If you’ve been sitting in the Stone Age and are still clinging to your tried and true version of ACT 6, you might want to take a look at the features that you missed by not upgrading previously.  If you have a more recent version of ACT you might also want to take a look at that list to see what you missed in the last version or two.

With my apologies to David Letterman, here’s my list of the Top 10 best new features in ACT 2011:

1. Your version of ACT will now be compatible with Office 2010.
2. Your version of ACT will now be compatible with Windows 7.
3. You can synchronize your Outlook contacts to ACT.
4. You can synchronize your ACT contacts to Outlook.
5. You can synchronize your Outlook calendar to ACT.
6. You can synchronize your ACT calendar to Outlook.
7. You can set up Smart Tasks to automatically schedule a follow-up call to any customer that you haven’t heard from in 60 days.
8. You can set up Smart Tasks to automatically send out several emails to each new prospect that you add to your database.
9. Automatically link ACT to your Hoover’s account.
10. You can take advantage of the best possible pricing during the pre-release sale.

If you’d like to see what the new version of ACT looks like, or have a question about upgrading, you can view my  ACT 2011 webinar.  And, should you purchase ACT 2011 from me, don’t forget that you’ll be eligible to attend a free class on the new features.

I no sooner got off the phone with that prospect when another client called; he was trying to install ACT 2008 with Windows 7 and was running into all sorts of problems.

Unfortunately I couldn’t help either person add new functionality without upgrading to a newer version of ACT.

It always surprises me when a business owner refuses to spend money on technology.  His home computer no doubt puts his office computer to shame and he probably doesn’t think twice about buying the latest HD television for himself or an I Phone for his kid.

Technology upgrades should be considered a necessary, recurring cost of doing business.  You can’t run your business without a telephone and office supplies, and you shouldn’t be running a business with outdated technology. Ironically, technology is the single best way to lower the overhead of a business.

In most cases the price of an upgrade is outweighed by the decrease in general operating expenses that proper use of technology will provide.  The cost of running a business is a fraction of what it was 10 years ago.

Here are some of the ways that you should be leveraging modern technology with ACT to reduce your overhead:

• VOIP (voice over IP):  Most VOIP business solutions include an “auto attendant” which means you can save on support staff salaries and decrease your phone bills.
• Automating Processes: I like to tell people I’m either very lazy or very smart.  In either case I hate to have to do the same work over and over again.  A case in point is reaching out to existing customers and prospects.  Traditional ACT users set up “reminders” for each and every follow-up.  “Turbo-charged” ACT users set up drip marketing campaigns or will use ACT 2011’s new Smart Tasks feature to speed up the process and insure that no contact is left untouched.
• E-Marketing: E-blasts have replaced more traditional marketing campaigns.  They’re quicker, easier and cheaper. However, even snail mail blasts are much easier and consequently less expensive to run with ACT.
• Telecommuting: ACT’s remote access options can eliminate the need for office space and equipment for your sales staff and other key personnel.  And the opportunity reports and dashboards will allow you to maintain complete accountability on their productivity.

I’ll be running a free webinar on ACT 2011 on Wednesday, August 11 at 6 PM EST.  Click here to register.  The webinar will be recorded and all registrants will receive a copy of the recording.

You might be wondering what in the world a tennis player has in common with a marketer.  I can think of several similarities:

1. Good work ethic – Prior to Tuesday’s match you might not have even heard of either of these players (Isner is ranked 18^th and Mahut 148^th in the world).  However, just like your marketing efforts these guys aren’t overnight sensations.  Isner has been playing since age 9, Mahut since age 5.  Just like you can’t play tennis one time and expect to compete at Wimbledon, you can’t send out one marketing piece and expect immediate success.  You’ve got to keep working at it.
2. Determination – I can only imagine what each of those players was thinking as the match wore on.  Obviously, giving up was not an option.
3. Confidence - Each player had the confidence that he would ultimately succeed.  When fatigue set it they allowed themselves to rely on their instincts.   A marketer has to have the same confidence that his efforts will result in great results.
4. Keeping an eye on the prize – Although Isner won the battle, he lost the war as unfortunately he lost his next Wimbledon match.  There’s no doubt that both of these players will be playing many more matches over the course of their careers.  And they’ll concentrate on what they did accomplish and not on what they didn’t.

Wonder if either of those players is looking for a job?

About that time my significant other wandered in wondering what I was up to and why I was “urgently” requesting a cash advance.  His main concern was that this transaction might cause us to miss the opening pitch.  My main concern was that one of my clients or friends might receive the e-mail and actually fall for this scam.

