Taking the reins of relationship management

Customer relationships are the lifeblood of any business, especially small to midsize businesses. If you’re reading this article, you probably have ACT! CRM and are wondering how to take advantage of ACT!’s capabilities that are designed to help you manage and organize your day; these are separated into tasks and activities that you can find on the calendar.

To fully utilize ACT!’s features, read the instructions in this article to learn how to use some of its most important organizational features. Along with instructions on how to create an ACT! task, this article will also cover opportunities, templates, quotes, and reports – all of which were created to help you in making more sales.

For information on adding users, contacts, or user licenses, check out our previous article.

The Task List is where you will find information regarding any activities that you have scheduled, such as participants, priority, location, and date and time of the activity. After you create an ACT! task, the Task List, displayed in a list format, can also be filtered (i.e. you can set it to show meetings for a set timeframe).

Calendar and Activities

In ACT! Premium Cloud, your schedule can be effectively managed and organized through the use of ‘Activities’ – these can be meetings, calls, or anything else you may need to accomplish during the day. Activities are sorted by default into six categories: appointments, calls, meetings, to-do’s, personal activities, and vacation.

Using Activities is ideal for sales, when you may need to schedule follow-up’s. You can also, for example, manage dispatching a team to a site – your team can view a calendar at a glance by utilizing one user account.

You can also create custom Activity types to help you organize your calendar. In the last example, you could create a custom activity called ‘dispatch jobs’ for your team.

ACT! Scheduler

What about tasks that need to happen but you don’t want to put much thought into? ACT! allows you to automate tasks even if ACT! isn’t open – as long as you have it running in the background, you can create an ACT! task and have it automated. For example, you can automate tasks such as database maintenance, backup, or even remote database synchronization. For more information, click here.

ACT! letter and email templates

We all know how beneficial it can be to make customers feel special and that this can be done by having more personalized communication with them.

With ACT! letter and email templates, you can create templates that are fully customized to help you get your message across in a way that is meaningful to your customers. While ACT! comes with its own pre-made templates (these are also fully customizable), you also have the ability to pull information from the database to include in the templates (i.e. names, addresses, etc). There’s also no limit to how many templates you can have.

Another bonus of these templates is that you have the option to make them available to other ACT! Users in your database, providing you with greater consistency in customer communication.

Out of the box templates

Opportunities in ACT!

As the name suggests, ACT! Opportunities helps you track potential sales by allowing you to input information such as contacts/groups involved, products or services that are being offered, prices, and other details to assist you in completing the sale effectively and with the right information at hand. To see how to create and modify Opportunities in ACT!, click here

Quotes in Act!

To follow up an Opportunity, ACT! has Quotes to allow you to create a quote for a potential client. Take note that you’ll need Microsoft Excel and Word in order to create a quote. For full instructions on how to create and modify quotes, click here.

Reports in ACT!

With ACT! reports, you can use filters to create reports on specific lists of information. For example, you could create a report on calls made in a specific timeframe, or find all contacts referred by a certain business. When creating a report, you can use a default filter or create a new set of filters each time.

How to Create Tasks and Activities in ACT! CRM Summary

When managing a business that relies on customer relationships, having an efficient system can make or break you. Learning how to create an ACT! task and utilize all of ACT! CRM’s features – activities, templates, opportunities, etc. – will help your business track its relationships, stay on top of tasks, and follow up effectively. Check out our next article for details on how to go mobile with ACT! CRM.