Contactivation

Hear what Sage ACT! 2012 participants said about the new features in Sage ACT! 2012

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:01:00 GMT

Universal Search:
“I absolutely love the universal search. I can't tell you how many times i have scrolled through my whole contact list looking for something. I was able to do it with typing one word and two mouse clicks. Thank you Sage!”

“All searches were done easily. This will be very powerful.”

“Universal search affords much more flexibility that previous versions of ACT and finds matches very quickly.”

“The new search feature is great. I will use this regularly."

“Universal search is a wonderful feature when a database has too many fields and regular search by field takes too long.”

Scratchpad:
“ I like the Scratchpad feature quite a bit. It should be a big time saver for me. I can see leaving the window open all of the time in the background.”

“Love the Scratch pad!”

“Really like Scratchpad, great 'integrated utility'. Very time efficient for on-the-fly notes that are easily transferred to ACT”

Google Integration:
“The integration with Google Gmail and contacts is a great enhancement.”

“syncing with Gmail is AWESOME!"

General Comments:
“Easy to use..great features..always gets better with every new version”

” I love Sage ACT! 2012 beta. I think the functionality is great and will help me in my business.”

“fast and easy”

“I like ACT! 2012. I use Windows 7 and found the software to be faster, smoother and easier to integrate with Outlook. I've had no errors or freezes. I especially like the scratchpad. The upgrade seemed to be faster, easier and smoother as well.”

“The upgrade was seamless and flawless. Users truly appreciate this.”

“Love the product and the beta program... I tell all who will listen to use ACT!"

“Loads faster. Seems to flow better. Better interaction with "Connections".”

Go mobile with Sage ACT! Connect

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:11:00 GMT

Are you among the 70% of Sage ACT! users that have a smartphone? If so, consider a subscription to Sage ACT! Connect, a new service that delivers Sage ACT! to BlackBerry®, Windows Mobile®, and Android™ devices, even web browsers for access from your laptop and tablet.

See if your device is supported.

With Sage ACT! Connect, your contact details, notes, history, meetings, and activities are stored safely in the Cloud. So, instead of running Sage ACT! Connect yourself, it runs securely in a Cloud-based data center managed by Sage. This makes it fast to get started, eliminates the need for additional equipment, and enables you to get to the details you need from virtually anywhere.

More specifically, Sage ACT! Connect gives you (and your team) access to critical Sage ACT! contact and calendar details from popular smartphones, including BlackBerry®, Windows Mobile®, and Android™ devices. Plus, you can access these same details via a web browser, including Internet Explorer®, Firefox®, Google Chrome™, and Safari ® on your laptop and tablet, like the iPad®.

Imagine the possibilities.... Quickly pull up that customer address you’re headed to from the computer at the hotel's business center. Make changes to an existing phone number or email address from your smartphone while at a networking event . Check your meeting schedule for the day from your home computer before you head into the office. Do this, and so much more, from where you are and from the method most convenient for you when you subscribe to Sage ACT! Connect.

Contactivation invited to Sage CRM Business Advisory Council (BPAC)

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:32:00 GMT

Contactivation accepted an invitation to the Sage CRM Business Partner Advisory Council (BPAC) for 2011. BPAC represents the Sage CRM business partner community and interacts with senior level Sage management on strategic and product-related matters for the Sage CRM product line. BPAC members are selected based on several factors including sales performance, industry knowledge, company reputation and other factors.

"We are thrilled to be on the BPAC for 2011. Everyone in our organization will work hard to represent the Sage CRM business community and to work closely with Sage management to continue the quest of building the best CRM solution in the industry." Karl Dumas, Chairman, Contactivation

"We are pleased to welcome you as one of the newest members of BPAC and are confident that the unique skill sets of your organization will be an asset to the Sage CRM Solutions Business Unit, and the Sage CRM Solutions Business Partner community as a whole." Jeffrey Gregorec, Vice President, Sales and Strategic Alliances, Sage CRM Solutions.

ACT! 2011 Roadshow coming to Atlanta October 20th

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:10:00 GMT

Are you looking for ways to streamline your business processes? Do you want to know everything about your customer and locate it all in one place? Are you growing so fast you cannot manage your customer interactions and need a method to improve customer releationships. Then you need Sage ACT! - a leading customer relationship manager.

