You’ve just returned from a successful tradeshow – unlike previous trips, you’re not returning with a stack of business cards, scribbled with hand written notes. No, this time you used ACT! and Scan IT to capture your business card sales leads. So, now that you have all these new prospects captured and recorded in ACT! what do you do?  The next step in the cycle is one that many fear – the follow up.

Sales leads are dead within 72 hours. Following up with all of your prospects immediately, no matter how quick or simple the message, is essential to building a relationship. Don’t be duped into thinking you know which of your leads will be a ‘real’ sale and which of them may just be ‘window shopping’ – every lead most be followed up on. Many believe that sales follow up is dirty work – it’s tedious, time consuming, and boring – however, it doesn’t have to be. With a few adjustments and additions, sales follow up can be easy, simple and quick – bringing you closer to what we all want – closing the sale!

There are  three ways to follow up on sales leads. Each method has options to make it less stressful.

• Email: This is perhaps the quickest, easiest way to follow up with a large group of leads. A short, generic note sent to a group of leads can get the job done. Outreach IT for ACT! allows you to send templated emails to ACT! contacts or groups.
• Phone: The most personal of all follow up options. A simple follow up script – :30 to a minute – can be very effective. Utilizing Dial IT for ACT! will greatly increase your call completion ratio, as well as give you a chance to associate the history and any notes from the call with the contact.
• Print: A very impressive method (as most choose not to go this route). ACT! has a library of templates available for this very purpose and a creative, signed letter can go a long way with a prospect.

Each one of these options has their positives and negatives – if possible, a combination of all three is the best option. At the end of the day (literally, by the end of your first day back from your tradeshow) make sure you choose at least one option and just do it.

That CRM projects are successful and remain successful, depends greatly on the CRM users in the enterprise. This is a well-known wisdom.
Especially in the daily business a CRM solution has to prove itself – and failes much too often.
Contact details are recorded in its sole discretion, opportunities are assed with a high degree of subjectivity and imagination and so the work with the CRM system does not make much sense and the main idea of a CRM system fails due to a missing of the CRM success.

The additional work with the system produces no benefit for the individual user – the user feels only as data collector. Furthermore many user have fear – especially in the distribution section – to be controlled and / or to surrender their own knowledge. These two facts do not conducive their enthusiasm when it comes to CRM. For them the benefits of CRM don’t seem significantly greater than the investment of time and effort required to use the system each day.

CRM is what it is and it can be useful to sales people. The problem isn’t with the solution; it’s with the packaging. So the question is what can we do to make it more ‘tasty’ to our sales people?

I´m sure this is a well-known scenario for you as well:
As an exhibitor you were successful at the trade fair and you had many interesting contacts. The moment you are back in the office, the daily business has caught up with you again.
Your folder with the contacts you met on the trade will stay in the corner, because you have no time to follow-up with them.

The reworking of the trade is just as important as the trade itself

You are sitting in your office, your desk littered with hundreds of contact forms which you should manually enter into your ACT! database. For this you need hours, if you assume that each contact takes around 12 minutes of your time, which means on one day you would create just 40 contacts – and that only if you would concentrate only on this task. That is a whole day when you can not deal with your normal business activities.

Just compare right now

With a single mouse-click into your database

With Scan IT this belongs to the past.
Already during the trade you can now scan the business card of your conversation partner into your database and additionaly add all the essential content as history – all while you are talking to your potential customer!

In seconds you can create more contacts with Scan IT, as you can type in hours! Time-consuming, manual entry of contact details was yesterday! Typos are excluded and Scan IT automatically checkes for duplicates, with the option to update them.

After the trade, when normally the collected contact forms / business cards are stacked on your desktop, you have the time to professionally and promptly follow up with your trade contacts – first come, first served!

You see – this investment pays off in no time!

With today’s rapid change of time you are always confronted with all kinds of data formats.  If you want to transfer this data into your ACT! database without entering the data manually,  we have developed an addon which allows you to easily import this data.  Groups, contacts, companies, opportunities and all other data can now be imported by any ACT! user.

With Import IT you have the chance to create new records or update existing ones with any information you got. Import IT for ACT! makes importing and managing contact lists in ACT! a breeze. It is packed with tools and features to let you quickly and easily import everything directly into ACT!.

Here are some of the functions, Import IT offers:

• Contacts, Companies and Groups
  •  
    • Create groups and companies while importing contacts
    • Use any field to associate contacts with groups and companies
    • Import and assign documents, pictures, and secondary contacts to contacts, companies, or groups
    • Define the hierarchy
• History, Activities, Opportunities and Notes
  •  
    • Create history, activities, opportunities, and notes and associate with a contact, company, or group
    • Add attachments and links to history, activities, opportunities, and notes
    • Create and update opportunities from any accounting system
    • Use a translation table for history type/priority/result, opportunity status/stage/process, and activity type/priority
    • Import, update, and merge activities and opportunitie
    • Create products and import up to 20 per opportunity
• Other Features
  •  
    • Import data from a single field into several ACT! fields
    • Import and merge both ASCII and Excel data into all ACT! tables
    • Use the “Additional Columns” function to select a column from the import Excel list and enter the default value that the field should have
    • Select the Record Manager while importing
    • Number your contacts so you can export them via the standard ACT! Excel export tool and reimport them with Import IT
    • Import existing .xls, .csv and .txt files into ACT!
    • Import XLSX, MDB, as well as dropdowns and bulk created users
    • Automatically update entries with the most current information
    • More flexible duplicate checking
    • View any and all data import errors in a Log File
    • Verify that contact information is complete and valid prior to an import
    • Add data without changing a source file
    • Choose at the field level how the program will handle data
    • Merge values from different fields in the Excel file when importing
    • Handle more records in one run with superior memory handling
    • Have multiple contacts with the same name? Create unique IDs for contacts in your ACT! database to make finding the right contact a snap
    • Run as a Windows Service in consumption with Service IT – no need to log in

ACT! is designed to help grow your business. Unfortunately as your business grows, so does the amount of manual input required to maintain your database. Over time, critical tasks can fall through the cracks, leaving you with inaccurate data, or worse, neglected customers.

Workflow IT is the software AddOn that lets you avoid redundant data input by executing pre-defined workflow patterns automatically in ACT! By automating recurring functions and standardizing critical processes, you can save time, reduce your workload, and streamline your current business practices. Workflow IT is installed on your server (the GUI is installed on the server or one workstation of your choice).

• Link individual activities together to build complex workflow patterns –
• create drip marketing campaigns, lead management processes, multitouch sales strategies, and more
• Set date, time, and duration schema for each activity
• Generates reports
• Export data (i.e. change of an ID/ Status generates a report)
• Monitor Contacts/ Companies/ Groups/ Opportunities for trigger events: i.e. Change in field value
  • Creation of a new Contact, Company, Group, or Opportunity
  • Synchronization of data
  • Modification of any data in your ACT! database

 Functions Workflow IT can execute:

• Create a follow up task and assign to a specific team member
• Modify field values
• Move Contacts and Companies to and from Groups
• Send email notifications to team members prior to scheduled Activities
• Generate written correspondance using an ACT! template
• Assign numbers to Contacts or Opportunities
• Schedule a new Activity dependent on the outcome of a previous Activity
• Monitor tasks and forward to another team member or escalate to management if not completed as scheduled
• And a lot more!

Workflow IT does more than save time. It increases accuracy, promotes compliance, and provides the operational consistency needed to accurately assess and improve your business processes.