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January, as we’ve discussed, is a great time of year to make changes to your processes and revamp the way you approach your CRM.  So with the end of the month upon us, we thought we'd leave you with one last tip to clean up your ACT! (clearly that pun is unavoidable).

One really great way to get the most out of ACT!, is to standardize your company’s usage.  Do you have data entry standards?  Here’s a great way to set some:

1)     Toss the empties
Empty fields just tempt users to stow away data that doesn’t seem to have a home.  Then the data, sitting in a mislabeled field, is report resistant—it isn’t organized so it won’t come up in a field search, and can’t be pulled into a report for analysis.

2)      House the homeless
Look around your database.  Just sift through some entries.  Do you see a pattern in the data that is being tossed into “catch-all” fields?  Create new fields to accommodate data you want to collect regularly, and move  the data into the properly labeled fields where they belong.

3)      Consult the staff
You may think you know what needs to go and what should stay, but maybe your staff thinks differently.  Have a quick meeting about your current ACT! usage, what people are using, what they aren’t, and what they wish they could do differently.  You should decide who is responsible for filling out which fields, and set up a standard by which people assign tasks to each other to facilitate smooth workflow.

4)      Idiot-proof it
Where possible, consider setting up activity series to encourage the steps in a workflow plan.  Every time someone adds a new prospect, does that mean your salesperson should make a call?  Or if every time a support contract has an expiration date, should a renewal request call be made 8 months later?  Set it up so ACT! asks you to schedule these things.

There are a number of ways to get your data to work for you--do you have any suggestions for keeping a clean database?  Tell us about it in the comments!

_ As a business, setting goals for the new year is a must for annual growth.  Often we reach for new products and services to point us in that right direction, but have you looked at trying to get more out of what you already have?  Have you thought about what else ACT! could do to help you reach your goals?  This month we will be offering you suggestions for getting the most out of ACT! to help you grow your business.

Put Your Dashboard to Work
How often do you use your Dashboard?  Do you know what it can do?  Your Dashboard has the ability to serve as a place in ACT! where powerful reporting info is all aggregated on one page, based on what will be most useful to you.  It can be a way to focus on your most important goals, every day when you first open ACT!.

To set up a Dashboard for optimum usefulness, think about what kind of data you should be looking at everyday in terms of reaching your goals.  Are you looking to get more hands-on with your Salespeople this year?  You can set up your Dashboard to track their activities and opportunities and have the information displayed in graphs and charts.  Or perhaps you are a sales person, and you want to track your goals.  You can likewise display your activities and opportunities via your Dashboard, and set up graphs that will give you a visual idea of how productive you have been thus far, and more importantly, how much more you need to do to reach your targets.

You can learn how to edit a preexisting Dashboard here.  Or learn how to create new ones here.

Don’t Lose an Opportunity
Are you currently using Opportunities?  Do you use them to track products and services your company sells, or do you also use them to actually track when you have an opportunity to sell products and services?  Tracking a prospect’s interest in what you offer will help keep you organized as you go through the sales process.  Marking your opportunities by stages, means you have a quick way to tell what needs to happen next.  You can pull up your opportunities list, and filter them by sales stages for easy follow-up.  Did someone express interest in getting services from you, but said they didn’t have budget?  Reevaluating your opportunities means you may be able to breath life into deals you thought were closed or stagnant.

And to get even more power out of ACT!, you can create a recurring activity on your calendar to “Evaluate ACT! use” once a year.  And of course if you find there is something you would like ACT! to do for you that it isn’t, please give us a call!

How are you working with ACT! differently this year?  How will ACT! help you reach your goals?