Accent Gold Solutions Blog

You might be one of our many clients who is using ACT! by Sage version 2009 or older. And you might be wondering what benefits there are in upgrading to the newest version. So we compiled a list of improvements from ACT! 2010 and ACT! 2011 for you to review. First the ACT 2010 improvements, then the list of ACT 2010 improvements:

ACT! 2010 IMPROVEMENTS

1. With the new look, not only will you get streamlined layouts, you’ll also have instant access to search from any view. Plus, you’ll get related tasks that provide you with more options for working with contacts, groups, opportunities, and more; consolidated menus with relevant feature options; big “easy” buttons for tasks you complete most often; and a new button that lets you create anything new, from contacts to activities.
2. See your customers on popular social networking sites and quickly understand more about their interests, their past work history, and their connections. Some of the sites included with ACT! are LinkedIn®, Facebook, Plaxo, ZoomInfo Contact, Google™, and Yahoo!.
3. Improve your marketing with end-to-end E-Marketing, including:
   • E-mail marketing—Create striking e-mail templates and send to contacts, lookups, groups, and companies in ACT!.
   • Drip marketing—Create a series of e-mails that are delivered to ACT! contacts over a period of time, automatically.
   • Survey and Web forms—Gather valuable feedback from existing contacts so you can build and grow your ACT! database.
   • Marketing results tab—Use a ranked call list of the most interested contacts so you know who to call first.
4. Maximize the way you manage leads with redesigned sales tracking functionality. Sales opportunities now behave and appear like contacts, groups, and companies, making them more flexible than ever, so you can add new fields and tabs; customize2 the product/services grid to include the fields you need to track your information; personalize the layout with the colors and graphics that best represent the look of your business; track activities, history, documents, notes, and more—all tied to the sales opportunity; and set security options.
5. Create custom reports with the new connector for third-party report writers (such as Crystal Reports®). It gives you the ability to run reports on everything you keep in ACT!, including user information, activities, groups, and companies.
6. See reports in the streamlined reports view and easily understand which ACT! reports are available to you, mark reports as your favorites for quick access, and customize report descriptions for a view that’s more personalized to your needs.
7. Track customers, sales, and users with new dashboards. Two new dashboards, 12 new dashboard charts, and 13 new opportunity reports have been added to ACT!, giving you at-a-glance snapshots of your customers, your sales opportunities, and even your users. New dashboards include Contacts Dashboard and Administrative Dashboard.
8. Do more with ACT! from the new Welcome Page. We’ve made it really easy for you to get the most out of ACT! with quick access to common resources, tips on using ACT!, where to go when you need more in-depth help, and ACT! news.
9. Send calendar invitations from ACT! to leading e-mail solutions. Not all your customers use ACT!, so now you can send ACT! calendar invites to customers who use iCalendar connected calendars and the invitations you send will appear on their calendar.
10. Share ACT! contacts with ease in vCard format to non-ACT! users with just a few clicks—no retyping or cutting and pasting required.
11. Use Mail Merge and Instant Quotes in ACT! Premium for Web with Microsoft® Word.
12. Create remote databases simultaneously, up to 50 at one time, for easy rollout of larger implementations.

