The Sage ACT! 2012 Roadshow will be held on Thursday, July 28, 2011, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Fort Lauderdale Westin Hotel, 400 Corporate Drive, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The event will feature presentations by Karen Fredricks, the woman who wrote the book (actually 7 books) on ACT! and representatives from Sage North America which is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Prior registration is required and includes complimentary hors d’oeuvres. There will be raffles for free ACT! 2012 software, ACT! addon products, books, and training videos. Attendance will be limited to the first 100 who register at http://act2012.eventbrite.com/.

Attendees will have an opportunity to interact with Sage ACT! representatives and have a sneak peak at some of the new ACT! 2012 enhancements.

Karen Fredricks, an ACT! Certified Consultant, Platinum ACT! VAR and Premier ACT! Trainer, will conclude the event with a presentation of her Top 10 Favorite ACT! Tips & Tricks.

Attendees will have the opportunity to network with each other and the Sage representatives as part of the event.

According to Fredricks, “I like to think of the Fort Lauderdale Road Show as an ACT! celebration.  I held a similar event at the Westin in 2002 to launch ACT! 6.  Then, as now, ACT! users eagerly anticipated a look at the new ACT! features.  Ironically, the Scratch Pad feature is a modern version of the old Side ACT! functionality that was so popular in the earliest ACT! versions.”

For further information, contact Karen Fredricks of Tech Benders at 561-470-5450, Ext. 1.  To register for the event go to http://act2012.eventbrite.com/.

As most of you know, I’m probably one of the biggest ACT! cheerleaders around.  However, sometimes I run across an ACT! feature that makes me slap my head and wonder “what were they thinking??”  A case in point is the Documents tab.  I love the ability to create shortcuts to my documents so that I can easily access them from the contact’s Document tab rather than grappling around searching for files while talking to a client.  However, what I’d really like to do in some cases is get to an entire folder of information at the click of a button.  Unfortunately, this is not an option in ACT! – or so I thought before speaking to  two long-time ACT! Consultants, Chuck Cutler and Rita Kogstad.  They provided me with what turned out to be a very simple solution to a bothersome problem.

Follow these steps to create a link on the contact record to a data folder:

1. In ACT!, create a new URL field and place it in your contact layout.
2. Launch Windows Explorer (or My Computer).
3. Navigate to the folder you wish to link.
4. Right-click the folder, choose Properties from the contextual window and copy the folder’s location into the Windows clipboard
5. Type file:// in the new URL field and then paste in the contents of the clipboard.  For example, to navigate to my own documents folder I’d place file://C:\Users\Karen Fredricks\Documents into my ACT! field.

The next time you want to quickly get to the folder simply click it; the folder will pop open in seconds.

I like that little trick but there’s also a way to get a folder to show up on the Documents tab as well that ACT! Consultant Art Russ shared with me that and doesn’t necessitate the need to create a new field:

1. Launch Windows Explorer (or My Computer).
2. Navigate to the folder you wish to link.
3. Right-click the folder and choose Create Shortcut from the contextual menu.  You will now be on a shortcut file.
4. Use your mouse to drag and drop the shortcut file to the contact’s Documents tab.
5. Double-click the shortcut in the Documents tab to view the contents of the linked folder.

There are lots of cool shortcuts in ACT! that users take advantage of every day to make ACT! even more powerful than it already is.  If you have discovered other shortcuts that you’d like to share please let me know!

Karen Fredricks
Karen@TechBenders.com
www.techbenders.com

There are virtually hundreds of add-on products that work with ACT!.  Need calculations between two fields?  Got it.  Need to link ACT! to QuickBooks?  Done.  One of my favorite add-ons is the Call On CRM solutions that allows you to dial your phone directly from ACT!.

“What happened to the ACT! phone dialer?” is a question I’m often asked.  Some of you ACT! “Old Timers” remember back in the day how easy it was to call from ACT!; there was a dialer icon right up there on the icon bar.  The setup was also easy:  plug a phone cord into your computer and you were good to go.  But hold the phone (pun intended); that was back in the days when computers came equipped with a phone jack so that we used to connect to the Internet via a dial-up connection.  If you’re using a computer that’s ready for the Smithsonian you might still have one of those but the rest of us have moved on to faster connections and therefore can’t just hook our phones to our computers.

