ENEWS > FALL 2007

Spotlight on ACT! Customers
ACT! by Sage Premium grows with Choice Hotels

Choice Hotels International offers worldwide franchise opportunities with ten well known and respected hotel brands, including Quality®, Comfort Inn®, and Cambria Suites™. The company succeeds by helping its franchisees succeed, investing heavily in marketing and brand awareness and providing its franchisees and hotel guests alike with exceptional service. For nearly 15 years, Choice Hotels has relied on the ACT! by Sage family of products to allow it to communicate its message and win new franchisees.

“We have about 115 people in several departments who rely on ACT! Premium,” says Kym Bridgers, manager of sales research for Choice Hotels. “Although each department uses it a little differently, we’re really making use of all the components of ACT! Premium—reporting, Opportunities, Groups, Companies, and Notes. Our largest database has over 100,000 contacts; another has 1,400 companies and hundreds of opportunities.”

Check Out the Competition
Bridgers says the company originally looked at other customer relationship and contact management solutions before deciding on ACT! Premium. “ACT! Premium is very user friendly and is configurable to our needs,” she says. “We also like that we can maintain the database ourselves, without added cost and overhead.”

Take Sales Tools With You
Choice Hotels outside sales representatives use ACT! Premium on their laptop computers, synchronizing with the home office server over the Internet. Rather than take the full database with them, each representative’s laptop houses just the accounts and prospects in their territory. By taking just the records they need with them, space required on the laptops’ hard drives is minimized.

The ability to take the details of their contacts, opportunities, and associated notes with them on the road proves invaluable to Choice Hotels representatives. “Before ACT! Premium, our reps kept their own notes, so management had no visibility into the sales process,” recalls Bridgers. “If they left the company, their leads and opportunities went with them.”

Recently, several of the representatives began using ACT! Premium on their Palm OS and BlackBerry handheld devices, enabling them to be productive wherever they are.

Make the Sales Cycle Visible To track the weekly activities of its sales representatives, management used to ask the representatives to prepare a spreadsheet of the number of calls they made that week and the results. The sales representatives saw it as busy work and resisted. Now, as the sales representatives schedule and complete activities and record their notes in ACT! Premium, that activity is summarized automatically in a Weekly Activity Report printed from within ACT! Premium. No extra steps are required by the sales representatives and it provides management with a clear idea of what each representative has accomplished during the week and what new opportunities are in the pipeline.

Import Leads
Choice Hotels subscribes to a report offering detailed information concerning thousands of hotels across the country. Bridgers imports that file into ACT! Premium, updating existing records and creating new ones as needed. The company’s sales representatives use this list as a lead database, pursuing potential franchise opportunities with hotels in their territories.

Customize to Track Specifics
An important service, and growing revenue stream, for Choice Hotels is the hosting of meetings and events at its hotels. In order to effectively provide the service, the company must track the details concerning each hotel’s facilities.

Bridgers added a custom tab with added fields to the ACT! Premium database to track details of each hotel’s meeting space. When the company recently decided to add the ability for customers to reserve meeting room through its Web site, Bridgers’ work paid off. “It is so easy to export the information out of ACT! Premium to our Web site,” she says. “Having the information in the format we needed for our Web site was such a time saver. Management was impressed.”

Target Marketing Efforts
In addition to its value as a sales tool, ACT! Premium is a wellutilized marketing resource at Choice Hotels. “Our marketing department uses ACT! Premium to send mailings and franchise information to our prospects,” explains Bridgers. “It’s easy to identify potential prospects by state or by territory and market specific to them.”

Stick With a Proven Winner
“We have to have software to track our prospects and our franchisees,” concludes Bridgers, “Throughout the years we’ve looked at other packages, but quickly realized we have no reason to change. ACT! Premium does everything we need it to do and the product keeps getting better every year.”