ACT! User Group Meeting   (for details, click here)

ACT! On-line Training   (for details, click here)

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How’s your week been? I hope productive and successful and you’re looking forward to a refreshing and relaxing weekend filled with idle moments and sunspot naps.

Seems as though my week was filled with administrivia. One of those weeks where every day you get in to your office, look at the things you need to get done, then get to work. At the end of the day, you look back at your accomplishments and wonder what happened to the day! Yikes, I hate it when that happens.

We did make progress on a few things though.

We launched our ACT! On-line training series this week with a GoToMeeting class on Thursday morning and another this afternoon. Both sessions filled to capacity pretty quickly with ACT! users hungry to learn more about segmenting their database using Groups, Companies, and Relationships. Next week our On-line series will be on Activity Management in ACT!. We will be talking about some advanced techniques in how to make sure you get done what you need to get done, when you need to get it done.

On April 28th, we are hosting an ACT! User Group meeting at the Southdale Library in Edina. Our topic for April is Eat That Frog! Have you read it yet? Awesome book by Brian Tracy. Brian goes in to great detail on his 21 ways to stop procrastination and get more done in less time. Great read. At our User Group meeting on the 28th, we are going to discuss and demonstrate what Brian teaches in his book applied in an ACT! environment. Should be an entertaining and perhaps even educational meeting.

I would love to hear back from you especially if you have any suggestions for topics. You can add a comment to this post if you want and let me know what you would like to see as an on-line class or discussed at one of our User Group meetings.

Enjoy your weekend and I’ll be back in touch soon.

Ken

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As many of you know, my background is contact relationship management (i.e. CRM) and most of my experience centers around the ACT! product.

Here’s a question for you. Is your company database a rolodex or a database? In previous articles, I’ve talked about how your company database is your most valuable business asset and that this database holds the key to your company’s success. Regardless of what you use as a software tool to manage this database, be it ACT! or SalesLogix or SalesForce or whatever, the most important concept is that, a) you have a company database and a good tool to manage it and b) you’ve customized this database to be specific for your business. If this is the first time you have seen the words customized and database in the same sentence, then read on because this information is spot-on for you.

When I think of a rolodex, I think of those index card holders that would sit on your desk, circular in design, and it would hold 3×5 index cards filled with contact information. It had a big knob on the side and when you turned the knob, the index cards went around like a ferris-wheel at a theme park. If you had a lot of cards, and you turned the knob fast enough, this thing doubled as a cooling fan and could blow-dry your hair (OK, maybe not in my case, but you get my drift). Each of these rolodex cards contained information on your contacts, or if you got one of the fancier ones, it actually held their business card. The trouble with these rolodex files though, was that you were very limited in the information you could keep on a contact. If you wanted to keep track of information in addition to what was already on the business card, you either had to write it on the card, or maybe add another card. If you were just looking for an address, or a phone number, it didn’t work too bad. However, if you wanted to keep track of their interests, or their kids or birthdays or anything extra, it got cumbersome fast. Depending upon how you filed the cards, as long as you remembered the contacts name or company name, you could get to the card pretty easy. On the other hand, if you wanted to do any kind of special search, forget it. The rolodex file just wasn’t set up for that. Now, enter the digital era and the concept of the database.

With a database, and a good contact manager, (like ACT!2010), now you have some power. Not only can you store the business card information, but you can also store all kinds of things about this contact. You can keep information on their family, hobbies and interests, purchase history, annual events like birthdays and anniversaries, contract renewals, on and on limited only by your imagination. Best of all, not only can you store all this great information, but you can access it in seconds. You can find all the people you haven’t contacted in the last 90 days, or all the clients that have a shared interest in a particular event or hobby. You can group contacts together based on common themes like all those that should receive your catalog, or that have indicated an interest in a specific product and now when you have a promotion going on, you can get this information out to them in just a couple of minutes. Either by a mail-merge to a letter or through an email blast where each recipient gets their own personalized letter or message, customized for them because this information is all stored in your database.  Now that’s powerful!

You can even take it up a notch if you want. If you’re using a product like ACT!2010, there are tools available that will let you synchronize your database to your cellphone, wirelessly, and in real-time. You can add tools that will do calculations on fields stored in your database, and store the results of those calculations in other fields. You can have the database automatically create an activity based on a value you select in a field. You can add contacts to groups or take them out of groups based on information you enter into their contact record. You can have the database create a call list of your hottest prospects, so you can get in touch with them when they are ready to buy. Tools like these (and there are many more) can turn a flat-file list of contacts into a living, breathing repository of client and prospect intel that puts you in control of your sales cycle and allows you to drive new sales even while the economy around us is in slow motion.