Ironically, what was so simple a few years ago has now become a complicated mess.  If you work in an office with a phone system you might be lucky enough to have a “TAPI compliant” system which is computer-speak for “connect my computer to a dial tone.” However, I find that once a company sells you a phone system the chances of getting them back in to your office to connect you to TAPI are slim to non-existent.  Enter VOIP (voice over IP).

Many people think of Vonage or Skype when they think of VOIP.  Those are “public” VOIP systems.  “Private” VOIP carriers are designed for business users and are generally cheaper than your local phone service.  Business class VOIP offers lots of cool features like “Auto Attendants” who direct callers to dial 1 for Sales or 2 for Leave me Alone, and what I affectionately call the “hunt me down like a dog” feature that will try your office, home or cell phone until you’re found.  Best of all, if the VOIP solution you use is “Broadsoft” compliant it can be easily connected to your ACT! database using the Call on CRM add-on.

Here’s how Call on CRM works.  When you want to call a contact in your database you simply click their number; when you complete your call the ACT! History window pops up.  You can either add a few notes or simply click OK and a history of the call (included the actual time spent) appears on the contact’s History tab.  The same thing happens when you receive a call; the History window pops up when you disconnect, you add a note and the History appears on the History tab.  You can even have ACT! schedule an activity for any missed calls you might have received.

Call on CRM includes a number of other cool features including the ability to send a text message to multiple contacts, transfer a call to a remote staff member and keep phone call logs.  Personally, I’m happy not to have to dial the phone or look up contact records. If you’d like more information you can find it at the Call on CRM website.

Karen Fredricks
www.techbenders.com
blog@techbenders.com

If you have ACT! 2010 or 2011 and you’re not using the Web Info tab you are missing the banana boat as we say in Florida. And, if you haven’t figured out how to use the Web Info tab in conjunction with your favorite social networking sites, then you’re in for a treat.

You’ll find the Web Info tab in both the Contact and Company Detail views. The Web Info tab is actually a browser that displays information based on data in various fields on a contact or company record.  ACT! comes with a number of links to sites including Google Search, Google Maps and Weather.com so you can instantly scour the Net for more information or just see what the weather is like in your contact’s location.  You can also easily add new sites; for example, many of my clients like to create a link between their contacts and Twitter.

By far my favorite web link is the one to LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site mainly used for professional networking; as of the latest count LinkedIn had more than 80 million registered users. The beauty of sites like LinkedIn is that they offer you another way to stay in front of your contacts; any posts you make on your LinkedIn site are visible to all of your LinkedIn contacts.  And, in the event that a contact leaves his place of employment and changes his e-mail address, you’ll still be able to connect with him.

Here’s how you can start building your own LinkedIn network in 5 easy steps.

1. Start by logging in to your LinkedIn account.
2. Create a Lookup of the ACT! Contacts that you’d like to add to LinkedIn.
3. Click the Web Info tab on the Contacts Detail View and select the LinkedIn link that runs along the left-hand side of the Web Info tab.
4. LinkedIn will search its database for matches to the current contact record.  Click the Add to Network hyperlink on the Web Info tab to send a LinkedIn invitation to the current contact.
5. Advance to the next Contact record and repeat the process.

Many ACT! users start out by creating a Lookup of all their customers and connecting to them.  If you’ve recently joined a networking group or attended a trade show you might want to “link up” with those contacts. Eventually you might get into the habit of checking the status of any contact you’re currently working with.

Social networking is becoming an essential method of communication.  If you’re an ACT! user you can stay in touch with your important contacts at the touch of a button.

Karen Fredricks
blog@techbenders.com
www.techbenders.com

Title: ACT 2011 Florida Road Show
Location: BankAtlantic Center, Sunrise, FL
Link out: Click here
Description: Join us at the BankAtlantic Center for an interactive half-day uncovering what’s new in Sage ACT! 2011. The Florida ACT! 2011 Road Show is an opportunity to meet with people from Sage Software and to learn more about the future of ACT!, using ACT! for marketing and sales, and to determine if ACT! is a good solution for your company.

