Unprecedented times are upon us. The Covid-19 crisis is affecting all of us. In particular, it's forcing many organizations to send their employees home to work remotely. This sounds like an easy thing to do - work from home. But for those of us who have been doing it for years, we know there are some things you need to do and do them quickly. It's all about staying sane while working from home.  Once you have figured out how to access your business data and applications (blogged about

While working with a client recently I described the basic underlying strategy for a CRM (customer relationship management) process.  He had chatted with several different companies and he remarked that he got paragraph after paragraph of descriptions. However, he said mine was the simplest and one that he felt he could repeat to his sales staff. These were powerful words to me and reinforced what I have felt is a really simple message. Set up a process, implement it, do it every day,

Recently, we have had several frantic calls from customers needing to restore contacts in Act! after a user has unwittingly deleted them. Unfortunately, in some cases, these clients haven't had a recent backup of their Act! Database to pull the deleted contacts from. Don't let this happen to you. Follow these guidelines to protect your Act! data: Limit user security to ONLY what the user NEEDS to do their job. It is a misconception that users need to be "administrators" in Act!. The

Today’s blog post is the first “official” entry for my Reese’s Southern Wisdom series.  During my conversations with Reese he kept referring to maximizing his strengths and “strategizing” his weaknesses.  This phrasing is a bit different than you will typically see when you research this concept. And that is on purpose for Reese. It's classic "Reese Speak." Reese spent many years studying sales and personal improvement techniques. He is particularly fond of Stephen Covey

It's hard to come up with fresh materials for social media. Every weekend when I plan out my tweets for the week, I've settled on having a general theme. It helps me gather material and puts a focus on things that come up spontaneously throughout the week. As I have said before, life in general is the best producer of ideas for posts. My social media theme this week in Nurture Marketing. What led me to this idea was actually reading another article about selling. The article talked about

We’ve all heard the saying, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”  Maybe you can’t MAKE him drink, but... you can ENTICE him to drink. You can provide beautiful, convenient and tasty water so that he WANTS to drink.  Let’s apply this analogy to software UI (screen layout) design. Designing a user interface that is attractive, intuitive and efficient is key for user adoption and ultimately, imperative to the success of your software implementation

During a meeting last week we were discussing a book to review during a quarterly education event coming up. Cleaning out my desk drawers the week before, I stumbled upon a miniature edition of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  I suggested we use that as our book review. It's timeless and still very relevant. That idea made me go look for the full size version and I re-read it over the weekend. Well, mostly I sped-read it. The reading event triggered my blog post today. Every

We have all known procrastinators or have been one at some point ourselves. Managing a procrastinator can be a frustrating and difficult situation. Let’s face it, procrastination not only affects our business but it affects our sanity. One of the obligations of a good manager is to mentor those we manage and help them achieve their project and career goals. There are ways to help a procrastinator from falling into those same destructive patterns. One way to help them is to find a way to help