested versus those that have said, eh, not right now. And you've got that kind of stuff and you want to build that. What I did is I just went right-click New folder, and I dropped in the folder for this Sample B Sample guy under the company Albatross Air. And so what I could do is I could start putting all of my emails that continue the conversation and discussion on this particular client in the folder. And then all I would have to do inside of here is come in and add in another item in here, say, you know, to 27/23, sent reply email folder. And then you know where it is, so you can go over there and read the email. And maybe you'll even put a little note, talked about AV needs, you know, something like that, so that you're tracking what happened and you're also plotting what you're gonna do next. Now, what you're gonna do next— before we go into that, oh, I want to show you one other feature that I think is really important in here. Notice this right here, it's called Categories, and I did another video about how I think they should have been called Labels because that's what you can do in here. And notice I've got a whole series of labels. One of them is Client Prospect, and notice I've already labeled Sample B Sample as a client or prospect. Now maybe you'll make one for clients, one for prospects. Maybe you'll make one for active clients, dormant clients, hot prospects, cold prospects. I mean, you can get as granular as you would like with these labels. But the nice thing is here inside of the contacts, you can put those labels on the contacts, which means that you could actually search and sort your data in your contact database by type of contact, which may also be very useful if you wanted to do, say, a more multi-person mailing or something. You could, you could set it up pretty easy to pull that database out of your bigger full database. So, so a lot of these capabilities are possible here, but the key thing is this: you got to be really good at tracking who said what, when, where, and what you're going to do next. And then inside of what you're going to do next, once you've got this, every time you do a change, by the way, make sure you come up here and hit the save. Because if you don't do that and you accidentally close it, you might not get the changes. Usually you'll get that little popup window says, do you want to save changes? Usually you're going to want to say yes to that. One other little thing that I want to talk about inside of here is this. Notice that these are the standard fields, but a lot of people don't realize that you can actually go details and notice this gives you a whole second set of stuff you could put in on this person. And then there's even this thing here called all fields where you can actually go just sort of bonkers with all the information you could put in here. Like here's personal fields, anniversary, birthday, children, hobbies, language. Wow. I mean, you could frankly go sort of stalk around a person. Not advising people on the internet to do that. All right, but I just wanted to show you that you can really get granular with the level of detail that you have here. So you have the ability to put in your contact information. You can go deeper in with the contact information. You can track Past conversations, you can track emails, you can use the folders to be the basis to go research the emails. You can track your next possible item. And look it up here. You can right from here send this person an email or send them a request for a meeting. It's a lot of stuff that you're doing in a CRM. It's pretty cool. But now let's take this one level deeper. Notice this, follow up on possible dates for staff event. One of the things that I can do now is I'm going to minimize that contact, pop in here to tasks. And now what I want to do is I'm going to create a new task right here. And inside the new task, what I'm going to do is sample B sample Albatross, send follow-up email. And now that I've done this, notice I can come in here to categories and once again label it client prospect due date. Oh, let's say Wednesday priority high. And so what I've done right there is I've taken that thing that's part of my notes in the contact, and I've now turned it into the task in my task manager. Now remember, you could also set up the next meeting on your calendar, but remember that when I was in the contact, I could just do that right then. It said, you know, it gave you the option to do a meeting request. And so not only can you track your communications, plan your communications, but through the use of the task list and the calendar functions, you can plot them so they'll pop up when you need to see them. That's the kind of automation that you're going to need to be able to do this client relationship management and building. Now, one of the other things here, right, is that you're going to want to even take it a little bit further than this because maybe one of the things that you want to do— oh, before I forget, timeout, timeout. I actually have several videos on how to better set up and use several features in both the Outlook Task Manager and the calendar. And the task videos specifically talk about how to set up your screen so that it gives you the information you need by date or by project, client, activity, event. And you can also track all completions. One of the cool things about the Microsoft Outlook task list is not only can you plot future tasks, but look at this, one of the views inside of here is completed. And one of the things that you could do is you could then sort this by category and you could see everything that you did for clients or prospects. So you've got retention capabilities not only in the notes that you're making in your contact, You can also see a record of everything you've gotten done via the completed items in your task list. So you've got, you've got several options here. So look for those videos in the comments below. But now going back to the presentation, one of the things that I wanted to share here is, you know, you're going to also maybe want to take it next level. And what's taking it next level? Not only plotting out what you're going to do next with this one person, but maybe taking some time to think about a more robust and planned communication series depending on where these people are at in your sales funnel. Whoa, sales funnel. What's a sales funnel? Here's a sales funnel example. Pretty simple sales funnel example. Sort of from related to my business. Okay, so here's what you got. You got somebody that makes an inquiry or you've identified as a good prospect for your business. Usually at this point you're just, just starting to get to know who the person is and they're just starting to get to know you. Next level is a hot prospect. And what that is, is that somebody who's taken an action, they have shown a