Microsoft Excel. Oh, how I love thee. I love the endless geeky ways that I can analyze data to my heart’s content. Pivot tables anyone? But I’ll tell you my dirty little secret about Excel… I just about start cheering when I am talking with folks about how they are currently managing their contacts or sales pipeline and they say “Excel”. Why does my heart beat just a little faster? Is it because I love working over their data in Excel? Nope. It’s because these are the types of people that have the most to gain from implementing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution like ACT! or Microsoft CRM. And those are just the sorts of people I love to work with.

Excel is a great tool, but it is really limited. With a CRM solution like ACT!, you get so much more. First, you have that all-important central repository of leads, prospects, customers, vendors and even competitors. Second, you have an integrated calendar that links activities, appointments and follow-ups to your contacts. Third, you can track and view all the history and interaction with your contacts and you can view that information on the individual contact level, or the account level or even a project level. That includes all the e-mails sent & received from Outlook, and you can live your e-mail life in Outlook and ACT! will still note your e-mail activity on the contact’s history tab. Fourth, you can use ACT! to track your deals in your pipeline. Fifth, you can setup e-marketing campaigns and track your lead/prospect/customer interest and response to those campaigns on the history tab. There’s more, a lot more, but those are the biggies. But here is the cool thing, the feature that makes my geeky Excel-loving side just dance a jig - you can still export most of your data to Excel, often with one easy click, giving you the ability to continue your data slicing & dicing.

Let’s take managing the sales pipeline, for example. You can have an Excel list of your current deals, but updating that list and keeping it current is time-consuming and, over time, can become unwieldy. If instead you use ACT!, and you track your deals using Sales Opportunities, then you can view your deals on the Contact and/or Company view, or you can view a list of all your deals.

And hey, while we are on the topic, I did a guest blog for Sage on the latest cool features of Sales Opportunities in ACT! 2010, the latest version of ACT! - check it out here.

Back to ACT! & Excel – so you have all your sales opportunity data in ACT!, and you want to send an Excel report to someone in your company, but you first want to work with the data in Excel. No problem, just follow these easy steps:

1. Click View | Opportunities from the pull-down menus.
2. Filter this list view to show the data you want to play with in Excel. Maybe you only want Open opportunities, or just the deals that are set to close in the next month, or deals that are over a particular dollar figure. Hmmmm, I think I smell a future blog post on filtering list views…
3. Customize the list view to add whatever opportunity data you want to see. For instance, I always add Days Open and Probability of Closure to the opportunity list view. Hey, there’s another blog post topic, customizing list views.
4. Now click Tools | Export to Excel and voila, all you data is in an Excel spreadsheet. But wait, there’s more. Notice the other tabs at the bottom of the Excel worksheet – ACT! very kindly builds a pivot table which you can use as a starting point to begin some really slick data analysis. Pivot tables, blog post topic #3!

Recording History

Many of our customers use the ACT! calendar and scheduling features, so they understand the value of clearing those activities and recording the details of a call or meeting, which then appear on the History tab in ACT! But other customer either don’t or can’t use the ACT! calendar, and use the Outlook calendar instead. In fact, we talk to virtually every one of our clients about integrating the ACT! & Outlook calendars. There isn’t a simple answer, it really depends on what information you want to send to and from Outlook and how your ACT! database is setup. If you do primarily use Outlook, there is a quick way to enter the details of your customer & prospect interactions into ACT! so that the information can be viewed, shared and reported on from ACT!

For most of our clients tracking that all-important history of your interaction & communication with your ACT! contacts is an important requirement. And even if your company relies on Outlook for calendaring, you can use the powerful Record History function in ACT! to enter the details of your meetings and calls with ACT! contacts.

How To Record History:

1. To Record History on a contact record, first find the contact by looking up the contact.
2. Click on the History tab and then either click on the Record History icon, or anywhere in the white space on the tab, right-click and select Record History.
3. Set the Type to either Call, Meeting, To-do or one of your custom activities if you have those defined. In the Regarding field enter the main topic of the interaction, such as “Proposal Review”.
4. Click in the Details: area and add all the detailed notes from the interaction. Note here that if you do use ACT! activities, you can click on the Follow-up button at the bottom of the dialog box and schedule the next follow-up activity for this contact, so that any key next steps don’t fall through the cracks.
5. Click OK and you should now be viewing the your recorded history on the History tab.

Recording History

This is a screen shot of the Record History Dialog Box in ACT!