Act CRM Link2Quotes First Looks Review

Transcript
(00:02): Good morning everyone. My name is Tony Horowitz and I want to tell you about a product that I’m actually very excited about for ACT Software users. And this product is called Link to quotes. Link to quotes. It is quoting software that allows you to create quotes directly from a webpage that is connected to your ACT database. So the webpage is Linktivity.net. Now the makers of the software is a company called Keystroke, and I’m a partner at Keystroke, Full disclosure. But I really like this product because I think it can really do some things very nice for you. You can get this as an individual and there’s also a team addition as well. And I’d like to show you a little bit about how this works and why I’m rather excited about it.

(00:56): So once you come to Linktivity, you can set up a free account. That’s the first step. Set up Linktivity account. Next, once you get into the account, they have a variety of different products that work with act, linked to calendar, linked to forms, linked to quotes, just a few of them. Having said that, right now I’m on their homepage. The way this software works is it works with API settings. So once you come into this and set up a trial of Linked quotes, you’re going to need some settings. We can help you with that. That’s not a problem, but I’m going to move past that for a moment now. For now, what I want you to know is if you’ve watched some of my videos in the past or listened to some of my tutorials, I tend to talk about, Imagine you’re in the ice cream business, and to show you how this can work, it’s the same exact thing.

(01:49): Let me illustrate what I mean. I put a webpage on my website about chocolate ice cream, and I use Ben and Jerry’s chocolate ice cream. I also have a page on my website for vanilla and strawberry ice cream. And the reason I’m doing that is it’s going to become a little bit more apparent once I show you how this works. So let’s go back to Linktivity and let’s say I want to create a quote because someone reached out to me and they’re interested in chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream. Well, I’m going to come up and click on link to quotes, and when I do that, I’m taken inside and I’m taken right to the page called quotes. I’m going to click on new. Now, just so you know, I’ve done some setup in here, and that setup is the setup of the products and the descriptions and some of the images you’re going to see in this. So I’m going to call this tutorial one. I can give it any name I want. And then once I put that in there, I’m going to go Creve from scratch, click on that, it’s already selected, and then I’m going to click on Create Quote. Once we get inside of this

(02:58): Area, you will find that we have the ability to go in and connect to any contact Interact database. So see right here where it says Bill two, I’m going to click on the lookup contacts option, and this is connected to my ACT database. Now I’m using an Act Premium cloud database, but I’m going to type in my name and I’m going to use me as the example. And for the examples I’m showing, I’ve put my name in my ACT database a few different times with a few different email addresses. So here I am Anthony Horowitz, I’m going to click apply, and now it’s going to use my contact information in Act. Now Act doesn’t even have to be open. I’m connected to Act through an API, and that API is reading the information from my database. If I want to have the ship to, let’s say I have a separate office and I want to ship to, I can go into Act and select that as well.

(03:54): By currency applicable taxes. Some of the stuff I’m not going to get into in this tutorial, I just want to show you the basis for how this can work. So let’s say we know that the shipping is going to be $49. I’m going to tell you bit right in here. Okay, so we’ve got the shipping, we got all this information, we got the date it was issued, and how long it’s valid. Do I require a deposit? For now, I’m going to say nothing is required and there’s nothing else I have to do with this. So the next step is to add my products. So again, I mentioned we’re using chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream. I’m going to come down to this area and I’m going to click on product. This little line comes up, and at this point I am just going to start typing in vanilla, and you’ll see as I start typing, nothing really happens at this point.

(04:43): This is a little tool that I use that I’m going to move up. And as I type in VA n, I’m going to click on the dropdown and it recognizes vanilla, Vanilla ice cream. So I’m going to click on that. Now, vanilla ice cream is $5 and 49 cents per container per pint. Let’s say I want to up the quantity, I’m just going to up the quantity. And what I want you to observe is over here on the right, as I up the quantity to 10, it takes the price and puts it over to the right. Let’s do a new product. I’m going to type in Strawberry. Now again, I’m going to click on the drop down. There’s strawberry ice cream, because I’ve already got it in as a product, and this time I’m going to just make this five. So again, my invoice or quote I should say keeps getting adjusted. Let’s do one more product. This time I’m going to go in and do chocolate. Now chocolate is our big seller. So at this point, that’s something I really want to sell. So I’m going to put in, let’s say a hundred. Okay, I’m going to hit the tab key. Now my quote is for $680 with the shipping $729 and 35. So because

