Every week I try to have a social media "theme" and this week it's Tips and Tricks. Last week we helped a client who couldn’t get Act to open after Windows did an update without him asking. Nothing appeared to be wrong. I asked him if he had rebooted and he said yes, multiple times. Then, I did my normal “call in the guru” (that being my husband) and he said have him do a RESTART and not a reboot. I’ve been working with PC’s forever and I “thought” reboot and restart were the

For years, there has been a diagnostics tool included with Act. It's called Actdiag. While it's not a tool that everyone will want to use, it's powerful and can get your Act database out of a jam in a crisis. There are several options that Actdiag can handle. The one I am going to cover today is Reindex. Within Act, under the Tools menu, there is a database maintenance option that an Administrator can use to Check and Repair a database. This is something that should be done on a regular basis

It's hard to come up with fresh materials for social media. Every weekend when I plan out my tweets for the week, I've settled on having a general theme. It helps me gather material and puts a focus on things that come up spontaneously throughout the week. As I have said before, life in general is the best producer of ideas for posts. My social media theme this week in Nurture Marketing. What led me to this idea was actually reading another article about selling. The article talked about

We’ve all heard the saying, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”  Maybe you can’t MAKE him drink, but... you can ENTICE him to drink. You can provide beautiful, convenient and tasty water so that he WANTS to drink.  Let’s apply this analogy to software UI (screen layout) design. Designing a user interface that is attractive, intuitive and efficient is key for user adoption and ultimately, imperative to the success of your software implementation

During a meeting last week we were discussing a book to review during a quarterly education event coming up. Cleaning out my desk drawers the week before, I stumbled upon a miniature edition of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  I suggested we use that as our book review. It's timeless and still very relevant. That idea made me go look for the full size version and I re-read it over the weekend. Well, mostly I sped-read it. The reading event triggered my blog post today. Every

I've been working with a client recently and we're getting ready to upgrade their Act! As part of the project, I asked my client what was their defined sales process.  And I got the answer I was actually expecting. There was none. Most of the sales reps had been selling this product line for years. They knew what to do. It just came naturally to them.  So I asked him were they planning on bringing anyone on board who was not familiar with the products or how they all sell.  He

One of the features of Act! is the ability to create Word templates that can then be auto populated with fields from the act database.  The classic details pulled into the document are company name, contact name, addresses, etc. A tip we often show is adding last contact interaction information such as the last time the contact was called or had a meeting.  If you use the Act! calendar and clear out the activities, Act! automatically records that information as Last Reach (phone calls

We have all known procrastinators or have been one at some point ourselves. Managing a procrastinator can be a frustrating and difficult situation. Let’s face it, procrastination not only affects our business but it affects our sanity. One of the obligations of a good manager is to mentor those we manage and help them achieve their project and career goals. There are ways to help a procrastinator from falling into those same destructive patterns. One way to help them is to find a way to help