CRM & Tech for The Small Business

 As the resident ‘techie’ at Winnovative, I field questions regarding the use of groups in Act! CRM software with some regularity, so I thought I would kick off a series of short articles that share potential workarounds and best practice surrounding the use of groups in Act!.

Groups are one of the most flexible features in the Act! CRM software platform for small business.  It is pretty safe to say that no other CRM product in a similar price range comes close to the level of functionality that Act! contact management offers in this area.

And therein is the potential rub.

Flexibility is a great thing, but it can also be challenging when you first approach it.

Act! groups can be nested (meaning groups inside of groups inside of groups) up to 15 levels!  This alone makes the grouping functionality of Act! CRM a powerhouse.

Before proceeding further – one point for qualification:  Only contact records (i.e. – people) can be grouped.  You cannot add company records to a group.  (This is not to say that you cannot ‘group’ companies in Act!, just that you use a different method, and that, my friend, is a topic for a different article.)

Further, since Act! 2005 came out back in 2004, groups can be ‘static’ or ‘dynamic’.

A static group member is a contact you manually add to the Act! group.  You look at a list of contacts, and you click to add the ones you want in the group.  (If you were an Act! legacy user – Act! v6 and older – than you know about static groups – these were all there were back in the day.)  Once a contact has been statically added to a group, it is there forever – no matter what.  Well, at least until you again manually remove it from the group – or it is deleted from the Act! database.

Static groups are ideal for those contacts who otherwise do not share consistent descriptive information.  One example might be ‘Golf Turnie Candidates’.  Likely you know who in your system is an avid golfer and would be interested in your annual tournament, but you do not have a data field for this – it is knowledge in your head.  Manually adding them to a static group is the way to go!

A dynamic group on the other hand, is one that Act! manages for you based upon data rules you define. 

For example, say you want to create a group called ‘Albany, NY’.  The intent of the group is to list all of the contacts in your Act! database that are from Albany, NY.  Yes, you can add them manually, but why?  After all, the city and state fields are uniform and pretty much always populated with data, so why not have Act! CRM do the dirty work?  You specify a rule for the “Albany, NY” group that says “When a contact’s city field equals Albany” add them to the group.

Now, each time you view that group, Act! runs a lookup invisibly in the background and searches for all of the contacts that meet the data rule(s) for the group, and then shows you that list as your ‘group’. (And, yes, you can have complex rules.)

See why it is called a ‘dynamic’ group?  If the former governor’s contact record has been updated to reflect that he no longer is in Albany, Act! will not include him in the group. 

Simply by updating your data during the course of your day-to-day affairs, you are also updating your dynamic groups w/o having to do anything further.

 Pretty cool, right?

Also, just to add a little more interest:  Groups in Act! CRM can contain both static AND dynamic members.  How about that?

In the next article of this series we’ll talk more about nesting groups and how Act! handles them.  (This is the topic that tends to raise the most questions!)

Talk with you soon!

 Send me comments and suggestions for discussions that you would like to read:  blogger@winnovative.com

 M Scott Schaffernoth, ACC, SLXCE
www.winnovative.com
Twitter: @InsideSMBCRM
LinkedIn:  MScott Schaffernoth