How to Tame your Outlook Inbox – Top Tips and Tricks for Microsoft Outlook 2016

ladies and gentlemen members of the press welcome to today's program my name is Warren Stokes and I'm going to be your host and presenter today I'm gonna be sharing with you by far the most popular topic that I've ever presented and I've done about 80 or so of these webinars now but the most popular topic has to do with how to tame your outlook inbox and how to basically get more out of Microsoft Outlook and we're focusing in today on how it looked 2016 I think you're gonna really enjoy the program it is being recorded you can also submit questions or comments through the chat control panel so let's get started first i wanted to enunciate the goals that I have and my overarching goal is to really add some value to your day and hopefully help you be more productive and more organized and if you're in business make more money so one of the key concepts is just understanding what outlook is all about so I'll be covering some of that and by the way I'm going to move fairly quickly through these slides and then we're going to demonstrate all this in a live instance of Microsoft Outlook as we demonstrate the functionality that I'll be talking about but this is really important concept because you really need to be able to manage your time effectively another concept is really as the main theme here is just gaining control of your inbox it can be quite a monster sometimes if you if you're like me you might receive over a hundred emails a day and process just about as many outbound emails and of course you also have to manage your calendar and tasks but it's all about enhancing your productivity one of the benefits you'll be able to impress your friends and colleagues with all this knowledge a little bit more detail on the topics today understanding Outlook functions key part of it but using color to be more organized as well as what I call the magic of rules you'll see how that works here in a moment we can learn how to do conditional formatting how to insert content from templates throughout Outlook it's very handy a little bit more about quick access toolbar and how to leverage that understanding the power of tasks and also how that differentiates from the use of a calendar and finally we're going to be showing you how to almost magically transform emails into contacts tasks and appointments with just a couple of clicks pretty awesome stuff so the basic idea of outlook is that it will help you with communications of course that's your email everyone knows what email is all about outlook helps you manage your time that's what your calendar function is about it'll also help you get things done and the combination of all these things really results in getting things done but the task function in Outlook is kind of key to that and of course contacts many of you use the Outlook contact form and what that does is it allows you to keep kind of a digital rolodex of all the people in your world I've come up with a concept I call the power of the four DS and to start with what I'd like to share with you is if you follow these four concepts I think you'll find that your product productivity is greatly enhanced so whenever you get an inbound email you do one of four things you deal with it you delegate it to someone else one of my favorite things to do you delay it or you delete it you've basically doing one of these four things you've effectively started to tame your inbox so again if you always take one of these actions you're going to be amazed how much your productivity increases the use of color is a very important concept color can be used to organize your tasks it can be used to help identify different attributes of contacts it can be used to organize your calendar and the magic of rules has to do with auto routing emails into specific folders and also formatting them so that they pop right out with different colors and fonts in your inbox pretty awesome conditional formatting can be done throughout Outlook from emails from appointments so you can change the color and font of inbound emails to your desire and I'll be showing you that you can color appointments automatically which as you'll see helps you stay organized and see how you're spending your time and another concept is to insert content from template so you don't have to type in repetitive information over and over and over you can do this in emails you can do it in appointments you can do it in tasks you can even insert content into contacts if that makes sense to you and their quick access toolbar it's I hit a little almost hidden little feature in Outlook very useful saves you time get things done a little quicker we'll get into that how to customize it how to show up below the ribbon and then the concept of transforming emails into contacts tasks and appointments is a very handy function so let's go ahead and get started I'm going to just switch our view here and you'll now see that I'm looking at my Outlook calendar and one of the concepts here is to use color to get more organized so as you may know a lot of a lot of functions are pretty much all the functions and outlook can be color coded now I'm going to use a couple examples here but if you look at my calendar all these colors have a specific meaning to me and you can assign your own meaning meaning to these colors for me the green ones are sales calls with customers and prospects the orange ones are preparing for a meeting or preparing for some action the purple ones are different types of follow-ups and so on now one of the things you can do is to simply create a new appointment and use the category feature to color code it you may know that you can create as many color categories as you wish so by selecting the categorized function and go