Our newsletter theme this month is giving thanks (appropriate with November right around the corner). Each of us was challenged to create an article about gratitude, thankfulness, and how to say we appreciate our customers. Since I love social media, I decided to focus on that and how it can help you engage your customers and provide a way to say thanks. Companies talk all the time about maintaining loyalty from their customers but I think they tend to forget it's a two-way street.  Yes,

Successful businesses have figured out how to use their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to foster relationships with prospects and clients. Building these meaningful relationships starts with: Learning about your clients – professionally and personally through dialogue and on social media Adding pertinent data to your CRM And, finally, taking action Here are six ideas for using Act! to add a personal touch to your client interactions and show gratitude to them for their

Earlier this month our PEC newsletter publisher, Anne Johnson, suggested that the theme for this month's newsletter should be Giving Thanks. So I thought about this trying to find a tip or trick that would tie my monthly article to this topic. I finally found that link! My work-related tasks in September led me to the content for this article. That is, giving thanks to my clients for sharing your personal life and interests with me AND for continuing to show an interest in my life

Make using your Act! database easier for your users. The easier it is to use, the more your people will use it. Training can help them build strategies and teach shortcuts, but you should take away the guessing and additional typing as much as possible. Here some things you could do: Ensure that your users can choose most of their standard responses from dropdowns rather than having to type the information each time-especially in the history regarding. Create templates for those often

Lifehacker.com says, “Mind mapping is one of the best ways to capture your thoughts and bring them to life in visual form.” Mind mapping allows you to capture your thoughts or those of a group in a very unstructured way and then tie those thoughts together as you go along. It is great for brainstorming ideas without the structure of outlines and notes. According to Tony Buzan, “A Mind Map is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain.

Over the last few years there phishing incidents have been on the rise, playing havoc with many small business and individual users. Even large businesses can be a target. The only way for a computer user to avoid these threats is to recognize a phishing email/phone call and know what to do (or not do). To understand what these threats are let’s start with the basics: What is Phishing? Phishing is an attempt to get someone to give sensitive information such as username, password, and

I recently worked with a client who had a CRM at their organization but they were using it as a glorified rolodex.  When I asked them why they had not taken the product to the next level, they asked me why should they? They wanted to know the benefits. Keeping track of your customers is one way to guarantee more sales. It's such a simple thing. Understand what they want, advise them on what's available, offer them good pricing and support, and you make sales. However that assumes you've

For those of us in service-based businesses it is important to track the time we spend on various projects. A contact manager like Act! is great for tracking appointments and to-dos, but as our lives get busier and more complicated, we find we need a more fluid system. That is why I went searching for an application to track my hours in real time. I began with a simple Excel spreadsheet – as I imagine a lot of people do. Once I started using this spreadsheet I realized a couple of limitations