bit of interest. They're nibbling on the line, so to speak, and you're trying to get them to take the bite. Then you'll get them to take the bite. They become a first-time customer, um, client, customer, whatever your terminology is. And then hopefully, if you do your job well, they become repeat customers. And maybe you'll even have a level for your very, very best customers where you do something super special. That's like high-level membership type marketing. So this is the sales funnel, and, um, at each stage what you're really trying to do is graduate them to the next stage. So you want your inquiries to become hot prospects, you want your hot prospects to become initial customers, you want your initial customers to become repeat customers, and so on. And so you are building a communication series that allows you to basically work to make all of these things happen. And now that I've explained that, let me show you a little something in here. So I was playing around. Let's go into the Notes function in Outlook. Now, timeout here. We could also do this in OneNote. What's interesting is I think I might build— do a follow-up video after this one sometime in the next week or two where I talk about how you could integrate some of the features in OneNote and OneDrive and maybe Teams I might make that even its own video to be part of this CRM process. Okay. However, what I wanted to show you is this, you know, we talked about the funnel. Well, wait a minute. Here's an inquiry. Well, let me open this up. Well, all I did was create a new note and I called it, you know, the inquiries I'm getting from my YouTube channel. Any of you that follow up with me? I would send you an initial response with the attachments, but then I might add you to my prospect database, send you one of my copies of my e-news and ask you if you'd like to subscribe, maybe send a free copy of my ebook, and then maybe finish up the series with a final note about my training. So my goal here is to take you from just being a YouTube viewer to maybe moving up to being somebody that would consider hiring me for their company. You know, one of the things I just think online, maybe I should put something in here about subscribing to my channel and Patreon and all that kind of stuff. I got to think about this. I just did this as an example. I haven't got it all the way there yet. But so there's a YouTube inquiry. What if they came in instead through my website or social media or email? Well, I have a slightly different and maybe a little bit more enhanced you know, response plan for them. Because in essence, if they've done any of these things, they are already basically a hot prospect. They've indicated at least a little bit of initial interest. Now, uh, if they've truly identified as a hot prospect, and I mean they're truly interested, then maybe I have an even more robust— and notice this, I'm going through the steps here But what I'm also trying to do is get it to this point right here. Did this work close? Did we get the contract? Or did it not close? And maybe what we do if the work didn't close. So, so as you can see at each layer of this, what I'm trying to do is build a series of communications to walk the people that I'm trying to build the relationship with through every piece of information they need to be able to allow me to have that good client or customer relationship. I'm trying to manage that client or customer relationship. Now, what's interesting about this is each of these, once somebody comes in, here's where you're going to have to have that good habits. You might, soon as somebody comes in, you might need to pop in here and then program in for that person in your task list and calendar all of these things you need to do for that new inquiry. That gets a little bit daunting. It's a lot of record tracking, and that's why I'm almost wondering if you would want to elevate, because you sort of have to do this manually inside of Outlook. Now, one of the things you might be able to do is say, just set up a new prospect inquiry task with all of these steps below it for each new person that comes in. That way, then you're not having to create all of these new tasks. You're creating one task with all these steps in it. You open the task every time it's time to do the next step and it's already there. That might be a better idea. You know, when I actually use a task like that, I can show you an example of this. Let's go into my task list and I'm going to select all task items. So I can see everything that I've put in, but I know I have a code word, accounting. And so I'm going to put that in and it does the search. And inside the search, let me look, year-end accounting review. So this is something I do every year to close the books for my business for accounting. And let's take a look at this. Notice that it's not a task. It's frankly a pretty significant project with each of the individual tasks inside of here. And I've done this so that every year I, it comes up in the holidays so I can do this process to close my books, to end up sending my stuff off to our tax accountant. And you could do something similar for each contact that now becomes part of your database as either an inquiry or a hot prospect or a client or a repeat client. You could have levels for this. And a communication series that you basically take the note that I showed you. Let's go back to notes and you could take any one of these and create a new task that would allow you to do this for that particular person. As a matter of fact, let me show you something that's sort of cool. You can actually take the note, drag it over here to tasks and drop it. Because if you do that, look what it does. It brings in the steps. So now all you have to do is put the person's name in, Sample B Sample, and I've already sent the initial response email. So now I need to add to prospect database. Then you just pick the date that you want to add the person to the prospect database category, client prospect, that easy. So you could utilize this system to build a plan for each particular prospect or client in your database all the way from the beginning of your sales funnel to the end of your sales funnel by doing some thinking, building the plans, building the templates. Now, when we talk about templates, let's talk about that for a second too, because Outlook can do one other thing here, which is really cool. Let me close this. I'm not going to save my changes on this one. This is a teaching example, clearly. But what I want to do now is show you something inside of email. It's going to my inbox. What I want to show you is something that I cover in one of my other videos on drafts, signatures, and quick parts. I'll put the link below. These are tools that allow you to basically start automating some of your emails through the creation of what are effectively automated