Join us at the Holiday Inn Select Perimeter for a high energy, interactive half-day uncovering what’s new in Sage ACT! 2011.

Learn More/Register

Media Gives High Marks to ACT!2011

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:51:00 GMT

We were pleasantly surprised by the media (a tough critic/crowd) after the release that they really like ACT!2011. Stay tuned to get a more in-depth review from our staff.

In the meantime, check out ACT on our website and view the demo: http://www.contactivation.com/Contact-Management

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Media Coverage (PC Mag): Sage ACT! 2011 -- 4.5 out of 5

Congratulations Sage ACT! Team! PC Magazine's review of Sage ACT! 2011 Premium posted today earning a 4.5 out of 5 rating from reviewer Samara Lynn. Our product has also received an Editor's Choice award - a distinction only 1 in 10 products reviewed receives according to PC Mag. Outlook synch proved to be a big winner with Samara who calls Sage ACT! 2011 "the ultimate contact management tool."

Big thanks to Larry for previewing ACT! for Samara, our marketing/web colleagues for developing content used in this process, the dev/quality teams for doing their thing, Amanda Jones for responding to technical questions, and I'm sure many others I haven't mentioned here.

Sage ACT! 2011 Premium
PC Magazine, Samara Lynn, Sept 20th 2010
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369360,00.aspsummary

Excerpts:

"Improved Outlook integration, excellent SMB services, and general improvements throughout make the latest ACT! the ultimate contact management tool."

"To call the new sync convenient would be an understatement, given the new ability to have your contacts and especially your calendar update seamlessly between the two applications."

"The attractive interface, the abundance of help within the UI, and new features like full synchronization with Outlook makes ACT! 2011 a hearty customer management application and a tool that any business person ought to consider."

________________________________________

Team, "it keeps getting better" and "[connected services] are incredibly smart" according to analyst Paul Greenberg as cited in CRM Magazine's Sage ACT! 2011 article. Larry is also quoted regarding new Smart Tasks and Hoover's list functionality.

Sage Beefs Up Services In ACT! 2011
CRM Magazine, Lauren McKay, Sept 13th 2010
http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Sage-Beefs-Up-Services-in-Act!-2011-69373.aspx
Lauren McKay covers Sage ACT! 2011 through the quotes of analyst and author Paul Greenberg. Does ACT! provide value to small businesses? "Oh God, yeah" says Paul.

(note: editor appears to have mixed a couple 2010 and 2011 product references in this piece)

________________________________________
Ramon Ray of Small Business Technology published a Sage ACT! 2011 piece this morning and included Napkin Mike video.

Automation and Qualified Leads from ACT! 2011
Small Business Technology, Ramon Ray, Sept 8th 2010
http://smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2010/09/contact-and-customer-managemen.html
Ramon Ray provides his Sage ACT! 2011 observations citing new smart task features and all three available connected services as highlights. Ramon also embeds the Napkin Mike video from our social media press release in his post.

________________________________________
Team, fyi, initial Sage ACT! 2011 coverage...

Sage ACT! Enables SMBs To Work Smarter, Not Harder
Customer Interaction Solutions, Brendan Read, Sept 1st 2010
http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/Analysis/articles/98913-sage-act-2011-enables-smbs-work-smarter-not.htm
Brendan Read selects Sage ACT! 2011 as the Contact Center Solutions feature article for Sept 1st

Sage ACT! Makes New Smart Tasks & List Building Services Available For SMBs
TMCnet.com Sept 1st 2010
http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/Analysis/articles/98913-sage-act-2011-enables-smbs-work-smarter-not.htm
TMC's CRM news portal pickup of press release

Sage ACT! 2011 Makes New Smart Tasks & List Building Services Available For SMBs
CustomerThink.com Sept 1st 2010
http://www.customerthink.com/news/sage_act_2011_contact_customer_manager_makes_new_smart_tasks_and_list_building_services_availab
Sales, marketing and CRM industry community lead by analyst Bob Thompson picks up Sage ACT! 2011 press release