Yikes!  I’ve written a couple of books and produced training videos on Outlook which included information on e-mail security.  My network is harder to access than Fort Knox.  How could this have happened?

Once the initial panic subsided I thought about the problem with a bit more clarity.   I only use the Yahoo account for “shopping” purposes and took comfort in the fact that all the companies that typically spam me to buy more products, etc, will receive a bit of spam of their own.  However, I needed to remedy the situation and, more importantly, prevent it from happening again.

My first step was to change my Yahoo password.  I then brainstormed for possible ways that this hacking might have occurred.  The list I came up with was rather short:

1. My computer has virus. This seemed unlikely because only my Yahoo account was affected and none of the numerous business accounts that I have in Outlook.
2. Someone stole my Yahoo password. Again, this seemed rather unlikely as I don’t post my password on the Internet or write it on a sticky note hanging from my monitor.
3. I checked my email from an infected PC.  A possibility, but because I rarely send or receive e-mail from my Yahoo account I have no reason to check this account from anywhere else than home.
4. I was drunk or on some other mind-altering substance and actually sent the e-mail.  A possibility except for the fact that I’ve never been very good at creating April Fool’s pranks or other hoaxes.  And I haven’t suffered from a hangover – or even a bad headache – lately.
5. Yahoo got hacked.

OK, I hate to point fingers but Yahoo seemed the most likely culprit.  So on Sunday I began to scour the Internet looking for other folks who had experienced the same thing.  I’ll have to admit that this was a bit time consuming as I had to keep reassuring various acquaintances that yes, I was all right and no, I didn’t need their financial assistance at this time.  My Internet search turned up lots of people who had experienced the very same problem that I had.  Ironically, in addition to Yahoo users, many folks using Gmail and Hotmail accounts had experienced the same problem I had.

Since I now felt comfortable in the knowledge that Yahoo had been hacked, I scoured the Yahoo help site for references to the problem and found – nothing.  Except of course for a few articles telling me how to change my password.  Hmm.  So Yahoo users routinely had their accounts hacked, but Yahoo wasn’t taking action?   Say it ain’t so, Joe!

I now set about trying to contact someone at Yahoo.  Surely they would be concerned enough to take action.  Surely they would want to prevent this from happening to other Yahoo users.  I found several messages advising me to change my password but no specific reference to any responsibility on the part of Yahoo.  It seemed to me that if someone was hacking into Yahoo and grabbing passwords Yahoo would want to know about it and, more importantly, put a stop to it.  After hours of trying I finally reached a heavily-accented person who, after several minutes of hold time, came back on the line and offered to walk me through the process of changing my password.

I now know what it feels like to come home and find that your house has been robbed.  My personal property was pillaged by some faceless low life and I feel violated.  The bad guys have won.  My main reason for posting this article is to get an idea of the number of other folks who have had their accounts hacked.  If it’s happened to you, let me know!

For those of you who might not be familiar with lynda.com I’d describe it as an online software school.  You can take out a monthly subscription for roughly $25 a month which give you access to all of the courses including my own courses on ACT 2010 and Outlook 2010.  For example, if you’re creating a blog you can take a Word Press course, or if you need to learn how to edit your photos you might want to check out a Photo Shop course.  The last time I looked there were over 800 available courses with new ones being added every day.

I actually created two courses on Outlook 2010.  The Outlook 2010 New Features course is aimed at Outlook users who are upgrading to 2010 and covers the “new stuff” such as the new Outlook Ribbon, Quick Steps and the Outlook Social Network connector.  The Outlook 2010 Essential Training course is for the new Outlook user who wants to learn everything from setting up an e-mail account and subscribing to blogs, to creating an address book and keeping a calendar.

Alternatively you can just purchase the course of your choice on DVD for $49 through Amazon.  My ACT 2010 Essential training DVD is currently available and the Outlook 2010 will be available shortly.

Oh, alarms – how do I hate thee?  Let me count the ways.  First of all, too many of you routinely snooze your alarms.  Secondly with all those alarms going off none of them really stands out so that the really important stuff is mixed in with the not so important stuff.  Finally, what happens if you forget to set an alarm or an activity?  The floodgates open and a deluge of information is lost forever.

Don’t believe me?  Research shows that at least 25% of the average database is dead wood.  And part of the reason for that dead wood is that we let too much important information fall through the cracks in our database.

