Why ACT!

ACT! is a contact management system, meaning that it’s all about people.  The idea behind ACT! being a contact manager is that you want to manage the relationships between you and your organization as well as their contacts and their organization as well. 

What does this mean? With ACT!, you can track and manage your relationship with customers and input information like names, addresses, phone numbers, and useful notes for miscellaneous information records related to the contact. You can quickly enter information in and pull critical information out of the ACT! system, and you can also manage ACT! CRM users so your employees are all on the same page. 

ACT! user licenses 

The ACT! Premium Cloud license costs $30 per month and it is billed annually. If you want to enjoy the remote database synchronization benefits to increase your productivity and allow multiple users to work on the same database, you will have to add another $10 per desktop device for the remote DB sync feature. Ultimately, ACT! will cost you at least $360 or $480 per year without addons. 

Note:  The license works with both desktop and web browsers. However, mail merge quoting is difficult through the web browser version of ACT!. 

How to add ACT! Premium Cloud licenses plus Desktop Client Sync add-on licenses

If you’re using ACT! In a multi-user environment, you need to make sure you have enough licenses for all users (our recommended way of using it is with Remote DB Sync). 

1. Log in to the my.act.com account. 
2. Go to the Billing tab.
3. Under Update Your Subscription,  add or decrease the number of users under Quantity/Users. 
4. Make sure the Add Desktop Client Sync is selected. 

How to Manage ACT! CRM Users

To create or delete a user or manage any of their information (passwords, roles, etc.), use the following link to access advanced user settings:  https://my.act.com/en-US/myact/users

Another way to manage ACT! CRM users, as well as to reach the Additional Settings (advanced) user management interface, can be seen in the picture below. 

Note: When you create a new user, that user will be in a pending state until the users logs in to the ACT! and sets up his/her password.

Tip: If the setup link expires, you can always choose the Reset User Passwords option on the Manage Act! – that will re-send the email for the password (re)setting. 

Windows confusing ACT! templates extension and associating it with the media player

Windows sometimes tends to default the ACT! templates file extension (.adt ) as a music file. Associate that file extension with ACT! to avoid this problem. 

1. Right-click on the template file in question and, from the context menu, hover over or click on the Open with option. 
2. Choose Act!. If you don’t see it, choose More apps and find it.  
3. Select Always use this app to open .adt files.

Here’s an alternative way to solve this issue: 

1. Right-click on one of the template files in question. 
2. Click on the Properties. 
3. On the General tab for the opens with option, click on the Change button. 
4. Choose Act!. If you don’t see it, choose More apps and find it. 

The contacts screen in ACT!

The contacts form contains information specific to the person that you are viewing at the moment (the contact name, company they work for, title, phone numbers, address information, etc.).  

Tagging – ID Status

It’s important to tag people so that you can search for them later. Some of the fields have special functions – one of them is the ID/Status field.

ID/Status is a drop-down menu with a list of all of the predefined IDs/Statuses. ID/Status is a way for you to identify what kind of a record this is (i.e. if somebody is a lead, customer or vendor).

It’s helpful to customize this list so that it reflects your particular needs.  

If you enter ID/Status against the contact record then you can do some pretty neat things. As an example, you could ask the database: “Show me everybody in the database that are vendors” and it will generate a list of everybody that’s a vendor.  

It’s a good practice to utilize the ID/Status with every record that you put into ACT! so that you know the way that it’s recorded in your database, otherwise you would end up with a bunch of records and you wouldn’t know who they are, what’s their purpose, and what the hell are they doing in there. 

Referred by is another special field that we use to know how we heard from this person. 

Later, you can use the ‘Referred By’ entry to filter all of the contacts that were referred by a certain person. 

Contacts notes tab

Notes are the line item, and you can have multiple line items as you go along with adding notes. 

Note formatting goes like this: Each note is date and time stamped, then you have the content of the note and the person who created the note.  

Having a record of the person that’s created the note is beneficial, especially since there will likely be multiple users inputting notes.  

Contacts history tab

By default, the contacts history tab does not contain any information related to producing a quote; it’s more related to information such as sales call follow-up’s, quote history, contact deletion, or database sync.  

User defined fields

Now that you know how to set up your contacts, manage ACT! CRM users, and address a common technical error, let’s discuss why ACT! maintains its popularity: You can customize UDF’s for your business. 

All the different ways that you can find information in ACT! can be really powerful when you start thinking from the beginning about how you want to use the information that’s stored in your database. On the same line, it will help you in thinking about what information you do want to store in your database. 

For example, if you have User Defined Fields that describe  the equipment that your client is utilizing, you could bring up people that are using that specific equipment. 

So, imagine that you are serving clients with a dozen different kinds of drills and want to query all the users or projects that have the Bayshore Portable Drill LD 1800; you could query for the contacts with the LD 1800 Drill UDF set.  

Furthermore, you can pre-create a drop-down menu list with predefined values for the UDF fields. So,  you could have a drop-down menu with those drills. And so, as you brought up the Jon Doe’s name you can put in what kind of drill he has with you. 

If you do this over time, later down the road, if there is an upgrade for the LD 1800, you can quickly find out how many of your contacts are using that drill and use that data to target those people with the new upgrade proposal, info, or a quote.  

Tip! If you right-click on a particular field on the contact form in ACT! from the drop-down menu, you can choose to do a quick look-up on that field data. 

UDF’s can also be used to populate the Mail Merge fields in the Custom Templates.  

Adjust the contacts layout

In Layout Designer, you can create new tabs or UDF’s for the contact layout.

How to Set Up ACT! CRM From Scratch Summary

In the world of business, maintaining relationships is everything. In this article, we covered how to get started by setting up your first contacts and manage ACT! CRM users. We also discussed some best practices for inputting your new users and contacts to help you effectively manage your database later on. Stay tuned for our next article on ACT! CRM, which will guide you through using tasks, activities, and the calendar.