I love Sage ACT's eMarketing feature.  It is a plugin that allows me to use the Swiftpage email blast and survey service. I can send out mass emails and ensure that none get delivered to people who have opted out of my emails AND (this is the good part) know that they have indeed received, opened, and clicked on links in my emails. The best part is the data gets written back to my ACT database and I now have information that I can search and act upon. In a previous life I used Constant

A while ago, I posted a blog article about building CSV's from SQL tables.  It was a very popular post, so I'm submitting it again.  I decided to go research if there were any things to do differently with the new SQL Server 2008. Turns out what I wrote before still applies. What drove me to write the original post was an email from another consultant who wanted to know a way to export SQL queries to CSV files. After I formulated my response to him, I decided it would make a good and

When thinking about the right CRM ask the 5 "w's" questions: Where are you going to use it, Why are you using it, When will you use it, What will you write about and Who is your audience. 1. Where - if you are selling GPS equipment to combine owners and you are outstanding in their field (and I don't mean good at what you do, I mean standing in the middle of a corn field), internet connections are probably not available and small devices not an option.   unless.... 2. When - if you

Don't forget to put your search words in quotes to get an exact result when searching in Google

Over the past year or two I have had a love/hate relationship with my Motorola Android phone.  It has a memory leak and without rooting the phone I can't clean out that bad file.  So, I keep resetting it to factory mode and reloading my contacts. Recently I started using the ACT and Google integration which works really well.  However, there is a rather obscure method to resetting the contacts.  Since my phone is so grumpy about memory, I decided to scale back the number of

Everyone we talk to recently is still lamenting about how bad the economy is and how hard they are struggling to get in new business.  We are in the same boat.  So, it is important to us to do everything we can to get in new leads and quickly react to them.  In addition, we and our clients are looking for ways to drive more people to our website.  It would be great to have a way to leverage both needs. Recently I attended a conference listening to awesome people with amazing

Well, once again my muse has come up with a great blog article topic.  I’ve been tweeting about not deadheading my cone flowers.  Turns out they are an excellent thistle seed source for Gold Finch.  Last week there had to be 50 or more of the lovely birds in my garden feasting on the dead blossoms.  In this case, there was a benefit to not dead heading or “throwing away” what appears to be something of no use. My muse, who is @kimjosephs on Twitter said “Oh, does the

What's New in Sage ACT! 2013 ACT! is 25 years old.  That's 25 years of serving the Contact and Customer Management needs for small businesses and sales teams.  The new version has fixed several outstanding minor bugs and issues, but to us the most important feature is the ability to run Smart Tasks on a schedule, offline, on a server.  This is HUGE. It means you can now automate a variety of functions and put staff doing more productive things like selling your product.