Fortunately, the use of ACT’s dynamic group function provides a simple solution for plugging those holes.  A dynamic group will work automatically and require less time on your part than the more traditional method of scheduling tasks.  The contents of a dynamic group change dynamically when the information in your database changes.  For example, you might create a dynamic group for each of your sales people.  When you assign contacts the sales force they will automatically appear in the appropriate group; if you reassign contacts the groups will realign automatically.

Here’s what you’ll need to do to create those dynamic groups:

1. Determine the purpose of your existing alarms.  My solution will work for activities such as following up with new prospects or reaching out to customers that you haven’t spoken to in the last two months.
2. Create a group in ACT by going to the Groups Detail View, clicking the Groups menu, selecting New Group and giving the group a name.
3. Right-click the new group from the list of groups on the left side of the Groups Detail View, select Group Membership, choose Add/Remove Contacts and then click the Edit Criteria button.

At this juncture you’re ready to create a simple query to automatically find the contacts that match your criteria.  I particularly like to build my queries based on a date field so that I can automatically find customers with expiring maintenance contracts, or orders that are still waiting to be shipped.

You might find it helpful to see the new prospects that have been added to your database in the last two days to insure that they don’t “fall through the cracks”.  Here’s what that query looks like:

Once you get the hang of creating dynamic groups the sky’s the limit.  Just think – the only alarm you’ll have to be snoozing is the one next to your bed!

Ten years ago one of the first things I showed new ACT users was how to modify the existing ACT fax coversheet.  Back then most of my clients were using WinFax to link ACT to their fax machine, or printing out a coversheet and feeding it into their fax machine manually.  Today many of my clients are opting to use an online fax service such as MyFax or eFax for the few times that they actually need to fax.  Ironically, those ACT users often spend countless hours wrangling with the service’s interface to create a coversheet when they could just as easily use the ACT fax coversheet.

The process is a simple one.  Here’s all you need to do to get started:

Start by editing ACT’s existing fax cover page.  If you’ve previously set Word as your word processor preference you’ll be working in familiar territory here.

1. From the fax recipient’s contact record click the Write menu, choose the E-mail Message (from template) option and then select Fax Cover Page.  For me this is the cool part because I can choose to either print or email any of the ACT templates that I’ve created or modified.  In this case a new e-mail message will appear with your fax cover information in the body of the message.
2. Fill in the subject line following the instructions of your e-fax provider.
3. (Optional) Attach the document that you want to fax.
4. Click Send.

Boom.  Your fax is sent.  Best of all, a record of the transaction will appear on the recipient’s history tab.

It’s amazing what you can do online, for free, in terms of connecting with your potential and existing customers right now!  What’s really great is that it doesn’t take a lot of time, and it’s a great place to promote your uniqueness and your personality.

If you’re looking for a few things you can right now to reach out people, and connect with them, let’s get started!

1) Assure your business is listed!

One of the best ways to do this is with GetListed.org.  GetListed.Org was launched in January of 2009 as a way for small business owners to learn exactly how their businesses are listed online.  They’ll assure you’re listed in some of the most important online business listings online, such as:

• Google Maps (via Google Local)
• Yahoo Listings
• Bing
• Yelp
• Best of the Web

2) Ask some of your most passionate customers for a Google review!

Once you’re listed in Google (see Tip 1) send your best customers an e-mail asking them to review your business on Google.  Google reviews (and people saying they found your review helpful) are a very effective way to grow online loyalty and it even helps with your Google relevance — meaning it helps your web site rank higher in Google’s search results.

3) Join LinkedIn.com, and connect!

If you haven’t jumped on the Social Media bandwagon yet, LinkedIn is one of the most effective ways to reconnect with existing customers, and introduce yourself to potential customers.  What’s really cool is their “introduction” feature that lets you introduce yourself via a friend or associate.  LinkedIn will either work from your address book, or let you search for contacts and add them to your network.

4) Join PRLOG.org and Spread the News!

One of the most effective ways to create awareness online is to “spread the news” via a press release.  If you, or your company, creates news releases, it’s really important that you share them online in addition to sending them to your local, regional or national news outlets.

I’ve found that one of the best, free, online sites for sharing news is PRLOG.org.

News releases are a great way to go after “keyword phrases”.  In my case I might want to appear in searches for “marketing consultant”.  The trick is to optimize the title of your piece to match the appropriate keyword.  Instead of a typical news title like “Train With Shane Offers New Service”, I might use one like “Marketing Consultant Company, Train With Shane, Offers New Service”.

