Ya’ Think?

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I’ve been worshiping at the altar of Seth Godin for more than a year now; the latest bit of WWSGD inspiration can be found in his recent book, Linchpin. I’ve decided that Linchpin is the B-2 Bomber of books – it works in stealth mode and sneaks up on you.

My reaction initially was that it  read like a collection of blog posts.  Well, okay.  I like his blogs but after all, harumph, books should read like books. A funny thing happened:  I’d  spend the rest of the day thinking about the few pages I read that morning.  Maybe I’d email someone with an idea raised in a particular chapter, or mention a concept in a conversation.

I started taking notes and tagging pages.  I gave a copy of the book to someone I want to be a Linchpin in my own organization. Amazing!  So simple to read, so much to think about. Here’s a favorite:  use the simple phrase, “if only”.

‘If only’ is a great way to eliminate your excuse du jour.  Seth Godin

I could get my project done on time if only . . .

I could do something to help earthquake victims if only . . .

I could become indispensable at my job if only . . .

Use If only to frame your reasons for not doing something, or for not doing it smarter, or better, or faster, or kinder. You’ll either gain clarity, or else realize you just called yourself out on your own BS.

Ok, the title is a bad pun, but it’s used for a good cause.

ACT! consultants support the Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund

I’ve been working with more than a half-dozen other ACT! experts to raise money for Haiti relief. We started our “Classes for a Cause” webinar series on February 11th and to date we have raised nearly $6,000. We have all volunteered to teach the sessions for free, and all proceeds go to the American Red Cross.

Donors will receive a DVD of the sessions at the end of the six-week program, so no matter where in the series you join, you’ll still be able to view all sessions.

• Session 1 – Introduction and Activity Management
• Session 2 – Outlook Integration for E-mail and Scheduling
• Session 3 – Web Info Tab and Social Media with ACT!
• Session 4 – ACT! and E-mail Marketing
• Session 5 – Reporting and Dashboards
• Session 6 – Bonus Session – Extending ACT! with integrated software (autodial/VoIP, advanced dashboards, integrated quoting, and more)

As I like to say, “Smarten up!” You’ll learn more about working effectively and productively using ACT! 2010, and you’ll help a very worthy cause at the same time.

As we all get stretched thinner to do more, the objective  is for technology to free human beings to be creative, productive, and effective.  Spending time and effort on tasks that can be automated is a poor use of intellect, is far more costly, and provides none of those benefits. Here’s what I like about Swiftpage Email Drip Marketing:

• A sequence of targeted messages delivered to contacts at the right time
• An auto-responder provides instant feedback to the recipient when survey information is completed
• Campaign results are written back the contact record to evaluate effectiveness
• Preset Email reminders to take required actions between stages (“Order the trade-show swag!”)
• Integrated surveys that trigger a new campaign to the contact
• and a whole lot more.

Once campaigns have been designed (that’s the creative part), Swiftpage email drip marketing intelligently moves communications from one phase to another.  These changes happen based on the predefined “triggers” and can include adding a new contact, a field change in a contact record, or even how the recipient has interacted with the e-mail. Contacts can be transferred from one campaign to another, based upon preset criteria. Campaigns can be centered on:

1. Anchor dates, allowing stages to be set before and after a specific date (great for promoting events)
2. Calendar dates, so events happen at predetermined times (useful for newsletters)
3. Duration, for continuous campaigns such as ongoing nurture marketing

Swiftpage Email Drip Marketing integration fees range from Free to $149.95 per month and are added to the basic  Swiftpage email price levels. Drip marketing options include ever-increasing control over how to build and manage automated drip marketing campaigns that let you integrate telemarketing and postcards as part of campaigns.

Free trials and online tutorials make taking SPE for a test drive a no-brainer, so check it out and get more productive. Before you snap.

We’re in the cloud! After a recent search for an on-line service for a collaboration, file storage, and file distribution tool, we discovered digitalbucket.net. It’s completely intuitive to use – we were set up in a couple of minutes.

Among the many ways we’re using the service is to store various versions of ACT! software as “published” files. Distributing these huge (350 +/- MB) files has alway been a challenge, as we often need to distribute installation files to clients in remote locations, and using digitalbucket.net, we can send a link to any customer who needs a hotfix, upgrade, or whatever and they download directly from the site.

We used this for an 80 user ACT! 2009 install recently with users located all around the country; it made it very easy for each user to download the full installer prior to us completing the remote installation. We posted the install log for the client’s project manager to access at the end of each day, which helped our communications tremendously.

We are also storing internal templates, graphics, and other files that we need to share among our staff as well. Different access levels can be set for different users, file access can be set to expire, and there is a virtual drive feature that lets you drag and drop files to folders on the virtual drive without being logged into the site.

