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

In our blog post from earlier this month, we discussed how to set up your database to track client anniversaries with the purpose of sending anniversary cards to your clients. We figured since we helped you with the start of this project, we may be able to help you with another step in the process—printing out mail merged mailing labels.

Why would you want to use this feature of ACT!? If you are sending out quite a few cards, it saves you time and energy to set up mail merging through ACT!. Hand-writing several envelopes can be a real chore and manually imputing contacts into your word processing software is also less efficient. Learning to use this simple, fast  feature now will save you time whenever you need to send out mailings in the future.

To start with, you’ll want to verify you have labels that are designed to work with your printer. In order for the ACT! template to print correctly to your labels, it is best to get labels that explicitly state they work with a laser or inkjet printer (for best results, by the type that correspond to your printer). Note that the labels you buy will have a label number—you will need this later.

Once you’ve selected your labels, you can get to the mail merging. First you will want to create a look-up of the contacts you will be sending cards to. Once you have your look-up of contacts, you just follow these instructions*:

        1.  Click the File menu, then click Print.

        2.  In the Printout type list box, click Labels.

        3.  Select the label that you want to use (should correspond to the label number on your package of             labels), then click OK. The Run Label dialog box appears.

        4.  Under the Create report for section, enable the desired option. In most cases this will be Current         lookup.

        5.  In the Send output to section, select Printer or Preview. (Preview allows you to view the labels             as they will be printed.) You can also print from the preview if you are satisfied with the appearance of         your labels.

        6.  Click OK to print your labels

And it’s that simple. Anytime you want to send out a mailing, you don’t need to spend your time writing out addresses or fighting with spreadsheets. Simply tell ACT! to print your labels and save yourself the trouble.

Could you use a personalized training to learn more ways ACT! can save you time on administrative duties? Contact our office for details at 847-520-0860

*instructions are modified version of this Sage ACT! Knowledgebase article