Nucleus research for ACT!

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Nucleus research for ACT!

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THE BOTTOM LINE
Sage Software’s ACT! offers individuals, corporate workgroups, and
management a single source of accurate and timely customer information,
as well as sales automation tools that help close more sales and boost
revenues.

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THE SITUATION
ACT! is a contact and customer management application with a 20-year track
record that helps sales personnel become more efficient and close more sales.
Relatively lower in cost when compared to broader CRM systems from Oracle,
Microsoft, or Salesforce.com, it provides contact management and lead tracking
capabilities for users and managers. ACT! capabilities include:

􀂃 Contact management, including the ability to track all customer interactions,
including notes, activities, and opportunities associated with a given contact
record. It also includes the ability to create groups of contacts and track
companies that have multiple contacts

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􀂃 The ability for managers to monitor sales team activities, measure sales and
marketing effectiveness, and run basic reports by territory or other categories
􀂃 The ability for users to automatically issue e-mails, generate and send sales
contracts, and, via a third party add-on, dial phone numbers and fax
documents
􀂃 The ability for companies with mobile workforces to access the application
remotely via a Web client or work offline
􀂃 The ability for users to synchronise the contact and calendar lists on handheld
devices such as the Palm and the Pocket PC, or, via a third party add-on, a
Blackberry.

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ACT! also offers six customisable dashboard components, which include:
􀂃 Schedule-at-a glance, which presents a daily activity list to each user
􀂃 The activities list, which highlights key tasks and their time allocation
􀂃 View of the opportunity pipeline by stage, which tracks opportunities and
ensures compliance with set processes in ACT!
􀂃 A snapshot of opportunities by user and a top 10 opportunities list, which
includes the total lead total value
􀂃 A closed sales-to-date list, which lets sales personnel stay current with the
sales cycle.

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Additionally, ACT! is a robust contact and customer management application that
serves a wide variety of industries and companies. It can be deployed with
relatively little training and deployment time, and, overall, is easily maintained.
This reduces implementation and trainings costs and reduces risk for the company
deploying it.

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Without a CRM or contact management system to support them, manual sales
processes often result in lost leads and lost customer information. For example,
one ACT! customer noted that prior to the rollout, the company was losing
customer data each time a salesperson left, as the salesperson took the pertinent
information with them. Process automation here is key and that requires software.
However, CRM applications vary widely in relative ease of use and the time required for users to become productive on them. Depending on the vendor and
the various features sought, such packages can be complex, cost tens of thousands
of dollars, and take months to install. Sometimes they deliver unwieldy and userun-
friendly technology, and ultimately fail to deliver a return on investment.

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On the other hand, ACT! takes the middle ground. It is a relatively inexpensive
and lightweight application that can be deployed in days, depending on the
circumstances of the implementation. However, it centralises all customer-related
data and creates simple workflows. These capabilities boost sales efficiency and
deliver a single view of the customer to sales staff. It is highly customisable,
scales out to easily support large networked teams, and is easy to maintain and
train on. It can be used by individuals, sales professionals, and in mid-sized sales
organisations. One user said he paid £15,000 for his ACT! licenses, where a largescale
CRM software deployment with as many users might have cost more than £1
million.

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BEST PRACTICES
Nucleus found that customers followed best practices to evaluate and install ACT!
that reduced risk and accelerated user adoption and productivity.
Make ACT! the key customer information repository
In many companies, sales are hampered by inefficient manual processes that
involve placing customer information in departmental or individual silos. Too often,
salespeople keep contact data in spreadsheets, on note cards, or in their own
memory. This prevents collaboration and all but guarantees that there will be
redundant efforts or not enough effort to close each potential sale. It also prevents
management from being able to gauge the sales pipeline or measure the
effectiveness of salespeople or individual marketing campaigns. Nucleus found that
ACT! can boost productivity of users from anywhere between 20 percent to 50
percent, depending on the success of the implementation and the relative
sophistication of the system ACT! replaced.