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Leveraging Contact Relationships with ACT! by Sage 2009 (11.1)
In today’s economic environment, it is more important than ever for people to reach out to their existing business relationships and to try and leverage the value of these relationships. The new Contact Relationships feature in ACT! makes this easier than ever before.
The Contact Relationships feature allows you to define relationships between contacts in your database. This provides an additional way for you to relate multiple contacts, in addition to the traditional Company and Group relationships. It also goes well beyond what is possible with the Secondary Contacts feature of ACT!, in that the relationships are defined with other full blown contacts in the system. This allows you to keep track of the relationships and to work with each related contact to the fullest extent possible.
This new feature allows you to:
- Relate a contact (or multiple contacts).
- Create a Lookup of the related contacts.
- Customize the columns that appear in the view.
- Print the Relationships.
The new relationships feature has many applications. For instance, Realtors can see what loan agents are making deals happen, loan agents can see which realtors are bringing them the most business, distributers can easily track which customers are buying from which resellers, and financial planners can track and leverage family relationships.
Case Example
Let’s look at Karen Franklin, the owner of KF Real Estate. She has signed a contract with Michael McDeere who is buying a new home. Below is a screen shot of the Relationships tab showing everyone who is involved with Michael’s new home purchase.
Figure 1 Contacts that are related to Michael
Creating the Relationship(s)
When you open ACT! 2009 (11.1) you will see a new Relationships tab. Note: If you are upgrading from a prior version of ACT!, you must add the Relationships tab to your layout. Refer to the bonus article at the end for more information on adding this tab to your layout.
Figure 2 The Relationships tab
After we enter Michael’s contact record into ACT!, we can navigate to the Relationships tab and click the Relate Contact button. We want to select Karen Franklin, the Realtor involved with this transaction.
Figure 3 How to select a related Contact record
We can then type in the relationship that these two people have or select from the drop-down list:
Figure 4 How to select a role for a contact record
After you click OK, here is what the Relationships tab displays:
Figure 5 Michael's record after relating Karen
Adding other relationships
Michael also has an appraiser and a loan agent. We have added these additional relationships through the Relate Contact function by selecting each contact and defining who is playing what role. Now in our Relationship tab we can clearly see what contacts are related to Michael and what role they play. As information changes (i.e. phone, e-mail, address, etc) on the individuals ACT contact records, the relationship tab is automatically updated to reflect the changes.
Figure 6 The Relationships tab with multiple relationships listed
How to lookup one or more of the related contacts
ACT! makes it easy to lookup any contact record that is related. You can click on the person’s name and ACT! will take you to that person’s record. If you would like to lookup all the related contact records, do the following:
- Press and hold the CTRL button on your keyboard.
- Use your mouse to click on any records that you would like to Lookup.
- Right mouse click and select the “Create Lookup” menu entry.
Figure 7 Right Mouse click options
By right-clicking in the Relationships tab, the additional options will display in the menu. Here you can relate another contact, remove a relationship, edit a relationship, or print relationship information.
Figure 8 Lookup of all the Related Contacts
After the lookup is done, you may send an e-mail to all the contacts, schedule a meeting with all the contacts, or perform other functions as you would from any list view.
As with other Tab views in ACT! you can use Customize Columns to customize what fields you would like to have appear on the Relationship tab.
Figure 9 Adding columns to the Relationships tab
The Contact Relationship feature now allows you to leverage your existing relationships to more effectively manage and close deals. With easy access to who has done what with whom in your database, you can choose to concentrate on those relationships that are working, foster relationships that need work, or expand your business by seeking out new business from those contacts who are related to contacts that you already have a relationship with. The new Contact Relationship feature puts it all at your fingertips. Have fun exploring this new feature.
Steve McCandlish
ACT! Certified Consultant since 1991
ASDS Computer Company
www.asdscomputer.com
Bonus Article: Learn more about Technical Considerations when using the Contact Relationships feature.
Did you find this article useful? Let us know: angie.stuart@sage.com
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