Several years ago I had the pleasure of meeting a new client who has also become a friend. His name is Reese Griffin. He is now retired, and was lastly a SVP at Boston Mutual Life. He's a born and bred southerner from Tennessee. Reese came to us looking for Act consulting. He is a devotee of the product and has been for years. It runs his world and he's almost lost without it. I was impressed with how well he used it and how he made it a vital part of his every day actions. Often,

We have a great tool that I had my programmer write years ago. It's called Duplicate Remover Expert for Act. We sell a lot of this nifty product. I had a client call me recently, told me they loved the program, but were very frustrated that they always seemed to have duplicates. He also wanted some tips on finding those duplicates that the normal internal process didn't detect. After giving him my answers, I realized they needed to be in a blog post and this is that article. First off, there

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