Hors d\’oeuvres will be served and there will be a cash bar. We\’ll also have some great give-aways including lots of free ACT software!
Start Time: 2:00 PM
Date: 2010-10-22
End Time: 6:00 PM

It was a dark and rainy night – literally – in August of 2002.

Let me digress.  I was one of the 12 consultants nationwide that had been chosen to run an ACT 6 launch event.  I was given 6 weeks to secure a location, make audio/visual arrangements and run a trade show of ACT addon vendors.  Attendees were invited based on a circle of Fort Lauderdale; the “powers that be” didn’t realize that the only attendees coming from the east, west or south would be sporting fins so I scrambled to create my own invitation list.  August is probably the worst month to hold an event in Florida as almost everyone is on vacation somewhere escaping the blistering heat.

I had told the caterers to expect 500 people.  After a few lightening strikes literally rattled the windows of the Westin where the event was being held I figured my kids would be eating finger foods for the next week!

The doors to the trade show were scheduled to open at 5 PM.  At 3 PM as I was scrambling around the room in jeans literally running wires when a member of the hotel staff sought me out; he didn’t look happy.  Apparently folks started arriving early for the event.  So many people in fact that a line had begun to snake around the entire lobby.

By 5 o’clock when we opened the doors the place was packed.  We ended up having over a 90% attendance rate; the few “no-shows” were quickly replaced by the dozens of people who showed up without a reservation.  Needless to say, the event was a success!

I have to admit that the event was truly one of the highlights of my life.  It was amazing to see so many ACT “FanACTics”  clamoring for a sneak peak of the new ACT product. After all, it had been nearly 4 years since the last ACT release and users were clamoring to see the new changes.

I’ve often wondered if I could have pulled off an event of that magnitude for any other product launch.  QuickBooks?  Excel?  Outlook? I think not.

I am thrilled to announce that after 8 years I am once again holding an ACT event.  This time it’s part of Sage Software’s “ACT Road Show” initiative.  Sage is sending down a number of their executives to show ACT FanACTics some of the new ACT 2011  features as well as to answer their questions on anything from usability to future product enhancements.

I know I won’t have 500 attendees this time; I’m limiting the event to a mere 200.  But I’m really looking forward to once again seeing the loyal ACT followers “raising a glass” to the latest ACT version!

If you’d like to attend please go to http://actroadshow.eventbrite.com to register.

Karen Fredricks
blog@techbenders.com
www.techbenders.com

Sometimes the things that seem so obvious to me aren’t quite as obvious to the typical ACT user.  A case in point is sending a fax directly from within ACT. 

 Ten years ago one of the first things I showed new ACT users was how to modify the existing ACT fax coversheet.  Back then most of my clients were using WinFax to link ACT to their fax machine, or printing out a coversheet and feeding it into their fax machine manually.  Today many of my clients are opting to use an online fax service such as MyFax or eFax for the few times that they actually need to fax.  Ironically, those ACT users often spend countless hours wrangling with the service’s interface to create a coversheet when they could just as easily use the ACT fax coversheet.

 The process is a simple one.  Here’s all you need to do to get started:

 Start by editing ACT’s existing fax cover page.  If you’ve previously set Word as your word processor preference you’ll be working in familiar territory here.

1. From the fax recipient’s contact record click the Write menu, choose the E-mail Message (from template) option and then select Fax Cover Page.  For me this is the cool part because I can choose to either print or email any of the ACT templates that I’ve created or modified.  In this case a new e-mail message will appear with your fax cover information in the body of the message.
2. Fill in the subject line following the instructions of your e-fax provider.
3. (Optional) Attach the document that you want to fax.
4. Click Send.

 Boom.  Your fax is sent.  Best of all, a record of the transaction will appear on the recipient’s history tab.