into all categories you can see all of your list of categories and then you can also create new categories such as a webinar example and I'm just typing in the name of the category so that you can I can refer to that later and maybe I want that one to be kind of a blue so now I can choose from all of these different color schemes you can even add multiple colors to an appointment as many as you wish and you can see how it didn't color codes it for three different things in this case when I save and close that the last one is the predominant color and the other two are the secondary colors but you can still see them through a kind of an overview of your calendar and that's all good you can manually do this all day long I'm going to delete that one but I'm going to show you something really cool here did you know that you can actually automatically color code your calendar by simply putting in a it'll recognize a keyword so for example if I put the word webinar in my subject line and I save that you'll see how it automatically color codes it right red pretty cool huh so in other words I didn't have to manually select that color it just simply automatically put it in give you another example and I'll show you how we set this up here as well but let's say I wanted to create a meeting that was a staff meeting I don't do the same thing just an Outlook appointment now this one's going to be automatically color coded bright yellow awesome so you can kind of see where your time is being spent the yellow ones in my case like they're non revenue generating activities so to speak internal staff meetings you know I want to make sure my whole week doesn't get you know filled up with those all right I like to see a lot of green ones because that's my income generating meetings and so on so how do we do that well what you do is you go up to your ribbon and you go into your view to set up a automatic color coding of your calendar so up here on the top you'll see the different tabs I'm in the View tab and I'm going to go over here where it says view settings and click that down here I'm going to select conditional formatting and you can see all the conditional formatting that I've done that staff meeting you can see how it's colored bright yellow if it says demo in it it's a it's the bright green sales called blue and so on to add one to this list you simply click the Add button and you give it a name so let's just say I'm going to color code one it has to do with following up and I'm going to make it purple so the condition is if the term follow-up is in the subject line you can put you can decide what you want that keyword to be then it's going to be color-coded automatically purple okay so I just created a new one now if I create a new one I'll do that just right now by way of example here and I'm going to put follow-up in the subject line create a new appointment save and close and as if by magic it's colored purple sweet love it such a nice little function you can use color throughout outlook at all as we go into the different functions today I'm going to kind of go from calendar to past contacts email and kind of go through those in an organized fashion well let's talk about how to use color for email so notice this is just my inbox but some of these are colored bright purple and they're bold font right in here so that's interesting how did that happen well I did the similar thing but now I'm in my email view and I went up to the view I select view settings and in this case I select conditional formatting here's all the conditional formatting I already set the one we were on it is called a software advise lead and it I changed the font to a larger font 14-point and I changed it to purple you just do that by selecting the font the style the size and the color now what that means is whenever I get a and by the way the condition here is that the sub does the word in the it's searching for the subject in the subject field is the word software advice that's one of our lead vendors by the way so it's important to me because you know some types of emails are more important than other and I want some of them to pop out so you kind of see how that works I have other folders where I've stored other things and you can see another quick example of that here's some of my my web leads are all colored green and bold again so that when they arrived in my inbox they pop right out at me awesome that's just a way to kind of start taming your inbox and actually kind of give you a way to quickly identify emails that are important to you now it doesn't have to be a keyword in the subject line it could be who it's from or any number of criteria so again we just went view these settings conditional formatting add a new one or select one they already have select the font the style and the size and the condition okay here's where you can put it either as search for the words in the subject line or you can select subject and body or frequently use text you can do from or - so these are ways to help organize your inbox kind of start taming that that volume of in email that we all get pretty cool now let's talk a little bit about what I call the magic of rules so outlook has a very useful function many of you I'm sure already use this it's called rules and I can create rules to do a number of different things but the most common thing that you want to do with a an email is you want to automatically put it in a certain folder I'm going to explain how that works so to create a rule you just say create a rule and let's just say I wanted a I wanted to put all of the emails from this example actually I got a better example let me do this let's say that you got a request for a quote ah here's a good example and I wanted to create a rule so that all emails having to do with a