New Site! www.zip-city.com has moved and improved!

loved this site, i have.  blogspot is free and easy to use, but a real wordpress site was calling me.  so this is the final post.  boo hoo.

you might want to wander over to the new site and take a gander.  it's pretty spiffy and it will be something to be proud of.   www.zip-city.com will get you there and the site itself will keep you there.

screenshot for the wary:

thank you, and the 118,000 or so other folks who have dropped in here in the last 3 1/2 years.  we'll see you on the other side!

thanks!  +bevan

Swiftpage Acquisition ACT! CRM: Update

Swifpage Progress with the ACT product.

In the next few months I will have more to share about the direction Swiftpage is taking the ACT product.  Exciting news of the moment:

• The next version of ACT will not be called 2014. It will be v16.
• v16 will be the last annual release. Sage stuck to an annual release cycle. Swiftpage will not.
• Be prepared to hear a lot about ACT through a broad distribution channel. Swiftpage has, in its first six weeks, signed on with 20 partners representing access to 30M small business users. Ubiquity is the goal.
• Swiftpage is building a new SaaS product, from the ground up, to support the product line.
• Expect tighter integration with Swiftpage's flagship products for email marketing and drip marketing.
• Look for a drag-and-drop email marketing design front-end.
• ...and I can't wait to see the Business Intelligence model, currently in concept form, when it makes its way into our application platform.

There is more to come and it affects every level of the company; you, as a longtime user, and me, as a long time ACT consultant. Look for news to pop up around ACT and Swiftpage. You will see it from places like Staples, hibu.com, and Comcast, as well as through social media outlets. ACT will be making a splash, but even better, ACT is now in the hands of a team that can take the product, and your experience with it, in a very positive direction.

Swiftpage expands its HQ with a move to downtown Denver
http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/print-edition/2013/05/24/swiftpage-hq-comes-to-downtown-denver.html

Sage ACT 2013 Email Marketing

Email Marketing in ACT? You're soaking in it. Because you are reading this post you are participating in a fully automated, successful, marketing campaign that began in an ACT database. Can your organization do this, too? Yes, and it should be one of the things we do now to make our business thrive in 2013.

Following up on our summary post, Do One Thing (click to view the post), where we asked you to do one of five things with your ACT database now to improve business in 2013, we now focus on email marketing. Read on to learn the simple steps we can take now to get our message out to our base.

We do this every day. Let's just automate the whole shebang.

We are used to providing great information to individual prospects and customers all the time. Sometimes different folks ask the same questions. That's our queue. Develop a templated piece to respond to frequent requests and seem brilliant to the reader by anticipating their need. Never mind our benefit: the templated process saves us time.

Here we walk through the 4-step process to launch our own campaign:

1. Determine who our readers are and a messaging strategy to engage them.
2. Collect content and graphics.
3. Merge data from our ACT database into our template.
4. Track our results in ACT.
5. Bonus #1: Set up a drip marketing campaign.
6. Bonus #2: Automate e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g

Do this and change everything. Now to roll up our sleeves and get started:

1. Our Readers and Their Message:
Low-hanging fruit. Our initial target market may best be described as our most productive. Let's start this conversation with them in mind. To summarize all the marketing gurus on this topic, we would be served best by speaking in a voice they want to hear.

Our Reader. We have to find them in our database. Do we go get every contact with an email address? We should focus on a segment, really. Exclude vendors, media, antagonists, etc. Include prospects, customers. Any segmentation we have built into our database will now be very useful.

Using ACT lookups or groups to segment our list is basic stuff. Let's consider making a dynamic group based on more complex criteria to ensure great precision for our intended mailing list.

Their Message: Again, to summarize the gurus, mix up the message. Provide valuable information our readers want to read with other messages to which we may refer as A Call to Action. A mix of messages might look like this:

1. Information*
2. Information
3. Case Study
4. Call to Action
5. Repeat

The trick is to land a message in a reader's inbox at a moment when they need what we have to offer. Building credibility with a consistent campaign of messaging will assist us at the precise moment our reader needs us. Be consistent, be useful, and reap the reward.

*"Information" should not be confused with specifications. We have all sat through Powerpoint presentations full of facts and figures. Yawn. Our email needs to capture our intended reader's imagination. Our message needs to inform.  Our broadcast needs to be magic. Approach technical data with a very light touch. The time to amaze the prospect with our technical brilliance will come further into the sales cycle.