ACT! 2011 IMPROVEMENTS

1. Automate key activities. Smart Tasks handle your marketing and sales to-dos with automated workflow. Get started with one of many sample Smart Task templates and accompanying email templates for the most common activities. These Smart Task templates will set in motion the most basic or advanced processes, including reminders of your best customer’s birthday, customers that haven’t heard from you in a while, or welcoming a new customer. And, best of all, you have total control over the timing, contact lists, and opportunities for each and every Smart Task. Apply Smart Tasks right out-of-the-box, make changes to fit your specific needs, or create your own.
2. Take communications to the next level. Since Smart Tasks are fully integrated with Sage E-marketing for ACT!, you get access to templates that allow you to send cheery birthday greetings and welcome new customers, among others. You can edit those emails to include additional content, graphics, and links.
3. Track the interest level of emails you send that are associated with Smart Tasks, like sales opportunity follow-ups, by viewing which customers are opening what you’ve sent.
4. Sage E-marketing for ACT! also enables you to request updates or missing contact details from your customers by emailing a link to an online survey. Once the survey is completed, those details are automatically populated back into Sage ACT!.
5. Unlock a rich source of new leads. Add fuel to your sales and marketing machine with Sage Business Info Services for ACT!, which pulls highly targeted prospect lists and business information from Hoover’s and puts that data directly into Sage ACT!. It helps you fill in the gaps in your database and gives you access to more than 65 million companies and 85 million executives.
6. Find new leads based on the traits you’re looking for and make sure your mailed materials find their target with addresses and phone numbers that are properly formatted when imported. Start with a free version for basic company, financial, and industry info, or sign up for a subscription to get more detailed contact, company, competitor, and lead information.
7. Eliminate double entry. Sage ACT! manages all the details of your business relationships and Microsoft® Outlook® manages emails, basic contact details, and meetings across your team. Now you can integrate your Sage ACT! and Outlook contacts, plus keep your calendars in sync. Everything will be kept updated in both places. No worry about duplicates.
8. Keep your busy schedule updated in both Outlook and Sage ACT!, no matter where you add or modify activities and meetings. Sage ACT! will help you cut back on meeting conflicts with rules that handle them automatically. Choose which contacts and activity types in Sage ACT! sync back to Outlook.
9. Watch your productivity soar. Benefit from additional enhancements made to Sage ACT! 2011, including the option to import data directly from Excel®, a re-designed Welcome Page with featured videos that help you get the most out of Sage ACT!, and security settings that prevent sensitive email history from attaching to Sage ACT! user records.
10. Do you work on a team? If so, consider Sage ACT! Premium. It’s designed for people like you who need to efficiently share relationship details. Even if your business is scattered in different places, Sage ACT! Premium gives you and your team access to a central database from Windows® and the web. Plus, it has features teams need to succeed, including enhanced security, group dashboards and reports, and advanced administration.

So, what are you waiting for? Need a web CRM demo or price information? Just give us a call! We’d love to help you. If you live in Orange County or San Diego, we might even be able to work out a live demo of how online CRM can work for you. Our team has been working with ACT for over 10 years and can hopefully answer just about any question you can throw at us.

The day has arrived! Sage ACT! 2011 is officially here and it is beginning to ship today!

As clarified in Sage’s press release, the new Sage ACT! 2011 features and enhancements include:

1. Smart Tasks to automate common marketing, sales and support activities with standard and customizable templates. Smart tasks integrate with the Sage E-marketing for ACT! subscription service so users can add prospects to automated drip marketing email campaigns, track open and click through rates and send welcome messages to new customers, among other capabilities.
2. Sage Business Info Services for ACT!, a list-building subscription service, to import targeted prospect lists from Hoover’s into Sage ACT! and help users identify new selling opportunities. Sage ACT! users in the U.S. and Canada can access 65 million companies and 85 million contacts to build lists based on location, company size, title and industry among other criteria.
3. Microsoft Outlook synchronization to sync Sage ACT! contacts and calendar items with those in Outlook. Data is updated in both locations regardless of where contacts were created or edited. Users control what data is synced back and forth.
4. Additional enhancements include direct import from Excel®, a re-designed welcome page with instructional videos and compatibility with Microsoft® Office 2010 and Firefox®.

Sage is delivering web-based connected services that enhance the productivity of customers’ on-premise software experience. In addition to Sage Business Info Services for ACT!, other subscription-based Sage Connected Services available for use with Sage ACT! include Sage E-marketing for ACT! to help design, automate and track email campaigns, and ACT! Mobile Live for wirelessly synchronizing contact and calendar data with BlackBerry® and Windows Mobile® devices. iPhone® compatibility is planned for later this year.

Sage ACT! is the #1 selling contact and customer manager designed for small businesses and sales teams, and is used by over 2.8 million individuals and 56,000 companies worldwide. Sage ACT! is easy to use, priced for the cost-conscious and personalizable so users can organize all the details of their business relationships in one place including recent emails, meeting notes, task reminders and social networking profiles.

