Using a standard Outlook feature, you can easily export all of the Outlook contacts for an attorney. With the IntelliPad “OnePass” Excel program opening this file, attorneys can quickly mark their contacts for mailings and newsletters. The resulting information is then seamlessly imported into the CRM.
Fast and Familiar with Excel
A Legal CRM can add a lot of capability, but Excel offers a familiarity for users and the rows and columns are hard to beat in terms of simplicity. Rather than scanning lists contact by contact individually within the CRM, the IntelliPad OnePass presents a contact list in Excel with the ability for attorneys to mark who receives which mailings and event invitations all in one go. That is an excellent start for the relationship intelligence the CRM will later best provide.
Mark when selected contacts are private
Even though Outlook exports ALL contacts, the OnePass spreadsheet does not pull in any already marked as Private.
However, even if a contact is not marked as Private in Outlook, the attorney may not want to have that person shared to the CRM database. So, OnePass offers an ability to indicate which additional contacts should not be shared.
Marketing Automation with Maximum Ease from the Start
With an Excel Import feature, you can bypass the necessity of learning any new software and just mark contacts with easy Excel check boxes. One click of the “Check” button at the top will select all shared contacts for a particular category or mailing. Then, exceptions can be quickly unchecked. This is only the first phase of marketing automation and doesn’t even require the attorneys to use the CRM – with an immediate benefit of improving firm outreach. After providing clean and client-specific targeted mailing lists the other advanced Business Development possibilities provided by a CRM can be gradually developed while this effective upgrade is already deployed.
To make this process even easier, the number of contacts to be evaluated in each spreadsheet can be as small or as large as desired to keep the activity easily manageable. Some attorneys may have thousands of contacts. Contact lists can be automatically divided by OnePass into smaller numbers per spreadsheet. Another option would be to print the spreadsheet out to be marked up on paper and have an assistant record the choices later with Excel.
Attorney View
Contacts can be sorted by Name, Company, or Category to make it easy for attorneys to evaluate which mailings each contact should receive. Attorneys own private and custom Categories are not modified by this process. They can use their own Categories to sort contacts by alumni networks or any number of other things which will not be entered into the firm’s master list. Only Categories of interest to the firm are imported to the CRM.Pushing the Boundaries of Convenience and Ease
This feature’s development came about through the request of a client law firm wanting to minimize attorney efforts related to CRM implementation.
Legal CRM software should always strive for time saving simplicity. IntelliPad’s highly functional and Microsoft-friendly infrastructure is readily adaptable to changing client needs. Sometimes implementing methods to simplify attorney efforts are not simple or quick projects. But the ongoing tech stack integration for IntelliPad is adaptable to marketing ideas and practices and continues to evolve.
Marketing or IT Staff View
Categories used by each attorney are summarized to show usage. The Marketing or IT staff can modify how this information is imported to the CRM.
The Categories shown in red do not match firm-desired Categories and will be ignored for the import and remain in the attorneys’ Outlook.
In the OnePass spreadsheet setup, options are provided to select which of the 90+ Outlook data fields will be imported to the CRM and which will be displayed for the attorney.
Large amounts of data can be hidden without corrupting the orderly layout of the columns since the OnePass spreadsheet has specialized autofit and word-wrapping capabilities built-in. Without this feature, Excel word-wraps each row based on all content in the row, whether it is displayed or not – so, multi-line addresses cause the line-heights to be wrong.