2. Do this now: We need content. Sourcing content is better than creating it from scratch. It takes less time. Let's use content we have on our website, or information we created for brochures or a blog post, then modify this content for use in an email. Take a moment to cruise through your store of content now, wherever it might be, and collect a few pieces that come closest to magical.

Where do we find graphics?  See that one-oared row boat up there? Go ahead and google "rowing circles". Take the image and smarten it up a bit in Photoshop and we have a header.

The approach in the email you see from me relies on finding memorable images and putting them to use.  Hence our Madge.

Another approach is to maintain a consistent look based on a brand, corporate image, or logo. If we want to maintain a consistent image for our reader this is one way to do it and limit the resources devoted to image manipulation.

Pull graphics specific to our message. Machine parts, children benefiting from charitable giving, training sessions, design samples, tropical paradise... whatever our focus will be, make sure the image supports the message and make sure the image supports the magic.

3. The Send.
Now for the fun part. Let's merge our ACT! contacts into our template to broadcast our message.

The benefit of using an integrated application, like SEMA (Sage Email Marketing for ACT!, licensed by Swiftpage Email) is the entire process is guided from within the ACT! interface. We create our lookup of contacts in ACT! and we get to review our Open/Click results from within ACT! The marketing process is self-contained. While slicker applications exist for content creation or reporting, the true benefit of using SEMA is the breath-taking end-to-end management in the same place your contact relationships are managed.

We do our lookup, or choose our group of contacts, select our template and... when should we send this thing? With the Pro or Team versions of SEMA we may choose when to send our email. Scheduling our send is a great option. For B2B (Business-to-Business) models we try to get the email out on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays early in the day. For B2C (Business-to-Consumer), nights and weekends are recommended, and for B2G (Business-to-Government), anytime during the work week would not be inappropriate.

Our SEMA account can easily connect to social media accounts, too. To exercise this option, all we need to do is open our SEMA profile and simply configure our accounts so SEMA may log in automatically on our behalf when we check the appropriate boxes as shown in the diagram below. Using social media to expand our reach beyond our email list is automatic and simple.

In addition, using the Team edition ($59.95/mo.), we can send as another user. This is particularly useful when the marketing team develops the campaigns with the intent that the message is crafted on behalf of a user who has a direct relationship with the recipient. With Send As the user with the relationship would never need to bother with the content creation nor the sending, but would get all the responses directly.

4. Tracking results.

Our every campaign gets granular attention, ensuring we know how our email is succeeding, both at the contact level, as well as overall. SEMA manages the math for us, scoring our recipient opens and clicks we can use later for creating Call Lists either online as part of the reporting tool, or directly in Sage ACT! Ideally, we will be following up with our hottest scoring recipients. If they are opening and clicking we should be calling. Call Lists are available in the Pro edition ($49.95/mo.)

First, we name our outbound email to correlate it with an overall campaign. In this example Do One Thing is a campaign comprised of six emails, all of which will be tracked with the name "One Thing". Sometimes a single email will have its own name, but let's consider grouping our campaigns under one banner Name so we may consolidate some of our reporting later.

When we send, SEMA will ask us to update our history records in ACT! This allows us to take action after our results come back in. Here is an example of the history SEMA writes back into our Sage ACT! database:

Using the ACT! Advanced Lookup by Keyword (Lookup menu > Advanced > Search on keywords...) we can, for example, find all contacts who have opted out on a campaign (Score= -01) . Because SEMA posts all updates to our Contact History, this will be where we search. See below:

We have a very powerful tool in our database for tracking interest generated by our email campaign, the Marketing Results tab in our ACT! database. Within the tab we may decide to track the results of a particular campaign we saved in SEMA. Below we saved a list of recipients scored for the Do One Thing campaign, abbreviated to One Thing with the suffix of 01 to designate this as the first of six emails in the campaign:

If we send out the same template more than once, or if we conduct a send as part of a drip campaign (more on this in a moment), then SEMA will aggregate the scoring for us.  Now that the scores are coming in and we have brought the scores into ACT! from the SEMA control panel, Results tab, the scores are ready for us to use. Want a lookup of all the contacts who opened our email sorted by score? Click the Look Up button:

If we want to create a list of recipients that clicked on a particular link, or clicked at a particular time, etc., that level of detail is available from the SEMA reporting tool. SEMA will push such data into a .CSV file format that may be delivered to our inbox where it may be analysed in a spreadsheet or imported back into ACT! for action.

