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

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

Recently during a staff meeting, we had a discussion about QuickBooks data security features and how they compared to those in a competitive product. Specifically, a client did not like that a QuickBooks user could change a transaction from a prior year. Data integrity and accuracy is important to all business owners, but especially to small business owners. Misinformation in a business accounting file can result in inaccurate tax filings, re-direct business owner to miss fraudulent

As a small business owner, you just spent a lot of money to purchase new business-critical software and the hardware to run it. How much of that investment may be wasted because it is not used it to its potential? Did you just load the software on workstations and say, “Just figure it out. How hard can it be? - Oh, and by the way, get all your regular work done too.” Have you given your staff members the tools they need to use the new technology more effectively? Do your business processes

Recently I got back from a much needed vacation and was lamenting about how much work and emails had piled up in my absence.  Yes, I have an amazing crew who handled the majority of the calls, but they too were very grateful we were back because we as the owners were the ones with some of the answers or who several of our clients insisted were the only ones to talk with. Sigh. That’s when you start asking yourself is it worth it as a small business owner to take a vacation because of