There are individual, business, and enterprise versions. We’re getting all the features we need at the business level for $200 a year, and that provides us with 10 subaccounts with more storage and bandwidth than we’ll ever need. Uploads and downloads are very fast.

We even have our internal file transfer folder set up as an RSS feed in Google, so when one of the staff posts a file another staff member needs, it pops right up in the iGoogle page. Sweet. Try it for free for two weeks – I can’t say enough good about it!

Even though I’m an ACT! Certified Consultant, I get that you can’t do everything you need to do effectively just in ACT! alone. A case in point: I strongly recommend to NOT use ACT! to manage email marketing campaigns and to use Swiftpage Email instead. We recommend Swiftpage rather than Constant Contact because it has a tight integration with ACT! and Constant Contact, regrettably, does not.

Naturally, we email from ACT! (using Outlook integration) for our regular emails at On the verge and, as a result, maintain a history of our communications. ACT! is great at that. But, considering the the time and effort it takes to create a campaign and the potential revenue and relationships it can drive to your company, it’s reasonable to expect much more than a mere history entry for your effort. For starters, wouldn’t you like to know if your email was even received?

Does your email go here?

Many people are unware that most email providers throttle the number of emails you can send at one time (the number can be as low as 20 or 25). Unless you’ve convinced your ISP ahead of time that you are not an evil spammer your campaign emails might not make it past their filters. In which case your domain address might get blacklisted. You keep sending emails, and they keep going nowhere. After the resources applied to a campaign, the last thing I’d want is for that effort to get launched into a marketing black  hole.

However, using Swiftpage Email, we can illuminate our marketing efforts. To justify marketing effort and expense, you must know:

• Was the email opened? (The template or subject was compelling)
• Did recipients click on a hyperlink in the content? (We communicated something of interest)
• Was it opened more than once? (Significant interest)
• Was it forwarded to a colleague? (Extreme interest)
• Who opted out?
• Which emails were undeliverable?

Swiftpage nicely integrates with ACT! (and other CRM/contact managers). Using your contact manager you can send single html or plain text mailings to individuals or send up to 1,000 per day to Contact, Group, or Company lookups. Email is sent via the Swiftpage server which is managed to protect against Spamming violations.

Mailing via Swiftpage provides reports on open, click-through and forwarded results. Now your sales team can focus their follow-up efforts on the prospects most likely to take action! This level of business intelligence shines a light on your campaign helping to refine your message and target your audience.

Swiftpage is affordable for any size business. Prices start at free and go to $59.95 per month for email-only accounts (we’ll look at drip marketing next time).  Price levels include a daily preset quantity of emails ( up to 1000 per day) and send limits can be increased for a tiny additional fee.

Alas, nothing is perfect: although building email templates is easy once you get the hang of it, the Swiftpage template editor is kludgy and confusing. Fortunately the folks at SPE recognize this and an improved interface is in Beta at this writing.

In Part Five, I’ll discuss Drip Marketing Campaigns from ACT! as a way to nurture leads and grow your business.

Recently I’ve been thinking about a simple test that customers should take before starting a CRM project. Our test? True or False, indicate if you agree with any of the following four scenarios:

• You’re travelling from Boston to Milwaukee and intend to get there as quickly as possible. You decide that going online to book a flight or get driving directions takes too much time, so you just start driving.
• You’re building a house. Because architects are expensive, you buy the materials for your builder and tell her you want four bedrooms and two and a half baths; she’ll figure out the rest.
• You’d like to fly from New York to San Diego in less than an hour, confident that the laws of physics can be conquered by your travel agent.
• You want to increase topline revenues by 25%. You buy ACT! contact management software and suddenly your sales close rate improves.

Obviously, in each of these cases, you immediately knew that the correct answer is false. Nonetheless, I can’t tell you how many otherwise rational and intelligent customers appear to approach their CRM projects thinking that:

• keeping the project budget a secret means the project will cost less
• project planning wastes time and costs more money
• do-overs are as time- and cost-effective as having a defined scope before beginning
• the project scope and the time it takes to implement the project have no relationship
• magic happens when software is installed.

I can be as impatient and inclined towards taking a shortcut as anyone, so I understand the tempation of let’s just get started. I also understand that the above approach is costly, unrealistic, ridden with pitfalls, and has failure written all over it. If you agree, congratulations: you’re ready to proceed with your CRM project.

Here is the truism I want to convey: A CRM project done well is an investment; if done poorly it is a non-recoverable expense. The return on investment grows – or shrinks – in direct proportion to the planning, project management, and resources incorporated into the project.  Bottom Line?  A successful project results when the customer and the consultant understand that the cost of the project is not  a zero-sum gain, that the customer should expect to make a profit on the fees paid, and that all parties are equal contributors and stakeholders in obtaining a successful result.

