Anyone that is in sales has had to, at one point or another, prospect for new customers. If you are one of the lucky ones the company you work for provides leads for you directly in to some kind of a CRM solution. For a while I was one of the lucky ones. Our website was generating about 15 new leads per day and these leads magically appeared in our homegrown CRM. But easy lead distribution, like all things, came to an end when I left that company to start my own consulting practice. Being self-employed meant I now needed to prospect my own leads.

I need prospects and I need them fast, I need leverage. When it comes to sales there are two ways to get leverage: the people you know and the tools you use. I'll leave how to leverage the people you know for another time. Today I'm focusing on tools, one tool in particular; a way to copy information directly into your contact manager from websites, emails, documents, anywhere that has electronic text. (www.copycontacts.com/tools to get the software)

Like many people I use Outlook as my CRM. It is not the best CRM solution but it has the advantage of also being my email client. In my business, search engine optimization, my email client is always open so it makes it easier for me to also use Outlook for my CRM solution. My biggest hassle when it comes to using Outlook as a CRM is getting the contact details into the database! I hate typing in all the little contact details. I bet you do too!

A little over a year ago I asked a software developer friend of mine if it would be possible to 'scrape' address information from a web page directly in to a database. He said sure it's possible but he wasn't going to do it. That sent me on a search for a tool that would make it easy for me to capture contact details in the variety of documents that I interact with most like webpages and emails.

After a little searching I found an add-on for Outlook that did an awesome job of copying contact addresses from web pages directly in to my Outlook with the press of a key. I couldn't how easy it was! No more need to tedious copy the address then move to Outlook, then back to the web page to copy something else and then back to Outlook, it's boring just writing about it never mind having to do it! When you factor in fixing mistakes and distraction factor I am now adding prospects to my Outlook in about 10 seconds instead of 5 minutes!