Question: Is there a way to skip a campaign stage "on the fly"? SAM will process all of the stages in a campaign if conditions are met. It will stop processing if the conditions are not met. If you want to skip a stage you either do it manually or you create intelligence in the campaign to handle it automatically. The Manual method: You look up the contacts in Act! and change the campaign stage to whatever stage comes after the stage you want to skip. Using Otherwise to automatically skip a

Question: I'm using SAM and Mail Merge on two different Act! databases for two different companies.  How do I make sure the merged templates use the correct email account to when sending email messages? First, you need to set up an account in Mail Merge for each email address you will be using. Next, you will need a copy of the campaign for each database (with unique names). Now, you have a few options for specifying the sender in the "send email action" in your SAM campaigns: If you

If you have used Web Prospect to download mail from an existing account and ended up with hundreds of emails that you want to purge (not process), there is a simple way to do this outside of the program. The email that is downloaded for processing is kept in this folder: %APPDATA% then "\Roaming\Northwoods Software\WP\Registrations." If you remove the items from that directory, that will clear the queue in Web Prospect. It would be best to have Web Prospect closed when you do this, and when you

Mail Merge uses "MF_Fields" to allow you to personalize messages when you use a particular account to send/create them.  The best practice is to fill in/create the MF Fields on the account prior to using these fields in your template and running a SAM campaign that includes that template. If you do not add the data to the account BEFORE running your SAM campaign, you will be prompted for it when you run your campaign. If you enter data when prompted, you may end up with "hidden" data in

If you want to use GMail or Yahoo Mail with Mail Merge or Web Prospect there are a few settings on your account that will need to be adjusted. First, you can't have 2-step authentication enabled on your Gmail account. Second, you need to enable "less secure apps" in your Gmail account. For Yahoo, you can edit these settings at https://login.yahoo.com/account/security. For the account settings, you should be using the following for Gmail: SMTP server = smtp.gmail.com SMTP Login Username =

When you run a campaign on a database for the first time, SAM adds 2 Contact fields to that Act! database. One holds the stage of the contact for the campaign, and the other holds the date that the campaign was last run on that contact. To remove a campaign from a database, you do the opposite...you go into your Act! database and delete those 2 fields. When you remove the fields it's also good to remove them from your Contact Layout (if they were added). Then you can also delete or archive the

Oftentimes in our workflows we need to compare a date field in our database to determine what happens next.  However, what do you do if there is no value in the date field you are comparing? The idiom to test if a date field in Act! is non-blank (contains a valid date) is to use the Compare Field pre-condition. Set the Fieldname to be the Act! date field you're comparing, the Operation to "x*y" (contains), the Value to the constant "/" (with the quotes), and set Type (optional)  

You start Sales Automation Manager and get a pop-up like this: Unfortunately that message is accurate - the file where SAM keeps most of the options set on the SAM screens is corrupt and unreadable. To fix it, you delete the file, restart SAM, and reset your options on the screen. The easiest way to find the file is to open up Windows File Explorer and type %APPDATA% in the address bar at the top of the screen. Then drill down from there into the directories Northwoods Software and then

If your mail is hosted with Microsoft Exchange, and you are using Web Prospect to pull mail in from an Exchange mailbox, you'll need to use the following settings: POP Server = smtp.office365.com POP Username = this is your email address POP Password = the password for your email address POP Port = 995 + make sure you put a check in the Use SSL box The settings should look like the image below: Click the "test mail settings" button, and if your settings were entered

If your mail is hosted with Microsoft on Office365/Hosted Exchange, these settings should work in Mail Merge as long as you enter the correct account information: SMTP server = smtp.office365.com SMTP login User name = the email address of the account you want to use SMTP Login Password = the password for the email address of the account you want to use From Email Address = the email address of the account you want to use Port = 587 Use SSL/TLS = checked Please note that this information