Dashboards were introduced to managers a few years back to consolidate data points into a single screen. Dashboards  can contain top opportunities, today’s scheduled activities, histories of contact interaction, revenue year-to-date against a target, etc., all in a single view. Think of a business dashboard as where you view your business’ speed, RPMs, fuel level, and warning lights, sans bobblehead.

Essential Dashboard Peripheral Device

ACT! introduced a dashboard in version 2008. It was a welcome (if overdue) addition for user productivity, featuring schedule-at-a-glance, activities, sales pipeline by stage, top-10 opportunities, and a (limited) gauge of actual closed sales against a projected target. In addition to customizing the six existing components, managers or administrators can add, customize, or remove components, change titles or legends, and utilize drag and drop functionality. ACT! Dashboards also have a limited drill-down capability.

Not unlike Sage’s addition of integrated quoting in ACT! 2005 (see part I of this series) their ACT! dashboard  is also best described as adequate for users with basic needs. Disappointing for some users with higher expectations and requirements, yes, but . . . along came TopLine Results (I think their unofficial motto is, Anything you can do, I can do better!). TopLine is a perfect example of why we advise our ACT! consulting clients to look beyond what “comes in the box” and consider other ways to extend the capabilities of ACT!.

TopLine Dash features a highly customizable, wizard-driven interface that installs with about 20 prebuilt dashboards. New dashboards can be easily added and filtered using the wizard and unlike the built-dashboard, you can add any database fields (including custom tables) to list views, create follow-up activities directly from a pipeline report, compare user’s calendars, drill down to specific, line-item details, view the last synchronization, (or new contacts, histories, notes, opportunities and activities) for each user and, frankly, much too much more to outline here. Suffice it to say, the differences between the ACT! and TopLine Results dashboards are many and significant. TopLine Dash starts a $79 per user.

A nifty extra is a work-flow component, TopLine Alerts, that can be added ($149) to your server to send email alerts based on preset conditions in your ACT! database. Managers can receive immediate notification when a prospect becomes a customer, a sale is closed, or a sales opportunity goes beyond its projected close date, for example.  Imagine being able to call a customer the same afternoon you’ve won the account to thank them for their business!

I won’t characterize either TopLine dash or Stonefield Query as the better reporting tool because each fills a different need. Like a mom who won’t show favoritism between her kids, I’m going to stick with “I love them equally” for their unique personalities and capabilities. Both products have fully featured trial versions and if you need to pick between them (we actually use them both at On the verge), you can test drive first and decide which suits best. 

Next time we’ll look at ACT! as a marketing tool: how to utilize it to develop strategic marketing campaigns, nurture relationships, and extract meaningful metrics from the campaigns.

There are a lot of features in ACT! that are fun to use; report design isn’t one of them. ACT! installs with about 40 reports with which users can generate notes, history, activity, sales opportunities, company, group, and contact reports. Default reports can be customized to a greater or lesser degree (or new reports created) and then the report can be filtered at run-time by date ranges, record manager, etc. While simple reports in ACT! are fine for many users, ACT! reports don’t do a good job of bridging tables (Contacts, Notes, Activities, etc.) , nor is there much control over grouping data in logical ways.

Trying to customize an ACT! report.

Running a default report from the Reports menu is simple enough, but customizing a report? Ouch. Definitely not fun. Take a look at the ACT! report designer (Reports> Edit Report), select a report such as the Contact Report, and you’ll find sections and sub-reports and Properties (F4) where the appearance, structure, and behavior can be customized. Frankly, the report designer is daunting and it’s rare for even an advanced user to master it.

To get beyond basic report limitations consider pre-packaged reports from 3rd party developers. These include custom ACT! reports created by ACT! Report Guru Roy Laudenslager of TechBenders  and  Crystal Clear Reporting from ADS Programming Services. Crystal Clear delivers 40 reports that can be run from the ACT! report menu and prompts allow the user to further customize the report. Each report package is under $100 so if predefined reports suit, then they are well worth the price. 

Stonefield Query Wizardry

In our experience, many of our SBE clients don’t want the limitations of static reports. They prefer to create and adapt reports in response to evolving business requirements. We recommend Stonefield Query for businesses who require more advanced reports because, unlike Crystal Reports, even a novice can create sophisticated reports with very little training (often less than an hour).  Report wizards guide the design of charts, graphs, cross-tab, summary and detail reports. 