Sage ACT! 2011 Coming In September
Accounting Today, Seth Fineberg Aug 6th 2010
http://www.webcpa.com/news/Sage-Act-2011-Coming-in-September-55197-1.html
Fineberg quotes Larry Ritter on the value incorporating ideas from ACT! customer community into the product, and references new smart task functionality

News portal pickups include:

San Francisco Chronicle http://finance.sfgate.com/hearst.sfgate/news/read?GUID=14531517
San Jose Mercury News http://markets.financialcontent.com/mng-ba.mercurynews/news/read?GUID=14531517
Yahoo Biz News http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Sage-ACT-2011-Contact-iw-373273953.html?x=0
MSNBC.com http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38951395

A social media (and tweetable) version of our press release is available at http://pitch.pe/84947

ACT! 2011 Gets Connected

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:49:00 GMT

For those of you that don't know about ACT! software - and there's still a few of you out there - here's what you should know:

Sage ACT! makes it easy for you to have meaningful conversations with customers by giving you an organized view of the people you do business with. You'll always be prepared with recent emails, meeting notes, task reminders, and social media profiles, because all of these details live in one place. You can even use Sage ACT! like a sales and marketing assistant to get the right leads, send striking marketing campaigns, and track your overall performance. The bottom line, Sage ACT! takes care of the administrative stuff so you can focus on building long-lasting, profitable business relationships.

ACT Gets Connected

ACT's product managers felt the product needed to be extended with what they are calling Connected Service providers. This "connection" with outside services complement the product, yet are provided a-la-cart for those users that don't want to pay for them. Two such offerings are available with ACT! 2011, E-Marketing Services and Business Services.
E-Marketing gives you the ability to collect info from your customers too. Use Smart Tasks (more later in another blog post) and Sage E-marketing for ACT! together for gathering updated or missing contact details. Send your customers an email that includes a link to an online survey15 requesting those details. Once the survey is completed, those details are automatically populated back into Sage ACT!. No need for you to manually sift through your database or send one-off email requests.

Business Services adds rocket fuel to your sales and marketing machine by pulling highly targeted prospect lists from Hoover’s™ and puts them directly into Sage ACT!. It helps you fill in the gaps in your database and gives you access to more than 65 million companies and 85 million executives. Find new leads based on the traits you’re looking for, along with business info for known contacts and companies, including profiles, financials, industry information, news, and more. Sage Business Info Services for ACT! makes sure your mailed materials find their target with addresses and phone numbers that are properly formatted when imported. Plus, get email alerts from a company watch list to stay on top of the latest news.

Our review of these two services is very positive. Both are very easy to use and quite affordable (based on a per user, per month basis). The E-marketing service lets you put things on auto pilot, especially if you use another new feature, Smart Tasks (more later in another blog post).

ACT! 2011 Launches Sept. 1

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:44:00 GMT

Sage ACT! 2011 Contact & Customer Manager Makes New Smart Tasks And List Building Services Available To Small And Midsized Business Users

Sage Business Info Services for ACT!, powered by Hoover’s™, debuts as latest Sage Connected Service

Scottsdale, Ariz. – September 1, 2010 – Sage North America today announced the new Sage ACT! 2011 contact and customer manager featuring new smart task automation for frequent activities such as sales opportunity and contact follow up. Sage ACT! 2011 includes numerous ease of use improvements and full synchronization with Microsoft® Outlook® contacts and calendar items. Sage Business Info Services for ACT!, a list-building subscription service powered by Hoover’s, also debuts as the latest Sage Connected Services offering for small and midsized businesses. Visit http://pitch.pe/84947 for a social media version of this announcement with video.

"Sage ACT! 2011 builds on the momentum created with last year’s edition,” explains Brent Leary, small business technology analyst and principal of CRM Essentials. “Sage Business Info Services for ACT! is a great connected services addition to Sage E-marketing for ACT!. Importing prospect lists from Hoover's database of 85 million contacts directly into Sage ACT! streamlines the lead gathering process and works nicely with new smart task capabilities so users can further automate common sales and marketing tasks."

New Sage ACT! 2011 features and enhancements include:

* Smart Tasks to automate common marketing, sales and support activities with standard and customizable templates. Smart tasks integrate with the Sage E-marketing for ACT! subscription service so users can add prospects to automated drip marketing email campaigns, track open and click through rates and send welcome messages to new customers, among other capabilities.

