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

Service Pack 1 for Sage ACT! (Pro and Premium) was released yesterday (January 8, 2013).  This release addresses issues that users have requested in Sage ACT! and focuses on staying current with technology trends. The most significant changes to this release are compatibility updates to fully support the following new platforms: Microsoft Windows 8 Windows Server 2012 Windows SBS 2011 Internet Explorer 10 IOS 6 for iPhone and iPad The Social Updates feature, introduced in the

I just learned something and thought I'd pass it along to people who are interested in Sage ACT dashboards and viewing them on the web. Behind the scenes, there is an XML file located in the Tools folder under Program Files that controls what templates are available for building dashboards in Sage ACT.  You can create your own SQL commands and embed them in this file by following the instructions at the top of the XML file. Ok, so, if you add this SQL statement to the Act.dashboard.

Back in 2009 I wrote a blog article about staying nimble in a bleak economy.  It is sad to note that we are still in that environment.  That made me think it was time to revisit this post and see what had changed.  Interestingly, not much.  I've added a few new items, but here is my take on what we are doing to stay ahead of the grim business reaper. Staying in business is important to my staff and I and we are celebrating our 15th year anniversary in 2013 and I want to make

Once again, I turned to Excel for a data cleanup project. It occurred to me that this would make a good blog article. Here's some techniques I use to help me handle data cleanup. Keeping data together Occasionally, I want to remove blank or incomplete rows. Or, I need to sort by a specific field (for example CITY) so I can find data that are in the wrong columns. If I sort by City, without a particular key, I could potentially lose the correct order for my data. The solution is to add a column