Sage ACT! boosts productivity by automating key sales, marketing and customer service tasks.

Turn Your Business into a Selling Machine & Customer Experience Magnet:

Sage ACT! helps you get more of the two things your business needs most - Time and Money -  by automating key activities and unlocking a rich source of new leads.

Sage ACT! includes powerful, yet easy-to-use functionality to help you turn your sales and marketing efforts into a consistent, systematic lead generation and selling machine.

Use Smart Tasks to develop standard, automated workflow for scheduling sales activities, sending out marketing campaigns - including Sage E-Marketing for ACT! - and remembering important customer service tasks.  Then, expand your business with highly qualified new leads from Sage Business Info Services.

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Meet your new personal assistant:  Sage ACT! Smart Task

What are Smart Tasks?

Smart Tasks are a series of common and connected steps, performed inside of Sage ACT!. Smart Tasks will set in motion the most basic or advanced processes to take care of things like reaching out to customer that you haven't heard from in a while or notifying you of stalled sales opportunities.

By putting together small steps, Sage ACT! can automatically perform many of your routine sales, marketing, and customer service tasks.  This helps everyone in your organization to work more productively so you can contact more prospective customers, sell more products or services and support more existing customers  -- all without needing to hire new employees or acquire resources!

Easily Automate Key Tasks

Smart Tasks enable you to automate activities that you do on a regular basis to keep the ball rolling in your sales and marketing efforts.  To create a new Smart Task, you will need to define 3 things: when, who and what the Smart Task should affect.

Smart Tasks run when they are triggered. You can either set a trigger to follow a schedule or trigger the Smart Task manually when you want it to begin. Schedule a Smart Task to complete the steps in the workflow on a certain day of the week or time of day.  You can also have a Smart Task move on to the next task as soon as the previous step is complete.  You can even direct a Smart Task to wait a number of days, weeks, or months before performing the next step in the process.

Read more articles about using Smart Tasks for your business, here.

In marketing, the right timing is essential. 

If you wait too long to follow up with an interested prospect, they will lose interest.  Likewise, if you try to sell to the right people at the wrong time, you are unlikely to meet with success. Too often, businesses do not make consistent marketing efforts.  Instead, they turn marketing on and off like a spigot when the sales team asks for new leads.  This approach costs more and is usually less effective than automating marketing processes to improve productivity and utilizing affordable methods such as email.

Smart Tasks help you time your marketing campaigns so that you will get the most return for your marketing dollars. 

By spacing communications with customers and prospects correctly, you will keep them engaged in a dialog with your company and nurture them toward a purchase until it is time to hand the lead off to sales.

As you design your marketing Smart Tasks, you can include campaigns in Sage E-marketing for ACT, which is a cloud-based marketing service that enables you to execute sophisticated campaigns, while leveraging and building on your existing Sage ACT! information.

Right out-of-the-box, Smart Tasks integrate with Sage E-marketing for ACT!.  Use it to capture leads with web forms on your web site, nurture prospects automatically with Drip Marketing plans, and quickly identify your hottest leads using a ranked call list based on prospect lead scores.

Nurture Prospects Automatically with Drip Marketing

Create multi-step campaigns to nurture new leads and incorporate these Drip Marketing plans into your Smart Task sequences.  Drip Marketing blends simple tasks, like automatically sending an email response when someone fills out a web form, with intelligent technology that reacts differently to contacts based on behavior, like automatically mailing a postcard or letter to a contact that has not opened email.

7 Ideas for marketing automation with Smart Tasks:

1. Send a welcome e-mail to new contacts.

2. Nurture leads by assigning all opportunities to drip email campaigns in Sage E-marketing.

3. Invite new customers to subscribe to your electronic newsletter, product announcements, or other programs. Make sure the content is valuable to them!

4. Put your customer loyalty program on auto-pilot with automated, timed email campaigns.

5. When opportunities changes to "Closed-Won" status, send an email that offers customers the opportunity to upgrade their selection, or purchase related products or services.

6. Schedule Opportunities in the "Inactive" status to receive periodic customer success stories and/or savings offers.

7. If an opportunity moves to "Closed-Lost" status, wait a while and then try a special campaign to reengage the contact, or survey lost sales to find out what your company could have done better.

Customer service is another great area to automate everyday tasks with Sage ACT!.

You can deliver those extra little touches that remind customers why they like dealing with your company, by setting up Smart Tasks.

The extra attention that you are able to pay to the customer experience is well worth the effort - it is much easier (and more profitable) to sell more products or services to an existing customer, than to replace that customer.

You can also go that extra mile to keep up with changing customer contact data and ensure a well-maintained database. Smart Tasks will contact customers that are missing key contact information form their records with a survey that automatically plugs any data received back into Sage ACT!.

So the following are 7 ideas for excellent customer service with Smart Tasks:

1. Schedule a follow-up call from an account manager after an opportunity moved to "Closed-Won" status.

2. Send an email to new customers explaining how to contact your company, where to find additional information about products or services, and how to sign up for any available training.

3. Deliver annual customer satisfaction surveys.  (Better yet- do after every major sale!)

4. Send a birthday email greeting to customers, or schedule a call from their account representative.

5. Celebrate customer loyalty by sending a thank you email or letter on the anniversary of each customer's first purchase.  (I always like to get this, don't you?)

6. Survey customers with incomplete mailing address or bad email address and automatically update the database.

7. If you have web forms for customers to fill out with questions, technical issues, or complaints, quickly acknowledge receipt of those comments with an automated email response.