(05:56): This is web based, I do recommend that on a regular basis, you save any of the quotes you’re working on. I’m going to come over to the left of where it says Save and close and click on the little disc icon. And now I’ve just saved that, but this is where it starts to get really interesting in my opinion. At this point, I’m going to come up here and click on preview, and you’ll notice it’s set up top that this quote was successfully saved. I’m going to click on preview. When I do that, it’s going to take me out to the web and here is my quote. This is all the information that’s in it. So now if I look at this, you’ll see that I have a description of my ice cream and all the quote information. Now, when people are sent a quote, this is what they’ll see on the other end.
(06:45): You can customize this in the ways you see fit. What’s also interesting about this is the way they have the ability to uncheck things if they decide they don’t want it. So you can make certain items selectable so they can pick and choose what they want. In this example, vanilla ice cream, I used an image that is on my webpage for vanilla ice cream and I linked it to vanilla ice cream in the description area of that product. If I click on this little image, this little thumbnail, I get a bigger image down below. By chance, when I did this one and brought in the description, I actually brought the photo right into the description area. So it’s there twice. And this was something that sort of surprised me. Having said that, because I took information from my webpage, sometimes when you bring things or take it from a webpage, they can come in different ways.

(07:39): Sometimes images will come in, sometimes they won’t. In this case they did. So if I wanted to put the image in for all three of these, I could’ve, It just so happened for the strawberry one, I didn’t do that. So at this point, once people see the quote on the other end, they can download it, they can print it, and they can accept the quote. So let me go back up and show you the next step. So here’s my quote. At this point, I want to send it to the person I’m quoting. So I’m going to click on save and Send.

(08:11): When this comes up, I have the ability through Linktivity to send this quote out to the person that is on the other end of this quote. I can send it directly to them. I can customize all the text and what I want to say in the text. This is the link to the quote. I can also attach the quote as a pdf, but as a general rule of thumb, I don’t want to do that and I’m going to take that off. I can also decide on what kind of email plate I template I want. So for example, I could create the ice cream template. I could create the chocolate ice cream, the vanilla ice cream, the strawberry ice cream, three separate templates based on what I’m moving

(08:55): Out to them, what I’m sending as a quote. So this is very customizable to make it work within the parameters of what you want to say in the email, you can totally customize the content of this email. Having said that, once I’m satisfied that I can send this out, I’m going to click on Send Quote. Now for those of you that work with act, Act has a tool called Sales Opportunities. And for those of you that have talked to me before, I’ve never been a huge fan of sales opportunities because of the simple fact that I just don’t use them. I think they’re time consuming. But on that note, this creates a sales opportunity act. So you can track where you stand right within inside of act. But also once these quotes go out, there’s other information here as well. So you have an activity dashboard that shows you activity that’s happened.

(09:53): You can see all kinds of different reports, You can save templates, you can save different products as I’ve done here. And just to give you an insight into what this looks like, I’m going to click on the edit product for chocolate ice cream. And inside is all the information. So you don’t have to type this over and over and over again. What’s great about this is once you have this set up, you can create a team account and share this with your staff in house. So if you have multiple sales people, they can use this to send and receive quotes when a quote goes out, and I’m going to go back to the quotes for a minute. When a quote goes out, you have the ability to see what’s going on with that quote. So I’m going to click on these little dots right here, and I can have different options.

(10:46): I can copy the link, I can download it as a pdf, I can accept it, I can disable, but I can see all kinds of information inside this quote. And that’s what really makes it nice. You can see what’s going on with it in the activity dashboard. I want to see all kinds of different information within these quotes that allow you to do a better job of managing your sales flow and process. So there is a lot involved in in this program. It’s improving every single month. Ken Quigley, the owner of Keystroke, is using it in house. They use it for their sales staff. And I highly recommend you take a look at this. I won’t kid you, it does take some time to set up. If your experience with setting up, for example, QuickBooks, you know it takes a little time to do that by having said that, Once you see that and once you see how it can work, I think it can be an incredibly valuable tool. So I’m going to create some other videos on this, but I want to show this to you because I think it’s really a worthwhile tool if you want to implement it within your business. So we’ll come back and revisit this in a little more detail later. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Tony Horowitz. Thank you very much for being here. You have a phenomenal day. Bye now.