Hoover your leads into ACT! 2011

One of the interesting new features with ACT! 2011 is Sage Business Info Services.

This is basically the ability of your database to reach out and connect with other sources of information or other applications on the Web. If you are familiar with Swiftpage/ACT! e-marketing then you are already aware of a 'connected service'.

Whilst these connected services or as Sage will be calling them, Sage Business Info Services, are a way for Sage to generate additional revenue, they are very useful and effective services to have at your disposal if you are an ACT! user.

One of the Sage Business Info Services that Sage are promoting with the release of ACT! 2011 is a connection with Hoovers. Many Australian businesses are probably not very familiar with Hoovers but they are essential a data or list broker.

By having a connection to Hoovers, you should be able to do a search for a list of businesses that you would like to add to your database and with a few clicks, import those contacts straight into ACT!. Having had to deal with List Brokers on behalf of clients in the past, this looks like a much faster, easier and hopefully more economical way of adding contacts to your database.

The good news for Australian ACT! users is that it seems that Hoovers has a large amount of Australian Company information available. According to Sage we can expect to see 650,000 records to choose from. Sounds promising.

To see a great explanation of how this concept of Hoovering leads into ACT! 2011 I'll leave it to our good friend Napkin Mike to demonstrate to you.

ACT! 2011 - Coming soon

ACT! 2011 is now available in the U.S. and It won't be long before it's available here in Australia.

There are ome great new features to come and we look forward to bringing you some thoughts on that soon.

In the mean time, the great news is Napkin Mike is back with a great demo on what you can look forward to in the new version.

Enjoy!

Getting GoToMeeting To Go Local

Like many companies we use GoToMeeting for doing remote demonstrations and training for clients and prospects.

One issue we have encountered a couple of times from attendees is the fact that they need to make a long distance call to join the conference call.

After talking with GoToMeeting support and liasing with their support team on twitter, it seems that the number provided for conference calls with GoToMeeting is provided randomnly and there isn't anything you can do to specify what numbers you would like associated to your meeting.

This seems to be a lazy feature that can cause problems. For example, if you are based in a city, like Brisbane, and all your attendees are based in Brisbane, it is likely that GoToMeeting will present a phone number for another state such as NSW. So all attendees and the presenter are making a long distance call.

This has come to the attention to some of our clients, who have then brought it to our attention with comments like: 'You mean we paid for the training and now each of my 10 staff are all on a long distance phone call for the next 2 hours - who's paying for that?!" Ouch & thanks GoToMeeting (not).

Now, as GoToMeeting rightly pointed out when I brought this to their attention, there is no charge for the VOIP option. Well, that is true, but we aren't always presenting to early adopters that have a speaker and microphone. And if they did, they've probably not used it before. The last thing we need to be doing with hot prospects or multiple attendeeds is troubleshooting audio issues. Having a convenient conference call they can join via their phone (not computer) is a feature many business like ourselves need.

If GoToMeeting want their platform to be more widely adopted they need to be thinking about functional improvements that will make it easier for the early majority to attend, and for the sake of GoToMeeting, possibly host webinars in the futre.

But since they don't appear to provide any channel for feature requests we need a work-around. I can't claim credit for figuring this out, but in the course of complaining about this problem to someone they told me this simple solution.

What is it?

Well, as it turns out, it doesn't matter what phone number GoToMeeting gives you when it creates your meeting, you can dial any of their numbers and it will allow attendees to join the conference call in your meeting.

This means you could provide the local number for your attendees and they can call in on that number at a local call rate. This should also work if you have attendees in different locales, you can still give them their local number.

At this stage, I only have 2 numbers, but please feel free to use the comments to provide the local numbers for your area.

Australia
Brisbane: 07 3123 6030
Sydney: 02 8014 4934