ACT! 2005 – A Classic Sales Tool Gets a Facelift
© 2004 Reprint by permission only. All
rights
reserved.
by Matt Hyatt
For nearly two decades, salespeople everywhere have used
ACT! to keep track of business contacts and sales information.
Now in its seventh major iteration, ACT! 2005 is a powerful
sales tool that you can use to build your sales pipeline,
close sales, and maintain strong customer relationships.
It was designed to make the sales process easier and more
efficient, and the newest version does that job very well.
As you’d expect, the program comes out of the box
ready to store contact information of all types
- addresses, phone numbers, and email information, plus
details about
activities, phone calls, and correspondence.
ACT! also integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft
Word, making
it easy to generate email messages and word processing
documents from within the program. Email messages
and other documents can be attached to individual contacts,
keeping
all your pertinent records available and easy
to find.
The first thing upgrading users will notice about
ACT! 2005 is the improved user interface. The
menus are arranged to facilitate a logical work flow, and
a new shortcut
bar allows quick access to favorite functions.
Tabs for viewing extended contact information, such as
notes, history,
and related documents, are easier to find now
that they appear in the middle of the screen. All of the
graphics
and icons have been beautifully redesigned, lending
a sense of refinement not present in previous versions.
New “company groups” are another welcome and
long-awaited feature. Previous versions of ACT!
required a one-to-one relationship between companies and
contacts.
This meant that company data would have to be
entered and maintained separately for every contact stored
in the program,
regardless of whether groups of contacts worked
at the same company. Fortunately, ACT! 2005 lets users
assign
multiple contacts to a single company group,
making it much easier to update notes or address information
for
all contacts related to an organization.
ACT! 2005 includes a built-in feature for finding
and merging duplicate contact entries. The simple
new “scan
for duplicates” tool helps root out duplicate entries
in your contact list. Once a duplicate entry
is identified, the program allows users to move fields,
activities, and
other data between contacts to form a single,
accurate contact record.
The sales opportunity and pipeline features in
ACT! have also been improved. ACT! allows salespeople
to track sales opportunities through a series of steps
called
a pipeline. To make updating easier, the new
Opportunity List view lets you review, update, and filter
all your
opportunities from a single screen. And the graphical
Sales Pipeline view gives you a quick snapshot of your
progress
towards your sales goals.
The standard version of ACT! 2005 allows up to
ten licensed users to share contact data on a
network. For larger environments, ACT! 2005 Premium for
Workgroups
supports up to fifty simultaneous users. The
Premium version also stores more contacts (up to 100,000
vs. 50,000 for
Standard), supports collaboration between users,
and includes a stronger user security system.
Alas, every program has faults, and ACT! 2005
is no exception. Both the Standard and Premium
versions require a fast computer and modern operating system
to
run. Windows 98 and Windows ME are not supported.
For multi-user environments, most recent flavors of Windows
Server are
supported, but the very popular Microsoft Small
Business Server 2003 is not. Add-on programs designed for
previous
versions of ACT! will not work on ACT! 2005.
Some features found in older versions, like the phone dialer
and support
for WinFAX, are no longer present in the current
version.
Despite the drawbacks, ACT! 2005 is a clean,
sophisticated upgrade and an excellent tool for
streamlining the sales process. It’s available now
from your favorite software supplier or online
at www.act.com.
Matt Hyatt (mhyatt@rocketit.com)
is a longtime Gwinnett County resident and founder
of Rocket IT, an IT consulting firm
in Lawrenceville. For technology help with your
business, contact Rocket IT at 770-441-2520 or
visit online at www.rocketit.com.
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