Act 2000 Tops for Sales Pros

For hard-core sales professionals, a good contact manager is an essential business tool. I looked at two of the newest: Symantec's Act 2000, a winning upgrade to an already powerful and hugely popular package; and the cheaper but convoluted Smart Contact Manager 2 from Surado Solutions.

Act 2000, which I tested in preproduction form, maintains the powerful, well-designed contact- and time-management features of previous editions. But the new version helps you track sales transactions efficiently using Dale Carnegie Training's 11-stage Sales Development Cycle and other sales-specific tools. You can associate potential deals with relevant contacts, estimate the deals' worth and likelihood of success, and monitor their progress with graphs and reports. A new wizard allows you to easily create groups of prospects--for example, clients in New York who haven't bought anything from you in the past year.

Act's interface, already easy to learn and use, has a few welcome improvements, such as fields that speed data entry by creating drop-down lists based on your input. A new vertical icon bar on the left side of the window (like Microsoft Outlook's) lets you hop quickly between contacts, calendar, to-do list, and e-mail.

Speaking of Outlook, Act can now exchange data with Outlook's calendar. This feature, combined with previous hooks into Outlook's e-mail and address book, should benefit Act users in Microsoft-centric workplaces.

Listed at $200, Act is a tad expensive--so Smart Contact Manager's $89 price is an eye-catcher. Like Act, this package has extensive reporting capabilities and potent features for tracking your dealings with contacts; it also offers extras such as a networked In/Out Board that lets coworkers keep tabs on each other's whereabouts.

But my shipping copy suffered from odd lapses and was often cumbersome to use. You can't, for instance, create a repeating appointment on an alternating schedule (say, an every-other-week meeting). You can't perform many operations until you've saved the current record, and you must be in the main screen, not the calendar, to schedule a new activity. So despite the higher price, Act 2000 is easily the smarter buy.

SUMMARY

Act 2000Smart Contact Manager 2 PRO: Easy to use, powerful, new sales tools and Outlook integration. CON: Somewhat expensive. VALUE: Worthy upgrade for sales and other customer-oriented work. PRO: Inexpensive for a full-fledged contact manager. CON: Difficult to use, missing some features. VALUE: A deal only if you don't mind a clumsy user interface. $89 Symantec Surado Solutions 800/441-7234 800/478-7236 www.symantec.com/act www.surado.com