request for a quote again I went to rules create rule I want it I want it to look like for the subject line that it contains request for quote in the subject line it could be anything you want but this is a good example because of requests for quote of course are a good thing to get usually and I'm just going to say select the folder that I want to go in and this is all your outlook folders over here you can see I got delegate read letter a quote request that's what I'd like to route them to okay so now I'm going to click OK and I'm gonna select run this rule to the messages in my inbox already all right so it just processed that rule and it took it out of my inbox automatically and and as you'll see it's gonna look for any email I have about 2500 emails that's kind of my personal limit in my inbox and now from now on any emails that I get in my inbox that have that the term and the subject line request for quote are going to be automatically routed into this folder called quote requests there you go that's how it works by the way if you haven't read it it'll be highlighted with the little dark blue number shows you how many you haven't read now well this is an extremely useful function you also have to bear in mind that that means you have to kind of keep track of these other folders so just bear that in mind it's something - something that's something to think about there so the the the use of the rules can be quite extensive though you can do all sorts of other additional rules so for example you might want a an email that contains the subject contains the term Independence Day but if I go into Advanced Options I could say that only if it has specific words in the body of the email so Independence Day and I maybe I want the word closed as the other criteria I'm going to add that to my criteria for the rules so you can stack up these rules so I think it's very very finite and here there's another sound or another option to do things like create sounds you know move it to a specific folder again and other things I'll just say play a sound and now when I finish this rule okay see there you go it will then automatically play a sound when I get an email that has a terms Independence Day and the word closed in it pretty cool now sometimes you can get carried away with rules I've heard people say I've used rules almost to a fault but it's certainly one of the methods to tame your inbox by simply auto routing it I'll give you another example let's say you got an email from rusty Jones and let's say rusty Jones was my boss I might want to create a rule that moves emails from rusty into the folder called read later because it's from my boss that's kind of a joke there anyway a little bit of humor we're going to move into a topic which is one of my favorites and that is how to automatically insert content into various forums and brought in Outlook if you will I'm gonna start with a very simple one let's say I'm going to send an email to help send this to Brad Pitt one of my colleagues in Hollywood but I I've already sent this email a thousand times before so maybe I don't want to have to type it in maybe what I want to do is just insert content from a template now I could just go to insert and outlook has a little function you may already be aware of called quick parts you can actually create a library of content okay I just inserted a block of content from a template again I'll do that again I'm in an email ready to write it and I've already saved these templates I'm going to show you how to create these in a moment and I went over here to the quick parts and I selected the block of content that I wanted to automatically insert into this email maybe it's a meeting request or any number of things so that's how you do it now how do you create these blocks of content well it's very easy you just select an email you've already created or you come you created on the fly let's say I wanted just this part of a this email to be a new new quick part so I highlight it with my cursor I go to quick parts and I say save selection to quick part gallery down here at the very bottom and I'm gonna call this o feedback it's one of the words in there okay now let's say I'm creating an email and I just want to insert that I could go in here and choose it from here manually go down to feedback but there's a cooler way I could just start typing in the keyword feedback and notice how it's it's predicting that I might want to use that template called feedback from the proposal boom there it is this saves like amazing amount of time over the course of a month or a year I don't know how many hundreds of hours it's probably saved me but I use it extensively so the cool thing about that is it's not just for use in emails you can also use it in appointments and tasks and contacts let's say I'm creating an appointment I'm going to invite well that's the invite let's invite Brad disappointment again and I'm going to put start putting in the invitation but now I'm going to type in the keyword agenda start typing it and see how it predicts that I want to put that block of content in there so I put this now into an appointment and of course if I had a keyword in the subject line it would automatically color code as well pretty awesome all right and while we're on the subject you can color code tasks as well as you may know tasks can be shown in your Outlook calendar view I like to keep it them both together because they work very well together and I'm going to get into that a little bit more in just a moment but you can color code a task so that you know it's got a color coding to it high-priority again that's just one of my color codes now notice how some of these have numbers on them let me explain why I've added a numeric sequence to that what that allows me to do with