THE HUNT FOR CRM (III)

by Hank Trisler

You may remember that Dale Loflin wrote eloquently--in comments to the first post in this thread--about a system he kluged together based on GMail and Android. He says it will send and receive email, write letters, do everything but wax your car and do it all by voice activation. There's even a GPS which he claims is superior to that offered by Garmin.

Dale is an extremely intelligent and credible gentleman and I trust him implicitly. I could no more operate a system like his than run a marathon, much less invent and assemble it. If you want to know more about it, write Dale and he'll probably steer you in the right direction. He doesn't sell them for a living, though he probably should.

ACT!, by Sage, is the CRM package most often mentioned by the folks who wrote me. It is without question a very capable, if uninspiring package. The most common complaint was about the customer support, or lack thereof. I downloaded a thirty-day trial package, which claimed it would link with Outlook, but not in the trial package. Same with Word. 

I don't want to download a trial package to be told what it will do, I want to see it work. The package further instructed me not to call, as there was no support available on the trial package.

If there's ever a time you need support, it's when you're first using a program. I wrote a scathing email to ACT!, and got a response from a nice lady who promised to call me to address my concerns the following day. She never did.

I uninstalled ACT! with a bit of sadness, as I'd thought it might be the answer to my problem. It even ran on the desktop, as I wanted it to.

My friend, Jeffrey Gitomer, was only one of MANY people writing to tell me about his program, Ace of Sales. It is a bona fide, guaranteed winner. If you want lots of tables, graphs and reports, look elsewhere. If you just want to sell stuff and brand yourself and stand out from the madding crowd, take a good look at Ace of Sales. It will guide you to create email that really packs a punch. It will do ezines, flyers, post cards, letters and greeting cards quickly, easily and professionally. If you can't look good with this program, you're just not good looking.

Ace of Sales runs "in the cloud," which means all your data resides on Jeffrey's servers. This is not nearly as scary as it sounds, as the data is encrypted and safeguarded. Running in the cloud means you can access your information with any computer, anywhere you can log onto the internet. It doesn't handle incoming email, so you still need to run Outlook, or something as an email client. The downside of running in the cloud is that it seems to run a bit slow. So plan ahead.

The real ball-buster for me is that it will not sync with my iPhone. My iPhone is permanently affixed to my body and any program that will not sync with it is a non-starter, in my view.

If you want a program to help you plan a sales campaign and then execute it with style and panache, you're going to have a hard time beating Ace of Sales.

I have a couple more programs that I'm evaluating, so I'll plan to write my final installment tomorrow. If you have any thoughts, comments or questions, now would be an excellent time to flush them out, you should pardon the expression.