Sage ACT! Premium Mobile
You’ve asked us about it for years. We can finally say yes, you can access your ACT! database via your slick mobile devices! You are out and about selling, taking care of your customers and your iPad is much lighter than your laptop. Your smartphone is always in your pocket. You simply need access to your database from those gadgets while you aren’t in the office. Sage recently introduced Sage ACT! Premium Mobile, or APM, which allows you to travel light and stay connected by accessing your Sage ACT! Contacts and Calendar details from your iPhone®, iPad® or Android™ device.
The new HTML5 compatible browser enables you to connect direclty to your database. So, you are live in the main database. It does require that you have an internet connection, either via WiFi or cell connection. It takes away any need to sync. There are no third party applications to license. It’s just part of your Sage ACT! Premium 2012. And, it’s included in our TrilogyCRM hosting. So, while you are out of the office, you can stay productive. For instance, you get and e-mail on your smart phone. The customer really needs a call back quickly. And yes, we use this! You pull up your browser on your phone, go to your live ACT! database, lookup the Contact via ACT! Premium Mobile, dial right from the interface and then enter the History of the call. The interface is a familiar one, with nuances of what you’ve come to expect of ACT!’s navigation melded with what we are all familiar with on our smart phones and tablets.
Key Features:
- Travel light and stay connected with real-time, mobile access to your Sage ACT! Premium contact and calendar details from your iPhone®, iPad® or Android™ device.
- Boost your effectiveness in the field with the ability to view, add, and edit Sage ACT! contact details, notes, history, meetings, and activities.
- Conduct a global search on any text field, even attachments, to find precisely what you need, when you need it—fast.
- Improve productivity with a clean interface that features single-click efficiency and follows familiar Sage ACT! functionality like capturing conversation notes after a call, and immediately adding to history in the database.
- Easily configure and personalize contact layout settings to match your work style.
- Keep everyone in your collective virtual office up-to-date and on the same page since workgroups have secured, shared access to the most recent Sage ACT! details.
- Get the most out of using Sage ACT! Premium, because Sage ACT! Premium Mobile is included with your purchase!
If you’ve been looking for a reason to upgrade, APM truly adds productivity and connectivity ACT! customers have been looking for. ACT! Premium Mobile provides ACT! functionality you’re accustomed to, with easy access and real-time updates. Give us a call at 866-221-0276 or e-mail support@trilogycrm.com to upgrade or talk more about upgrading to Sage ACT! 2012 and the new Sage ACT! Premium mobile.
ACT! and Quickbooks
From time to time, we receive requests to add fields into ACT! that really should be tracked in an accounting system. We always explain that ACT! is for your sales and contact management, and Quickbooks, Peachtree, or any other accounting package should be used to track receivables or COGS.
Generally speaking, each program serves a very specific purpose – one for tracking Contacts, the other for tracking numbers. That distinction is a consulting issue we like to make clear, but there is value to sales seeing some accounting data. Wouldn’t it be helpful if a sales rep could see that a customer has an outstanding invoice before they sell the next deal? Read more
New fangled sales technique?
I spend a lot of time reading, watching and soaking up information about sales and marketing. The marketing side being my “past life” and something I’m still very interested in, and sales being my thing. It’s what I love and a talent I constantly hone. I like to joke that I wish God gave me the gift of a singing voice, instead He gave me sales. In a lot of articles, blogs, tweets and YouTube videos lately, Sales Coaches and Marketing Experts preach that the old way of selling is dead. You need to leave the “old” ways behind. It’s all about technology, social media and changing it up. Is it? Read more
Sage ACT! E-marketing
If you work with us, you know we do not push products we don’t believe in. If we haven’t tried it, used it, or received positive feedback about it we don’t sell it. Sage ACT! E-marketing is one that if you aren’t using it, you probably should.
Almost daily we receive questions about how to send e-mail campaigns. Without dredging too deeply into why you shouldn’t just blast out of Outlook, skipping the soap box speech on CAN-SPAM rules, and glossing over putting yourself at risk of being black listed, (all very direct hints that those are bad things) we thought we’d point out a great utility that’s literally built into ACT! – ACT! E-marketing. If you send out newsletters, announcements, or just regularly scheduled touch base e-mails, you really need this add-on.
You see Sage ACT! E-marketing every time you open ACT! and likely don’t even realize it. It’s that button in the toolbar with the fluffy little cloud behind it.
There is also data dropped right in your database if you subscribe to ACT! E-marketing. That is the tab you probably click on and immediately close because you don’t know what that dialog box is that splashes your screen.