task is not only color code but sort by that and you can see how all of my high-priority ones medium priority low priority are sorted automatically and this is just my task list I'm just clicking on task but again you can also keep your tasks and I'm going to reading pane over here to your right of your calendar which is what I prefer and notice how those color codes show me what type of task it is purple eye nose follow-up if I open it you can see it says follow up and you learn to kind of remember your color code so you don't have to look them up green demo right purple follow up dark green low-priority that kind of thing so all we're talking about now is using color to effectively help organize your information both all in your calendar your tasks but it also works in contacts I'm going to go into my outlook contact view and I'm just going to open up a contact Brad Pitt so I could color code all kinds of different things in here I can let's just clear all categories and I'll show you how I got to that to color code a contact you'll see the little categorized function in the main ribbon and you can say this is a client this is a client that is in a certain department IT so there we go now I've color-coded that contact and by the way if you're in a ListView in Outlook which you can just change you can see those categories here in the ListView as well so now we've seen how you can use color to help get organized throughout all of the outlook functions mail calendar contacts and tasks cool one of the questions I get a lot about is what is the quick access toolbar all about well Outlook has a little function and by nature that quick access toolbar shows above the ribbon up here by default and these you add to you have to add things to the quick access toolbar so if I wanted to for example add one of these functions like delete I simply highlight that right click and say add to quick access toolbar and now you can see that little X's up there I prefer to have it below the ribbon so it no matter where I'm at it's always below the ribbon right handy and to do that you select that little drop-down arrow and you say show below the ribbon and now it's showing down here it's a matter of personal preference doesn't really matter which one you choose but that's how you can then quickly access all the different Outlook functions and I'll show you one that's pretty handy what if I wanted to you know select the contact and do something like oh you know create a meeting or something with that contact you can just say click meeting and it'll create a meeting with that contact a very quick way if you're in your contact view to create a meeting with the contact that's just an example of that quick access toolbar so again the quick access toolbar by default resides above the ribbon and there's not much in it you just go into your any-any tab up here and any any little icon you can basically add it to your quick access toolbar you can then also again show it below the ribbon if you prefer there you go so we're gonna talk I just wanted to kind of back up kind of for a minute and talk a little bit about the whole concept of managing time and getting things done one of the questions is why is it then that in Outlook you have both your calendar and your tasks some people kind of use them interchangeably or maybe they use one and not the other but really here's what I've learned after using Outlook for over 20 years it's what it really is about is making sure you get things done that's really your task list and if you keep a task list one of the things that happens is when a task becomes late you'll see that it will automatically turn red like if this one were actually due yesterday call Brad about quote you'll see that now that's one of the red ones here a little business tip for you Oh a little business tip if you get too many red ones you're behind you got to catch up ok but ok so the idea is that this is your to-do list these are things you're going to do there's a you can set a reminder time if you wish the date of course you can also keep track of whether it's in progress or or partial progress you can give it priorities and so on and you can set the reminder time but the key concept is these persist if they get late they keep reminding you by being red on your task list now how does that work with a calendar well a calendar has two functions but overall it's the block off time to get something done it's block off time to perform a task if you will think of it that way unless it's something you can do in just a matter of seconds one of the things you'd probably need to do is block off time to do it like following up with someone or calling someone or things of that nature so the ideal the ideal situation then is to both set both a task and block off time on your calendar to do it and here's why next week I'm not going to be looking at my last week's calendar but my task list is still there they persist and if they're late they turn red that is a very key concept for you so again the idea is the whole overarching concept here is to help you get organized and get things done the task list keeps track of the tasks that you have to do and make sends reminders to you and your calendar is used to block off time to do it of course your calendar is also used for meetings with people but that's not exclusively what it's for it's to block off time to do something whether it's meet with someone prepare for something follow up or do any most anything that you might have to do now here is a very useful way to transform emails into various functions so I'm going to just go into my inbox and I'm gonna say with this email from Rusty Jones here that I want to transform that into an appointment well one what simple way to do it is simply drag that email over my calendar