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

I've been working with a client recently and we're getting ready to upgrade their Act! As part of the project, I asked my client what was their defined sales process.  And I got the answer I was actually expecting. There was none. Most of the sales reps had been selling this product line for years. They knew what to do. It just came naturally to them.  So I asked him were they planning on bringing anyone on board who was not familiar with the products or how they all sell.  He

One of the features of Act! is the ability to create Word templates that can then be auto populated with fields from the act database.  The classic details pulled into the document are company name, contact name, addresses, etc. A tip we often show is adding last contact interaction information such as the last time the contact was called or had a meeting.  If you use the Act! calendar and clear out the activities, Act! automatically records that information as Last Reach (phone calls

We all know that procrastination can get you into trouble. You can lose data if you don’t backup your computer/database, you can lose a customer if you don’t follow-up when you said you would, and you sure don’t want to be at a meeting at the wrong place on the wrong day or time. So what can you do? Act! to the rescue! Use the Act! Calendar and Task List Have you ever gotten to the office and thought, “I know there was someone I was supposed to call” but you cannot remember who it was

Last week was National Procrastination Week so it inspired a theme for some of the articles in our monthly newsletter (which ironically is one week late.) That is just dripping in irony. For years, I have been a proponent of time management and organization. But I can and do procrastinate when there is something I simply don’t want to handle. Whether it’s that grumpy customer or an employee issue, the situation isn’t going away. It’s best to deal with it head on. The hard things you

Act! v19 has been released and we are currently rolling it out to customers. With each new release, Act! keeps fixing outstanding issues or requirements from customer feedback. In addition, it is improving and modernizing the application to fit the current environment. One of the most exciting aspects of the recent releases is the WebAPI. It has put in place a rich infrastructure to allow Act! to interact and communicate with other applications, such as Quickbooks online, EventBrite, Paypal and