5. Drip Marketing.
We could repeat steps one through four over and over if we wanted to, or we could do it once and let SEMA take over from there. In fact, we can add conditional statements to the mix.  A query in ACT! can guide how a contact in our database will hear from us, or how often. Imagine finding a way to connect with all the contacts in our database for whom we do not have an email address, for instance. Our drip campaign can be asked to evaluate whether the contact does, or does not, have an email address, and if they do not, then they are queued up for a direct mail piece instead, as an example.

If prospects are receiving email from us that is different than what our customers receive, AND a prospect then becomes a customer, then let SEMA take that new customer out of the prospect email list and drop them into the customer email list.

• Drip campaigns are great for sending a monthly newsletter. 
• Drips can be set up so a new contact starts off with the first email, while another, more senior contact may be on the 8th email, all part of the same campaign. 
• Got a trade show coming up? Use an anchor date to send out invitations to visit the booth, then to join us in the VIP room, to highlight the speaking schedule, directions from the airport... all up to the day of the event. Then afterward, to thank them for coming to the show, or to share highlights.

That's Drip. Do it well and keep those relationships with our prospects, customers, members, and donors strong.

Drip is a service we would buy in addition to our SEMA edition. The price range is $29.95/mo. to $149.95/mo. with significant features added as we walk up the scale. To see all the pricing on two pages (one for SEMA and the second for Drip), simply click on the 60-day Free Trial link at the top of this post and then click on the pricing link on the top-right of the landing page.

6. Automate Automate Automate.

Using Sage ACT! 2013 Smart Tasks we can deliver contacts in our database to a campaign, or a simple email template. The tool is so cool we will devote the fifth entry in this series to this feature. For now please take a look at our post on creating an automated checklist in ACT! using two separate Smart Tasks here. Looking for a planning guide for setting up a Smart Task? We have one posted here.

The opportunity to better connect with our contacts exists in successfully interacting with our email tools. Attract new business and retain existing accounts by delivering relevant and consistent messaging to the contacts in our database. The ROI on email marketing is the highest of all the tools in the marketing toolbox. If we Do One Thing in our Sage ACT! database to improve our business in the coming year, perhaps adding email marketing would be a great candidate!

The series, Do One Thing, continues with Layout customization next.  Perhaps the simplest of all tasks on our Do One Thing list, we will look at how to evaluate the mess our database has become and decide what we want to do about it. Wouldn't it be great to start the new business cycle with a clean database and a clean layout? That old one is looking dreadful, isn't it?

Sage ACT 2013 Opportunity Management

What can we do with Opportunities in ACT!? Following up on our summary last week, Do One Thing (click to view the post), we now focus on taking action.  Let's embrace opportunities in our Sage ACT! database to improve business performance in 2013.

Design and Embed Business Processes in Sage ACT! Opportunities.

Here we walk through the process required to re-engineer our business in the ACT opportunity entity. We have a few moving parts here, but stick with the steps and realize a permanent benefit if we seek to gain more traction with every prospect in our pipeline:

1. Identify our Processes and the Stages within them.
2. Modify our Product List to reflect method for recognizing revenue.
3. Special circumstances? Customize Fields and the Opportunity Layout to reflect our specialized market.
4. Tracking ROI.

Tracking this information against the contact record currently? You're not alone. Here we hope to make the case that the one-contact-has-many opportunities case. What can be tracked solely against the ACT! contact record turns out to be very limiting. Take a look at moving to opportunities. Do this and change everything. Now to roll up our sleeves and get started:

1. Business Processes and Stages: 

We all know how we approach any opportunity we identify. Whether we sell a product, a service, membership, subscriptions, brokerage, loans, space, time, events, or ideas, we need to focus on where our relationship-driven revenue is generated, and how it is generated.  

Simplicity is key. Let's say we sell widgets and have a service to install those widgets, in this example we want to track all the opportunities for:

1. New sales
2. New service
3. Cross-sales and up-sales
4. Maintenance and support

Because our interactions with new prospects are likely to be different than the interactions we have with existing customers, and in this example we may have a different approach to selling a product than we do with service and maintenance, we then want to identify the unique stages associated with each process.