icon down here and as if by magic it creates an appointment the content of that email is in the appointment already awesome so now that would be on my calendar I could also transform an email into a task similar idea I drag it over my task icon down here my task label content of the email is in that task the subject line of the email is the subject line of the task I'll just go ahead and create that again I'll just mark it yellow so we can see it I'll make it due today and I'll make it man low-priority it's just about somebody being close okay now maybe I want to remind her maybe I don't on that so I just drug that email over my tasks folder now you're gonna see it in my task list which are also and which I usually refer to on my calendar you'll see it right over here you can see that it's a colored yellow and there it is I'll mark it complete just to get it off my task list today so again what we're looking at right now is how to transform emails into appointments into tasks and here's something pretty cool you can also transform emails into a contact I'm going to use one that here and my web emails that I've got so this person named Edward Fitzgerald sent me an email now I want to I want to create a contact out of that so how do I do that guess what I just drag it over my contact folder now in this instance what you're gonna see is that a different window pops up if you're a prophet user you'll profit CRM user which was our outlook based CRM it pops up a dupe checker so you don't and unit vertically create a duplicate of that contact but otherwise you just create the contact and it'll automatically fill first name last name and email address and then usually if there's a signature line you want to like move the address line over to the you know the address form of Outlook pick the phone number you want and you just I'm highlighting and dragging that's all I'm doing company name and now I've just created a contact from an inbound email and if the content of that email is if you want to keep it in the notes it's the first note in your contact again maybe I want to categorize that maybe I want to prioritize it and so on and now I've just created a new contact pretty awesome so that's one of the concepts of transforming emails into appointments into tasks and into contacts there's another one it's a little bit less known you could actually take let me go back to my calendar view you could actually transform a task into an email by dragging the task over the email the content of the content of the task is in the email now it's ready to send to them you could create a task into an appointment by dragging the task over the calendar item content the content of the task in the subject line is all part of the of the appointment so it's really quite flexible and the main concept here is just simply saving you time rather than having to manually build a task or in this case an appointment or even a contact I could also create a contact by dragging a task over my people folder so so that's kind of the 360 degree view of it and now I want to give you all just a little bit of bonus material and this what this webinar is really mostly about Microsoft Outlook but I wouldn't explain a little bit about our company and about who we are and it's not a sales pitch but just to give you a little more context for things you can do with Outlook for one thing there's a lot of what are called outlook add-ins you can see them by going into you probably have some already you may not even know about it you go into file options and look at your add-ins and you can see all these different add-ins well what are those well those are plugins essentially are add-ins to Outlook that provide additional functionality for other applications one of them is called prophet CRM I actually of course I I sell prophet CRM and we developed a market this program been selling it very successfully for about don't know since 2002 a long time and what it does is it basically adds functionality to Outlook I'm showing you this because you may have a need for something as simple as more advanced contact management for example it could be that you have fields that data that you need to capture about a contact that isn't available in Outlook so this plugin this outlook plugin called prophet CRM allows you to capture an additional 20 attributes of a contact these are all customizable - which is nice every business is different so you can decide what kind of contacts they are this would be your list are they an employee are they a consultant you know current client a prospect or what have you and again that's customizable maybe you want to know where where did this contact come from you know came from a referral or trade show or what have you you can do things like rating your contacts different ways maybe capturing things like hobbies or areas of interest so all of these things become things that you can capture I I joke because Tiger Woods I got in here on these three hobbies golf golf and golf that's kind of funny but any event basically you can capture all of these things and they're very useful because then I could say maybe I want to create a list of everyone who's maybe gonna hold a golf tournament and I want to just find everybody who's interested in golf so I'm just gonna show you a couple little things about profit there we go there's the golf tournament list and I wanted to also add a filter so these filters are just additional criteria I want to make sure they're all in California in the zip code 902 one out because what I might want to do is send them all an invitation to my golf outing and this is a profit CRM function this is not an Outlook function but I could say I want to send a group email to everyone in that zip code that has the hobby of golf and guess what I'm gonna