* Sage Business Info Services for ACT!, a list-building subscription service, to import targeted prospect lists from Hoover’s into Sage ACT! and help users identify new selling opportunities. Sage ACT! users in the U.S. and Canada can access 65 million companies and 85 million contacts to build lists based on location, company size, title and industry among other criteria.

* Microsoft Outlook synchronization to sync Sage ACT! contacts and calendar items with those in Outlook. Data is updated in both locations regardless of where contacts were created or edited. Users control what data is synced back and forth.

* Additional enhancements include direct import from Excel®, a re-designed welcome page with instructional videos and compatibility with Microsoft® Office 2010 and Firefox®.

Sage Connected Services:

Sage is delivering web-based connected services that enhance the productivity of customers’ on-premise software experience. In addition to Sage Business Info Services for ACT!, other subscription-based Sage Connected Services available for use with Sage ACT! include Sage E-marketing for ACT! to help design, automate and track email campaigns, and ACT! Mobile Live for wirelessly synchronizing contact and calendar data with BlackBerry® and Windows Mobile® devices. iPhone® compatibility is planned for later this year.

Sage ACT! is the #1 selling contact and customer manager designed for small businesses and sales teams, and is used by over 2.8 million individuals and 56,000 companies worldwide. Sage ACT! is easy to use, priced for the cost-conscious and personalizable so users can organize all the details of their business relationships in one place including recent emails, meeting notes, task reminders and social networking profiles.

Sage ACT! helps users improve marketing effectiveness, attract new customers, and create more value from existing relationships. Complete sales pipeline visibility helps users identify and take action on the most qualified sales opportunities. Sage ACT! integrates with existing business solutions including Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and Lotus Notes®.

To learn more about ACT! 2011 click here.

Tweet Button Pulls Twitter Followers To Web Sites

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:29:00 GMT

Twitter has rolled out a Tweet Button for web sites a la Facebook's Like button. So if you see something cool on a web site, you can press the Tweet Button to send the link to your followers without the cut-and-paste hassle. Thirty web sites are participating in the launch of Twitter's Tweet Button. It could bring Twitter new users as well.

Not to be outdone by Facebook -- or even TweetMeme for that matter -- Twitter has officially rolled out its own Tweet Button for web sites. The Tweet Button lets users link to content on third-party sites with a mouse click.

Let's say you are on CNN.com (which happens to be one of the early adopters of the Tweet Button) and you read an article that wows you. The Tweet Button lets you click a link and share the article with your friends via your Twitter account. No need to cut and paste the URL, shrink it down to size with bit.ly, or jump through any other hoops. The Tweet Button does all that automatically.

"Twitter is great for sharing interesting things you find on the web. In fact, close to a quarter of all Tweets include a link in them," a Twitter rep wrote on the company blog. "Despite the high volume of sharing, there is plenty of room to make it easier. Copying and pasting, link shortening, and bouncing between browser tabs just to share a link in a Tweet is too much work."

Expanding Twitter's Universe

Twitter's Tweet Button capabilities don't stop with simple sharing. After you post a story to Twitter, you may also see suggestions for other Twitter users to follow. Twitter bases these suggestions on the web site you visited. The list of suggestions may even include CNN.com, if you posted an article from CNN, or the reporter who wrote the article.

"The Tweet Button is not only simple for users, but for publishers of all sizes, too. Recreational bloggers to large media companies can quickly and easily add the Tweet Button to their sites," the Twitter rep said. "It only takes a few lines of code. The Tweet Button will help publishers grow traffic and increase their Twitter following."

Thirty sites joined Twitter for the launch of the Tweet Button. You'll begin to see the button on sites like Ask.com, CBS Interactive, eHow.com, YouTube, Hulu, Time.com, WordPress.com and more within a week. Twitter expects additional publishers to come aboard in the months ahead.

Partnering for Profit

Although there are several third-party tweet buttons on the web already, Twitter is forging ahead with its own effort. But Twitter isn't starting from scratch. The company partnered with TweetMeme on the project. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"Digg and Delicious started this trend a while ago, and the goal was to drive traffic to those aggregation sites. So this is nothing new. Twitter is just introducing its own button," said Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis. "This lets Twitter take responsibility for the content coming to their site, which lets them customize and build on it a little more."