 Karen Fredricks
Karen@TechBenders.com
www.techbenders.com

Boy, do I hear that question a lot!  Sometimes I get a variation (feel free to substitute the name of the current CRM product du jour for Sales Force).

Here’s the deal.  I know folks like you – I call them ACT fanactics.  I had 500 of them wait in line to get into a seminar I ran in August, 2002 on a not so sunny night in South Florida introducing the all new ACT 6.  I guarantee I wouldn’t have had a crowd like that for a seminar on Excel or QuickBooks, not to mention Sales Force which was just a dot on the horizon in 2002.

If you were brand new to CRM it might be a different story, but you obviously know ACT and have liked it for years. If you move to another product you’ll constantly be missing core ACT features like dynamic groups and lookups.

When the “new” ACT SQL version came out in 2005 the developers asked me for a dozen of my ACT 6 Dummies books which I thought was strange until I realized that the programmers wanted to maintain ACT’s “look and feel.”  That means that although there are lots of cool new features in ACT (Outlook integration, e-marketing, companies, opportunities, web info tab, dashboards, secondary contacts and relationships)  the old “tried and true” features (adding contacts, deleting contacts, groups, lookups, mail merge) remain exactly the same.

 I’ve written books and produced training videos on a number of products (Sugar, BCM, Sales Force, Outlook) as well as on ACT and I have not found anything I like better for a number of reasons:

• There’s safety in number s.  ACT has a lot of longevity and loyalty going for it.  It’s been around for over 20 years and has millions of existing users. 
• ACT has widespread availability.  You won’t find a box of Sales Force on the shelves of your local computer store.
• Each new version expands the core functionality by adding new functionality that typically matches current technology trends.
• ACT is extremely customizable.  There are hundreds of consultants to help modify your database to exactly what you want – or you can learn to make those changes yourself.
• ACT is easy to use and intuitive.  I recently found out that Sage actually has a “click counter” (OK, that’s not the official title but you get the drift) who’s job function is to “count the click” required for basic functions such as mail merge to insure that the number of clicks is much fewer than with competing products.
• ACT is one of the least costly solutions around.  Compare a one-time purchase of ACT to the recurring monthly Sales Force charges and it’s a no brainer.

Hope this helps you in your decision!

Karen Fredricks
www.techbenders.com
blog@techbenders.com

I ran a webinar this week on synching smart phones to your ACT database.  Presenting with me was my old friend Rushang Shah of Companion Link software.  Rushang looks like the guy selling replica watches out of the trunk of his car; the last time I saw him he must have had a dozen different cell phones in his brief case.  Although I’ve used Palm, Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices in the past, he’s my go-to guy when it comes to cell phones.

We had a great turnout to the webinar.  I was particularly surprised by the number and quality of the questions that we received.  There is indeed a black hole area in the minds of many ACT users.  And, although I’ve been synching my ACT database to my phone for years, I learned a few new tidbits that I thought I’d share with you.

Many of the questions revolved around picking the “best” phone.  The bottom line is to pick the phone that you like best with a few minor concessions:

1. Some phones are dumb.  Literally.  A smart phone by definition is one that contains an operating system such as Blackberry, Apple, Android, and Palm.
2. Only smart phones can synch to a large database such as ACT.  It’s not that dumb phones are really dumb, they’re just not big enough to hold all that data.
3. Your cell phone carrier determines the phones that are available to you.  If you’re lusting for an I-Phone you’ll have to move to AT&T.  If you stick with Verizon you’ll have a huge selection of Androids to choose from. 

The next set of questions involved the synching process itself.  To sum it up, there are three basic scenarios for synching your ACT data to your cell phone:

1. Synchronize using a direct connection between your phone and your computer – your information data will flow directly from your database to your phone.  This requires a piece of software like Companion Link. This is probably the most traditional way of synching ACT data.
2. Synchronize wirelessly using the new free Google service.  This is the coolest way of synching but perhaps the most confusing as it contains two separate parts.  You’ll use Companion Link to synch your ACT database to a free Google account.  From there Google will automatically update your phone with your ACT information.  As complicated as it sounds, you actually only need to click a single button to synchronize your data and you won’t need to hunt for any cable wires.
3. Synchronize wirelessly using a paid monthly service.  This is a great option for folks who want the latest and greatest changes on their phone – but don’t have the time or patience to wrangle with the technology. 

