Focus your sales and marketing efforts using Contact Manager
You may already know that Microsoft Office Live Small Business Contact Manager provides a centralized location for managing your business contacts, from customers and prospects to colleagues, vendors, and employees. But, if you only think of Contact Manager as a place to store contact information, you may be missing an invaluable sales tool.
Most mid-sized and large companies use specialized customer relationship management software and systems (known as CRM) to track sales opportunities. These companies usually have a dedicated sales force and a marketing team, and they hire agencies and expert consultants to handle advertising and promotional opportunities.
In your small business, you may be your own sales force, marketing team, and advertising consultant combined. And, if you are like most small businesses, you do not have the budget for expensive CRM systems. Your sales and marketing needs, though, are not that different from those of a larger company.
Whether you are selling a product online or in physical stores, or marketing your own professional services, Contact Manager can provide key tools to help you focus your efforts on the best opportunities for growing your small business. This article shows you how to use the CRM capabilities of Contact Manager as a to-do list that keeps you focused on your customers and your profitability.
In this article...
Put Contact Manager to work for your business
The most obvious type of business to benefit from tools for managing sales opportunities may be a company that sells products business-to-business. For example, if you bid on contracts to sell items in large quantities, you want to track the progress of your efforts toward winning each bid.
However, regardless of your product, service, or customer base, you can benefit from the Contact Manager tools for tracking sales opportunities. Consider two examples.
Professional services
Consultants or freelancers may offer a set of services instead of products. For example, as a personal trainer, you may teach classes at several gyms and offer private training. Keeping track of which gyms are the most profitable for you helps you decide which jobs to take when requests conflict; tracking training history and successes with private clients can help you build them into more frequent customers.
Opportunities to build your business in new directions can also present new challenges. Perhaps a personal training client recommends you for a project at his company to design a fitness program for its executives. Bidding on such a project may be a long process that requires proposals, meetings, and various forms of communication. Tools to help you manage and organize such a process can save you time that you can spend earning money now with current customers.
Merchants
An online merchant may sell various products to consumers or businesses. If you sell your own jewelry line, for example, you probably have one-time customers who purchase one or two items and repeat customers who come back frequently for gifts or special occasion purchases. You may also have larger potential customers, such as a bride who inquires about the possibility of having you design custom pieces for each member of her wedding party, or a retail store that wants you to provide merchandise on an on-going basis.
Because one-time buyers can become repeat customers, it is a good idea to keep a record of any customer who makes a purchase from your site in order to track their preferences for future marketing opportunities. And, you definitely want to track purchases from repeat buyers to help you develop them as customers. Tracking purchase information can also help you see buying trends across your customer base that may help focus your marketing efforts. When the possibility of a large sale occurs, opportunity management tools can also help you track your progress and measure the potential profit versus the cost of winning the opportunity.
Whatever your business, use Contact Manager to help you grow customer relationships and stay focused on the best opportunities.
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Customize Contact Manager
When you open Contact Manager, you see a list of contact groups in the left navigation bar as shown here, under the heading Business Contacts. Depending on your business, some groups provided by default may not apply. But, you may need other groups to effectively categorize your contacts.
For example, a personal trainer may not have employees or vendors. But, he may want to separate customers into private clients, gyms, and corporate clients. Similarly, an online jewelry merchant may want separate contact groups for first-time customers, repeat customers, and custom order clients.
You can organize contacts into the groups that suit your business, by adding or deleting groups as needed.
To add a new group, do the following:
- On your Office Live Small Business Home page, at the top, click More, and then click Contact Manager.
- In Contact Manager, on the left navigation bar, under the heading Business Contacts, click Add a Group.
- In the Add a Group dialog box, type the name that you want to use for the new group and then click OK.
To delete an existing group, do the following:
- On your Office Live Small Business home page, at the top, click More, and then click Contact Manager.
- In Contact Manager, on the left navigation bar, find the list of groups under the heading Business Contacts. Point to the group you want to delete, and then click the
X
icon that appears next to the group name.
- Click OK when you are prompted to confirm the deletion.
You can add or delete groups at any time or move a contact from one group to another. You can also add a contact to multiple groups, as discussed in the next section. Assigning contacts to multiple groups can be especially useful for planning marketing efforts. For example, if a personal training client recommends you for a corporate contract, you may want to include that person in your marketing efforts for both private and corporate clients.
When you delete a group to which contacts are assigned, those contacts lose the group association but are otherwise unaffected. If you delete the only group association for a contact, that contact will appear in your main contact list. To access the main contact list, on the left navigation bar in Contact Manager, click Business Contacts.
Note In addition to customizing your contact groups, you can also create or modify the way that you view contact lists, such as changing the fields displayed and their order. To do this, select any list from the left navigation bar in Contact Manager. Then, under the actions bar, click View, and then click Modify View or Create View as needed.
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Add a contact
When you add a contact in Contact Manager, you can store the contact information and track your business relationship with that contact all in one place.
To add a contact, do the following:
- On the Office Live Small Business Home page, at the top, click More, and then click Contact Manager.
- In Contact Manager, on the left navigation bar, click Business Contacts or click the name of a group to which you want to assign the new contact.
- On the actions bar, click New. The New Contact screen opens.
Note You can also access the New Contact screen from any Contact Manager list view. To do this, on the actions bar, click the arrow next to New, and then click Contact.
- Complete all of the relevant text boxes for your new contact.
Note If you started to add this contact after you selected a group in the left navigation pane, the contact is automatically associated with that group. However, notice that you can select multiple groups if applicable.
- To associate this contact with a company, select the company from the Company list in the New Contact screen. Or, if you have not yet saved the company information in Contact Manager, click the Create New icon next to the Company list to add the company information. Learn more about how to add company information in the section "Add a company."
