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

Summer is finally, maybe, just about here—depending where you live, of course. And summertime, while lovely for all things outdoors and vacation related, can also be a slower time for business. Due to this slow down, some businesses find themselves looking for projects that are aimed at helping improve how they run their business.

Well if you use ACT!, we have a small project for you: organizing your database to find customer anniversaries. Why do this? Sending anniversary cards is just a nice way to say, “I recognize how long you have been using our services and I appreciate your business.”

In fact that’s almost exactly what you can say in your anniversary cards. So how do you use your database to send out these cards?

Easy. Create a custom field on your contact view and name it “contract start,” “client start date,” or “anniversary” and make it a habit of filling it out once you gain a new client. When you create the field, you can set it as an annual event to make running your query even easier. If you set it as an annual event, you can easily go to Lookup, Annual Event, and then you can simply select your custom field from the dropdown, select current month, and then click Find Now.

The list that pops up is all of the contacts with anniversaries in the current month. From the search window you can print the list, schedule a to-do, or even pull up the contacts as a lookup for further refinement.

What you want your cards to say is up to you and can reflect your company’s values. We recommend scheduling a recurring activity for someone on your team so they can remember to send out the cards every month. This method makes it easy to say thank you to your clients without having to spend a lot of time trying to track whose anniversary is when. Plus it will give you something to do this summer that will make your clients happier.

Would you like some help setting up custom fields or sorting the contacts you already have? Please call our office at 847-520-0560 for help.