Summary of the Major
Contact Management Solutions
Contact Management software (also known as
Personal Information Management or PIM) is one of the most useful types
of software applications available today. Think about it – what are the
three most important things in your business world? Your contacts, your
calendar, and your “to do” list right? Well that is exactly what a
contact management system does. These solutions organize the three
things that are most important to your professional, and personal life –
your calendar, your contacts, and your to-do lists. Not only do they do
this well, but these solutions have grown to include support for hand
held devices and browser access to your Contact Management data. There
are literally hundreds of contact management solutions available today –
far too many to list here. For this reason, we have listed only the most
popular of these solutions along with their web site addresses as
follows:
These are the primary solutions that CPAs
consistently report positive comments on in my lectures across the
country. I am sure that some of the other solutions are also great
solutions, and you should evaluate all packages yourself.
Evaluating Contact
Management Solutions
When evaluating a contact management system,
you need to understand that whatever you choose should be used
throughout your entire organization. If you choose a no-name product,
there is a good chance that sales reps that you hire will need to be
re-trained on the new system. However if you standardize on a popular
product such as ACT! Or Outlook, there is a good chance that any sales
representatives (or others) that you hire will already be well versed in
using those products. Additionally, the most important features to look
for include the following:
- Integration with Outlook via synchronization
- Integration with handheld devices such as the
Palm Pilot and iPAQ Pocket PC
- XML import & export
- Wizards
- Integration to and from Word & Excel
- Integration to your accounting software package
- History tracking
- Opportunity management
- Web portal view
- Sales & quota analysis
A CRM feature evaluation chart is available for download at the
Accounting Software Advisor webstore at
http://www.standardobjects.com/asa/default.aspx?t=1 A sample is
posted below:
ACT!
Customer
Relationship Management systems have been among the hottest solutions in
the accounting software industry over the past two years. To fill this
need, Best Software offers two solutions – ACT! And Sales Logix. Both of
these products have an excellent reputation and are widely regarded as
being among the top contact management and CRM solutions available. Once
again, because MAS 90/200, ACT!, and Sales Logix are owned by the same
company, this virtually assures tight integration between these
products.
ACT! Is the #1 best-selling contact
management solution in the world with millions of users. While most
people think of ACT! As a simple contact management solution and are
largely unaware that ACT! Offers many advanced add on modules including
ACT! For Web which provides instant password protected and
encrypted access to all of your contact detail over the web; ACT! For
Palm OS, which offers complete contact management system designed
specifically for Palm OS handhelds; ACT! Link for Pocket PC,
which offers complete contact management system designed specifically
for Pocket PC handhelds; Accounting Integration, which allows you
to share information between ACT! And your accounting software; and
ACT! Deduplication Wizard, which eliminates duplicate records in
your database.
Some of the key features you will find in
ACT! Include the following:
- Includes an e-mail
client that can work with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet
Mail and Lotus Notes. This allows you to create, send and track
e-mails to and from your contacts.
- More than 70
predefined fields.
- Add fields to meet
your specific needs.
- Date- and
time-stamped notes.
- Tracks completed
activities such as meetings held, letters sent, e-mails sent and
received, calls completed, etc.
- Instant Lookup and
Keyword Search features.
- Standard reports
include phone lists, activity report, relationship histories, sales
summaries.
- Customize reports to
meet your specific needs.
- Attach, view, and
edit files (price lists, memos, letters, presentations, contracts,
pictures and so on) from within ACT!
- Attach web pages to
contacts – even if the web page has been changed or removed from the
Internet, you’ll have it captured in ACT!.
- View and print your
schedule by day, week or month.
- Set alarms and
monitor them in up to three databases – even when ACT! Isn’t running.
- Schedule recurring
events.
- Calendar Pop-ups
make it easy to view activity details.
- Task List allows you
to filter calls, meetings, and to-do items by priority, date range, or
user – complete with Totals for each type of activity.
- Assign priorities
and view by importance.
- Set up an Activity
Series to automate prospecting, follow-up and sales activities.
- Rollover incomplete
activities to the next day.
- Synchronize your
ACT! Calendar with an Outlook calendar.
- 20 supported
calendar formats including, Day-Timer, Day Runner, Deluxe, etc.
The screen below shows the ACT! Main screen
and menu with contact information.
The next screen below displays ACT!’s
calendar based to-do list and scheduler. Tools located down the left
side of the screen speed up common operations and tabbed based dialog
boxes do a good job of organizing complex information.
As people within an organization use ACT! To
maintain their prospects, opportunity and client information, the totals
from all persons can be grouped together and presented in total to
management as shown in the screen below:
This tool is useful for managing your sales
pipeline with the built-in forecasting tools. There are eight
pre-formatted sales reports, and you can create your own reports to
analyze your sales pipeline, sales by customer, sales by account
manager, or sales totals. You can also track opportunities through the
sales cycle with the graphical sales pipeline report. Sales graphs can
show your open, won, or lost sales for any timeframe you choose.
With ACT!, you can share complete customer
information in a workgroup environment. You can also get your company up
and running without additional software with multi-user and network
readiness right out of the box. You can share databases over a network
or synchronize remote workers via e-mail so everyone has the most
up-to-date contact information. All data is protected via the built-in
record locking and password protection. You can also share calendars for
easy lookup of free and busy times — including private and public
activity types.
You can synchronize your Outlook calendar
with ACT! To view activities scheduled in Outlook from ACT!. You can
also set reminders to sync your ACT! Calendar with Outlook whenever you
choose. You can access your Outlook Inbox and other folders from within
ACT! To keep track of e-mails sent and received for every ACT! Contact.
You can access up to three ACT! Address Books from within Outlook for
sending e-mail to both ACT! And Outlook contacts.
You can synchronize ACT! With your Palm OS
handheld or Microsoft PocketPC device to import information including
Address Book, Date Book, and To-Do Items. You can also sync your ACT!
Calendar, contact, and to-do information along with notes and history
items to any Palm Powered or PocketPC handheld including Palm,
Handspring, Kyocera, Sony, HP, Toshiba etc. This allows you to add
contacts and events to your Palm and then sync them back to ACT!.
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