Your brand is your company’s face to the world; it starts with your business name, your logo and the colors used that represent you business identity.  This imagery is your first impression to potential customers and like it or not, you are either attracting or repelling them on visual representation alone.  A strong brand and what it stands for (you) is invaluable as the battle for customers intensifies in this challenging economy.

If your branding is good, it will separate you from your competitors. Some elements to consider when evolving your brand’s identity are:

• Is your business name identifiable and memorable? 
• Does your company logo reflect your business name, products or services? 
• Your logo is the visual component for your business, is your logo design and colors appealing?
• Does the font types, sizes and colors you use in your communications reflective of your business identity?

Once you have identified the elements of your brand you will want to place them into action.  From your website to your marketing materials (web, print, social media and advertising), everything needs to incorporate your brand elements.  Brand consistency enhances credibility and builds trust with current and potential clients. Otherwise, to deter from your brand identity will dilute your brand and confuse your intended audience.

Interacting with your customers and prospects, every business can use ACT! Software.  It’s a dynamic CRM system ideal for tracking sales, marketing endeavors, customer service and support, and daily business operations – key components to the success of any business. The program is customizable and you will save time by modifying your communication templates to incorporate your brand identify.   These templates can be shared among employees, increasing the consistentacy with communicating your brand.  You can modify:

1)     Document templates – When reaching out to your targeted audience through traditional marketing, easily customize your letters and customer documents with your logo, fonts and colors.

 2)     E-mail Templates – ACT! enables you to deliver your information consistently and successfully using the same word processing templates.  Or modify your existing templates to include hyperlinks and/or modify your graphics to accommodate e-mail size limits.

 3)     Quote Template – Customize the ACT! Opportunities Quote template with your branding for your sales staff, reinforcing your corporate identity into their sales endeavors.  

 4)     Report Templates – Customizing Reports with your branding for both internal and external communications helps keep the information simple and consistent.

Being consistent is not a difficult task; it is just one that needs focus and attention.  Once your customizations are complete, you are ready to show the world who you are and what you have to offer.

It happened again…we received a phone call from a company who experienced a hardware failure which meant their server was out of commission.  They needed to restore their server and ACT! database as soon as possible to prevent further impact to business operations.

Prior to calling us, their IT guy said “no problem”, “we backup the server nightly so we’ll just conduct a restore and you’ll be back in business”.  Well, there was a problem, their backup system wasn’t properly backing up the ACT! database files.  Neither the company nor the IT guy ever thought of testing a restore prior to this emergency.

This is a call that is dreaded by all in our line of work – we feel the customer’s pain.  Losing data can have a disastrous impact on any business.  It is imperative to have a database recovery process in place and to test this process. 

Every database recovery process should include using the ACT! scheduler.  All ACT! 2009 products come with a scheduler where the utility can perform unattended database backups and maintenance.  Any ACT! administrator or manager user can create a regular schedule for creating database backups.

What files are included in an ACT! backup?

Database
Attached Documents
Layouts
Document Templates
Report Templates
Saved Queries
ACT! 2009 now has the option to reduce the size of backup files by excluding attachments from ACT! database backups, allowing backups to complete more quickly, particularly if you have a large number of attached documents.

Now that you have your backup, test your recovery process by restoring the backup to ensure it opens and operates as expected.  Having a tested database recovery process is your insurance policy against a business disaster.

So don’t delay and start your ACT! Scheduler service today!