Stonefield Query lets users report on all of the “native” ACT! tables (Contact, Company, Notes, Activities, History, Sales Opportunities, etc., as well as custom tables that can be added to a ACT! database (more about custom tables in a future article). In addition, there are multiple output options that include PDF, HTML, XML, XPS, Excel®, CSV, Word® RTF, and DBF. In it’s newest release, Stonefield even let’s you add existing Crystal reports which you can filter through the Stonefield Query interface – that’s pretty amazing.

At $600 including a year’s worth of maintenance, Stonefield Query comes packaged with five “run-time” licenses; reports can be created by a “report administrator” then distributed throughout the organization for others to run. And, yes, creating the reports is actually fun! 

Although we’re focusing on ACT! integration, you should know that Stonefield Software has  reporting solutions for other contact management, ERP, and CRM products as well, including SalesLogix, GoldMine, Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200, Timberline, and others.  That’s significant if your company is Sage-software focused, as you can use the reporting tool with a number of your business applications.

Watch for I didn’t know I could do that with ACT! Part 3 where we’ll look at ACT!’s internal dashboards and compare them to advanced third-party dashboards from TopLine Dash.

Call you back . . . how?

E-mails signed, ” . . . so give me a call at noon,  Bob” are as aggravating as voice mail messages that end with,  ”. . . so it’s really important to hear back from you right away.” Click. Basic etiquette requires that you include your full name, phone number, and e-mail address in your e-mail signature and your number in your voice message. Ignoring such simple courtesies makes it difficult for people to respond and puts the burden of figuring out how to reach you entirely on them.  

Oh, and leaving a phone number at the speed of light; uh, NO! No one, not even Mr. Fast-Talker, can write that fast, never mind process the number. By the time I’ve replayed the message, “You can reach me at 6175555555″ three times so I can actually transcribe it, I’m ready to smack someone, not call them. But, that might just be me.

ACT! added quoting capability to ACT! by Sage 2005,  a feature best described as adequate for users with basic quoting needs.  ”Adequate” falls into the “damned by faint praise” category for sure but, unless you’re Microsoft, most software publishers don’t develop significantly more capability than the target-market user needs. Funny thing, though: as ACT! grew into an application that could support much larger workgroups (25, 50, 100 + users), the requirements and expectations of those users also grew. Capabilities that were sufficient for the small workgroup no longer cut it for this new market segment; this is where talented developers comes in handy!

Quotewerks

Developed by Aspire Technologies, Inc., QuoteWerks integrates with ACT! (also with Microsoft Business Contact Manager, Goldmine, salesforce.com, Maximizer, SalesLogix, SugarCRM, and other CRM/contact manager applications). It pulls data from the contact manager fields resulting in a printed quote that includes information from the contact record. That’s pretty much what happens when creating an ACT! quote, so what’s the big deal? 

Using ACT! to generate a quote, the user creates a sales opportunity of products or services. The associated line items integrate into an Excel worksheet embedded in a Word document. If your organization is presently doing little more than that, but in a much more manual way, then taking advantage of this feature in ACT! could be all that’s needed to ramp up quoting capabilities. Adding a logo or some ACT! fields into the document address area is essentially the extent of customization to a customized ACT! quote.   

In today’s market quoting must be accurate, comprehesive, and fast;  getting the quote into the customer’s hands quickly can mean the difference between winning – or not winning – the sale. QuoteWerks provides a comprehensive quoting capability that includes the ability to:       

• Update and attach quotes to the contact database
• Schedule follow up activities in the contact manager
• Make vendor price comparisons
• Create and save quote revisions
• Create “bundles” or “kits”
• Configure a step-by-step process of building products using other products
• Create quotes with required, optional, and substitute products
• Support 9 different ways to price products and services
• Create product/price catalogs for customers (including customer-specific pricing)
• Integrate into real-time data modules 
• Sync Quotes and Product/Price lists with remote users
• Generate detail reports on your sales, product lines, inventory, etc.
• Integrate into accounting applications
• and a great deal more

If I have a complaint about QuoteWerks, it’s the archaic interface for designing templates. While it gets the job done, the best description of it’s function is clunky and outdated. Creating and modifying templates takes longer than it should because of the unforgiving interface, but nice results are still possible. That said, once templates are customized to your specifications, it’s not an everyday feature, so it’s a deficiency I can live with.

Bottom line: if you have more advanced quoting needs than ACT! can support, QuoteWerks integration significantly increases productivity and can help close more sales by simplifying and speeding up the price quoting/estimating process. A full-feature demo version of QuoteWerks is available to test drive for as long as you like. 

Find out more about QuoteWerks here: http://www.yourcrmteam.com/otvtoolkit/quoting.html.

In my next article we’ll take a look at how to extend ACT!’s capabilties with advanced reporting tools that create pivot tables, graphs, cross-tab reports, and more. Best of all, designing reports is wizard driven, so you don’t need a Ph.D in report writing to create them.