Sage ACT! helps users improve marketing effectiveness, attract new customers, and create more value from existing relationships. Complete sales pipeline visibility helps users identify and take action on the most qualified sales opportunities. Sage ACT! integrates with existing business solutions including Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and Lotus Notes®.

There are 70 ACT! Add-on solutions that further extend Sage ACT! 2011 with shipping, project planning, Voice-over-IP and other capabilities. To find out more, click here or contact us directly.

So, what are you waiting for? Need a CRM demo or price information? Just give us a call! We’d love to help you. If you live in Los Angeles, Orange County or San Diego, we might even be able to work out a live demo of how web CRM can work for you. Our team has been working with ACT for over 10 years and can hopefully answer just about any question you can throw at us.

Have you seen how easy and flexible Sugar 6 is? Here are 4 Teasers.

Custom Reports and Dashboards
With a few clicks, users can create a custom report or dashboard chart, display it on their Home Page and even share it with others.

Administrators can build custom fields, custom layouts and even custom modules (i.e. “Billable Hour Tracking”).

Workflow
Sugar 6 also empowers users to design workflow automation that controls the flow of information and action within your business.

Email Alerts
Do you need to be alerted via email each time a Sales Opportunity is created or closed? No worries. This is easily handled within SugarCRM’s workflow.

Microsoft Office Integration
SugarCRM’s open architecture is designed to easily integrate with 3rd party data sources – so that the user stays in control.

Need to integrate SugarCRM 6 with Microsoft Outlook, Word or Excel? No worries! Integrate Sugar with Outlook E-mail and Calendar.

Need to mail-merge to Microsoft Word? Sugar automatically populates form letters, direct mail and other Microsoft documents.

Need to see your reports in Microsoft Excel? No worries. Sugar easily exports into Microsoft Excel so that you can analyze your data as much as you need – including Pivot Tables!

Need more information or a demo/review of Sugar? Do you have questions regarding the pricing and feature differences between the free/community edition and the  paid (professional, enterprise) editions? Are you interested in upgrading or in need of a download of SugarCRM 6 to install? Not sure which mobile (Android, iPhone, Blackberry) will work the best? No worries! Just give us a call!

Do you need a review of how SugarCRM compares to Zoho CRM or Salesforce.com? Do you have questions regarding the world of online website CRM  and how the CRM cloud (Saleslogix) can work for you in a hosting CRM environment? Do you need clarity regarding CRM lead generation tools or CRM support/help plans? No worries! Just contact us!

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is very intuitive. Especially for those users who truly require an Account-centric CRM database. In this blog, we hope to provide a few little known tips on how to work with Accounts.

Creating, Editing and Deleting Accounts

1. There are several ways to create an Account. You can select the New button located on the Actions toolbar. You can also select Account on the New Record menu.
2. You can also open the Quick Create and select Go. Enter the name of the Account/Company and select Save. 
3. To share this record with other users, you can double-click the account in the list. Then go to the Actions menu and select “Sharing”.
4. If the company you are dealing with is very large, you can create divisions (aka sub-accounts).
5. To view existing sub-accounts, simply go to the Sub-Accounts option.
6. To edit an existing account, select the Sales icon on the Navigation Bar, then select Accounts.
7. Remember, you might have access to view an Account but you might not have permission to edit the Account.
8. You can deactivate an Account if it is no longer needed. We have discovered that this is a better option to deleting the Account. you are still able to search for inactive Accounts by selecting the Inactive Accounts option within your Account views.

Searching for Accounts

1. To find a specific account, you can manually search. But it might be easier to use the Advanced Find feature on the upper right.
2. You can also select a letter on the Alphabet bar on the bottom of the screen.

For further Microsoft CRM training, please contact us or refer to our Resource Center. If you need more details regarding practical user options within Microsoft Dynamics CRM or in comparison with ACT by Sage, SugarCRM, SalesLogix, or Salesforce.com, please let us know. We would love to help clarify these differences and empower you to choose the proper web CRM software or on-premise CRM system.

