Some Fundamental Concepts About Your ACT! Database

What can you do with ACT to improve your business?

  1. Contact details
    1. Keep track of all contact details like Phone, Fax email address details, personnel and their roles.
    2. It is also important to think about the type of contact you have. Are they a loyal client or not, how important are they to you?
    3. What are the prospects for the future with this contact?
    4. You need to establish what you need to track. That means making a list of all the characteristics of the contact which could be useful in communication with them.

  2. Shared diaries : tasks, meeting and calls
    1. Act becomes your shared diary. That means that all users with the correct security can view their colleagues diaries. Great to cooperate and coordinate.
    2. Private meetings can be just that : private.
    3. When clearing a meeting in the diary, ACT will record any specific details you may wish to record in the contact history in relation to this activity.
    4. Schedule recurring meetings, calls or to-do's.
      1. Set a scheduled meeting with important clients.
      2. Schedule regular staff meetings in advance.
      3. Schedule regular tasks in advance, eg BAS returns
    5. Set reminders for important dates like anniversaries, birthdays or any important event.
    6. Synchronise the ACT diary with your Outlook diary.

  3. Communicate, coordinate and share
    1. Use ACT to record details of meetings, calls and documents. These details can be viewed in the contact record and in the company record if the contact is linked to a company.
      1. Record phone conversation details in ACT's History.
      2. It automatically records the person entering the history against the contact record and other details such as date and time.
    2. Documents can be attached or linked to a contact records.

  4. Email from ACT and use various options as to the detail to be recorded in ACT. This can be:
    1. None.
    2. Subject, Date and time.
    3. Subject, date and time as well as the content.
    4. Attach the entire email to the contact.
      1. Mail merge to one or many
      2. Mail merge to hard copies.
      3. Mail merge to email to create personalised messages to one or many people.
      4. With FaxAdmin, mail merge to fax.

  5. Divide and focus

    1. By adding the important information to contact and company records ACT can automatically segment the database into important groups of clients and prospects.
    2. This is achieved by categorising clients and prospects as much as is relevant to your business. Examples are:
      1. Industry.
      2. Purchase history.
      3. $ sales.
      4. Current rating.
      5. Potential rating.
      6. Category within an industry.
      7. Products they do purchase from us and products they don't but could.
    3. Payment performance & do they meet payment terms.
    4. Groups are created by adding contacts to a group (Static membership) or better, by letting ACT add and remove contacts from groups depending on the values of database fields.
    5. For example, we could have a group for clients and a group for prospects. If a contact is flagged in the Status (called ID/Status in ACT) field as a prospect they will automatically be listed in the prospects group.

  6. Monitor sales and opportunities - Act has a built in opportunity tracking system.

    1. Create a customised sales process.
    2. Assign prospects to the process and monitor their progress from initial contact to completed sale.
    3. Create pipeline reports. These can be filtered by process, stage, or even sales person.
    4. Export sales reports to Excel and do pivot reports and graphics.
    5. Letters and newsletters etc
    6. Standardise letters and other documents using ACT's very powerful mail merge facility.
    7. These can be used for documents and email.

  7. Track
    1. ACT comes with more than 100 reports about contacts and activities.
    2. If you need different reports, these can be created with the built-in report writer.

  8. Additional features

    ACT has many available add-ons. Examples include:
    1. Swiftpage email marketing has a very powerful mass emailing system.
    2. Calendar View Plus has expanded diary capabilities.
    3. Quotewerks for integrated quoting.
    4. Topline Designer to add more tables to the ACT database.
    5. ACT2sms
    6. Accounting links to MYOB and QuickBooks