Datasheet

The most powerful Outlook tool is the on-screen reminder. The alarm pro-

duces on-screen messages, which reminds you to take action. Whether it’s

reaching your quarterly business forecast or simply reminding you, year after

year, to order your spouse an anniversary gift, this feature makes life much

more manageable.

Looking Out for All Parts

of Your Business

The purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Without customers,

there is no business. But without profit to recover your investment and pay

expenses, no business can survive. Marketing, sales, and financial control are

all key issues, but you also need to innovate — not only in the product or ser-

vice but also in the general procedures of your business. Outlook is an addi-

tional tool for your current sales and accounting systems that can help you

achieve your goals and objectives with innovative solutions.

Customers

No business exists without customers, and you create customers through

relationships. Therefore, relationships are perhaps the most important part

of any business. Unfortunately, companies all too often think about their

products or services, but forget how to develop customer relationships or

understand and solve their customers’ problems.

You can develop your customer relationships one by one if your business

allows you to do so. But people in businesses that have thousands of cus-

tomers who don’t require daily attention often forget that they can still develop

relationships with their customers. They can take actions and communicate

with customers in groups. Outlook categories allow you to group your cus-

tomers for various needs. (Read more about categories in Chapter 4.)

Businesses that work with customers in large groups, such as credit-card

companies, newspapers, and the phone company, know customer addresses

and names. You may have the intelligence to sell mass products, but the cus-

tomers are still just names in your databases. While you have an understand-

ing about what it takes to work with groups of people, rather than single

individuals, you still don’t know your customers’ wishes or desires to fulfill

one by one. You can use Outlook Categories to classify your customer base

and work by company type, territory, or vertical markets (see Chapter 4).

Chapter 1: Changing Your Outlook on Managing Business

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