ACT! and the Web - Social Contact Management: Part 3 of 3

larryr — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:26:17 GMT

Part 3 of 3: “How ACT! can help me in the new Internet enabled World”

In Part 2 we saw how our prospects are increasingly being influenced by sources they find on the Web. Fortunately, the internet works for all us. So as a vendor working with a prospect we can also leverage the Web to gather information about our prospects. At Sage, we emphasized a concept we call the “Anywhere Workforce Experience” in our Sage CRM Solutions 2010 strategy. See the published strategy whitepaper for full details though at the core is the fact we are already taking advantage of and plan to go deeper in terms of exploiting the Web.

For example, within ACT! there are a number of convenient plug-ins or “mash-ups” available that pass contents from relevant fields to a variety of internet services. For example, some really simple “mash-ups” pass the name of the current contact I am viewing to common search engines, like Google. The results are then conveniently displayed. without any further user action. Then as I transition to another contact, the same results are displayed for that contact – providing convenient “in-context” results for each contact. This means results are automatically updated and always up to date as I move between contacts. Others are available for displaying driving directions, searching for names on Social Networking sites, like LinkedIn, etc. These simple but powerful concepts enable ACT! users to leverage and harness the internet to make us more productive when dealing with our customers. Your ACT! Certified Consultant can help you with these “mash-ups” and/or you can download them from the Developers Network portion of this community.

We intend to go further in this space by looking at a company and leveraging services that provide additional names of contacts within the firm. Other examples would be to use the result of search to find related contacts, customers and influencers. This would enable me to understand the extended connections of my prospect and how they might be brought to bear on a particular opportunity.

We are in the infant stages of Social CM. We expect to continuously improve the connectivity and benefits of leveraging the internet and ACT!. We have a range of ideas from simple connections to existing internet sites to fully functioning services that operate independently.

I hope this 3 part series was interesting to you. Since I started this series I had the chane to presnet at the North America Sage Insights conference. I shaerd some thoughts on how Socila Media is shaping the Contact Management and CRM space with our partners and a numebr of Analysts. This led to an invite to be one of 30 bloggers in a recent CRM Magazine focus on the topic. Here is the link for the interested:

http://www.destinationcrmblog.com/2009/06/16/social-media-maturity-model-information-wants-to-find-you/

I’d love to hear your ideas for services and internet connections that would be of most interest to you.

Larry