ACT! Professional is the latest version of Sage's entry-level customer relationship management solution for individuals (workgroup version also available for networked users). The real strength of ACT! Professional is its ability to share information across your company and link together people and processes so that everyone can access documented details about contacts and customers. However, unlike FrontRange Solutions' GoldMine 6.5, ACT! Professional is extremely intuitive and easy to use, and doesn't overwhelm you with a myriad of windows and sub-directories. With a look and feel similar to Microsoft's Outlook, ACT! is an excellent application for assisting small sales teams to work more closely together by making the process of sharing information effortless.
Pros: Easy to use; marketing and sales tools; links to PDAs
Cons: Only converts ACT! 5.x or 6.x databases; requires activation
ACT! Professional is the latest version of Sage's entry-level customer relationship management (CRM) solution for individuals. If you intend to use the software in a networked environment (up to 50 users), you'll need to purchase ACT! Professional for Workgroups (£1335 ex. VAT, five users). The software allows those in a small office/home office, as well as small and medium businesses to track calls, meetings, to-do items and manage marketing and sales processes. You can also use ACT! Professional to analyse historical sales trends, 'understand' the profile of customers, plan marketing and sales campaigns, as well as import data for direct mailshots, faxshots and e-mail communication.
A built-in sales process system further allows you to track communication with a prospect, and reporting tools help you to analyse sales forecasts for a single team or a whole sales team. The new version represents a significant evolution of the software with more than 50 new product features and hundreds of usability enhancements. Some of the key enhancements include improved workflow capabilities with the integration of opportunity forecasting tools, an updated 'look and feel', the ability to store company records and associate individuals to company records, a redesigned calendar view which includes a new customisable week view, enhanced database synchronisation, enhanced security layers, better customer segmentation, improved customisation of the database with advanced field types and activity types, as well as improved integration with office applications such as Outlook, Excel and Word.
When running ACT! Professional for the first time you are presented with a Getting Started Wizard. This wizard allows you to set your default word processor and e-mail software to be used within the software (can be changed at a later date), as well create a new database. Similar to accounting packages, careful attention is needed here to insure that your database is created or converted (ACT! 5.x and 5.x databases only) correctly for use with ACT! Professional (i.e. ACT! 7.0). For instance, you have to give your database a name, indicate where the database will be located on your hard disk, decide whether the database will be shared with others, as well as assign a username and password. Password protection is optional, but it does help to prevent another user gaining access to your database.
The central element of ACT! is contacts. A contact can be a customer, business associate, friend or anyone else you need to keep track of. All contact information, such as name, address and phone numbers, make up a contact record, which is then stored in the ACT! database - just like Outlook. Every task you then perform in ACT! relates to a contact, such as adding a diary entry, managing opportunities or even creating an opportunity pipeline.
From the software's clean and uncluttered home page you can opt to organise your contacts into groups and/or companies. A group is a collection of contacts with something in common, such as those working on the same project, whereas a company is a record type that allows you to track contacts within a company. Once contacts are organised into groups and/or companies, you can view activities or sales associated with the group or company in one location, not just individual contacts. Other benefits of using groups is that you can create notes and histories for the group, as well as send e-mails or create documents for the whole group. This is another benefit a CRM package has over a Personal Information Manager (PIM), such as Outlook.
Another key area of ACT! is its calendar section. From here you can set activities including telephone calls, meetings, and do-to items. You can also schedule an activity with a contact, and you can associate an activity with groups and companies. If you schedule activities using Outlook and ACT!, you can update and display those activities on either calendar. Workgroups will be pleased to know that users can view activities on each other's calendars, including details for public activities. However, when viewing someone else's calendar, you can see when a private activity is scheduled, but you cannot see the details for it. Users with an administrator or manager role can schedule activities on behalf of other users, and you can grant scheduling access to your calendar to allow users to schedule activities for you.
Where ACT! really shines in workgroup environments is its ability to create opportunities, or a sale to a contact. You can track an opportunity from beginning to end by creating the opportunity and updating the opportunity's stage and status (such as open or inactive) as you work towards closing the sale. Each process has a set of stages associated with it that indicate where opportunity is in the sales cycle. For example, a stage might be 'initial communication' or 'negotiation'. Each stage also has an assigned percentage, which indicates the likelihood of closing the sale.
To put this into real-world terms, when you open an opportunity with a new contact, you can assign the 'Initial Communication' stage (10 per cent chance of successfully closing the sale), and when you schedule a meeting to make a presentation to the contact, you can update the stage to 'Presentation' (40 per cent chance of closing the sale). The probability, or percent, is automatically listed when you select a stage, but you can change the probability if you want.
Managers should be interested to know that you can view and print a list of opportunities of other users, regardless of role, and you can filter the list so that you can see certain opportunities only, such as those that have been closed and won. You can also remind yourself of a task related to an opportunity, view the history of opportunities, forecast sales opportunities (view opportunities at various stages), as well as create an opportunity pipeline or graph (graphical representations that you can use to monitor and forecast opportunities).
In addition, from January 2005 ACT! Professional and ACT! Professional for Workgroups will be available to integrate with Sage Instant Accounts, Sage Line 50, Sage 100 and Sage MMS accounting software, delivering an integrated front and back office system for your business. The benefit of linking to an accounting package is that you can manage both your business contacts and view their accounts at the same time, allowing you to see which business contacts are more profitable than other, which contacts are late payers and when they last paid their bills, for instance. There's also a copy of the software called ACT! Professional Link for Pocket PC/Palm, allowing you to access and synchronise data with your handheld computer.
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