New Software Puts Customer Management Into Action

If your employees have to manage lots of sales contacts, it’s essential that they get their act together. And that’s exactly what ACT 2000 is all about. The newest version of the granddaddy of sales automation software is designed to help you manage the entire sales process from the initial opportunity to follow-up.

The fundamental principle behind ACT is that business contacts are more than just names on a screen or people you interact with only when they call you. How you manage your contacts--especially customers or clients--can determine how well you grow your business. ACT, priced at $199.95, allows you to maintain a complete database on each of your contacts. It includes a place to take notes about each meeting or phone call, so when you have a follow-up conversation you can quickly refresh your memory.

Although it’s primarily designed to help manage customers, it can also be used to keep track of vendors, co-workers, colleagues and even friends.

You can, of course, enter names, addresses and contact information directly into ACT, but you can also import them from Microsoft Outlook, the popular personal information management program that comes with Microsoft Office.

You can also synchronize the calendar in ACT with your or other people’s Outlook Calendar. If you need to schedule a group meeting, for example, you could merge both your ACT calendar and other people’s Outlook calendar to be sure you have a mutually convenient time to meet.

ACT has always been good at keeping track of all your contacts with individual prospects, but now it has the ability to coordinate activities with groups of people, such as all employees of a firm or employees of a division of a firm. I know what it’s like to have clients who are constantly changing personnel. You develop a good rapport with a person and later find out that you need to deal with someone else or maybe even an entire group of people at the same company. ACT doesn’t change that frustrating aspect of modern business, but it does make it easier for you to keep up with several contacts at the same company.

The new version has a system for creating rules that allow you to create groups of contacts--for example, employees of a company in a certain state or people who have bought a participator product. With these rules, you can more easily locate sales contacts without having to pore over a lot of irrelevant data.

ACT can be especially handy in a work group situation where more than one person from your business may have to deal with customers or prospects. ACT works over a company network or over the Internet to allow several salespeople to work with the same account.

The product has sales forecasting tools that not only give you an inkling about how you’re doing, but let you produce slick-looking charts and graphs to impress your boss, partners or co-workers about how much money you’re going to make.

A training program from Dale Carnegie is built into the program to provide you with sales techniques and advice. Like an extra help system that focuses on strategies, it covers topics such as handling new opportunities, initial communications, a first interview, and getting a commitment to buy. Additional help is available from the Dale Carnegie Web site (https://www.dale-carnegie.com).

Like most Windows programs, ACT is able to run in the background while you do other tasks. However, certain tasks such as sorting your e-mail messages hog all of your computer resources, making it impossible to use other programs until the task is completed.

ACT competes with Goldmine 4.0 from Goldmine Software of Pacific Palisades. Goldmine is a $199 Windows program that lets you track prospects and customers and offers direct links to Web sites so that people who visit your Web site can fill in information that finds its way to your Goldmine database. The program also offers built-in e-mail and elaborate sales reporting features.

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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached at [email protected]. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.â€