Finally, there were lots of questions about Outlook, multiple databases and multiple users.  Can you synch both ACT and Outlook to your phone?  Yes!  Can each ACT user sync to their own phones even though they are all using the same ACT database?  Yes!  Can I synch just a portion of my ACT database to my phone?  Yes!

If you’d like to listen to the webinar you can access it online by clicking here.  And as always, if you have a comment or a question please feel free to post a reply.

Karen Fredricks
blog@techbenders.com
www.techbenders.com

I’ve lost ten pounds since the holidays!  Having been on the Injured Reserve list with a knee injury for over a year I packed on the extra weight.  I’ve been fortunate enough all my life not to have to deal with weight loss issues so I wasn’t sure what to do.  Quite frankly, the thought of paying hundreds of dollars for artificial meals or drinks wasn’t appealing so I tackled the problem in the same way that I tackle most problems:

• I did a bit of research
• I developed a plan that consisted of a small number of baby steps
• I stayed with the program

My system worked and it got me to thinking how I could apply the same concept to removing some of the “dead weight” often found in databases.  Although I work with a variety of CRM solutions I find that my clients deal with the exact same issues.  Here are a few of my solutions:

• Learn your software.  Every CRM solution contains a category field; in ACT it’s called ID/Status.  This field usually contains values such as Customer, Prospect, or Vendor.  This will help you pinpoint the exact portion of your database that you need to market to.  Learn how to add another choice like “Dead Lead” so you’re sales folks won’t spin their wheels calling companies that aren’t a good fit for your business.
• Have an easy way to find the data that needs updating.  You can’t lose 10 pounds – or slim down your database – in a day.  As you work through your database using baby steps, it’s imperative that you have a quick bookmark to find the contacts you haven’t as yet had a chance to work on.   I set up Dynamic Groups in ACT to keep track of all my contacts that are missing contact information; as I fill in the blanks – or add a new, incomplete contact – my group changes accordingly.
• Have a system for dealing with your duplicates on a timely basis.  Unfortunately, computers aren’t bright enough to understand that William, Bill and Billy are all the same person, and that ABC Co and ABC Company are one and the same.   ACT has the cool Copy/Move Contact Data feature that allows you to merge duplicates as you run across them.  A search on the Internet will help you find addon solutions that will “deal with the dupes” for other CRM products.
• Fill in the blanks. Sometimes it’s not what you know but what you don’t know that can kill you.    I recently looked over my own database and found that I was missing the e-mail addresses for nearly 10% of my prospects.  I found a free solution for finding contact information that worked so well that I was soon able to cut that number in half.  Once I had e-mail addresses I was able to use ACT’s e-marketing tool to send out an e-mail requesting corrected contact information; I then sat back as the replies automatically updated my missing contact information in ACT.
• Link to your accounting software.  I compare this ability to lifting weight in the gym.  Your existing customers are without a doubt the best source of future revenue.  You need to reach out to the folks who spent lots of money with you three years ago, but haven’t called you since.  The ability to query on your accounting information in your CRM solution is crucial.  I’m running a free webinar if you’d like to see how I’ve linked ACT to my QuickBooks information.
• Eliminate unnecessary notes and histories.  I’m a firm believer in keeping accurate notes about my contacts.  However, over a period of time too much information is, well, too much information.   I have a great tool that lets me selectively pick and choose the history data I want to purge from my database.  For example, I recently removed just the histories from 2007 and 2008 showing that I had sent out e-newsletters; that alone eliminated over 50,000 history records from my database!

Although I’m certainly not a weight-loss expert I’d be happy to share my dieting tips if you send me an e-mail.  In the meantime, if you take a few baby steps at a time, you’ll find that your database is soon looking a lot sleeker and healthier.  Good luck with your weight loss program!

Karen Fredricks
blog@techbenders.com
www.techbenders.com