Recently, a website was disabled that is called by ACT when it opens.  The missing website makes ACT open very slowly.  There is a fix for this.  This blog article will describe the fix and will give credit to the person who found this and documented it for us. A product called Sage ACT Connect is going away to be replaced by a soon-to-be-named alternative, but in the mean time, the URL that supported this tool - http://sageact.sageconnectedservices.com was turned off.  ACT

Recently, I had a very interesting but somewhat unpopular conversation with my staff.  The  topic was  multi-tasking - or in this case, the inability to do so.  It turns out this is hard to do in our ever changing world.  There are constant interruptions and distractions that make it a challenge to keep on track.  In this case,  I wasn't asking for them to build me a space ship to go out in search of the final frontier.  We all just needed to step it up a

Once again I showed a tip to a sales rep that is so simple but so effective.  The application we are using is ACT, but this could be done with any CRM. We were going over his processes and were discussing how to make his sales calls more effective.  Lately, we are spending quite a bit of time doing business and sales coaching.  One thing that frustrated my client was going out to call on someone and they were not there or had been called away.  This happens quite a lot, even

In an interesting dialog last week, KPIs, or key performance indicators, were the topic but it occurred to me during the discussion that it meant different things to the participants on the call.  That inspried me to write this blog article. What do KPI's mean? And what do they mean to you and your organization. Wikipedia says: "A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. An organization may use KPIs to evaluate its success, or to

Here's another one of our "We love your tips" posts. I have now helped two clients resolve this issue so I thought - hm - let me turn it into a blog article. By now, I think everyone knows I adore the Swiftpage eMarketing tool.  It's what I use for my marketing campaigns and I have dozens of clients using it as well.  Lately, some of my clients have been having problems editing their HTML templates.  In all the cases, it turned out to be an issue with Internet Explorer (IE

It's time for another ACT Tip.  This week, one of our clients upgraded to ACT V16 so they could utilize some of the great new features.  One of their newest sales staff was using the web based version and loved the flexibility.  He could access his details from a customer site and didn't have to carry his "heavy" laptop.  His next purchase is going to be a small tablet, but in the mean time he has been happy with just jumping on a browser when at a client site.  Until

When you hear the term ROI, I am betting you are thinking money.  When I buy this stock, what will be my return.  If I invest in a business, will I get my money back. According to Wikipedia, ROI, or Return on Investment “is the concept of an investment of some resource yielding a benefit to the investor.”  Basically it means whatever you invest, be it money, time or effort, you are expecting some form of benefit. Often I am asked by clients to help them get across

We will periodically get calls from customers complaining that ACT syncs run forever or their ACT database is running too slow.  Before killing the computer, as the graphic alludes to, instead it's better to look at what is the root cause of the problem.  Usually, at this point we ask a couple of questions then we logon to their database and start checking a few things.  One of the things we look at is the size of the ALF file. An ACT database is a SQL database and is really two