Managing large numbers of Outlook contacts

Desktop Sales Manager can use Outlook's contact folders as it's contact database. The advantags are twofold: 1) You can edit/change/add contacts from either Desktop Sales Manager or Outlook and 2) You don't have to do import/export/synchronize operations between the two programs.

However, if your volume of Outlook contacts is measured in thousands, then the initial load of those contacts each time Desktop Sales Manager starts is annoying. There is an inherent overhead/performance loss in dealing with contacts in a "foreign" database - i.e. in Outlook.

One solution: Multiple folders
To cut the access time, look for ways to reduce the size of the single Outlook folder. You might consider splitting the contacts into several folders - perhaps organized around "active/inactive", or product lines, geography, etc.

You can click/move between Outlook folders in the Contacts tab, so you can still access all of the contacts...but you avoid the long initial load delay.

Alternative solution: Export
Another approach is a bit more radical...export the contacts to a text file, then import them all into a sales pipeline (or sales pipelines). The B2C template supports this type of approach - more of the fields are used for storing contact information. Then if you casually add new Outlook contacts into a much smaller Contacts folder, the contact information can be one-click transferred into Desktop Sales Manager as needed.

All of this gets down to using Desktop Sales Manager as either a contact manager or a sales opportunity manager. It does both well...