ACT! is the best selling contact manager software on the market today. This cookbook is full of immediately applicable recipes covering advanced features of ACT! 2012, with a particular emphasis on those new to this forthcoming release. Many recipes will be relevant to users of ACT! who have not upgraded since 2009 or 2010 as many advanced features originate from these releases. The content will familiarize you with the new startup options and a new design to better navigate the product. You will also learn to use ACT!'s E-Marketing and Opportunity features, so that you will be able to easily build your business and keep track of your profits.
This practical cookbook provides numerous recipes that will take you from being an ACT! novice to a CRM pro in no time, as you learn to utilize all of the advanced functionality of ACT! 2012 added in the most recent ACT! versions.
The recipes begin by covering the most basic elements of opening an ACT! database, and advance to include several recipes that will guide you through powerful CRM functionality, including creating E-Marketing Campaigns and sending them off to specific segments of your database. If you have information in your ACT! database, you need to be able to use it quickly and logically—this book will help you do just that.
Chapter 1, Working With the Welcome Page and Navigation Bar, explains what to expect when you first open ACT!, how to change the various startup options, and how to navigate around the ACT! software program.
Chapter 2, Jotting Down Your Notes Using Scratchpad, shows you how to use Scratchpad to keep a list of tasks that you need to do or notes that you want to jot down.
Chapter 3, Using Queries to Find Data, covers how to perform lookups based on various contact information including fields, notes, histories, and activities. It'll also walk you through running advanced lookups or queries which allow you to find contacts based on multiple criteria.
Chapter 4, Relating Contact Records, shows you how to cross-reference two existing ACT! contacts by creating a relationship between the two contacts.
Chapter 5, Integrating Contact Information With Your Websites, shows you how to use the existing links on the web info tab, which pull ACT! contact data directly into popular websites including Google and weather.com. You'll learn how to edit the existing links and create new links to your favorite web and social networking sites.
Chapter 6, Grouping Your Contacts, teaches you how to make groups and sub-groups, how to create dynamic groups that automatically populate based on your search criteria, and how to create quick lookups based on the contents of a group.
Chapter 7, Working With Companies, teaches you how to create companies and divisions to create an account-centric database. The chapter will show you how to link existing company and contact records, update all related contact records from the company record, and add new contact records to a company record.
Chapter 8, Creating Golden Opportunities, teaches you how to create a sales pipeline by adding a sales process, related stages, and a list of products to ACT!. You'll learn how to create a new opportunity, edit it to reflect its progression through your sales funnel, and report on the final outcome of the sale. You'll also be able to access, filter, and sort all of your opportunities from one centralized location.
Chapter 9, Integrating With Microsoft Outlook, shows you ways in which you can integrate Microsoft outlook with ACT!. You'll learn to send and receive outlook e-mail and have the history automatically recorded in ACT!. You'll learn how to synchronize the outlook and ACT! calendars and contacts, and learn how to create a new ACT! contact directly from an incoming e-mail message.
Chapter 10, Integrating with Google, covers setting up Google and ACT! integration, synchronizing your ACT! and Google calendars, synchronizing your ACT! and Google contacts, setting the Record History options for Google, and setting up Automatic Integration.
Chapter 11, Performing Routine Maintenance, shows you how to use the ACT! scheduler to create automatic procedures to run periodic backups and maintenance routines. You'll also learn to access the ACT! diagnostic utility to perform advanced maintenance, if needed and run reports on the inner structure of your database.
Chapter 12, Creating an E-Marketing Campaign, explains the difference between ACT! e-mail and E-Marketing. You'll learn how to design HTML e-mail templates, send out marketing pieces, and analyze the results of your E-Marketing campaign.
Chapter 13, Working Smarter with Smart Tasks, explains how to edit the existing Smart Tasks as well as create brand new ones to automate your sales and marketing efforts. You'll learn how to add additional Smart Task steps to automatically send out e-mails and remind you of important follow-up activities.
No prior ACT! knowledge is necessarily required; however, you'll find it helpful to have good working knowledge of how to add data into ACT!, or to work with an ACT! database that has already been populated with data.
This is an advanced cookbook of easy-to-follow recipes about ACT! 2012 designed to transform you into an ACT! power user. If you are an ACT! end user who wants to learn about the advanced functionality of ACT! 2012, then this book is for you. It will also be useful if you are a 2009 or 2010 user, as many advanced features originate from these ACT! versions. If you are an ACT! administrator who needs to administer an ACT! database or understand outlook integration, you will also find this book helpful.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click the Write menu and choose Manage ACT! Services".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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