One of our favorite reporting tools for ACT and SQL is Stonefield Query.  They have issued a new release. In this release: 1. Stonefield Query is compatible with the new Act! 2014 Service Pack 1 (16.1). 2. A new chart type is now available: Donut, which is similar to Pie but with a hole in the middle. 3. New fields "Activity User ID", "Activity User Name", and "Is Organizer Record" have been added to the Company Activity, Contact Activity, Group Activity, and Opportunity Activity tables

Quotewerks has released 4.9.7 of their software Since October 1, 2013, there have been 16 QuoteWerks updates released containing over 145 new featurs.  We love Quotewerks and whenever they come out with an update it's always full of improvements.  The integration with ACT is seamless and makes creating opportunities a snap. Nice new features are a scripting language, undo/redo on multiple levels, a dashboard, Google contacts as a source for Contacts, and an active

ACT has a new eMarketing product.  This feature has been added to ACT v16 Service Pack 1.  It has an easy-to-use template editor so you don't have to be a graphics wizard to product nice looking marketing campaigns.   You can create, send, and track professional campaigns that reach customers and prospects with the right message at the right time, and know who to follow up with first with intelligent, prioritized Call Lists– all from within Act.  NOTE: this feature is only

It's been another week of intensive Excel projects and once again I used several tricks I've learned over the years.  It occurred to me that they would make a good short blog article.  Here is one of the techniques.  I'll post another blog article soon with more ideas. Working with Dates. I am often helping clients convert data that's been given to them by vendors or trade shows.  Sometimes the dates come over all jammed together without slashes or in text mode.  To

Recently, a website was disabled that is called by ACT when it opens.  The missing website makes ACT open very slowly.  There is a fix for this.  This blog article will describe the fix and will give credit to the person who found this and documented it for us. A product called Sage ACT Connect is going away to be replaced by a soon-to-be-named alternative, but in the mean time, the URL that supported this tool - http://sageact.sageconnectedservices.com was turned off.  ACT

Recently, I had a very interesting but somewhat unpopular conversation with my staff.  The  topic was  multi-tasking - or in this case, the inability to do so.  It turns out this is hard to do in our ever changing world.  There are constant interruptions and distractions that make it a challenge to keep on track.  In this case,  I wasn't asking for them to build me a space ship to go out in search of the final frontier.  We all just needed to step it up a

Once again I showed a tip to a sales rep that is so simple but so effective.  The application we are using is ACT, but this could be done with any CRM. We were going over his processes and were discussing how to make his sales calls more effective.  Lately, we are spending quite a bit of time doing business and sales coaching.  One thing that frustrated my client was going out to call on someone and they were not there or had been called away.  This happens quite a lot, even

In an interesting dialog last week, KPIs, or key performance indicators, were the topic but it occurred to me during the discussion that it meant different things to the participants on the call.  That inspried me to write this blog article. What do KPI's mean? And what do they mean to you and your organization. Wikipedia says: "A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. An organization may use KPIs to evaluate its success, or to