August 12, 2006

From Sage: ACT! and CRM Sales Logix 2007

For Sage's ACT! and SalesLogix customers, Christmas will come on September 6 and 12 2006 respectively. That's when the latest version of ACT! 2007 and SalesLogix 2007 hits store shelves. Chris Reich, Director, Product Management, CRM Solutions, and Larry Ritter, Vice President, Product Development, ACT! have added new features to both products.

ACT! is the ideal tool for small businesses, individuals and corporate workgroups who want to manage relationships with contacts more efficiently.

SalesLogix is the tool for growing businesses who want a full suite of sales, marketing, customer service, support and mobile connectivity for their entire business.

ACT! 2007's new products include ACT! 2007, ACT! Premium for Workgroups 2007, ACT! Premium for Web 2007 and ACT! for Palm OS 2007.

Improvements in ACT! include better search, security, contact intelligence, and improved integration with Microsoft Outlook. Each one of these enhancements will increase your productivity.

"Contact intelligence" lets you quickly see the last email you sent to a particular person. Another seemingly small, but useful feature is an expanded notes pane. Many people type extensive notes into ACT! about their contacts. ACT! now offers a note preview pane so you can quickly and easily see more (or all) of the notes for a particular contact.

If you don't want to go through the hassle of installing ACT! to your computers/servers ACT! for the Web provides your business with a FAST and EASY way to centralize your contact management. Remote access is a given, as all you need is a web browser to get to your companies information.

Having a customer list in Outlook is managing contacts - but not relationships. Microsoft's free Business Contact Manager does add more features to Outlook to help you manage relationships better but I don't think it's as robust as ACT! or other contact management solutions on the market.

If you are a growing business and need more than just contact management Sage's CRM SalesLogix is something you should consider.

SalesLogix's interactive dashboards are a POWERFUL way for your employees and managers (YOU) to get a visual read on the "must" see statistics that affect your business.

It's mobile CRM, lets your mobile sales and marketing teams and managers have the vital data they need, be they on the road or in their homes.

SalesLogix's marketing features have been boosted in version 2007. I'm not going to go into all the details here, you can read all about it yourself here

If your business is in business to provide superior service and support you MUST have software to make that support possible. How do you think the Ritz Carlton and other great customer service focused companies do it. Magic? I think not. There's two things great service oriented companeis have - SalesLogix can only help you with one of them.

1. They have GREAT employees who are passionate about customer service. (SalesLogix can't help you with this)

2. They have powerful customer service databases that help them manage the entire customer experience. It's a powerful tool that let's them meet customers needs at the right time, every time.

If you currently use ACT! or SalesLogix both of these new releases offer enhancements that will boost your productivity even more. If you use another product have a look at ACT! and SalesLogix and see if they offer something your current product is not and will not provide you.

PS - NYC based Infinity Info Systems is the leading Sage reseller. If you are looking for a consultant to help you with CRM, you'd be hard pressed to find a better consultant than Infinity.

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