With marketing budgets tightening, and the need for new business growing, every ACT! user is weighing the value of every marketing expenditure, particularly the big-ticket events.  Let’s take a look at how this blog will help your event prospecting and set your marketing budgets within Sage ACT!

Your events may include:

• Industry-specific meetings you attend
• Seminars or webinars you host
• Conferences
• Trade shows

This article will include examples of simple modifications to Sage ACT!, as well as complex overhauls, all with steps you can take to realize your goal of increasing the value of your investment in your Sage ACT! database.

Our own experiences hosting road shows, seminars and webinars, attending shows, exhibiting at shows, and organizing shows provides us with the tools to help you build a better prospecting database.  We write this blog to share our experience with you and guide you as your own needs evolve.

Tracking ROI (Return on Investment) with Opportunities. Doing the Math.

Whether you belong to a networking group or invest in exhibition space, you are making an investment in sourcing leads.  How is each of these investments panning out?  Depending on the scope of your operation and the length of your sales cycle the answer may vary.  Getting a handle on which investments bring you the most value is a measure of that event’s success.

Track two investments: time and money.  How much are you spending on hard costs associated with an event?  What are the soft costs associated with your time and opportunities lost as a result of the time invested in preparing for the event?  (future posts will show you how to track these line items in ACT!).  Once you arrive at the number you will want to begin tracking the event’s path to an outcome in ACT!

Tracking revenue: opportunities.  The most direct way to track the revenue generated by a meeting is to use the Referred By field in Opportunities.  Whether the business is with an existing customer or a new prospect, if the business opportunity hatched at your meeting, then add the unique name of the meeting to your Referred By drop-down list to uniformly add a searchable term in the field.  In our example we added CommunicationShere 2011, our sample trade show, to the list and to each opportunity that came from that show:

As each opportunity is added, use the new value in the Referred By field to ensure that the revenue generated from your event is captured.  You are on your way to tracking ROI for the show.
How long it takes to realize the value of participating in the show depends on the length of your sales cycle.  In our sample database we have some products with long cycles and others, including services for existing customers that are shorter.  We have multiple Processes with different Stages to track the progress.  To track a genuine number for our ROI in ACT! we will use the longest projected cycle and base our ROI on that cycle.  With CommunicationSphere 2011 taking place in June, and our longest process taking about six months to close, we will use the anticipated revenue for all opportunities generated from the event with revenue projections in December.

Two options for tracking ROI. Quantify results either shortly after the event, or in December at the end of the longest cycle.

You can project your ROI for the event by using Weighted Totals and Estimated Close Dates.  Weighted totals are derived from percentages associated with each stage of your Opportunity Process.  Historical information helps here.  In the past, what percentage of deals close from the total number of opportunities that enter that stage?  Use Sage ACT! to align that Stage with a percentage and Sage ACT! will do the math for you.

According to the logic in this example, one in ten deals that enter the sales cycle closes as won.  The likelihood increases as the prospective buyer advances through the process.  For this deal, the Weighted Total reflects the earliest stage of the opportunity, Initial Communication, with a 10% likelihood to close.  (The Probability may be edited as you wish on a case-by-case basis.)

By aggregating your list of deals (Opportunity Lookup by Referred By Equals “CommunicationSphere 2011″) you gain an appreciation for the actual value of the event by totaling up the Weighted Total in your list view.  In our example, the Weighted Total for these 8 deals is $25k:

The second way to calculate ROI for CommunicationSphere 2011 is to run the same numbers in December and to calculate the Actual Grand Total for deals that are Closed Won.

Calculating ROI for your event, whether it is an inexpensive webinar or in-house seminar, to a booth at a trade show, is as simple as tracking the source of each lead in the Referred By field and measuring your actual success against the investment made.

Cynthia Thomas, ACC
Wasatch Software Consulting Group
435-783-4052

Recently we went into a company to set them up with the ACT! 2010 software. The company makes super lightweight components for high tech racing bicycles.  I held up a  $6,500.00 bicycle frame of theirs in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The coffee weighed more.

The first business problem in the company was that they had a  team of competent sales people that were often at bicycle events. If someone was out of the office, the other sales people did not know where that salesperson was in the status of pending sales transactions for bike parts with their customers.  They each needed to know the  status of customer transactions at all times. Having the ACT! database in a shared folder on a network server with each salesperson having access gave them a central repository for all transactions. Additionally they fully utilized the ability to customize the Opportunities layout to track the exact data about each transaction. Doesn’t matter who is in the office  now—as long as the transaction data is in the ACT! database anyone can continue the transaction as the customer dictates.

Second problem was in these economically difficult times,  more customers were taking longer to pay for the bicycle parts. They need each sales person to know what the past and present payable and receivable status is with each customer as they are speaking with them.  They wanted full insight into QuickBooks for each salesperson as they were speaking with the customers and entering data into the ACT! database.  We set them up with a new addon solution to link their QuickBooks data to the ACT! database.  Everyone now has what they need at their fingertips at all times.   Business is racing faster than ever!

A customer contacted me late Friday afternoon desperate for help with his ACT! 4.0 database. He has been using the ACT! software program since 1996. He recently updated his computer with a new Norton Anti-Virus program that corrupted his old Symantec ACT! 4.0 program wiping out his history going back 14 years and all the Contact names.  He tried various resolutions himself to no avail.

After review of his ACT! 4.0 I decided to take a recent back up copy of his database, pull it onto my machine and upgrade it to ACT! 6.0. After upgrading the ACT! 4.0 database into ACT! 6.0 I was able to recover all his Contact history going back to 1996 and all his Contact names. He is set now with his database working as he needs.