One of the things that I see time and again in organizations that have been using Act! prior to their engaging me for best practice advisement is confusion about the difference between an Act! note and an Act! history. Versions of Act! prior to Act! 2005 lent to this confusion since it displayed notes and histories on the same tab with minimal differentiation.
When I train on this topic the way I define these two (very) different record types is as follows:
- A note is a random, yet important, piece of information that is valuable for your relationship with the contact. Typically it has no reference to time (it is not an event) and is something that does not occur commonly enough that it warrants being saved to a custom field. Some examples:
- Likes cats.
- Rides horses.
- Plays golf.
- Owns a 1957 Bel-Air
- A history is a record of a specific action or event that has occured at a specific time. Unlike notes, histories can be created directly (Create history) or are dutifully created for you by Act! when you complete an item on your task list or calendar views. Examples:
- A completed phone call.
- A product demonstration.
- An online meeting.
Now, at first glance, this may seem like splitting hairs. After all, if you have been using notes to track meetings or phone calls, your data is still in the system. True enough. But you have to ask yourself: “Why am I entering this information in the system in the first place?” Isn’t it so that it can be found and used later? And isn’t it better when you can quickly and accurately find the data you need, without having to scroll through hundreds of non-related items to find what you need? I think so.
And that comes to the heart of why histories, when used instead of notes, makes your use of Act! so much more powerful. Because histories are tagged by type, result, and date, they drive your ability to create powerful lookups and reports.
The next part of this article will explain the various tools that you can use to mine all of your valuable history data now that you have been carefully creating it.