Do this now:

Open a notepad and write down what you sell.  This is NOT a product list (we will get to that in a moment).  Look at the big picture: we sell left-handed widgets and we sell right-handed widgets, sure, but the process is the same for both.  If we sell widget accessories and parts, in this example, those lines of revenue may be more transactional (closing on one phone call), rather than more relationship driven (requiring full engagement), and may not need to be tracked in your ACT! database.

Identify your market segmentation.  It may be as simple as a single vertical, or it may be more complicated.  Remember, keep it simple so updates, tracking, and reporting are more meaningful. Getting this right is important.

Now, for each process identified, create a series of Stages, or steps, required to complete the process. These are NOT activities, though they are always the outcome of those activities. In our example of New Sales of widgets we may have the following Stages:

Customize Processes and Stages from the Tools | Define Fields
and select Manage process list

1. Identify (We recognize a potential opportunity)
2. Qualify  (We engaged the prospect and determined the fit is good)
3. Quote (We provide a quote or proposal)
4. Done... We get the business or we don't and update the opportunity Status (Closed - Won, or Closed - Lost), appropriately.

View these stages as your prospect might, aligning your process stages to the prospect's motivation to engage. While your methodology may dictate whether you proceed, the stages you define in your ACT! database remain true to the process.

Probability.
Before we commit our processes to the database let's establish our probability percentages to our stages. The Probability of Close becomes important when we view all our opportunities, all our users' opportunities, in an aggregated list view.

When we create our Stages the Probability is an optional point of data feeding our Weighted Total. For instance, we may have empirical data (or even just a feeling) that for every ten of our opportunities that come in at the Identify stage, only one advances to the Qualify stage. Therefore, the Probability for the Identify stage would be 10%.  This number may be adjusted to reflect your actual close percentages as reporting improves with real-world data.

For every stage, in each process, associate a percentage.

2. Product List
What do we sell? Homes, memberships, medical supplies, design services, mortgages, architectural components, landscaping, booth space, executives, software, expertise, rooms, banks, balloons, airplane timeshares, yachts, widgets... you name it. What do our customers buy? Millions of pages are printed every day answering this very question.

When we structure our opportunities we build on the components making up those opportunities. What our own product list looks like may define our niche. How we sell the items on this list may be what defines us as a company, hence the reams of reports.

To keep the conversation of how we present this in our Product List simple let's look at two ways to view out list: Brief and Comprehensive.

Comprehensive.  If we are looking for an accurate list of products, down to the last wing nut, it is likely we would be a great candidate for integrating our ACT! database with our accounting application where this sort of detail is essential. This way, quotes may be generated by ACT! users with up-to-the-minute accuracy.  The Product List in ACT! is synchronized with, say, Quickbooks, nightly. Accountability is guaranteed. Take a look at the very affordable and comprehensive ACT!<->Quickbooks link, QSalesData, for this sort of integration. When our own reams are generated they will be rich with really groovy data well suited for our widget business.

ACT! Manage Product List accessible from Tools | Define Fields menu.

Brief. Our line may be more amorphous. Realtors come to mind. Our clients are either buying, leasing, or selling, a home. (Three processes, by the way). Our Product List may have as few as two items on it: Home and Rental. We could add things like Land, etc., depending on the specialty, but that's the point.  Just a few items and the costs and prices of these items would be different for each opportunity. The reporting doesn't suffer from applied brevity.

Commissions.  Recognizing revenue based on the margin between the Price of an item and the "Cost"? We can find ACT! manages this very well. Should our commission be based on the Margin, ACT! will track this number with a system field, doing the math for us on stock reports.  No more spreadsheets. Complicated commissions? Let's manage those in custom tables associated with our opportunities. Call me if this is of interest.

3. Custom Opportunity Fields.
Tracking the particulars of a deal often requires we track special data. Work with suppliers to whom you would like to present a WHYDFML (what have you done for me lately) report? Add a field with a dropdown of suppliers. Done. Is there a checklist of tasks that need to be completed for each type of opportunity? Add those fields, appropriate dropdowns, and automate the completion of those checklist tasks. Done. (See our recent post on how to do this, with step-by-step instructions here).

