Written by Ken Quigley

June 01 2023

If you're in sales, the start of every month is a pain. Not only do you go from hero-to-zero with each monthly reset of your quota, but there is a lot of pipeline management to be done. For instance, you have to decide which quotes should be killed, and which ones pushed, and regardless of what you decide, each and every one of them has to be...

Written by Ken Quigley

May 23 2023

I remember the first time I heard the term "Minimum Viable Product" used to describe a pre-launch software product, I admit I scoffed. How could the meaning of MVP be so casually flipped on its head? However, over the years, I've come to understand the wisdom of the term. The fact is "perfectionists" would not fare well in the software world, and...

Written by Ken Quigley

May 15 2023

When businesses or service professionals first get started, the temptation to use Outlook as more than an email tool is perfectly understandable. Outlook has, after all, a serviceable contact manager that includes a customer list and calendar that is suitable for most people's basic needs. The trick with using Outlook is not to avoid starting with...

Written by Ken Quigley

May 09 2023

With the scheduled release of Act! v25 next month, it's helpful to start planning the upgrade of your Act! software. Act! v25 will include the first schema change since Act! v21, and will feature exciting improvements to Insight reporting, SMS capabilities, as well as a long list of bug fixes. Whether you plan to upgrade to the latest version, or...

Written by Ken Quigley

January 31 2023

Customer engagement is a Madison Avenue buzzword that has come to mean everything and nothing. To be clear, customer engagement is not an intention, but a method, and the methods your business chooses reflect how seriously you take it. For instance, if your website cannot respond to customer inquiries at all times of the day or night, your...

Written by Ken Quigley

November 11 2022

Act! users that have older 32-bit versions of Act! installed prior to them upgrading to the new 64-bit version of Act! v24 may find some issues with doing so. The first is that the old and new versions of Act! get installed into different Program Files directory. All versions of Act! v23 or older get installed into "Program Files (x86)\Act", with...

Written by Ken Quigley

October 21 2022

QuickBooks is an accounting program with over 4.5 million active users for a reason - it's very good at small business bookkeeping. Act! is a CRM with over 800K users worldwide, because it's very good at contact management. If both programs are good at their respective jobs and have very few overlapping features, why do so many QuickBooks users...

Written by Ken Quigley

October 17 2022

Most websites have a Contact Us page. They're so common, in fact, many business owners treat them as an afterthought, leading them to often fail at their most basic objective; to effectively engage visitors. This may seem of little consequence, but an inefficent Contact Us page can hurt businesses more than they suspect, because whether this...

Written by Ken Quigley

October 10 2022

From now until the end of the year, Act! subscribers can get a 25% discount when they upgrade their Act! Marketing Automation (AMA) to a higher tier. That's right, new & existing Act! subscribers can step up to a higher AMA tier for 25% less for the balance of their subscription term. This means any user on a free or paid tier of AMA can...

Written by Ken Quigley

July 29 2022

You are what you eat. This is true of people and CRMs. With people, it’s more about what they eat, and with CRMs it’s more about how they’re fed. A CRM that relies on user updates only will quickly fall into disuse because each time you log in the data will be exactly as you left it. You’ll have the field data you entered, the appointments you...