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.

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!

Here’s the deal.  I know folks like you – I call them ACT fanactics.  I had 500 of them wait in line to get into a seminar I ran in August, 2002 on a not so sunny night in South Florida introducing the all new ACT 6.  I guarantee I wouldn’t have had a crowd like that for a seminar on Excel or QuickBooks, not to mention Sales Force which was just a dot on the horizon in 2002.

If you were brand new to CRM it might be a different story, but you obviously know ACT and have liked it for years. If you move to another product you’ll constantly be missing core ACT features like dynamic groups and lookups.

When the “new” ACT SQL version came out in 2005 the developers asked me for a dozen of my ACT 6 Dummies books which I thought was strange until I realized that the programmers wanted to maintain ACT’s “look and feel.”  That means that although there are lots of cool new features in ACT (Outlook integration, e-marketing, companies, opportunities, web info tab, dashboards, secondary contacts and relationships)  the old “tried and true” features (adding contacts, deleting contacts, groups, lookups, mail merge) remain exactly the same.

I’ve written books and produced training videos on a number of products (Sugar, BCM, Sales Force, Outlook) as well as on ACT and I have not found anything I like better for a number of reasons:

• There’s safety in number s.  ACT has a lot of longevity and loyalty going for it.  It’s been around for over 20 years and has millions of existing users.
• ACT has widespread availability.  You won’t find a box of Sales Force on the shelves of your local computer store.
• Each new version expands the core functionality by adding new functionality that typically matches current technology trends.
• ACT is extremely customizable.  There are hundreds of consultants to help modify your database to exactly what you want – or you can learn to make those changes yourself.
• ACT is easy to use and intuitive.  I recently found out that Sage actually has a “click counter” (OK, that’s not the official title but you get the drift) who’s job function is to “count the click” required for basic functions such as mail merge to insure that the number of clicks is much fewer than with competing products.
• ACT is one of the least costly solutions around.  Compare a one-time purchase of ACT to the recurring monthly Sales Force charges and it’s a no brainer.

Hope this helps you in your decision!

What made the story even more meaningful for me was that I actually knew one of those high-schoolers as well as his father; they were both former ACT consultants who I had met on numerous occasions.

The above story struck me for two reasons.  First, those three incredible kids were reunited via a networking site, Facebook, which wasn’t even in existence 20 years ago.  And secondly, I gained a bit more insight into two of my business acquaintances.

You might feel that technology has served to make our world a bit less personal.  And, while I agree that Internet shopping lacks the warm and fuzzy feeling our parents might have encountered at their local store, I think that in many ways technology has made our world a much smaller place.  In fact, technology makes it even easier than ever to develop a personal connection with our business associates.

When I first started my consulting practice over ten years ago, I routinely hopped in my car and drove to my client’s location.  Now, I’m more likely to hop on their computer.  Although this has allowed me to expand the territory that I service, it’s also removed a great deal of that human touch.  Consequently, I make just a bit more of an effort to build a better relationship with my clients.  I’ll admit I cheat a bit by using ACT’s web info tab.

I recently discovered that the Travel Channel had run a piece on a cool diner in one client’s small New Jersey town, and that another client has pretty much devoted his life to finding a cure for his special needs child.  If nothing else I can badger a client about a winter snowstorm when I reside in Florida, or discuss an event that might have occurred close to his location.

For me, the world just keeps getting smaller, and folks a bit friendlier!

If you’d like to read the original story about the abandoned baby you can find it by click here. You might also want to take a course on Facebook at lynda.com to see the ways that it can benefit your business.

Some companies force you to upgrade every year or so.  For example, Intuit’s tax tables will stop working when QuickBooks reaches a certain age, or you’ll no longer be able to access your accounts online in Quicken after a year or two.  Sage takes a different approach with their new releases by trying to entice you to upgrade by offering a bunch of new “must have” features.  And of course, you’ll be forced to upgrade if you change other aspects in your computer world; for example, users of Vista and Office 2007 found that their older versions of ACT simply wouldn’t work.

Quite frankly, ACT 2009 didn’t have a huge “wow” factor, although it did make significant changes in performance.  On the other hand, ACT 2010 has added several cool features that I really like:

• The new Welcome Page includes things like instant access to search and links to your most common tasks.
• The new Web Info tab automatically integrates your contact records with data from all the latest sites including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Maps.
• The Opportunities area has been revamped to  behave like contacts, groups, and companies, which means you can add lots of customized fields and change the Opportunity layout.
• There’s now “out-of-the-box” integration with Swift Page’s e-mail and drip marketing solutions.
• There are 9 new dashboards, 13 new reports (created for Sage by Tech Benders!), and a new customizable Reports view.
• iCalendar and vCard compatibility so that you can send invitations and contact information to “non-ACT” users right from ACT.

I’ll be running a series of “Drive Before You Buy” webinars of ACT 2010 throughout August; for more information visit http://techbenders.com/users.php If you decide you want to take advantage of some great pre-release pricing drop me an e-mail at info@techbenders.com.