That said, Shimmin sees the fast follow feature as potentially valuable because it lets Twitter broaden its user base without creating roadblocks. Twitter can now bring in people who may be interested in seeing what is going on and using Twitter as a news source but not participating as an active member, he said.

By Jennifer LeClaire
CRM-Daily

6 Steps to CRM Transformation

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:59:00 GMT

CRM transformation needs to be linked to overall IT strategy of the organization. While the business demand is the key value driver in the phasing of CRM transformation, the interdependencies between CRM and other operational systems are a major cost and risk consideration. Therefore, the business demand alone cannot dictate the CRM transformation phasing.

In general, professionals and customers involved in unsuccessful CRM transformations commonly point to certain causes of failure. These vary from lack of customer-centric strategy to absence of measurable goals, poor change management to poor implementation.

In our personal experience, most CRM implementations have been beset with similar challenges, owing to lack of appreciation of functional strengths of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products in attempting IT-enabled CRM transformations. However, many of the causes are heavily accentuated by poor planning and phasing of CRM transformation programs.
Plan Your Journey and Know What to Expect

CRM transformation needs to be linked to overall IT strategy of the organization.

While the business demand is the key value driver in the phasing of CRM transformation, the interdependencies between CRM and other operational systems are a major cost and risk consideration. Therefore, the business demand alone cannot dictate the CRM transformation phasing. Otherwise, a huge investment may be required in the product customization and developing temporary interfaces.
Release Planning Framework

The release planning framework for CRM transformation is based on business drivers as well as footprint and data coupling analysis. This framework helps the program managers identify the paths of least resistance in transformation planning while accommodating business needs.

Following is a six-step journey in planning the CRM transformation.

* Step 1: Establish Motives and Drivers. The first step in the transformation is to select the business drivers from the business case for the CRM transformation.

* Step 2: Identify Process Enhancements Supporting Business Drivers and Their Expected Business Benefit. The selected drivers can then be broken down to business processes that need to be enhanced to deliver the business benefit. Expected business benefit metric against each process improvement should be clearly identified at this stage.

For instance, in a logistics company the business driver is the need to increase first-call resolution (FCR). The expected benefits may come from FCR of various types of enquiries, e.g. track and trace enquiries, billing enquiries. We can assign a score (relative or absolute) of potential improvement that can be expected by the CRM transformation for each of the enquiry types. In the illustration in Fig. 1, FCR for billing queries from CRM transformation is expected to improve only by 3 points as compared to 7 for track and trace.

* Step 3: Identify the Transformation Candidates for a Release Milestone. Transformation candidates are the applications (COTS and bespoke) that will undergo change as part of automating/enhancing the business process to achieve the business process improvement objectives. It is important to identify all the transformation candidates that are rolled out in a release. We will refer to all the applications that are modified for the release as "Transformation Candidates for a Release Milestone".

* Step 4: Analyze Footprint and Data Coupling for Identified Processes. At this stage, we have identified the business processes that need to improve and have also identified the transformation candidates that have to deliver that capability. We now need to analyse the extent of native capability in the transformation candidates to deliver on expectations and the extent of interfacing required to make them work together.

Based on our experience in COTS implementation, we have formulated two key drivers of technical complexity in the solution.

1. Footprint Index: This index provides a measure of the native support On-demand Remote Support - Free Trial from LogMeIn Rescue: Fast, secure solution for today's most popular platforms. for the enhanced process within the transformation candidates. The higher the value of Footprint Index, lower the expected customization on a COTS product.

This index can be calculated as a ratio of the footprint of the transformation candidate's native functionality in the execution of business process to the total number of supporting applications in the business process domain. The index should be assessed a value between 0 and 10.

2. Data Coupling Index: This index provides a measure of inter-dependence of the transformation candidates to the rest of the applications. The lower the Data Coupling Index, the lesser the dependence on the interfacing system and risk on the functionality.

It is evaluated as a factor of number, frequency and volume of business entities exchanged multiplied by a complexity factor (real time integration). The index should be assessed a value between 0 and 10.