do here I would use my you know my quick parts thanks for your interest in profit we're holding a tournament at the Riviera Country Club and love to have you there right and this is one of the functions it's very useful in prophet's era but I don't want to capitalize on all this because the main concept of this is is Outlook so I'm gonna go check my questions so far no questions let's see we got no questions have come in yet that's what that's just dandy just a kind of review and also we just kind of make sure we are tracking on all the things we just learned today I wanted to kind of review that and if there are any questions feel free to put them right into the check control panel but really what this is about is taking more advantage of Microsoft Outlook I find that people typically don't even really scratch the surface of it so understanding the outlook functions how it helps you manage your time very importantly in control of that inbox that's something that we all want to do and at the end of the day it's going to enhance your productivity so things like the advanced use of email appointment tasks and contacts but I wanted to kind of kind of close with this and I'm gonna also be checking my messages here this is really powerful here I've I've seen versions of this before but I just created this for this topic but think of it if you get an email do one of four things and you've tamed your inbox basically deal with it means do something about it reply to it or delegate it to someone else that's another thing that you can do delay it you know you can actually put it in a folder to read later or deal with later delete it deal with it delegated delay it or delete it and you'll find how it's amazing how much productivity you'll gain from that so I did have a question from the audience and I think many of you in the audience today could very well be profit CRM users so the question is does it generate a first-name when I do that and the answer is yes if you choose that selection so I'm going to go back and demonstrate that little group email function again right click send group email here is where you choose the salutation you want might want to say you know dear mrs. Smith might be the title the salutation you want or hello first name so notice when I click create email it picks up on that the first one is just where I'm putting in my content and this is just basically you know whatever you want to put in here I'll put that it you know will put to thank you thanks for your interest email in there again every single one of those is going to get an email that's personally addressed and I can actually show that to you so when I send that all of those people will get that group email now I'll just show you the one so that's in my sent items now and you'll see that it says hello Anthony thanks for interesting profit and all those same people would get that I use it all the time and I'm going to might as well explain that one other thing and by the way yes one of the questions is again can I send this to it so you can review yes there's also a handout in in the GoToMeeting control panel it's the slide deck welcome to email me later I'll post my contact information in just a couple of minutes but what it's going to show you is what those emails actually look like if you send a group email first of all here is ones that I've sent out various webinars and you can see I have different folders here's one just for webinar invites here's one for the the webinar invite that I sent out to the list of people that are on this call today so you can actually see that if I open it it's an individually addressed I selected hello first name could have said hi first name or you know dear title last name but notice it's from me to them they're actually sent about a half second apart these differ from by the way from emails that you that you send that may use send and receive through things like Constant Contact those are pure marketing emails typically and they got the very high volumes of contacts and but you know when you get these emails the recipient gets them there's a little right click to tap here to download and little warnings Java click warnings and all this kind of stuff and so well this has a certainly a place in your email marketing communications it's not good or bad right or wrong these are good for high volume emails the ones in profit are really intended for people you're already in touch with presumed to be opted in but it makes a much more personal touch when you send those group emails through profit good for clients prospects you're already engaged with that sort of thing so I'm gonna post my contact information and this this webinar has been recorded so you can access it later you automatically get an email with the recording in it they also get posted on YouTube just go to youtube and search profit CRM webinars and you'll see actually you'll see a whole bunch of them and and this topic I want to reiterate is extremely popular and valuable I did a I've been doing a series of webinars and the total webinar reach has over eight hundred thousand views on this very topic so I want to thank you all for participating today and if you have any questions feel free to reach out and contact us your account manager or just reach out to me I'm pretty easy to reach thank you all and have a wonderful day

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Views: 444,568

Rating: 4.868227 out of 5

Keywords: Sales Training, Productivity, Outlook, CRM, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office, Building Sales Skills, Sales Skills, Business Productivity, Business Performance, Business Excellence, How to use Outlook, How to use Excel

Id: JW4xum620QI

Length: 38min 22sec (2302 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019