Through filtering, finding the information you need to help your business is a breeze. One way of filtering (that most don’t think about) is filtering by what doesn’t match. Sometimes it’s important for you to find people that don’t match your regular searches. Confused? I’ll explain. Let’s say you’re in sales and you have smart lists of customers that have bought a specific product, but you want to reach out to new potential customers. For this, you need to find out who isn’t already using your product. If you’re in real estate you may have a list of clients that you need to keep up to date with about meetings and appointments, but you may also want to find people that you haven’t had any recent activity with. To do so, you would need to find which contacts of yours do not have an upcoming scheduled appointment.
Let’s talk about the steps involved. We want to end up with a list of people. In Daylite select “People” under the Contacts tab and click on the magnifying class in the top corner to start a search. Here’s where we refine our search. In this scenario I want to find all the clients that don’t have a follow up appointment so that I can see who I should potentially be contacting. In the search box next to Category I’m going to choose “client” as all my clients have been marked with this Category. We can remove keywords as we’re not basing this list on them and add an additional sub filter for “appointments” by clicking on the “. . .”. I’ll select “do not match any” from the pull down bar, then select “appointments” as the criteria for that sub filter from the next pull down bar. Click the “+” and select “start date” and “this year”. This feature of filtering allows you to find contacts that match “x”, but does not match “y”.
This gives me a list of all clients that I do not have an appointment with in the next year. I could change this filter so that it’s based on this month instead. In this case, Daylite would automatically update this list to include clients I do not have a meeting with this month, or in the next 30 days etc. You can click “Save as smart list” for a quick go to list of clients that you may want to touch base with.
Another use for this filtering method is through projects. Let’s say that your “Not Done” tasks are overflowing so to solve this problem you decide to hire an assistant for basic admin work and sending follow-ups. Since your assistant will be taking over some of the tasks on your “Not Done” list you want to filter this list to view only what you need to focus on completing. The process is the same as above, but applied to projects. Select “Not Done” tasks and filter them to not include the categories “administrative” or “follow up” as these tasks will now be taken care of by your new assistant. Now to filter your task list even further so you can focus on what needs to be done pronto, click the “…” and select “match all” of the following “due date” that is “this week”.
Now you have a filtered focus list of what you need to complete right now and you can forget about all the other tasks that either don’t need to be done right away, or will be done by your assistant. You are clear to focus and accomplish!
Watch this video about filtering and smart lists if you’d like more information about the steps involved in filtering.
How about you? How do you filter info in Daylite to help you find what you need fast?
