The first question you should ask yourself is “how can I tell who really likes us?”  Of course, off the top of your head you probably can name quite a few people with whom you do regular business.  But if you can set up Act! to tell you who is interacting with you and when, then you can get a clearer picture of who your best clients are.

Of course, what you consider your “best client” may vary.  Do you want to thank clients who buy a lot in net purchasing?  Or is it the clients who are consistent return customers?  Or do you have clients who always make contact with you around the holidays?  All of these things can be tracked in Act!.
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Once you decide what your criteria is, you can set up Act! to stratify your clients.  Creating a field called “prospect level” or “client level” gives you a place to track what kind of client you have.  You can then choose a method of tracking them.  You could go with a hierarchical classification, like assigning clients “A” through “D” status, or you can use descriptors, like “frequent customer” or “loyal promoter.”  Once your contacts labelled in this way, it’s easy to run a search for everyone who is an “A level” client or a “frequent customer.”
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From there it’s up to you how you thank your customers.  Whether you want to provide them with free, valuable white papers, send them hand-written thank you notes or do something else, making the effort is a guaranteed way to be sure you’re letting the clients who appreciate you know that the feeling is mutual.

Need help setting up client stratification? Contact us via email at info@kristismith.com or phone (847) 520-0860.

Are you looking to increase sales, improve customer relationships or be more efficient in 2016? Maybe you’re interested in the latest marketing tools or learning proven marketing techniques. Following KSC on social media can lead you to some great resources. Check out a few of our recent posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn:
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• 5 Must Haves to Revamp Your 2016 Email Strategy 
• Your ‘revenue roster’ could bring you riches 
• 10 Small Digital Marketing Strategy Hacks That Move The Needle 
• What Your 2016 Content Marketing Strategy Should Look Like 
• Boosting CRM uptake
• Organizing for productivity: 4 tips for minimizing distractions​ 

As we discussed earlier this month, the holiday season is the perfect time to send gifts, cards, and tokens of appreciation to your clients and set a tone for the new year. But what if you have a  very long list of clients? Perhaps you'd like to send cards to some, gift cards to others, and gift baskets to some of your best clients. How do you go about dividing up a meal of a contact list into manageable pieces?

We recommend stratifying your clients--in other words, sorting them into tiers. For instance, you can decide to use four tiers, A, B, C, and D. You can then create a customized field on your contact record layout, by which you can label your clients. If you go through your clients, you can quickly label them an A, B, C, or D, in your tier field and you save yourself work for next year, too.

Once you have your database of clients stratified, you can update them based on how your business changes. At our office, we have a custom report that takes different variables into account (frequency of business, quantity of sale, how long someone has been a client, etc.) which we can then run every month. The report generates a list of what tier each client should be at, and we then update our contact records accordingly. This way, we can quickly pull up a list of our tiered clients and market to them using the levels as a guide. We may check in with our A's once a month via phone to see if there is anything they need. We may check in with the B's just as often, in hopes they become A's. You may want to run a drip marketing campaign so your C's and D's keep you in mind, even if they don't need your services as frequently.

And for the holiday season, you can run a quick look-up of your contacts by tier, and you have sorted mailing lists ready to go. You can refer back to our previous blog to learn how to print mailing labels or envelopes for holiday cards. And if you are interested in our help setting up a stratification report like ours or customizing fields, please give us a call at 847-520-0860.

And from the KSC team, we sincerely hope you have an enjoyable holiday season with you and yours. Thank you for visiting our blog. We are grateful for your readership!

The traditional holiday card is a sweet way to say you are thinking of your clients this time of year, and with ACT!, you can cut down on the prep time and tedious busy work necessary to put them together. We recommend selecting cards and filling them out by hand for a personal touch. However if you need to save time and energy, there are several great vendors available who will fill them out for you. We then recommend using ACT! to print out labels or to print addresses directly onto the cards. This is a seriously simple process.

1) Create your lookup
First you will want to decide who will be getting cards and how you will organize them. We recommend either creating a group which you then add all card recipients to, or selecting recipients by a commonality--all clients, all networking contacts, etc. If you have them marked off by ID Status already, you can then create a lookup based on the ID Statuses very simply. Once you have the card recipients organized, create a lookup of all those contacts.

2) File>Print>Labels or Envelopes
From your lookup, go to the File dropdown and select Print. From the Print window, you can select either Label or Envelope (label if you will be printing address labels, envelope if you will be printing addresses directly onto your envelope).

3) Select your stationery
Stationery companies like Avery make it easy to print directly from your computer. ACT! has the dimensions of the most popular labels already saved as default. Simply select which product number matches the labels or envelope size you have purchased, and ACT! will print your labels so they fit on the labels or envelopes you've selected.*

4) Preview and print
You can then preview your labels, save the document and print later, or print right away. It's that easy. You have then reduced the amount of time you've spent on an activity that strengthens your current relationships, giving you time to create new ones.

If we could be of any assistance to you as you put together your holiday cards or gifts, please give us a call at 847-520-0860. *If you would like our help creating a template for an envelope or label that does not come with ACT!, we are happy to help.

In the past, we have encouraged our clients to keep track of not just sales information regarding their clients, but to also make notes when clients tell them about an upcoming big event in their lives or when they share anecdotes. In this way, ACT! has always served as a tool that helps create and maintain a strong relationship with your clients.

But ACT! 2013 has made it even easier to care for those relationships. Let me show you an example.

Last time you spoke to John, you remember him saying that he was going on vacation to Florida soon. You have a follow-up call to make with him today, so you pull up his ACT! record. You made a note in your database that John was headed to vacation in Florida, so you will probably ask him how is vacation went.

But you are also friends with John on Facebook and linked to him on LinkedIn. So now with Sage ACT!’s social media integration, you can select the Social Updates tab to see what John has said recently on his Facebook or LinkedIn account. John mentioned that he went SCUBA diving on his vacation, and you are an avid SCUBA diver too—so now when you call John, you may inquire about the activities he did on vacation and spend a few minutes sharing your enthusiasm for SCUBA diving.

By pulling in your contacts’ updates which they shared with you on social media, Sage ACT! 2013 makes it very easy to engage your contacts in meaningful conversation, thereby cementing your relationships with them. And it saves you time—you don’t need to check Facebook and LinkedIn to see what John has been up to, because now ACT! puts it in one place for you.

Social media integration also may help you understand when would be a good time to make an important call. For instance, you may pull up a client’s Social Updates tab to find out they are on vacation, on a business trip, or perhaps they are not working due to personal matters. Social media integration can give you a heads up about what is currently happening in your client’s world, so you can more aptly frame the conversation and its timing so it is most convenient for them.

With this new release of ACT!, managing your contacts is smoother and more social than ever. If you would like to see more, feel free to contact our office at 847-520-0860.

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.