Check out the new features in Sage ACT! 2011. Larry Ritter, SVP in charge of Product Development with ACT!, has put together a fantastic presentation of how ACT! has the new features and benefits you need! Here’s the brief overview below:

1. One step integration with Lead Generation sources such as Hoovers.
2. E-marketing as a Sage Connect Service
3. ACT! Mobile Live for Smartphones – syncing Calendar and Contacts
4. Major enhancements such as Outlook Integration
5. The new workflow module: Smart Tasks

So, what are you waiting for? Need a CRM demo or price information? Just give us a call! We’d love to help you. If you live in Orange County or Los Angeles, we might even be able to work out a live demo of how online CRM can work for you. Our team has been working with ACT! by Sage for over 10 years and can hopefully answer just about any question you can throw at us.

For workers on the move, Sugar 6 has you covered – when it comes to managing CRM on mobile devices.

Will it work for your iPhone or iPad? YES!

What about the Android (like my HTC EVO 4G)? YES!

At Accent Gold, we “get” your need to run your business on Mobile. This is one of our specialties. We test devices, we test usability. And we’ll give you an honest answer to your questions. Every device and every software eventually runs into its limits. So call us to find out what REALLY works.

Tim Priestley, President of Accent Gold Solutions, has spoken numerous times to hundreds of CRM Consultants from around the world. If he trains CRM Consultants, he might just be able to answer your questions too!

Call us to find out how easy it is to get Sugar 6 running on your mobile device.

Do you simply need advice regarding SugarCRM modules or Sugar hosting? Or do you need clarity regarding Sugar 6 features or upgrading to the latest version? We can help you with this – as well as clarifying SugarCRM pricing. Need to know the difference between the free Sugar CRM (SugarCRM Community Edition) vs the SugarCRM Professional or SugarCRM Enterprise. It’s not really that complex – just give us a brief call and we would be glad to answer your questions or give you a demo of Sugar 6 – as well as a free download.

You might be wondering if you should upgrade to Sage ACT! 2011. What are the differences and benefits of moving up? Is it worth the investment? We have compiled a list of features for you to review. Sure, you might not need to improve your E-Marketing, Social Media integration and Sales Productivity. But odds are that you probably do. So take a look. And let us know if we can help you with understanding these differences!

Comparison of ACT! Versions 2009, 2010, 2011

Features	ACT! 2009	ACT! 2010	ACT! 2011
Related Contacts
Microsoft Outlook Email Integration
Outlook Rules
Social Media Integration
Sage E-marketing for ACT!
ACT! Mobile Live
Reports View
Simplified Navigation
Welcome Page
Customizable Opportunities
Smart Tasks
E-Mail Templates for Smart Tasks
Sage Business Info Services for ACT!
Outlook Contact Sync
Outlook Calendar Sync
Outlook Sync in ACT! for Web
Direct Import from Excel
Re-designed Welcome Page
Security for Email History

Creating, editing and deleting leads is pretty straightforward in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. So instead of rehashing the basics, we thought we would offer a few insider tips on working with Leads.

Creating, Editing and Deleting Leads

1. When entering a new lead, keep in mind that fields marked with a blue plus sign are recommended.
2. Also, fields marked with an asterix are required.
3. Don’t despair if a desired option is grayed out: Some options are not available until you have saved the record!
4. Before deleting a lead, keep in mind that this cannot be undone. It is considered a best practice to deactivate leads rather than deleting them.
5. You can choose to convert or disqualify a lead. Once disqualified, you are able to reactivate the lead though. You will want to make sure though, that the data is still correct, especially if the lead was disqualified over 12 months ago.

Importing Leads

1. Not all users have the user rights to import data. You might have to ask an Administrator to perform this for you. Or you might just request to be given permission to run imports yourself.
2. Make sure to clean up your data beforehand. The better your data looks in Excel, the better it will import into Microsoft CRM.
3. Make sure that your field headers in row 1 of Excel are as clean as possible. Make sure to match your headers with the CRM Attribute Display names.