ACT! E-marketing is a safe way to send out glossy, professional e-mails. Because it is powered by Swiftpage, it includes web reports and tools that help you hone your e-marketing based on real results. You can track open rates, manage opt-outs, all those things you need to know to be a nimble e-marketer.
You should check it out. Free, live demos of Sage ACT! E-marketing. Or, give us a call, we’d be happy to talk about how we leverage Sage ACT! E-marketing.
Beyond Meetings, Calls & Todo’s
One of the great things about ACT! is its flexibility. You can tailor so much of the application to fit your process. Yes, we know most people install it out-of-the-box and never even relable a single field. (Shameless plug, we can help with that!) One of the simple ways you can customize ACT! to your process is by creating Custom Activity Types. Because each company’s process is slightly different, the old Meeting, Call and To-do options just don’t cover it. We have customers across almost every imaginable industry. Pharmaceutical reps need to track their doctor’s office “Drop Ins”, another company needs to schedule “Equipment Deliveries”, and yet another has and Activity Type of “Install”. Sure they all have Calls, Meetings and To-dos also, but they have those just outside the box items that warrant a custom type. In the latest versions of ACT!, you, or your trusted TrilogyCRM ACT! CC, can customize the Types. Read more
Sage ACT! 2012 Road Show
Summer means sunshine, swimming pools, beach vacations, and . . . software previews. Sage ACT! 2012 is coming to Columbus for a special preview prior to its release this Fall. This year, we are happy to sponsor the Ohio edition of the Sage ACT! 2012 Road Show. The ACT! 2012 Road Show is a great, FREE way to see the latest product features right in your backyard. We’ll have Sage employees on hand to showcase what’s new and improved. Read more
Trilogy Awarded Top Performer Award from Sage Software
We found out today that TrilogyCRM was awarded the Top Performer Award for our Region, for the Fiscal Half of 2011. Sage Software presents these awards to the top performing ACT! Certified Consulting firms on the half and full year. We have a talented team, that works so well together. Recognition like this Top Performer award help us to continue to shine. We’ll display the trophy proudly. Of course, we’d like to say thank you to our team for your hard work and dedication to the product and the company!
Take a look at the announcement.
Is your database really backed up?
If you need a backup of your ACT! database, how confident are you that the backup file would be usable? Of course, if you are a TrilogyCRM Hosting customer, we’ve got you covered and then some. But, if you aren’t one of our Hosting customers, and you are doing the self-hosted thing, do you have a good backup plan? If you use ACT!, really use it use it, it’s likely the crux of your business. It’s where you keep everything you need to keep on top of your business. So, you better be sure.
Recently we received a call from a new Hosting prospect. They would like to move their database to an outsourced hosting model. Ok, we like that. No problem, we say, all we need is your database backup and we can get you up and running. It’s usually that simple. They sent us their file, which we diligently set to move to one of our ACT! 2011 servers. What we found was only a portion of what we needed. Come to find out, they had a server failure. Through a little more conversation and digging, we figure out that their database wasn’t actually being backed up, just a few select files. We don’t give up easily. With the intensity of those doctors on Grey’s Anatomy, we worked on that little database file with all we had. Even with our bag of tricks, we weren’t able to get that little file up and running as a full-fledged database.
Then the fun part; we went back to explain that the file isn’t usable. Luckily in this case, we were able to get a full database folder structure from an older server snapshot, and we have the customer happily moving forward.
This can easily be avoided. ACT! has a great little tool built right in. ACT! Database Admins, we’d like to introduce you to the ACT! Scheduler.
It’s actually been there for several versions. Frankly, until recent versions, we didn’t recommend relying on it. Now, take full advantage of it. You and your IT team will be all the happier for it. Basically, it’s a little app that’s installed along with ACT!. You can select how many iterations of the backup to keep. 
Schedule the times for the backup to run.
We typically recommend ACT! Scheduler be setup on the server, backup to a designated folder, then have your server backup utility backup that folder. You might want to check the log every once in a while, just like you would check the server backup logs, to make sure all is copacetic. The nice thing about the ACT! Scheduler created backups – they are in a format that ACT! can extract right in the program itself. File, then Restore. Ah, nice and easy. Bases covered, automatically.
Why Hosting Makes Sense
ACT! Hosting is something you might think makes most sense for smaller companies, companies that can’t afford a server. There are so many other reasons Hosting makes good sense – money-wise and otherwise.
First of all, you really have to look at the cost of hosting. It goes way beyond the couple thousand dollars you could spend on a server. Yes, you do have to buy a server. No, we wouldn’t recommend buying something off of eBay, repurposing your receptionists computer, or buying a server off your brother-in-law who got it at a going out of business sale. Read more