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.