My obsessive testing of CRM software demos has kept me away from blogging for a few days. The good news is these demos inspired to try some things in Business Contact Manager (BCM) and I discovered a few things I didn’t know.
One thing that I had struggled with is creating a form letter (mail merge) from within BCM. I had not been able to find the Mail Merge command in Outlook, so I always started my mail merges in Word. This made for an awkward workflow when working with contacts. I’m not sure why I missed this for so long – I think it is because I usually open contacts be searching for them rather than using one of the contact views.
It turns out that if you are in one of the contact views like this:
Then you can access the Mail Merge command under Tools menu.
From here you can indicate that you want to merge only the current record and you can pick which form letter to use. You can also change the merge options to create an e-mail:
This works in any contact view, so you can use it for Outlook contacts as well if you don’t use BCM.
Bill Brelsford Small Business Marketing Consultant
