Act software can now play nice with other software. But what does it all mean? Honestly, I find it a bit overwhelming with all of the potential of what act software can now do.

One of the most compelling issues facing act software users is a rather simple aspect of using the software. Adding contacts to act. How do you do it? And once you’ve done it, how do you manage those contacts? You might add a contact from a business card. Maybe you are importing a number of contacts from an Excel file. Maybe you received an email and you want to add the email contact to act. There are tools and methods for accomplishing all of this.

Act connect and Zapier takes the management of contacts to a whole new level. Let me give you some examples of what you can accomplish:

• You can create a web form and have the content that is submitted from that form be imported directly into act.
• You could create a more complicated web form that helps you gather data about your clients or prospects and have that data pulled directly into act
• You can create an action that is triggered by an event that happened elsewhere

I am still trying to wrap my mind around the immense potential of using Act Connect and Zapier. There are so many options and so little time. At the end of the day, my experience has been that most act users need to master the fundamentals of taking care of their clients first and foremost. This does not have to be complex. It could be something as simple as making sure that you do routine follow-up with your clients. The habits you develop by taking care of your clients can then be expanded to how you work with all the prospects in your database.

I do not see the point of using act software to do complex integrations with other software if you are not even taking care of the fundamentals first. Having stated that, after the fundamentals are completed and as time permits, there is so much potential. Let me give you an example.

Imagine for a moment that you are in the ice cream business. You sell many different types of ice cream: ice cream cones, ice cream in a cup, milkshakes, quarts of ice cream, gallons of ice cream as well. You have put all of your customers into act and contact them monthly with an email outlining the ice cream of the month and various specials on ice cream.

What do you do if you want more detailed information about your clients?

For example, you would like to specifically know what their favorite ice cream is and how they typically purchase it. There are tools that will allow you to connect act and Zapier to a detailed web form that you can create for free that asks all these questions. People fill it out, hit submit and all of that information goes somewhere. But where does it go? In the past, you could receive it via email and then go find the contact in act that it applies to and update his or her information in act. Today, with act connect you can have all that information automatically imported into the contact that sent the email. That is amazing.

Maybe you’re holding an event and you would like to send out an invitation using Eventbrite. Just a quick disclaimer here, I have never used Eventbrite. This idea was suggested to me by a fellow act certified consultant. You could send an email out inviting your customers to an event such as an ice cream tasting, and when they register all of that information would come back into act.

If you are a long-time act user you have at some point asked yourself if there is better software out there for your business. Today, you can ask yourself a slightly different question. The question now becomes is there better software out there that I can combine with act? The answer is yes. The answer is many.

Over the coming months, we will explore this in more detail.