Usually to reap quick wins, taking a first step in the transformation journey requires more data containment within the system to reduce dependency.

* Step 5: Maximize the Business Benefits While Minimizing Cost of Ownership. At this stage, we have an assessed of benefits expected and costs associated with delivering each process. As a next step, we need to identify the processes that can give the maximum benefit while reducing the complexity, cost and risk of technical implementation.

A benefit complexity matrix is prepared for each business processes that maps out the Expected Business Benefit, Footprint Ratio and Data Coupling Index.

The business processes falling in the quadrant with high application footprint index and low data coupling index are the processes that have lower cost of ownership in implementation, support and upgrades. These business processes should be selected for transformation.
* Step 6: Prepare Road Map. Determine the cumulative expected gains for the selected process enhancements. These processes should form a part of the initial release. The rest of the processes should be picked up in the next tranche of application uplift for the transformation when newer transformation candidates are identified.

In case the business benefit expectation is lower, go to Step 3 and evaluate another set of transformation candidates.

In Conclusion

The first step in COTS-based CRM transformation is the most critical, and failure can mean loss of sponsorship. This CRM transformation risk can be substantially reduced with proper planning and phasing.

The release planning framework proposed here can help in planning the roadmap to a successful transformation. The high footprint index and low data coupling index are the key parameters to assess in release planning. It balances the business needs against implementation challenges effectively, and the framework makes decision-making easier, leading to better phasing of CRM transformations. Such a properly planned CRM transformation shows more resilience when faced with challenges of change management, technical implementation and stakeholder management.

References:

* CRM Failures: Don't Blame the Tools
* Six Ways CRM Projects Go Wrong

By Manish Sarswat and Himanshu Sharma are principal consultants with Infosys Technologies.

Hoffman's Hot Seat: Making the Most of Social CRM Opportunities with Customers

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:17:00 GMT

There's a huge amount of buzz around social CRM but a limited amount of action that marketers are actually taking. Larry Ritter, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Sage CRM Solutions, shares his insights on opportunities for marketing leaders to engage with customers through a variety of social CRM platforms.

Interview by Tom Hoffman, 1to1 Media

Barbi Osborne joins Contactivation

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:26:00 GMT

Contactivation is pleased to announce the hiring of Barbi Osborne as Design Manager and will be responsible for managing its web and graphics design projects. Barbi brings impressive design experience from both the client and agency side. Most recently, Barbi graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta (AIA) where she focused on Web Design and Interactive Media. She was awarded the Gold Award "STARS 2010" for her work by the AIA.

Contactivation is now able to offer web (and graphics) design work for its customers. For more information please call 770-521-4450 or submit an inquiry.

ACT! Mobile Live Debuts

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:31:00 GMT

Sage North America, which provides business management software and services to more than three million small and midsized businesses in Canada and the United States, today announced ACT! Mobile Live as its latest connected service. ACT! Mobile Live is a cloud-based subscription service that delivers ACT! by Sage contact and customer management data to BlackBerry devices. iPhone, Windows Mobile and Symbian compatibility are planned for later this year. ACT! Mobile Live service is available now for $10.00 per month.

As announced at its Sage Insights partner conference last month, Sage is delivering web-based connected services that enhance the productivity of customers’ on-premise software experience. In addition to ACT! Mobile Live, Sage connected services for contact management and CRM include email marketing services for ACT! and Sage SalesLogix. Additional services for sales, marketing, database management and e-commerce business processes are in development.

ACT! Mobile Live helps users:

* Access ACT! data in their mobile phone’s native environment, using a phone’s built-in address book and calendar interfaces.
* View, create and edit ACT! contact information, calendar items, activities, meeting notes and conversation histories on their phone.
* Sync quickly between their ACT! database and phone, keeping data on each consistent. Users subscribe to ACT! Mobile Live on a 12-month basis.
* Back up data using an online portal that provides ACT! data access and backup files in case a phone is lost or stolen. Information syncs quickly when switching phones.

ACT! Hosting Now Available!

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:33:00 GMT

ACT hosting services is now available to Contactivation customers seeking an online, web-based solution. The popular ACT program can now be accessed via a web browser 24/7 on our secure hosted servers.