Speaking of a slow economy, in the spirit of Cyber Monday, we are offering a special incentive to upgrade to ACT!2010.  If you schedule your upgrade with us by noon on Monday, December 7th, you will save 20% on the cost of your installation and services. Upgrades must be scheduled to occur on or before January 31, 2010.

For more information and to schedule your upgrade, please give us a call at 952-292-3420.

Have a great day!

Ken

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So, is it me or is everyone feeling like the days are just flying by? I feel like the Adam Sandler character in the movie “Click” with the fast-forward button stuck in fast-forward mode. Good grief! I certainly don’t remember time going by this fast when I was waiting for my 21st birthday to come around.  Sorry, I’ll stop whining now.

OK, so here we are at Thanksgiving. What are you thankful for? I’ve got a list, long as my arm of all the things I can think of, right off the top of my head. You probably do too. Top of my list are our troops. God bless them and the work they do! Without them, we wouldn’t have the freedom to be an entrepreneur, or own a business. Sure, times are tough right now. Economy is down, job market is tight, belts are tighter, but in this Country, life is good, and for that, thank a soldier!

You know what else I’m thankful for? Technology. I LOVE technology! Bring it on and bring me more! I’ve got one television in my house and five computers. The computer on my desk that I’m using to write this has more processing power, memory and hard-drive space than the computer that ran the entire hospital I worked at back in the 80’s, and that computer filled a room. A very big room. This computer sits under my desk.

Speaking of technology and being thankful for things, I’m really thankful for backups. In the last week, I’ve worked with two clients that had to recover data from their backups. The recovery process was smooth and their systems restored perfectly, but I’m reminded that it’s easy to become complacent and take that sort of thing for granted. A few months ago I worked with a client that wasn’t so fortunate. Their backup didn’t restore, and that recovery process was an entirely different story. Painful, to say the least. So, what’s in your backup? Have you tested it lately? Do you have the peace-of-mind that if you had to restore from backup you actually could? Are you backing up all the mission-critical files you need to keep your business running smoothly and of equal importance, have you tested your backups to make sure recovery is possible, not impossible. I really do love technology but I love it more when it works! Stop back again next week as I’ll share some more insight on some awesome technology designed to save you time and make you more productive.

All of us here at True North Partners wish you and your family a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving holiday. Enjoy your freedom and say a prayer for our troops!

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Today, I want to start a new series of blog posts aimed specifically for the ACT! users. As many of you know, I’ve been an ACT! Certified Consultant for several years, and an ACT! user for many more (since 1988 actually). As an ACT! consultant and trainer, I try and stay up to date and plugged in to the ACT! community and as a result will provide to you, the ACT! user, the latest updates and highlights that ACT! has to offer. The best way I can think of to accomplish this is through weekly blog posts to my site as ACT! Tips. My intent is to provide you with content that you will find valuable and if implemented, save you time, increase your productivity and perhaps even save you money. I would encourage you to respond to my blog posts with your comments and even suggestions on additional topics you would find helpful.

Today’s topic is a general overview of the newest ACT! release, ACT!2010 (version 12).

If you’re already an ACT! user, I’m sure you’ve received several marketing pieces from Sage over the last several weeks encouraging you to upgrade to ACT!2010. Some of you may have already taken the plunge and upgraded, while others are on the fence, waiting to see or waiting to hear if the buzz about the new version is all that it’s cracked up to be. In my humble opinion, it is.

The look and feel of ACT! has had a major overhaul with many new features introduced. I won’t go into all the details here, but will instead refer you to the ACT! page on my website where you can actually view “mini-demo’s” (called demoettes) of the primary new features. Go here, to take a look for yourself. Right now, the link to check out a free 30-day trial of ACT!2010 hasn’t been enabled, but I hope to have that available in the next few days. When the link is enabled, you will be able to request a CD from me that will include the full version of ACT!2010 Premium, in trial mode, that you can install on your system and see for yourself if it’s something you want to take advantage of. Please just bear in mind that before you install the latest version of ACT!, there are a few things you will need to be aware of, so your current production ACT! system doesn’t become compromised. All of this will be spelled out for you in great detail in the supporting documentation that accompanies the CD. I had considered offering the free trial version as a download from my site, however, the file size is in excess of 350MB’s and for a lot of folks, their internet bandwidth just isn’t robust enough for that size of download. I also wanted to make sure that anyone interested in checking out the newest version had made adequate preperations to insure the new version would run on their existing system and they didn’t run any risk of jeopardizing their current installation. That’s why I am including pre-printed supporting documentation.

So, in the mean time, check out the mini-demo’s (available here) and as soon as I have all the pieces put together, I will let you know how to request your CD. If you have specific questions about the new version, post them as a response to this article, and check back frequently (or subscribe to my RSS feed here) for updates.

Have an amazing day!

Ken

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