Here's another one of our "We love your tips" posts. I have now helped two clients resolve this issue so I thought - hm - let me turn it into a blog article. By now, I think everyone knows I adore the Swiftpage eMarketing tool.  It's what I use for my marketing campaigns and I have dozens of clients using it as well.  Lately, some of my clients have been having problems editing their HTML templates.  In all the cases, it turned out to be an issue with Internet Explorer (IE

It's time for another ACT Tip.  This week, one of our clients upgraded to ACT V16 so they could utilize some of the great new features.  One of their newest sales staff was using the web based version and loved the flexibility.  He could access his details from a customer site and didn't have to carry his "heavy" laptop.  His next purchase is going to be a small tablet, but in the mean time he has been happy with just jumping on a browser when at a client site.  Until

When you hear the term ROI, I am betting you are thinking money.  When I buy this stock, what will be my return.  If I invest in a business, will I get my money back. According to Wikipedia, ROI, or Return on Investment “is the concept of an investment of some resource yielding a benefit to the investor.”  Basically it means whatever you invest, be it money, time or effort, you are expecting some form of benefit. Often I am asked by clients to help them get across

We will periodically get calls from customers complaining that ACT syncs run forever or their ACT database is running too slow.  Before killing the computer, as the graphic alludes to, instead it's better to look at what is the root cause of the problem.  Usually, at this point we ask a couple of questions then we logon to their database and start checking a few things.  One of the things we look at is the size of the ALF file. An ACT database is a SQL database and is really two

Recently, I read a great article talking about calling prospects.  The main point of the article was that not all leads were equal - you needed to mix it up when reaching out to potential clients.   One of the questions people often ask is how many times should a prospect be called before you give up and call it a dead lead.  The article said it depended on the size of the business.  Smaller business owners were able to make decisions quicker while larger organizations had "

You can configure fields on ACT! Envelopes, Labels and Reports to collapse for contacts with no data in that field by enabling the Collapse if blank attribute for that field on the template. Follow the steps below: From the Report Designer and the Envelope, Label or Report template; right-click the field you wish to collapse for contacts with no data, and then click Properties from the shortcut menu. The Field Properties dialog box appears:  

I love creating groups in ACT - or for that matter, in any CRM.  It's a way of consolidating contacts into meaningful relationships.  Examples are christmas lists, prospects, do not call or email, and many others.  A client of mine has a "big spender" group - really.  You know what that one contains - it's his customers that he wants to ensure get TLC treatment. As a contact database grows, it is wise to create groups to make accessing the contacts faster.  If you have

By default, ACT will return 50 results whenever you do a search using Universal Search.  To increase or decrease this number, do the following: Close ACT!. Open Windows® Services screen and locate ACT! Service Host. Right click on the service and select Stop. Using Windows Explorer, browse to the Sage ACT! installation directory. 32-bit operating system default: C:\Program Files\ACT\Act for Windows 64-bit operating system default: C:\Program Files (x86)\ACT\Act