To learn more about ACT hosting or to take a free test drive, please call 770-521-4450 or email us.

The Architecture

We have a 3 Layer Architecture. The SQL Server Database servers resides on a Raid 5 Server, on an internal Network that is not accessible from the Internet.

Sitting in front of the SQL Servers, in the DMZ, are the Web & Synch Servers. The Web & Synch servers are the only servers that can communicate with the Database Servers on the background network. The web Servers have 128 bit SSL layers over them for ACT Premium for Web. We utilize ACT internet Synch as our primary synchronization method and this is 64-bit encrypted by Sage.

Sitting in front of the Web & & Synch servers is MaxControl. All Web users go to a common web page to log on, regardless of the ACT version. MaxControl verfiies the login credentials of each web user before passing them to the Web Servers that serve that SQL Server database. Max Also logs the user into ACT automatically after credentials have been verified.

Backups are performed nightly by MaxControl, both onsite and offsite. Or you may obtain a backup on demand through your MaxControl account.

Cut Time From CRM Projects

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:40:00 GMT

CRM projects can have some very tricky technical elements, particularly when it comes to integrating with other customer-facing and internal systems. They can also be quite labor intensive when it comes to normalizing, deduping, cleansing, and converting data. But in many CRM projects, those issues aren't the biggest contributors to schedule slips. Look closely: the larger the CRM project, the more likely that the delays are coming from outside of IT. No, it's not time to beat up your vendors. It's time to engage more closely with your users and project sponsors.

Why? Because a key problem in CRM projects is getting permission to proceed. The team is waiting for user feedback, executive policy decisions, or management approval. CRM projects are much more vulnerable to this issue than most enterprise applications because the requirements and business processes are much more variable than, for example, an accounting or HR system. Since CRM systems provide the most business benefit when they are tightly aligned with business policies and personal preferences of the sales and marketing VPs, fit really matters. Organizational politics really matter. And some of the priorities will change with every reorg...which in sales and marketing can happen pretty frequently.

So, approval cycles -- quick, definitive, and broadly communicated -- are a key success factor for tight CRM projects. There are two levels of approval cycle -- and the project lead can only do one of them by him/herself. The second one, senior management has to help with.

User Feedback

User adoption is a key metric for CRM systems. You don't have to believe in Agile to know that engaging users early and collecting their feedback on a regular basis are the best ways to avoid waste and rework. In our CRM projects, we want users to try out features-in-progress at least once a week.

Why so often? Because users are busy people, and they tend to forget what they told you. Further, as their personal goals and priorities shift over time, it can be tough to even keep the users on topic (sometimes they'll give you feedback on a different system than the one you're working on). Asking for feedback incrementally, and publishing user feedback in a Wiki, will improve the quality and relevance of their input.

It's also important to get feedback from the right users. Sometimes, the people who have time to spare for a functional usability session aren't the ones who matter. Other times, people who just love to be critics aren't setting realistic standards. Choosing the right users is something of an art, but an art that the project lead must learn.

Even though the characteristics of the review users will vary by organization, we use the following guidelines:

• The feedback team should be selected at the start of the project, and explicitly authorized by their managers to spend an hour a week (or whatever you need) for however many weeks the project needs them. Try to keep the team stable for at least one release cycle.

• The team should be about equal thirds: power users/computer sophisticates, luddites/passive-resisters, and people who work closely with another system in addition to the CRM.

• The team should be reasonably centralized. Even though much of the review should be done over the Web (and in some cases must be remotely to be realistic), it's easier to coordinate and schedule the sessions when the team isn't on the road or scattered across several time zones.

• The team should be comprised of people who have the bosses' ear. Decisions and approval cycles go faster if the boss trusts their representative, better yet if the boss delegates the authority on small decisions to the team member. Beware fake delegation, where the boss overrules or contradicts their delegate!

It is typically much faster to collect user review feedback in individual meetings. Of course group sessions would be a better use of engineering's time, but the scheduling impact of a single meeting can be far worse. It's easy to lose a week's time just trying to coordinate a 5-way meeting, and the resulting traffic jam effects can stall parts of the project and idle your engineers.

