Are you looking for another way to drum up some sales in these occasionally quiet summer months? You can always use ACT! to figure out which of your clients have been particularly quiet in the last few months. Sometimes clients have work for you to do, but they just have not gotten around to calling you yet. Reminding them that you are available and happy to help may result in the rewarding reply,“I’m so glad you’ve called, I could really use your help.”

And the good news is, there is a very simple way to pull up a list of the people you haven’t spoken to in any given number of days. All you need to do is use the advanced query function. To get to the advanced query window, you just select Lookup from the file menu, then select the Advanced dropdown, and then select Advanced Query. Once that window is open, you can run a search like this:

You can make changes to this query as needed to suit your business needs. Do you want to pull up contacts who you haven’t talked to in 60 days who are also located in a similar geographic region? Add city, state, or zip code parameters to your query. Are you thinking of sending out a mass email to reach out to your clients? Try adding a filter to your search that assures that the email field contains data—that way all contacts pulled up are the ones you have email addresses for. And while you’re at it, you can do the opposite search—contact clients you haven’t spoken to in 60 days who do not have an email on file, and then you can ask if they would like to receive your email communications when you give them a call.

There is really a very large scope of creative ways to filter your clients to contact them. While you have a minute to breath, why don’t you do yourself a favor and start reaching out to your quiet clients today—with any luck, they may just reach back with a project for you.

Are you interested in learning more ways that ACT! can aid in your business development strategies? Please give us a call at 847- 520-0860.

Are you meticulous about your sales pipeline? Are you using ACT! to help manage your prospects and projects? Because if you already have ACT!, you could be using the opportunities feature to manage and track sales opportunities as they go through the sales process, and even better—you can then analyze your past opportunities to gain insight into your strengths and weaknesses as a salesperson.

To successfully leverage your opportunities in ACT!, you can start by adding prospects you meet to your database and then creating opportunities for the potential services or products that interest them. Then as you move through the sales process, you can update the opportunity to reflect where you are at. If the default list of stages in a process does not mirror your own, the stages are editable. This means that ACT! can be customized to match your business needs, giving you the ability to be nimble. ACT! will keep up with you.

Once you’ve started creating opportunities for prospects and potential projects, you can then fully manage your pipeline through ACT!. You can easily pull up your opportunities by opening the opportunities tab on the left navigation panel, and then filter which opportunities you would like to see. You can then get a feel for what business may be coming in in the next few weeks, months, or years (for those longer sales cycles). And because each stage in a process has a probability for closing, you can calculate the probability of what your business can expect to bring in.

You can also pull up opportunities from the past—in particular those marked lost. What part of the sales cycle were you in when the opportunity was lost? Do you see any patterns? By examining your lost opportunities, you can better understand what you may want to work on to get better results in the future. If you pull up your won opportunities, you can similarly review what made deals go well to assure you continue with those practices.

With these features geared toward selling, ACT! helps set you up for success. By providing you with tools that support an effective sales process, ACT! can help you fast-track your business.

Would you like training on using ACT! for sales success? Contact us at 847-520-0860, or email us at info@kristismith.com