What is your plan for Act and all the contacts that reside inside your Act database?

Why hasn’t Jean Smith bought from you recently?

Seemingly this is a simple question and most people would have an answer for this. Surprisingly, one of the most important things I do for my clients is to help them think of the potential of what Act can do for their business. People organize information in Act in many different ways and I am one of those people that believe simplicity is key. The most important field in Act in my opinion is the ID status field. This is the field that allows you to categorize every single contact in Act. For the sake of this discussion today I’m going to treat your Act database as a sales tool with two simple ID statuses: prospects and clients.

How many prospects you have in your database? How many clients you have in your database? How often do you want to reach out to your prospects? Clients? Daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly?

Frankly, when I start working with my clients I’m all about asking questions.

It is not unusual for me to come across the company that has thousands upon thousands of contacts in their database and no one can tell me the last time they reached out to Jean Smith at the ABC Company. In fact, based on acts point of view Jean has been totally forgotten about.  How do we know whether or not Jean is the person and business that is going to purchase your products or services in great quantities, so much so, that it is going to make a huge difference for your business bottom line this year and in future years?

Yet, there is Jean Smith, the lonely contact in your database that has not been touched for more than a year. She doesn’t know you exist and obviously you don’t know she exists. It doesn’t have to be this way. Let me explain how we can fix this right now by simply coming up with a plan. The Monday Plan.

Let me state what I hope is obvious: you do not have to implement this plan on a Monday. The whole idea is to be consistent and pick a day in which you follow-up with your implemented goals. Just pick a day and work at the process.

The Monday Plan Outline

When you look at a contact in Act there are multiple ways in which you can touch base with that contact. You can call them, visit them for meeting, email them or send correspondence via your Postal service or shipping provider. The easiest way to reach them obviously is by email. Making a phone call quite often results in leaving a message; I predict about 80% of the time that will occur. Visiting them requires a large commitment of time on your part. Mailing them something requires some thought and expense.

Can we agree on one thing: emailing is the easiest way to touch people quickly and efficiently.

Let’s assume for a moment that we have decided that we want to contact prospects quarterly via email. Next, and in many cases more importantly, we have decided that we have two types of clients: key clients and inactive clients. Key clients we want to reach every month via email. Inactive clients we want to reach quarterly via email. This is where having a game plan, or my Monday plan comes into play. Let me explain in more detail by giving you some examples.

Every Monday When You Come into the Office You Do Certain Things, Such As:

• review all of your new leads
• review all key clients
• review receivables
• create and submit invoices to clients
• review emails from the previous week

On the First Monday of the Month You Do the Following:

• send an email to all inactive clients that have not received an email for 90 days
• send an email to all prospects that have not received an email for 90 days
• review all untouched contacts in your database

On the First Monday of the Quarter You Do the Following:

• review your sales process and tweak it
• find more prospects
• place a phone call to all of your key clients
• review all of your inactive clients and assess their needs
• plan your email marketing campaign and goals for the coming months

If you implement the Three Monday Plan, no contact will ever slip through the cracks. At the end of the day, shouldn’t that be the goal for the contacts you have within your database?  Contact me to discuss this in more detail and I will help you implement the three Monday plan today.