An Act database can hold thousands of contacts and many of my clients have no idea how to find the contacts in Act that are relevant to their business; for example, prospects and clients.
Act users that don’t take the time to organize their contacts properly usually mean that they they cannot find them when they need them. That can make ACT more work than it’s worth and I’m here to tell you there is a better and easier way to manage your contacts with Act. Many of my clients use groups to organize their contacts and this approach is fraught with problems. These tutorials on working with groups will teach you an approach to managing your contacts.
Act Groups: Manual Groups
Imagine for a moment that you owned and operated an ice cream shop and you kept all of your customers and prospects in act. Then imagine that you had a number of contacts whose first name was John. You also kept track of their favorite types of ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, pistachio and coffee ice cream. Next, you want to look up all the people whose first name is John and whose favorite ice cream is strawberry. You can do all of this manually in act and with the results you can move all of these contacts into a group called people named John whose favorite ice cream is strawberry. What this does for you is to create a group of all of these people so the next time you want to find these people, you don’t have to go through so many steps. That is the basic idea of groups. Unfortunately, just last week, two new people whose first name is John and whose favorite ice cream is strawberry entered your database. But they are not in the group because you forgot to put them there. This is where groups start to break down and I am going to show you how to deal with that problem.
Group Membership Rules (Dynamic Groups)
Group membership rules allow you to create rules in act that will automatically put certain people in a group. At this very moment you might not recognize how powerful a tool this can be, but let me tell you this can be the game changer that you are looking for when it comes to managing and keeping your contacts and act organized.