Synthesis, Inc. - Synthesis, Inc. - Administrative Support for Creative People
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ACT! Tips
Keep track of contract dates in ACT!
One feature I love in ACT! (and use diligently!) is the Activity Series, using a future date as the ‘anchor’ date. This allows me to schedule reminder activities leading up to an important date, such as a contract renewal. Here’s one way I put that into practice:
Our Synthesis Executive Assistant program runs in 3-month increments. Renewal is not automatic. I like to give our clients a week’s notice by email, sending them a new contract as an attachment; then I follow up in 3 days with a phone call. If the client does not renew, I also want to be sure to inform our Project Manager so she can stop working on their behalf, unless we have hours available to complete a project.
The ACT! Navigation Pane
The newer versions of ACT! have a beautiful layout that resembles Outlook in many ways – there is a large block of buttons and information on the right of the screen. This is great unless you have a complicated layout that runs to the right of the screen and you are of a ‘certain age’ that doesn’t want to have the font size reduced to 8 point!
Dare to Look!
I just went through my ACT! database and deleted all folks with an ID/Status as “Suspect” who have not responded to my repeated attempts to contact them. I felt safe doing this, as those who did express some type of interest were immediately upgraded to Prospect and put in my sales funnel.
This simple process of casting the net to introduce our company and services to new markets every year has allowed us to tap into industries we never would have considered a candidate for our services! But we have learned: Nothing ventured, nothing gained, correct?
Deleting Multiple Contacts / Adding a Note to Multiple Contacts
If you read the sales tip this month by Gary, (my husband, Sales Director and Operations Manager for Synthesis), well you may have noticed he nixed my idea of giving one last shout-out to our Elder Care Providers (a target market for 4th Quarter 2010 and 1st Quarter 2011). In fact, he not only nixed the idea of calling – he wanted all folks who had not graduated from Suspect to Prospect to be deleted from the database – yikes!
You can do blanket replacements in ACT! (Edit / Replace); you can even enter in a single note for multiple contacts (I’ll show you that in a minute). However, you can also (sob!) delete multiple people at the same time but you better know what you are doing!
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