Corporate inside sales reps? Marketing referral codes? Product or service categories of interest? Portfolio requirements? Split commissions? Effective dates? Regions or territories? Done. Done. Done. Done. ...and Done.

During our notepad moment, detailing Processes and Stages, we think deeply of all aspects of our potential deals. What we commit to the database will likely be permanent and unchanging. More transitory information will likely be captured as an Opportunity History item: a call completed, a meeting held. Elements of our process, hard-boiled elements, will be tracked. To track that information we will create fields in the opportunity entity. The example above works inside the zip city operating database and shows many custom fields in a custom layout. Do this one thing well and change everything.

4. The case for ROI.
The holy grail of opportunities, perfected: Return on Investment. If you are still reading you have arrived to the payoff. We have taken all the data we used to collect against the contact records in our database and made room for it in the revamped opportunity entity, using our sales strategy to craft a selling machine. Now we leverage this new business intelligence and make it work for us. The reporting potential is astonishing, but here we will look at ROI.

Need to know if an initiative is paying off? Of many initiatives, which is our most productive? Periodic sales and marketing meetings will benefit from hard numbers. Collect opportunities tagged with either a referral source or marketing codes and see how many, and what weighted value, those resources have brought to bear by running some ROI analysis in our new ACT! database.

Fortunately, we have a step-by-step approach to create this in a previous blog post using an event as an example. Take the investment associated with an event and measure the results. Understand the investment made in many events and enjoy solid numbers on performance for planning purposes in 2013. Make the jump and see how you can do this, too.

Do One Thing. We have seen how to build out opportunities in ACT! and make one significant change to our database.  Do One Thing. Continuing on this theme, our next item on the list intended to change everything is Email Marketing, specifically the integrated marketing available with Sage Email Marketing for ACT! (SEMA, a.k.a. Swiftpage Email). Do this one thing well and your prospective customer base will thank you. Do One Thing, baby.

Do one thing better in Sage ACT! 2013

If we have spoken on the phone you may recall me saying, "The river is both deep and wide," referring to the possibilities within ACT.  With the free time occasionally associated with the upcoming holidays, now is a great time to Do One Thing with your ACT database to improve your business performance in 2013.

What One Thing Can You Do?

Attend to one detail, finish that detail task, and reap the rewards of your vigilance immediately. Avoid the rut. Below is a short list of tasks undertaken by zip city clients that have made an immediate impact on their businesses. Implementing one of these ideas will improve your own business trajectory. Pick one that makes sense for you and take action:

1. Define, then embed, your business processes.
2. Embrace Email Marketing inside ACT.
3. Turn your spreadsheets into Custom Tables.
4. Too many fields? Fix that Layout to improve your flow.
5. Automate Automate Automate.
6. Measure success. Metrics (see #1 above) track performance.

Yeah, that's six...  so, let's dig at a high level right now, and go deeper with information here in subsequent blog posts. Now to roll up our sleeves and get started with this summary:


1. Business Processes: Opportunities.  No one ACT! feature offers us more than this entity offers. No other feature is so universally underutilized.  Now is a great time of the year to think deeply about how you segment your revenue and the processes you use to address each area of segmentation.  We'll revisit this topic in our next post.  In the meantime diagram your sales processes so we can implement them in ACT.

2. Email: You're soaking in it.  If you get my email regularly you already know the power of the built-in broadcast email tool in ACT. Already using SEMA? Then consider implementing drip marketing campaigns and automating your marketing.  Looking for a way to launch your marketing efforts? Zip City will set up your first campaign for free.  Look for an email on SEMA, drip marketing, and automated marketing in our second email in this series. Click on Madge if you'd like to get started.

3. Spreadsheets: Are you tracking contact or deal data in spreadsheets? If you are then this is one area where you can gain profound efficiencies to your internal processes. Use custom tables in ACT to manage all your connected data and never attach, file, or lose discrete information that should otherwise be available to all your ACT users with the click of a button. Do lookups, analysis, math, and much more by converting your spreadsheets into custom tables. We'll be posting examples of table solutions to spark your imagination on how this one tool can change everything.

