Outlook Plugins and Add-Ins for Salespeople, Managers and Small Business Owners

If you use Office in a business environment it’s very likely that you spend more time using the email program Outlook than any of the other available components. As a salesperson, you might as well try to get a bit more out of Outlook.

We rounded up a number of plugins that extend Outlook’s functionality and make it an even more useful sales tool. We’ll maintain this page as a quick resource to all Outlook Plugins we discuss as part of this series.

• Speedfiler - a Claritude plugin that makes the process of archiving incoming and outgoing email messages much easier. From within a received message, it’s quick and easy to determine where this message needs to go and by using the “pre-file” feature, you can set the archive destination for each outgoing message once it has been sent. If you receive a good amount of email every day, this plugin can help you clean up but - even more importantly - it will prevent inbox clutter from happening in the first place.
  system requirements/download - $25 (30 day trial available)
• Attachment Alarm - You write an email, click “send” and ack, you forgot to attach the sales proposal or presentation. If this ever happens to you, try Attachment Alarm for Microsoft Outlook. It’s pretty easy to use - the add-in scans all outgoing email messages for words or phrases from a customizable list (ie “see attachment” or “attached”) and notifies you when it finds a listed keyword but no actual attachment in your email message.
  system requirements/download - $20 (15 day trial available)
• Auto BCC/CC - A simple plugin but a time-saver for those of you involved in team-selling. It allows you to pre-define a blind CC for your all outgoing email messages or to base the BCC on the recipient of your email - ie. if the email goes to Tom, Ted and Mary will be bcc’ed - or the subject line - ie. “Project ABC” in subject, Paul and Sue get bcc’ed. This way, you could easily make sure that your support team gets copies of outgoing emails related to a specific project.
  system requirements/download - $30 (15 day trial available)
• LinkedIn Toolbar - If you’re an active LinkedIn user, this plugin is a must-have. It enables you to access much of the LinkedIn’s functionality (searching, adding new contacts, sending invites and managing communications) right from within Outlook. It comes with a handy wizzard which can scan your inbox and other folders for people you communicate with and add them to your LinkedIn Profile as well.
  system requirements/download - free
• Email Follow-Up - With the abundance of email we all receive every day, this plugin comes in quite handy. It helps you keep track of emails you sent and reminds you when a reply has not been received within a certain time-frame. If desired, you can have this plugin auto-remind the recipient that a response has not been received using a predefined template - potentially cutting quite a bit of tedious follow-up work out of your day.
• system requirement/download - $24 (20 day trial available)
• Email Follow-Up - regardless of the ability Outlook offers to organize your emails with folders and colored flags, most of us still have a difficult time keeping track of messages that need follow-up in the flood of email we receive every day. Follow-Up will watch for messages, show an alert when a reply has not been sent it will offer to send a reminder email (from a customized template) that a reply has not been received. It’s a great way to prevent messages from being pushed down to the bottom of your inbox and forgotten.
  system requirements/download - $25 (20 day trial available)
• CloudMark - a simple toolbar that installs in minutes and starts blocking spam, email-borne viruses, and phishing scams automatically. It claims to have the best spam-blocking accuracy rate in the industry and it is a lightweight application that becomes part of your Outlook toolbar, not a separate application that can slow down your computer’s performance. If you mark a message as spam, the message is forwarded to Cloudmark’s central database for automatic analysis. If more users receive the same email and identify it as unwanted, all users’ Outlook add-ins are notified to block it. It’s an effective, network based, approach against email spam.
  system requirements/download - $40 (15 day trial available)
• Attachment Processor - this plugin saves attached files in a selected folder on a local or network drive instead of keeping it in your inbox. No more searching through thousands of emails for that one presentation you received last month - no more cluttering up your inbox and exceeding your email server quota because someone sent you a 6 megabite PowerPoint. After the file is saved, the attachment can be removed from the message, replaced by a shortcut to the saved file or by a text file with a description of the saved attachment. Moreover, this plugin re-attaches the files back to the messages when forwarding.
  system requirements/download - $25 (20 day trial available)
• SendLater - an easy-to-use and convenient email scheduler with a recurring email option allowing you to handle your e-mail correspondence in a timely manner even if you are away from your computer. There are more than one way to get this done - we wrote about l8r in a previous post. Your own requirements will determine the best product for you.
  system requirements/download - $25 (14 day trial available)
• Print Tools - this add-in will help you automatically print incoming and outgoing messages with attachments (as well as messages and attachments separately) without even opening them. This Outlook plug-in automatically unpacks and prints packed “*.zip” and “*.rar” attachments, and supports manual and automatic working modes.
  system requirements/download - $25 (20 day trial available)

More suggestions or ideas? Post them in the comments!