Spring is in the air and it's time for some spring cleaning.  How often do your scrub your contact lists? How often do you check for duplicates and merge them? If you are like most people, not often enough. That's not surprising.  We all get caught up in our day to day work schedules so data cleansing is not high on the priority list.  But it should be.  Bad data costs money - in efficiency, lost revenue, wasted marketing expenditures, and a variety of other ways. And you

An Act! CRM data base contains lots of information and getting it out is frequently the problem you have.  So we tend to look at using different reporting tools, or Microsoft Excel, for the extracting or reporting task.  And the way the data is stored in Act! can sometimes make extracting the information the way you want a bit more difficult than it should be.  But if you understand the data base structure and your SQL Select statements you can do it easily. Here is an example. &

This is another in one of my information ninja articles.  Information Ninja is what one of my customers calls me. I told him, no, it is my job to make him one.  He laughed and said he wasn't quite sure that was the case. But indeed it is.  I know how to find data and report on it - which is what this article is all about. But he knows his business. He knows the numbers he wants to see or, in many cases, what numbers he is not seeing - ie sales calls not being made.  I

ACT is a complex CRM and as such it will periodically have issues with the backend database, SQL.  There is a great knowledgebase article which lists the most recent DBFIXERS - little small executibles that will correct the issue once it's been found.  These are great because often you just run the DBFIXER on the database and don't have to update all computers.  Love it when it's that simple. Here's the link to the article: http://kb.swiftpage.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/24753/

Recently we worked with a client who upgraded their Office to 2013 and ran into this error with editing a template in ACT.  The full error was: "Unable to cast COM object of type 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.ApplicationClass' to interface type 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word._Application'. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID '{00020970-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}' failed due to the following error: The RPC server is

Recently, my iPhone battery started to rapidly decline.  In the past if I wasn't on calls, it would last a day or more with a recharge.  Now it was lasting an hour or two.  I figured I would have to go and get a replacement battery - and I've only had the phone a year. However, before I trekked down to the ATT store, I decided to poke around Google and see if there were some known issues with my 5C phone.  What I found was a software fix - and it worked like a charm.

Today's tip is something I do all the time. You can run commands from the Windows Explorer address bar. This is very handy if you want to create a file or open a command box in a specific directory. An example of this is launching the ACT Logviewer - a tool I use all the time. It's in the ACT\act for windows folder. I open Explorer and find the folder noted above. I then type "cmd" in the address bar and it opens a DOS box directly in the folder. I can then just type in Logviewer or even

Over the past year, I have been reading a lot of articles about how social media is changing the world of sales. What has been happening recently is I'm actually seeing this in action. A couple of my clients decided to survey their customers to ask them how they preferred to be contacted for sales and if they searched social media for product information. In both cases, the customers responded that they wanted to be more "in charge" of the process of researching products and choosing how they