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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By now, I expect everyone is making use of some type of contact management database system (for anyone who isn’t yet, read my earlier blog here). Hopefully, you are also using that systems calendaring function. For ease of illustration, I’m going to use the example of the ACT! Contact Management System (however, everything discussed here applies equally as well to the Infusionsoft system).

When I get in to the office in the morning, the first thing I do is fire up my computer and log in to my ACT! database (ok, this might be second only to getting my coffee ). Once in my database, the first place I go is to my Task List to review any pending activities prior to today. Sometimes, if I have a meeting late on Friday, or over the weekend, I may not get my database updated until Monday morning, so I want to make sure I don’t have any activities pending in the past. If I do, I either clear them as completed, reschedule them to another date and time, or erase them. Once that’s completed, I change the filtering on my task list to show me today’s activities. Now I go to work and review the things I’ve got scheduled for today.  Anything scheduled for a specific time gets reviewed to make sure I have the necessary details covered. For example, if it’s a meeting, have I confirmed the meeting and do I have the material I need for the meeting ready to go. Once I’ve reviewed the “non-discretionary” items (i.e. the tasks that are scheduled for a specific time), I take a look at the other tasks on my list. These are typically made up of phone calls that should be made and To-Do’s that need to be done, all scheduled “timeless”. Sometimes this list of “timeless” activities can be daunting as I’m one of those people that tend to put everything I need to do into my database. So the trick becomes, how do I manage this list of timeless activities to make sure I am using my time as efficiently as I can and be as productive as I can be.

Here is one technique I use that you might find helpful. As I review my list of timeless activities, I change the priority of any activity that needs to be done today to a status of “high”. I also color code this high priority to “red”. Now, when I look at my Task List, or my Daily Calendar, I can see at a glance the activities that are of highest priority and will focus my attention on those for the day. As I get each one completed, they are removed from my Calendar and Task List, and I can focus on the next one. If one of the activites need to be rescheduled to another day, I reschedule it right away. If I reschedule an activity to another day, I make sure and change the priority to either medium or low, so when that day comes, I again can review all the activities for the day, and determine which ones need to be bumped to a priority status of High. This technique helps me to stay focused on those items of greatest concern, and get the things done that absolutely needs to be done that day. My productivity stays high, and my efficiency stays high as I tend to get less distracted. In my next blog post, I will share with you another technique I use to manage my daily activities which is particularly helpful when I have several calls to make or return.

I hope this helps you get your Monday off to a great start, and helps to reduce your stress around too many things to do, and not enough time to get them done.  If you have any comments or thoughts you would like to share, please pass them along by posting a response below.

Enjoy your day!

Ken

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