ACT by Sage 2006: New ACT, Same Success Story Freshen Up Your ACT Wayne Kawamoto
When who you know is just as important as what you know, you might consider using contact-manager software to track all of your dealings with clients and customers. ACT by Sage 2006, a descendant of the original ACT and one of the few such programs that's still around, offers a powerful feature-set that helps you manage contacts and keep tabs on just about everything that you do for and with them.
Like any decent contact manager, ACT manages key contact information, lets you schedule activities and tasks, and records all contact-related notes and communications. Sales professionals, real estate agents, company reps and small business owners are only some of the many professionals who can benefit from using ACT. This latest version offers incremental improvements that aren't "must haves," but can be useful to some.
Freshen Up Your ACT
New features in the 2006 release strengthen the program's ability to organize contacts into companies and groups. A new "tree" view graphically depicts contact and company relationships and hierarchies. At a glance you can see divisions, employees, and individual contacts. Also, you can now add contacts to multiple groups and companies.
ACT 2006 conveniently prints phone numbers of all your scheduled calls on its calendars. This way, when you print a calendar, you can automatically take the necessary phone numbers with you. The program also now supports Lotus Notes, and third-party companies have created some 40 new ACT add-on solutions to extend the program's capabilities and perform specialized marketing, shipping, and synchronization functions, to name a few.
Making Contact
ACT is all about maintaining and managing contacts. The program acts as a digital address book that stores and calls up names, addresses, and phone numbers. Beyond address book functions, it maintains a complete log of related customer information and interactions that include appointments, related tasks, and sales opportunities.
To track contacts, the program offers 60 pre-defined fields, including name, company, phone, address, Web site, e-mail, last meeting date, and ID status, plus you can add fields of your own. In addition, you can easily enter unlimited date- and time-stamped notes and history to each contact record.
The ability to manage hectic and busy schedules is another strong feature in ACT 2006. The program allows you to schedule calls, meetings, and tasks, and set priorities for them. There are weekly and monthly calendar views as well as pop-up calendars and activity alarms that alert you to an approaching task or event.
The program tracks all prospect and customer correspondence and provides a history of all communications with a contacts or organizations. You can write letters using Microsoft Word or the built-in word processor. ACT's word processor offers features that handle graphics, create tables, save files in HTML, and perform spell checking. It's adequate, but it's no Microsoft Word.
First-rate merge features allow you to select a group of contacts and merge their names and addresses into letters or e-mails. And when you send such correspondence, the program adds the letter to each contact's history. You can create, send, and track e-mail to contacts using ACT's e-mail client, as well as rely on Outlook, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes E-mail.
Another plus, the program tracks opportunities and potential sales contacts. With each opportunity you can set closing dates and a potential customer's status in the sales process — a handy feature for sales professionals.