templates. Let me show you one example. Like here in my drafts folder, I have a YouTube bonus PDFs as requested email. This is an email I've already sent and I moved it back into my drafts folder because when I open it up, you'll notice I've even got it set up so that I can add the person's name in here to personalize it. It's a message that's already been sent. And here's the beauty of this. It's got all the attachments I would want to send out to that YouTube inquiry. By the way, since you're watching this on YouTube, maybe Send me an email, randy@randaldean.com, and I'll send you this email. You'll see how it works, but hopefully I won't say dear name to you. I'll say dear your name. You know what I mean? All right. But then all I have to do now that I've got this set up like this with all these attachments, all I need to do is hit the forward button and it turns it into a new email. I can come down here and sort of get rid of all this header stuff. And then I can come down here, double-click dear sample. And one last thing before you send it to sample, get rid of that little FW or RE because that basically tells sample you mean nothing to me. So now you've got basically a personalized email with the information that sample needs with all the attachments. So that's one option. Wait, there's more. Let's close this, not save the changes. Let's close the original drafts email. The other thing I could just do is hit a new email and check this out. You can utilize the signatures tool, not just for normal signatures, but you can even put in like an info request. And, and what basically happens, let me show you how this works. I'm going to go down here real quick to the far bottom, click on signatures. This opens the signatures wizard on your computer so you can set up signatures. And you could have signatures for even if you had different email accounts, you could have different signatures. One of the signatures I've set up is what's called Info Request. And as you can see, it's basically got that same personalization capability. It's also got web links so that way I don't have to use attachments. Instead, just post them out on a website or a share file. And then I have an automated message that I can easily input right into an email as I open it. And let me show you what I mean by this. I'm going to hit Cancel, and then what I'm going to do is go Signature Info Request, and then maybe take that top line right there, pick that up so you don't have to think of a subject. Dear— watch this— Dear Sample. Pretty cool. Maybe clean it up a smidge. Pretty cool. But wait, let's take it one level even further. Hold on, check this out. Let's close. Not gonna save changes. Let's go back to that original contact with Sample. Well, if I've got Sample's email right in here, I notice I can either hit email here or I can just click on it here. And if I double-click, It's going to bring up the information and then I can click here to send an email. That's one way to do it. No, let's not do it that way. Let's just hit email right here. Sample email. But now watch, I can come up to signature now from the contact and bring in the template. And then what I can do is clean it up like we said earlier and personalize it. How long did that take? And see, what you could do is you could take each of those communications that were in each one of these planned communication notes, and you could basically build an automated signature and/or draft and/or template for each one of these. And bam, you know how to make the series right from the contact, clicking on the email, new email button, and using the signatures or the quick parts or the drafts. Watch that video for sure. And there might even be more things you can do if you integrate OneNote, but if you put this all together I mean, you're sort of doing the basics of a primary CRM tool. You know, if you got the right habits, you're getting the contact information, you're taking good notes with your interactions, you're plotting your future communications and meetings via your task list and calendar, you're planning your series like I showed in the notes for each layer of your funnel, you're building out your signatures and/or other tools to automate the messages. And maybe you've even got template documents ready as attachments, like info sheets or proposals or contracts, so that you can open those up and just change some of the words and have everything set up. You— I mean, we're a CRM. There is one issue though that I want to share with you here that I want you to think about. This will work great for you. You know what it won't work great for? If you need to have other people interacting with this same data and information. Outlook is a really good one-to-one person. And yes, you could potentially set— share the contact with another party so that they could see everything that's happened. You could potentially attach that other person on a meeting so that they join the meeting. You could assign them a task. But it's still a lot of one-way communication. It's not a collaborative thing. That's where I think some of this might be even better if you handled it in tools like OneNote, OneDrive, or Teams. And frankly, if any of you are hardcore Google users, I don't know why you'd still be watching the video at this point, but if any of you are hardcore Google users, I'm going to make a video that sort of talks about how you can do almost everything I've covered in this video in Google, because you probably could. So watch below for all of the bonus video links that show you how to do the technical aspects of a lot of the stuff I just showed fairly quickly. And then— oh geez, crazy mouse time. Okay, watch the comments below for those different videos on how to better use the task list, how to better utilize the calendar, how to, you know, basically build some of this stuff out using notes. I mean, there's a lot of bonus tips here that can give you the technical expertise you need to be able to utilize this tool sort of as a CRM. I mean, I still would argue though that if you want to automate it even more and think a little bit less and not have to be so diligent, you might want to consider upgrading, especially if you've got multiple people. But watch for the future videos where I'll talk about maybe some OneNote integration with this video and also maybe Microsoft Teams, maybe Google Keep. You know, and other things. So watch for that. If you like these videos, please click on like, please subscribe to the channel, please share these videos with other people that you think might find them useful. And once again, if you want to get all those bonus PDFs I showed you already in the video, just send me an email, Randy@randaldean.com, and put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send my automated response email out to you. Thanks everybody. Have fun. Bye.