Do you have any other suggestions on free ways to connect with customers online? Be sure to share them with us!

Unfortunately, the summertime can also mean the start of the slow season for many businesses as families everywhere pack up the SUV and head out for vacation.  As the song goes, See You in September.

If spring represents the time to clean-up your database, then summer should represent the time for the smart e-marketer to ramp up their marketing efforts.   Take advantage of the slow time to plot your future marketing efforts.

Here are a few ideas for those Lazy Hazy Days of Summer.

• Start segmenting your database. As tempting as it is to simply send out marketing pieces to your entire database, you’ll achieve much better results if you send out to a targeted audience.  For example, you might offer existing customers of one product a discount for another product, or offer new prospects a discount on their first orders.
• Fill in the holes in your database. Sometimes it’s not what you know but what you don’t know that can make a difference.  Create a query of all your existing customers for whom you are missing e-mail addresses and get to work tracking them down.
• Reach out to your clients through the social networking sites. I absolutely love ACT 2010’s Web Info tab because I can send an invitation to any of my contacts for Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the social sites at the click of a button.
• Develop a drip marketing campaign. Take advantage of the slow time to sit down and develop a good marketing campaign.  Create at least two campaigns:  one for new inquiries and another for new customers.  Design the templates, decide on the intervals between the pieces, and then “set it and forget it.”
• Write some blog articles. Like a little squirrel stock piling food for the winter, start writing articles now that can be posted later so that your blog will have a continuous flow of fresh articles throughout the year.
• Create some newsletters. Write ‘em now and avoid the holiday rush.  Once written you’ll want to add them into a drip marketing campaign.  As silly as it may seem to be writing holiday newsletters in June, you’ll thank yourself when you find yourself with one less thing to do in December!
• Relax and enjoy the slow time. After all, even the best marketers deserve a little time off!

Who knows?  Maybe you can write some of those articles while relaxing on the beach or floating in the pool.  Singing a few “summer-themed” songs is optional.

Do you have other ideas for summertime marketing?  I’d love to hear from you!

For those of you unfamiliar with the In-N-Out chain, they have approximately 250 locations sprinkled throughout the Southwest.  Compare that to McDonald’s who has over 31,000 stores world-wide and you’ll get a feeling for the size of this chain.  Talk about David and Goliath!  If there’s any question as to who is winning the burger war (in California at least) take a look at the drive-up lanes or ask a local which chain they prefer and you’ll have an answer.

I’m not a fast food person but the In-N-Out phenomenon fascinates me, especially after hearing Tom Hanks tell Conan that “one of the true great things about Los Angeles is In-N-Out Burger.”  And wouldn’t we all like to be the In-N-Out of our respective industries, especially those of use in the small business sector?

There are several elements that have led to In-N-Out’s tremendous success that can be easily applied by the typical business:

1. Word of mouth advertising: When In-N-Out opened in Scottsdale, Arizona, there was a four-hour wait for food, and news helicopters hovered overhead.
2. Loyal customers: Heisman Trophy winner Troy Smith raved about In-N-Out from the podium of the 2007 BCS National Championship Game, golfer Phil Mickelson mentioned the chain in his book, and many celebrities make In-N-Out part of their “post-awards” rituals.
3. Customer Satisfaction: The In-N-Out restaurant chain consistently rates as one of the top fast food restaurants in customer satisfaction surveys.
4. Good product: Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsay was quoted as saying that he’d chose an animal style In-N-Out burger for his “death-row” last meal.
5. Branding: The signature colors for In-N-Out are white, red, and yellow and they are used extensively. The white is used for the buildings’ exterior walls and the employees’ basic uniform. Red is used for the buildings’ roofs and the employees’ aprons and hats. Yellow bands appear throughout.  It’s not hard to miss an In-N-Out location!
6. Not so Secret menu: The In-N-Out menu boasts four items (burger, cheeseburger, fries and drinks).  However, part of the In-N-Out allure is the “secret menu” that all employees know as the items appear on the cash register.  I suspect that knowledge of this “secret” menu makes customers feel like insiders who somehow share a private connection with the chain as they order their animal fries (topped with cheese, onions and 1000 Island dressing) and their protein burger (nestled in iceberg lettuce rather than a bun).

Maybe you can’t offer a secret menu, but you can make your customers feel like insiders by treating them like members of the family.  And although you might not garner celebrity endorsements, you can ask for referrals or post positive comments on your website.

If you’ve heard of In-N-Out please leave a comment and let me know what you think.