Learn How Outlook Business Contact Manager can help you generate lead reports

For a small business it is always a challenge to embrace technology without incurring huge costs. Many small business owners refrain from using a CRM tool owing to the associated costs. However with the Business Contact Manager (BCM) feature in Outlook, small businesses can look to work with a flexible and feature rich mini CRM tool without running up any additional costs. Since the time the BCM feature was rolled out, it had its fair share of admirers and critics. While some people criticized it for lack of sophistication, the truth remains that it is a very formidable customer management tool in the hands of a knowledgeable user. In fact one can generate reports of the leads that have stored as per their preference using the BCM tool.

Generating Repots and Charts in Business Contact Manager

The Business contact manager offers several predefined reports for you to view leads according to your needs. Besides the standard reports, you can create customized ones based on your requirements by altering the predefined formats. To start with you need to select the report you wish to modify and click on Modify report on the report toolbar. In the subsequent pane you can make the changes related to filters, headers, font etc as per your choice.

The filter options available in the BCM allow you to include certain set of leads based on different parameters such as location or date or stage of the lead. Besides filtering the leads you can choose to customize reports by including user defined blocks or create criteria to match your requirement. Incidentally BCM offers customization of the existing record types too and even the forms for entering records can be tailored to your needs.

Besides creating custom reports you can also view a specific report in form of a graphical chart. In order to do so, select the report you wish to work on and then click on Charts on the Ribbon interface. Outlook allows you to add appropriate labels and select the data range that you wish to display in the charts. In case you wish to undertake a detailed analysis, you can export a lead report to Ms Excel.

Outlook crash can compromise lead data stored in BCM

While the Outlook application is extremely suitable for lead management and the Business contact manager is laden with features to facilitate the same, an Outlook crash can jeopardize your entire effort. If the Outlook application crashes due to a PST error, there is a distinct chance that it will not only compromise the encompassed emails but other data including lead information stored in the Business Contact Manager. So if you ever encounter such a situation, it would be prudent for you to invest in a powerful pst repair tool like DataNumen Outlook Repair application. It is capable of recovering every data element stored in the Outlook application including leads, contacts. journals and notes. Moreover the recovery process is rather easy to carry out and can be completed within minutes.

Author Introduction:

Alan Chen is President & Chairman of DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including sql recovery and outlook repair software products. For more information visit http://www.datanumen.com/