- Toward the bottom of the screen, notice the Activity pane, where you can add business activity including a phone log, a business note, or a new sales opportunity. Remember that you can use these activity tools, and any text boxes for your contacts, as they best fit your particular business. For example, the personal trainer may want to use business notes to track each session he completes with a private training client. The jewelry merchant may want to keep a phone log of each conversation with her prospective wedding party customer.
- When you have completed your contact information, click Save at the top of the New Contact screen.
Notes
- To edit the contact at any time, including adding new activity, select the contact in any available view and then, on the actions bar, click Edit.
- If you use Office Live Small Business Store Manager, a contact is automatically added or updated for you whenever a customer makes a purchase in your Office Live Small Business store. You may also be able to import existing contact lists from other sources. For help importing a contact list, see the article Getting your information into Contact Manager.
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Add a company
In addition to storing information and activity for individual contacts, you can also store company information for any entity with which you do business, such as customers, vendors, or partners. Then, as introduced in the previous section, you can associate contacts with their companies for easier access to all of the relevant information about your business relationships.
To add a company, do the following:
- On the Office Live Small Business Home page, at the top, click More, and then click Contact Manager.
- In Contact Manager, on the left navigation bar, click Companies.
- On the actions bar, click New. The New Company screen appears.
Note You can also access the New Company screen from any Contact Manager list view. To do this, on the actions bar, click the arrow next to New and then click Company. Or, click the Add New icon that appears next to the Company list on the New Contact or Edit Contact screen.
- Type in all of the relevant information for the company.
- Toward the bottom of the screen, notice the option to associate business contacts with this company. You can click Add existing to select from a list of your contacts that are not yet associated with a company. Or, click Add new to open the New Contact screen.
- Notice that the same business activity tools are available for companies as they are for individual contacts. So, you can decide the most appropriate location for a given type of activity information.
- When you have completed the company information, click Save at the top of the New Company screen.
Notes
- To edit the company information at any time, on the left navigation bar, click Companies. Then, click the arrow that appears when you point to a company name. Select the option that you want from the list provided, as shown here.
- If you select the option to add a contact, opportunity, or phone log item, you can use the screen that appears to add only basic fields. To add complete contacts or business activity items, select Edit Item from this list and then add the contact or activity from the options on the Edit Company screen.
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Create opportunities to help focus your business efforts
Opportunities in Contact Manager provide a key CRM feature for your business. Opportunities give you an easy way to track all activity related to prospective sales, projects, or contracts. They also help you plan your business activities by giving you tools to help determine the most effective use of your sales and marketing efforts. To create a new opportunity, do the following:
- On the Office Live Small Business Home page, at the top, click More, and then click Contact Manager.
- In Contact Manager, on the left navigation bar, click Opportunities.
- On the actions bar, click New. The New Opportunity screen appears.
Note As mentioned earlier, you can also access the New Opportunity screen when you are adding or editing a contact or company. Also, as with contacts and companies, you can access the New Opportunity screen by clicking the arrow next to New on the actions bar above any Contact Manager list view.
- Type a title for the opportunity and select either a company or contact to associate with this opportunity. Every opportunity must be associated with either a contact or a company. When you make this association, you can also access the opportunity screen from the applicable contact or company.
- Type in all of the relevant information under the Status and Details headings. The information under the Revenue heading is automatically calculated based on product information that you supply.
- Under the Product heading, notice that you have the option to associate products with this opportunity. Select Add existing product if you have already added the product in your Products list, available from the left navigation bar in Contact Manager. Or, click Add new product to associate a product with this opportunity without adding it to your main products list.
Notes
- When you add a new product, some fields may not seem applicable depending on your type of company. However, remember that you can use the fields as they best suit your business. For example, the Opportunity Product – New Item screen includes fields such as Quantity and Unit Price. If your products are services, such as for the personal trainer mentioned earlier, the opportunity may be to sell a block of training sessions, as shown here. In that case, the product is private training; the unit price is the trainer’s hourly rate, and the quantity is the number of training hours.
- After you associate a product with your opportunity, you can edit product information that is specific to this opportunity from the Products list on the Edit Opportunity screen.
- After you add a product to an opportunity, Office Live Small Business calculates the Revenue fields for the opportunity automatically, as shown here.
Notes
- The Total Value of the opportunity is the unit price (less any discount percentage) multiplied by the quantity. The Revenue Forecast is the Total Value of the opportunity multiplied by the estimated
Probability that you will win the opportunity (which you indicate under the Status heading).
- Many types of revenue forecasts are used in business, and some of these are very complex financial models. The simple forecast provided here is intended to give you a source for comparison that can help you determine where your sales and marketing efforts are best spent. For example, an opportunity with a total value of $100,000 may seem far more worthwhile than an opportunity worth $10,000. However, if you have merely a five percent chance of winning the larger opportunity and a 90 percent chance of winning the smaller opportunity, the $10,000 opportunity may in fact be a better use of your resources.
When you use tools such as this revenue forecast to plan your sales and marketing activities, also remember to consider other factors, such as the time and cost involved in pursuing the opportunity or the potential customer’s payment history.
- If you collaborate with employees, colleagues, or partners, you may increase the benefits of tools such as Contact Manager by sharing the information that you store there. If you are an Office Live Small Business account owner or administrator, you can assign permissions to other Office Live Small Business members to enable them to view or edit the content in your Contact Manager lists. For help getting this done, see the article Manage permissions using the Sharing sidebar.
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Small business, big benefits
You do not have to be a large company to benefit from tracking your customer relationships and business opportunities. When you do it all, the set of easy-to-use, organized tools in the Contact Manager features found in Office Live Small Business can help you plan, focus, and track your business opportunities. Contact Manager gives you more time to manage your business and more information to grow your business effectively.
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