Sometimes it's the little things that matter.  You work with a software program for so long that you "assume" someone else knows the tricks and tips.  Ah, yes, you know what they say about assuming.  Well, it happened again.  While working with a client showing them my Company Wizard Plus add-on for ACT, I did one of my favorite tricks and the client went - "whoa, stop right there - what did you just do."  I had hit Ctrl A to highlight all contacts in the list. &

We are super excited about the announcement that Swiftpage, one of our favorite companies, is purchasing Sage ACT.  This is a great  shot in the arm for ACT and we expect to see great things happen from this purchase. Here's a section of their press release from February 15th: "Swiftpage, provider of the leading digital marketing platform for small business, announced it has reached an agreement with The Sage Group plc to acquire the Sage ACT! contact management and Sage SalesLogix

Once again we are sitting around the business "camp fire" discussing why people think it is not fair when we say we charge for answering questions. We are a consulting firm. That's what we do. The advantage we have over other support numbers is we know the answers quicker so it may take someone 1 hour of waiting on hold for a support person who "may" know the answer when we answer the phone immediately (usually...) and have the answer within 5 to 15 minutes or less. So, they are already ahead of

[caption id="attachment_1300" align="alignleft" width="210"] Are you working too hard on your Sage ACT report?[/caption] Just got off the phone with a client and realized this might be a great blog article. The most loved/feared report in Sage ACT is the Notes/History report.  This shows what you have been (or - this is the feared part - haven't been doing) over the last several weeks.  I can always tell when someone is having an issue with their database when we get the Friday or

Recently two of my staff were having a discussion about ways to get people to let us know if a quote was still a go.  One of my people came from an organization that was very aggressive in their sales techniques.  He wasn't really fond of that aggression nor are aggressive tactics our style, but he remembered something that actually worked really well.  You put either ANY NEWS or IS THIS DEAD? in the subject line of an email.  Nothing goes in the body of the email

After upgrading to Office 2010 I noticed I could no longer get a Record History box to come up after printing a mail merge document in Sage ACT.  This is how it has worked forever.  I did some research and found one of the solutions was to ensure that a line was on the Hosts file in Windows.  Microsoft had sent out an update to "protect" computers from malware and in the process commented out a line that ACT needed to make the Office and ACT connection work. So, armed with this

A few months ago I had a great lunch with a friend here in town who owns a marketing firm that has a particular emphasis on social media.  One of the things we discussed is the changing face of marketing.   What is also changing is the role of sales and salespeople. My company is really starting to focus on changing how we sell and market based on what I am seeing in the industry.  The whole topic gave me the idea for today's post. I’m going to start it off with

If you have ever worked with drop down lists in Sage ACT, you know that you can import items to populate the list.  The list has to be a text file with the items one per line, enclosed in double quotes. I like to use Excel to key in the data, sort it, remove duplicates, etc.  Then save the file as a text file.  However, it doesn't put in the double quotes. Here's a formula you can insert in a column next to the data.  Assume the text items are in the A Column. =concatenate