Searching for Leads

1. If you are having difficulting finding a specific lead, check out the alphabet bar at the bottom of the view.
2. If you still cannot find the lead, try performing an Advanced Find in the upper right corner of the screen.
3. If the view doesn’t display the required columns, you can lock down the columns when configuring the query within the Advanced Find. Don’t forget to save the view for future reference.

Converting Leads

1. Some consider it a best practice to enter every contact initially as a lead – and then convert to a contact. This allows for simplified de-duplication in the future.
2. Keep in mind that when you convert a lead, the activities remain associated on the lead’s record. These are viewable though on the resulting records of the converted lead. You will need to select Activities on the Navigation Bar (select Related Regarding Records).

For further Microsoft CRM training, please contact us or refer to our Resource Center. If you need more details regarding practical user options within Microsoft Dynamics CRM or in comparison with ACT by Sage, SugarCRM, SalesLogix, or Salesforce.com, please let us know. We would love to help clarify these differences and empower you to choose the proper web CRM software or on-premise CRM system.

Sage ACT is crossing over from Contact Management to CRM! Check out the new features in this latest version. Here’s an excellent Powerpoint presentation detailing the new CRM features in ACT! 2011.  Topics addressed are as follows.

1. The three main reasons to upgrade your online CRM to ACT!
2. Benefits and features of Smart Tasks – ACT!’s answer to workflow.
3. Overview of the Smart Task designer screen.
4. Benefits and features of the Outlook Contact and Calendar Sync
5. Overview of the Outlook Contact sync configuration screen.
6. Overview of the Outlook Calendar screen side by side with ACT
7. Benefits and features of the new Hoovers Lead Generation service in ACT
8. Overview of the Business Info Services (Hoovers!) configuration screen.
9. Comparison of the various Business Info  and Lead Generation plans
10. Feature comparisons of ACT versions (incl. 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011)

Don’t forget all the “lesser” new features too! Slick new import functionality and improved dashboard as well as flashy Excel export and mobile service!

So, what are you waiting for? Need a CRM demo or price information? Just give us a call! We’d love to help you. If you live in Orange County or San Diego, we might even be able to work out a live demo of how web CRM can work for you. Our team has been working with ACT for over 10 years and can hopefully answer just about any question you can throw at us.

Sys-Con Media reported this week about how SugarCRM is signing up new partners in the CRM community. And Accent Gold was listed as a top new Gold Partner in North America. The article highlights our excitement about adding SugarCRM to our short list of offerings, yet there was one incorrect statement with regards to Accent Gold Solutions. Although we have consistently been a top 10 ACT! reseller over the last several years, we are described in the article as “the largest selling ACT! reseller in North America”.

Enjoy the entire article or simply read the synopsis below.

SugarCRM, the world’s leading provider of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced unprecedented success of its Open+ Partner Program in the first half of 2010.

The company added 50 new partners across the globe during the period, and existing partners have grown their businesses to focus on SugarCRM’s flexible, intuitive and open product offerings. In addition, channel partners continue to account for approximately 70 percent of new SugarCRM billings.

“In our company’s pursuit to provide the best solutions for our clients, SugarCRM impressed us as a simple, flexible and dynamic offering,” said Tim Priestley, executive director at Accent Gold…”

“Partnering with their team has been an absolute joy—in a short time, they have worked hard to make us successful.

We have evaluated many CRM packages over the past few years and felt that adding SugarCRM to our short list of solution sets now—especially in view of the version 6 release—was a compelling choice.”

“Our partners play a critical role selling and deploying SugarCRM’s commercial products,” said Delbert Ross, vice president of channel sales at SugarCRM. “As a result, we are laser focused on working with and enabling our new and existing partners to insure their success working with SugarCRM. Our consistent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth proves our indirect model is the future and that we will continually gain momentum adding top notch partners such as Castle CRM and Accent Gold.”