4. Layouts: Perhaps the easiest, or most immediate, task you can complete, is to relieve that tired old layout from active duty. Probably the most requested service Zip City provides is one that includes an overhauled layout (or four). Perhaps you have undertaken this project in the past, building, and rebuilding, your layouts to suit the particular needs of your business. Let's make it flow. Let's update the color scheme. Let's get rid of the moldy dynamic that we accepted as a default when we installed ACT years ago.

Coming up, we will review the major categories of change you can make here, implement processes (see number 1, above), and ensure the right kind of data is showing up in the place you would expect. Details on how to proceed will come to you in the fourth email in this series.

5. Automate: Now  that your database has appropriate fields and recognized workflow, and perhaps integrated drip marketing, it's time to automate your processes.  Repetitive functions can be codified and set to run based on a query of field values with Smart Tasks.  When a record falls into the bucket then the list of automated tasks launch. Fields may be updated, activities scheduled, email sent, and even a drip marketing campaign may be applied, all without lifting a finger.

We wrote about a great example of a Smart Task series (link below) set up for a checklist of action items in our sample real estate office, marking items as pending, then scheduling activities which, when complete, marked the checklist fields as "Done".  This is a great introduction to the potential benefits we may realize in our own database to accelerate our business.

If you would like to see how we did it, go here.

Now is a great time of the year to implement changes to improve business in the new year. Take any one of these ideas and enjoy the impact you can realize.  Further details will come in subsequent posts all this month. If you would like help implementing innovation soon, just give us a call or respond to this email and we will get  you moving in the right direction.  Not on our email list?  Become a zip citizen by filling out the Swiftpage Survey form on the top-right of this page and be added to the zip city act! database.  We will share many tips and opportunities to improve efficiencies in our business right away.

Sage ACT! 2013 Smart Task Planning Guide

This post follows up on our last, very popular post, here, about automating checklists with Sage ACT! 2013 Smart Tasks.  Here, Sage ACT! Fast Tip Friday wrote up a post showing you how to plan your own Smart Task automation.  We stole it and post it here for your convenience:

As you learned last week, Smart Tasks have several new features that make it even more useful as you automate your routine processes. This week, we are taking a step back and a closer look at planning a Smart Task template. You’ll use the process introduced last week, map it out and learn more about the details to consider as you plan your Smart Task template.

Planning the Template

As mentioned last week, I’m going to use the following as a business case/example of how you might apply Smart Tasks to your business:

When a prospect purchases a product/service, you do the following:

• Create a new contact (if one does not exist)
• Update the Contact ID/Status field from “Prospect” to “Customer”
• Create an Opportunity with associated Products/Services
• 1 day later, you E-mail the customer a Thank you/Welcome kit
• Schedule a follow-up call for one week following the creation of the Opportunity

Before creating the task in Sage ACT!, you may want to map it out using Microsoft Word, Excel, Visio, or other process mapping tool such as gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com), or xmind (http://www.xmind.net/). Mapping the process will help you visualize, standardize, and communicate the process. It also serves as a useful tool for identifying how you will create the process in Sage ACT!. For example, the previously mentioned process might look like this when fully mapped out:

After mapping out your process, you may begin planning the Smart Task template that will put this process into action. Consider the following:

• Will the template be accessible to all users in the database (Public), or only you (Private)?
• In the above example, yes. It should be available to all Sage ACT! users.

• Will it be based on a Contact or Opportunity? This is important because it impacts automatic run criteria, and fields available for update.
• This is a critical decision point. If you choose to trigger the task based on field criteria, the fields available for your criteria will depend on this choice. Similarly, if you are going to use a “Field Update” step, the choice of fields you may update depends on this choice. For example, if you create this task for Contacts, your trigger criteria is limited to Contact fields, and any “Update Field” steps will only be able to update Contact fields. 
  
  For the above example, you may want to run the task against Opportunities that are “Closed-Won”, so selecting Opportunity is appropriate.