Management Decisions

In CRM projects, management decisions about the four Ps (priorities, policy directives, people, and process) can be pivotal to CRM project success. The more important the decisions, the longer it takes to get the meeting...and the bigger the schedule impact of decision changes.

So it's critical that the project lead be able to tap the political power of the CRM executive sponsor as well as top IT leadership. The specifics depend on your corporate culture, but it's generally better to have short, quick decision cycles and avoid the "summit meeting" impulse. Of course, sometimes a big meeting devoted to CRM is required, but too often these are non-productive because the focus tends to wander away from the specifics of what you need decided. We've all lived through meetings like this where decisions from previous meetings were overturned, almost invariably clobbering the schedule.

No matter how executive decisions are made, it's best if there is a signoff sheet at the meeting, and the decision published on your Wiki to reduce the chances of misinterpretation and eliminate plausible denial. Trust me, your schedule will thank me six months from now.

By David Taber, CIO.com

Sage SalesLogix to Float in Cloud

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:39:00 GMT

At its recent annual Insights event here, the business solution provider announced that it is putting its CRM software Sage SalesLogix on Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure. Sage SalesLogix Cloud, which was introduced to partners last year, will be available to customers in June.

To provide context for Sage's "cloudy" announcement, Bruce Guptill, senior vice president and head of research at analysis firm Saugatuck Technology, shared survey results indicating that an average of 20 percent of firms today use such cloud-based solutions for at least one core business system. The figure, Guptill predicted, will double by year-end 2012.

"A couple of years ago, if you wanted to be good at SaaS, you had to be good at the infrastructural level -- and hats off to them," said Larry Ritter, senior vice president and general manager of Sage CRM Applications. "We have always been at the applications."

Along with Joe Bergera, executive vice president and global general manager for Sage CRM Solutions, Ritter explained the cloud solution in depth during a press and analyst session here.

Sage took an incremental approach with the cloud offering. Bergera said the solution was made available to select "handheld customers" in December. Twelve customers have been signed on with the Amazon subscription-based solution to-date. Hundreds more are using it through a SalesLogix trial. Prior to the cloud solution Sage was limited in offering trials to customers.

"We are actually getting a lot of traction just by having the solution," offered Allen Duet, senior product manager for Sage CRM. Some customers, in fact, have signed on with Sage on-premise CRM just for knowing that the vendor has a cloud offering on tap that it could migrate to in the future.

Sage is calling this June release Phase 1 of SalesLogix Cloud. The solution will be expanded to international partners and customers later this year. Also a new version of SalesLogix on-premises will be released in the next 6 weeks. SalesLogix Cloud is offered to customers in two ways. Customers can provide named users who will access the solution, or companies can pay for five "concurrent users" and rotate the licenses throughout the organization on an as-need basis.

Sage deals primarily through a partner channel, which may be an explanation of the year-long ramp-up of the cloud solution. "Some partners really stepped up to the plate," Ritter reported. "The ones attacking this opportunity are seeing overall pipeline expand." He noted, however, that the value proposition for partners is different. "You aren't going to make the same kind of money that you used to," he said.

In terms of Act!, Bergera said Sage is focusing on the connected services to bring users online. The Sage e-Marketing application, for example, offers customers the reach of the Web, but keeps the core contact management system where many users want it -- on the desktop. Ritter speculated that Sage might some day want to do something similar with Act! and the cloud, but the price point does not make sense right now.

Ritter hinted at a handful of connected services to come later this summer. One of particular interest for CRM users will be an integrated Web service with Hoover's.

Beagle Research Principal Denis Pombriant notes that the SalesLogix cloud solution may be on the periphery of being called a software-as-a-service application. Pombriant wagers that Sage is more fittingly categorized as an application service provider (ASP) since Amazon is the company doing the hosting.

Ritter said that the company is ultimately working down the path toward becoming a hybrid service provider where companies use both installed Sage products and Web services. After all, Sage's definition of cloud, as iterated by Himanshu Palsule, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing of Sage Business Solutions at Tuesday's keynote, means "taking the richness of on-premise applications and connecting it to the reach of Web services."

With Act! reaching out to the Web for extensions, and with SalesLogix finding its place in the cloud, executives hinted that a Sage application store in the cloud may be a big move to come.