Ya’ Think?

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.

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.

ACT! contact management software was introduced over 20 years ago.  Although originally designed as the simplest of tools, ACT! has evolved considerably over the last few years. The changes in ACT! have been so significant, in fact, that it’s often lumped into the CRM category (erroneously, but we’ll get to that).  Unlike enterprise-level applications, ACT! is contact-centric, with a focus  on managing and maintaining interactions with individuals.

The current version of ACT! (2009, v 11.1) supports pipeline management, account-level management, manages relationships between contact records, and even has modest workflow capabilties.  While ACT! isn’t as feature-rich as CRM software, depending on your business requirements, that might be a distinction without a difference.

A big advantage of CRM is that it provides a 360 degree view of the customer – let’s call that the whole pie. But, what if your business only needs a slice of pie?

CRM pie - too filling?

The cost of customer relationship management software is exponentially greater than the cost of contact management software.  I’ve seen companies spend 10’s of thousands of dollars for CRM software when all they required were a few features not natively in ACT! That’s not sound ROI management and there are alternatives.

A less costly way to go is to integrate ACT! (or other contact manager) with a third-party product to enhance its capabilities. I’ve heard resistance to this approach, as in “I don’t want a bunch of ‘bolt-ons’”.  I expect the “bolt-on” reaction comes from those who got  stuck with software whipped up by a colleague’s  brother’s nephew. We’ve all been there and it’s not pretty. Where is that guy when you need him, anyway?

There is a community of talented developers who work with Sage, using tools approved and provided by Sage, to create slick integrations to significantly ramp-up ACT!’s capabilities – just a slice of pie, as it were.

Over the next six articles, we’ll look at ways you can scale not only ACT! but many other contact managers and CRM applications by integrating 3rd-party solutions.

Whether a business requires advanced reporting, quoting, dashboards, e-mail marketing or other business tools, you may only need to invest a little to get a great deal of additional functionality. Next time, we’ll look at integrating robust quoting capabilites into ACT!, Goldmine, salesforce.com, SalesLogix, and other CRM and contact management programs using QuoteWerks.