• How will it be triggered?
• Manually - users will have to look up Contacts or Opportunities, and then manually run the task. If the process is routine, but not something that you foresee running with high frequency, this may be appropriate. This enables you to standardize process without having to recall specific steps when the need arises.
• Triggered Automatically based on Schedule - the task will execute daily, weekly, monthly or other scheduled basis if certain field criteria is met. For example, you may want Sage ACT! to run a query weekly, checking for any Opportunities that have been Opened within the past 7 days and kick off a series of steps. User intervention is not required, and it is possible for activities to show up on a user’s calendar if he/she has opened an opportunity within the past 7 days.
• Triggered Automatically based on Field Data – the task will execute immediately if certain field criteria is met. For example, you may want Sage ACT! to kick off a series of steps immediately if a new opportunity is opened. User intervention is not required, and it is possible for activities to show up on a user’s calendar if he/she has just created an open opportunity. This type of trigger is not retro-active when it is run automatically. Only new opportunities with a status of “Open” would trigger the task steps. However, if a user ran the task Manually against all records, then past opportunities with a status of “Open” would trigger the task.
  
  For the above example, you may want to trigger the template based on the Opportunity being Closed-Won within the last day.
• Run only once for any record
• The "Run Only Once" option prevents a Smart Task from being run against the same record multiple times by the same user. Other users can still run the Smart Task against the same record unless the Smart Task access is set to Private.
  
  For the above example, selecting this option is a good idea.

After you have determined the Task Template properties, you can begin to consider the types of steps to automate. In Sage ACT!, you can create steps that schedule activities, send email via Microsoft Outlook, or Sage E-marketing for ACT! (if you are a subscriber), or update a field. Reviewing the process above, you are likely to manually create the Contact record if it does not exist, and also update the ID/Status field. However, after the Opportunity is created, you can have the remaining steps triggered by your Smart Task Template and automate the sending of the Welcome Kit email, and creation of the Phone Call activity, placing it on the user’s calendar 7 days from the date of closing the Opportunity.

As you can see, creating Smart Tasks can be easier if you take time to define, and map out your process. Not only does it help you document your best practices, but it enables you to communicate them with other team members, outside consultants, or others that may assist you in your business. Next week, I’ll show you exactly how to create the template in Sage ACT!. In the meantime, pick one or two of your routine processes and start mapping them out!

Building Automated Checklists with ACT! Smart Tasks

Do you use checklists?  Would you like to make your checklists smarter?  Today we will look at how to incorporate your checklists into your ACT! database and have them fill themselves out automatically based on the work you already do in ACT!

We are actually a little breathless about the possibilities of this particular capability and can’t wait to show you how it works.

Using an example based on a realtor’s model we will look at a checklist of actions that need to be completed on behalf of a new listing client.  As you may know every item on a realtor’s list must be completed in order to get to a closing successfully, and when there are several properties to track it could quickly become unmanageable if the lists are on a spreadsheet, on paper in a file, or in our head...

In our example we are using a database with some customized opportunity fields, each representing a necessary step in the process of getting to a Closing.  Here, when a property is listed, there are nine checklist items that need to be completed within ten days of the home being listed.  We need to know, at a glance, which ones are Pending and which ones are Done.  We also need to be certain an activity has been scheduled on behalf of each required item without overpopulating our calendar.  And we need to mark the item as complete as soon as the activity is complete without manually updating the field.

This calls for automation.  This automation removes any uncertainty you may currently experience with paper files, spreadsheets, or a reluctant memory.

To automate our checklist we will use the Smart Task feature released with ACT! 2013 that allows us to query the database every few minutes in the background looking for records that match our criteria and update records and activities accordingly. 

Here is the list of fields used to track the progress of the new property listing after they have been added to the database in the opportunity entity and revealed on the layout: (Apply these steps to your own checklist in ACT!)

We will set up this checklist by querying on three opportunity fields (for your list you may query on contact fields, as well), the Stage field, the Status control, and the Open Date field.

To begin the process of automating the process we will go to the Schedule menu and select Manage Smart Tasks…

From the Manage Smart Tasks box we will click on the button, New Smart Task and fill in the appropriate information to describe our Smart Task.  We will want to be pretty specific as our Smart Task Name will be used on the list of all Smart Tasks and we will want to be able to find it easily on the list. 

Here we will call this Smart Task “New Listing Setup” and give it a pretty definitive description.  Here we will also keep the default setting for Access, leaving the radio button set to Public so all users can use this feature, and since we are updating a checklist contained on the Opportunity record we will select Opportunity from the record type.

There are three available Triggers, and ours will be “Run when conditions are met”, referring to the aforementioned opportunity fields.

