Contactivation

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).