Nucleus research for ACT! 2

Rex

ACT! delivers a central view of customer data in a corporation: this prevents a
salesperson in one division in one region from contacting an existing client lead
from a company who might already have someone handling that account.
Companies always want to appear professional by streamlining their customer
contact activities. Having no central contact management system means different
sales people will often call again on the same account. It creates wasted effort,
can annoy the customer, and prevents a company from presenting a consistent

face to the customer. ACT!, with its centralised database and process discipline,
can eliminate those problems:

Rex

Lay out ACT! to fit your company’s work habits
The biggest challenge to deploying any technology is effective user adoption, and
no where is that more true than in the world of CRM. Planning your ACT!
deployment to support and reflect your current users’ work practices and habits as
much as possible will reduce training needs and smooth adoption. The user
interface should be easy to use and reflect your company’s processes. ACT! fields
and tabs are highly configurable and customisable and can be cross-linked to
support a variety of tasks. One user, for example, highly customised the main
ACT! customer contact screen, reordering it, adding fields and even using different
colours to highlight pertinent sections. The screen also enables tasks such as the
tracking of credit history and marketing contact information. The more carefully
you plan how the application will look to the end user, the more successful the
deployment will likely be. As one customer said, “You’ll want to know every field,
every drop down menu and every tab and all the reasons why they are there and
don’t go over the top.”

Rex

􀂃 Infrastructure upgrades or enhancements to support performance
􀂃 Planned upgrades and patch schedules
􀂃 Technical troubleshooting
􀂃 Structuring ACT! reports
Having a game plan for each of these areas based on technical experience will save
both frustration for end users and one-off expenditures to fix problems.

Rex

Use a qualified consultant or internal IT staff for the rollout
ACT! users were most successful deploying the application to workgroups when
someone with ACT! knowledge or experience ― an independent consultant or
internal IT resource ― guided the deployment.
Individual users running ACT! as a standalone desktop application are likely to be
self-sufficient. However, as with any application, the further out it scales to
support more users the more difficult it becomes to manage. You’ll want to
consider how to best manage a number of factors:
􀂃 Importing or integrating data from outside sources
􀂃 Networking and synchronisation strategies

Rex

An ACT! implementation can take a relatively short time to complete – users
estimated a properly planned project can take from a couple of days to a couple of
weeks to complete, depending on variables such as data migration. But you must
carefully think about your own sales and marketing processes and decide what is
essential. You must also consider carefully what your overall goals are, not just
around the sales processes, but for reporting and any other operations in the
company that sales supports.

One user suggested it would be helpful to spend a month and half to prepare for an
installation and have at least a half dozen meetings with senior management
explaining precisely what the goals are. Reach out to other members of the
organisation who might be affected, including management and IT staff. Another
user even recommended running a pilot and getting familiar with ACT! before the
actual rollout. “It’s very helpful to know the ins and outs of any software program.
Some things just aren’t documented.”

Rex

Carefully study your own business processes first
No two companies perform all their processes identically, even if they are in the
same industry. Each company has some processes that are unique and must exist
for a competitive advantage or to fulfil a special business need. Thus, no one
application can completely conform to the one-size-fits-all model. That is why
applications such as ACT! are built to be configured or customised out of the box as
needed. However, these customisations will require a bit of extra work, so prepare
adequately for an implementation. Also, make sure that the customisation project
stays focused and in scope. ACT! may be relatively inexpensive and easy to install,
but it can’t be rolled out on autopilot.

Rex

􀂃 “Prior to ACT!, it was ugly. We deal with so many different customers across
the nation. We were finding 10 of us might be working with the same
company and bombarding them with phone calls. We wanted to work
smarter.”
􀂃 “Our general philosophy was that this would allow the company to create and
enforce the discipline that we need to apply. It creates a central place for
users to share information. It gets everyone on the same page. We’ve got
cowboys in the field doing their own thing and this disciplines us as a unit and
gives us cohesive behaviour.”