sales automation manager (sam)
Perfect Followup ... made easy! ®

Sales Automation Manager (SAM) adds to ACT™ the power to automatically schedule activities and generate correspondence according to patterns (called campaigns) that you define.

Sales--It's All About Follow-Up

ACT! is a great contact manager, but it requires that you manually create followup activities after a customer interaction (i.e. a "touch point"). As you probably know, it’s nearly impossible for a busy salesperson to do followup consistently and well.

Because SAM lets you predefine the followup steps for any situation at a touch point, SAM, unlike any other ACT! add-on, finally gives you Perfect Followup…made easy!®

Sales Automation

SAM's goal is to "automate everything that can be, so the salesperson/ACT user can be most efficient". Our Sales Automation Manager ACT! addon finally gives you “true sales automation" with ACT! Northwoods' Sales Automation Manager's automation can:

• Look at fields and decide next steps
• Wait a number of days
• Schedule Calls, Meetings, or To-dos
• Merge and send emails, letters, or faxes
• Assign different record managers to incoming leads - in round-robin fashion, or by zip code, state, etc.
• Much more…

Sales Automation Manager's features can help you implement campaigns like these:

• Implement “Drip Marketing” for your new prospects
• Periodically stay in touch with your best customers
• Send out your monthly newsletter
• Send out monthly "dunning notices" for overdue invoices
• Automatically schedule a long series of To-Dos needed to fulfill an order
• Automate client portfolio reviews for a financial analyst
• Automate the loan processing workflow for a mortgage broker
• Automatically generate and send birthday cards
• Watch for upcoming meetings and then email reminders to participants
• Remind customers to renew service or maintenance contracts

Marketing Automation

Sales Automation Manager was originally designed to automate the sales process, but its powerful features can also implement complete marketing automation. Here’s a recipe for achieving "total marketing automation" with SAM:

• Generate marketing collateral to cause prospects to visit your web site.
• Design a web form to gather their contact information, and especially, to ask "qualifying questions" that indicate the size of the opportunity or urgency.
• Setup Northwoods WebProspect to automatically merge the data from your web forms into ACT, and also insert the contact into a Prospects campaign.
• Design the Prospects campaign to "triage" contacts - route highly qualified leads to your valuable salespeople for telephone followup, and route the lower priority leads to an automated email campaign.

SAM’s flexibility lets you customize campaigns, including “drip” campaigns. For example, SAM can send out personalized letters from your company President, from the CTO, from a specific salesperson, or from a sales engineer.

With careful design, you can reserve your valuable direct human interaction for only the most important clients or the most important touch points.

A Completely Automated Sales and Marketing Solution

If your goal is to implement a fully automated marketing and/or sales automation solution, you can save money by purchasing the sam bundle.

Office Workflow

Sales Automation Manager can also automate the workflow of a whole company.

Workflow is just a sequence of steps. Because Sales Automation Manager can look at database fields and make decisions about “next steps,” it can automatically create Calls, Meetings, and To-dos, and it can guide each customer through the critical steps needed to execute an order. For example: many of our customers use SAM to automate mortgage loan fulfillment steps.

Requirements

• ACT! 7 / 8 / 9 (2005, 2006, 2007) all versions (except for ACT! for Web client)
• Word 2003 or later (for letters and faxes)
• Microsoft FAX (optional part of Windows) (for faxing)
• An SMTP internet mailbox (for emailing) /or/ the Swiftpage email service
• Northwoods Mail Merge must be installed for E-mailing (but does not need to be licensed for use with SAM alone.)

Pricing

You only need one copy of SAM... your purchase allows the same user to install SAM on two computers

• We strongly recommend you install one copy on the same computer that hosts the ACT! database (your "server"). This gives SAM the fastest access to your database.
• The other copy can be installed on the "campaign designer's" computer
• We recommend that our SAM Client program be installed on the "office administrator's" computer and/or database user's computers. The SAM Client allows contacts to be added to campaigns, and correspondence to be sent out, but prevents modification of the campaigns.

Performance

Here are some measurements of Sales Automation Manager performance to help you understand how fast SAM's automation runs (made on a two year old desktop running ACT 2007):

• 1700 contacts per minute
• 7000 campaign steps (transitions) per minute