Clean Up Your Contacts
We all have contacts in Outlook that we can't remember:
| Name |
Jim T |
| Phone Number |
434-9999 |
| Comments |
House |
Hmmm... Is Jim a realtor, a DJ, an interior decorator?
What about the people you do remember, but haven't spoken to in three
months, six months...
Has it been two years?!
Like all other forms of data – from project plans to accounts receivable
– contact information requires constant updating. The likelihood of a
business contact's information being accurate a year or two after it was
last modified is pretty slim. People change jobs, titles, extensions,
locations on a regular basis.
To check the last time you updated your contacts, change your contacts
view to Phone List. Go to your contacts in Outlook, click View > Arrange By
> Current View > Phone List as shown circled in red below.
Once you’ve displayed your contacts in this view, you can choose what
columns to display. The view can be modified in a number of ways and sorted
on any column.
Right-click any column title (like Full Name as shown below) and then
click on Field Chooser.
Scroll down through the fields displayed and then click and drag
Modification Date up onto the column titles.
Now that
you’re displaying Modification date, you can click on the column title to
sort by latest modified or click on the column title again to sort in
reverse. You’ll want to sort your contacts in reverse to see contacts you
haven’t modified in a long time.
Though it’s a hard thing to say, you may just want to delete contacts
that haven't been modified in a year or more unless you immediately
recognize them. We all hate throwing anything away, but really old contacts
are worse than useless. They get in the way of actual data.
What about the other contacts? How do you know if they’re still valid?
There’s only one way – if you have a phone number, call it. If you have
email, send them an email.
For making phone calls, you can use
Need Based Calling on your
Windows Mobile PDA phone or Blackberry phone. You
assign a category to your old contacts and import them into Need Based
Calling. Then your PDA phone dials one contact after another. You can see a
demo at
http://www.needbasedcalling.com/site/onlinedemo.html. Keep Outlook open
as you go through your lists and update or delete as necessary.
For emails, try
Mail Merge with
Outlook for sending contact letters requesting new information. The ones
that bounce back, delete.
Either way, you’ve got to stay in touch with your contacts to make sure
you have up-to-date information. You wouldn’t let your accounting system or
ongoing project plans get six months out-of-date, make sure you keep your
contacts timely too!