Below, after clicking on the Edit Conditions… button we put in our conditions so the Smart Task knows the records to which it must take action.  For the opportunity Process, Property Sale the first stage is “Property Listed”, and we include this in the query by adding the condition:

Opportunity field “Stage” equals the value “Property Listed”.

The status of any opportunity is either Open (active) and has at this status a value of zero (0).  FYI, the remaining status values are one (1) for Closed Won, two (2) for Closed Lost, and three (3) for Inactive.  Here, we use the value”0”.

Finally, we optionally want our checklist automation to run against the system date field, Open Date, with the query capturing only the records on or before today.

Finally, we make sure to ask the Smart Task to run only one time against any record it finds matching the criteria by clicking on the Run Only Once for any Record checkbox since we do not need it to run multiple times.

As you see below, we can click on the hyperlink to learn more about the option to Run Only Once.

Now we can see below our New Listing Setup criteria and description are embedded as a Smart Task template, with a green box containing the information we just entered.  Since we are initiating the checklist for this Property Sale we want to tell ACT! our Setup checklist is activated by showing all the tasks are marked as “Pending”.  To accomplish the field updates down the list we need to add a step for each field on the Setup checklist by asking the Smart Task to Update those fields.

Click the “Click here to add a step” button, and select Update Field from the resulting list.

As you see here, all we need to do is give the step a reasonably precise name, tell it which field to update, and offer a value.  In this database we gave the checklist fields a prefix of CL so they would all be grouped together in the field list in the dropdown selection.  Our first field is called “CL File Front Office”, meaning that a file has been created to hold all the important documents generated during the sales process.  We mark the field value as “Pending” and ensure the action happens automatically by checking the appropriate checkbox.

…and we continue to add a step for each of the fields on our checklist so the end result looks like the diagram below.  To automate the Smart Task we then click on the Enable Auto-Run button before closing the Smart Task box.

Smart Tasks in ACT! are set up to run every two minutes.  After the Smart Task runs a refreshed records will show our updates with “Pending” in each of the Setup fields.  We are halfway to automating our entire New Listing process.

Activity Series

Next we will want a nearly identical process that will schedule activities on behalf of the New Listing.  Once a task is completed we will want to mark the task “Done” and then schedule the next task.  We should be able to look at the list and always know where we stand.  We will also have the added benefit of looking at our History and seeing that the activity has been completed.  Our Smart Task will set up the entire process and only be finished when either the final task is complete OR when the record no longer matches the conditions we established in the beginning.

To save a lot of work we can elect to copy our existing Smart Task template and then modify elements of the template to meet our new requirement.  Below, from the Manage Smart Task box on the Templates tab we simply select “Duplicate”.

…and then we modify the Smart Task Name to reflect our new purpose.  In this case we want to set up activities that, once completed, mark the appropriate checklist fields as “Done”.

Below, our first step is to schedule a To-Do.  The activity will be scheduled on behalf of the Smart Task user (that’s us) to create the file for the front office one day after the listing has been opened.  Close inspection of the Smart Task’s version of what an activity looks like will show you the Schedule Activity dialog box is subtley different that one of ACT!’s standard Schedule Activity dialogs.

Here we have an option to delay the start of the activity, so we will initiate a Start Date on 1 day after the step is triggered.  Subsequent activities may go out further.

Since we duplicated the first Smart Task we created we will have inserted this new step right after the New Listing Checklist Setup Activities initial step:

…then we modify the Update Field step to automatically mark the checklist field that the activity has been complete by changing the field from “Pending” to “Done”.

…and so on, down the list, until each of the steps has a corresponding activity associated with the required task.

Ensure that the Smart Task is enabled to Auto-Run.

The behavior we can now anticipate is that an activity will be scheduled.  Checking our Pending Smart Task Steps (from the Schedule menu) might show us something like this:

…and when we check the Activities tab on the record we will be rewarded with something like this:

…and when we clear the activity we might be rewarded with this:

Never again will we drop this particular ball.  No matter how many listings meet the conditions all the tasks associate with every one of them will now be managed automatically because we (and ACT!) are now Smart Task proficient.

Do you have a scenario you think would be well-served with Smart Tasks?  If you would like some help getting your own processes automated in ACT! feel free to contact Bevan Wistar at Zip City, bwistar@zip-city.com  or 503-381-5654.  It’s what we do all day, every day.