ACT! and Outlook: A Comparison

by Rich Spitz

It is important that your contact management solution work with your existing tools.  The information below will help you and your users better understand the differences between ACT! and Microsoft® Outlook™ so you can  make the right decision regarding a contact management solution.   

ACT! as a complement to Outlook

Outlook is an excellent communication and collaboration tool for sending e-mail and does a good job at tracking a calendar and contact list.  However, it lacks the comprehensive contact management functionality necessary to most effectively manage business relationships.  For contact-centric groups or individuals in your organization, ACT! can be used as a complement to Outlook.  

History Tracking

Built on the foundation of a contact-centric database, ACT! provides complete and comprehensive history tracking on all the interactions with every contact including all phone calls, meetings, to-do items, faxes, and e-mail correspondence; other documents that have been sent and more. For example, if you hold a meeting with a particular contact, the meeting date, time, discussion notes, and all associated correspondence are tracked with that contact for instant reference at any time.

While Outlook 2002 offers an Activities tab on contacts, it is not a straightforward approach to organizing the data. All information found in Outlook related to that contact is placed on that one tab. Though it can be filtered, it does not offer the ordered approach of ACT!.

 Account Management

Although Outlook allows users to put contacts into categories, no information can be attached with these categories. ACT! allows users to effectively manage a group of contacts in the same company by allowing them to track interactions with all their contacts at a company, whether it's a sales account or a vendor partner. Furthermore, it can all be viewed in one place.

 Reporting

Outlook allows simple printing of lists. It does not include the ability to create custom reports or specific sales reports. ACT! provides many contact reports, all of which are easily customizable to meet the specific needs of a particular individual. Additionally, ACT! includes several predefined sales reports, including a Sales Funnel report in both written and graphical form, to see where all of the sales opportunities are in the sales process. Also, ACT! offers the ability to quickly and easily graph all aspects of the sales data without leaving ACT!.

Customization of Contact Database

Outlook offers very minimal customization. The tool for modifying forms is, at best, difficult to use. ACT! allows users to store the exact information they need by easily modifying or deleting existing fields and adding unlimited customer fields for each record. In addition, you can add drop-down menus to standardize the data entered by your users to track your contact information and require entry on needed fields.

Automated Activity Series

Outlook does not offer the ability to automate an activity series. ACT! offers the ability to predefine a series of activities and automatically schedule the steps of the series. The series may be scheduled based on a start date or a due date.

Intuitive Interface for Advanced Features

Because Outlook 2002's users tend to be the general population who use Outlook only as an e-mail client, they tend to use just very basic personal information manager (PIM) features. ACT! users include sales professionals, business development executives, and marketing and public relations people that tend to live their days in ACT! and use it to its fullest. Because of this, many features of Outlook are considered "Advanced" and make them complex to use. ACT! considers these basic features, and makes them intuitive to find and easy to use.

Sales process management

ACT! is used heavily by sales professionals while Outlook is used more by a general audience and does not contain key sales process management functions. ACT! allows users to track sales opportunities as they move through the stages of the sales cycle, to effectively manage the pipeline from prospect to close. Information such as product, pricing, quantity, probability of completing the sale, and sales stage can be entered for each opportunity, then later used for reporting and analysis. Additionally, ACT! utilizes the Dale Carnegie Sales Methodology — an 11-stage Sales Development Cycle to assist users in tracking sales opportunities through the sales funnel.

Integration with Outlook

There is a seamless integration between ACT! and Outlook. 

1.        You can import your contacts from Outlook into ACT! to track valuable history with your contacts.

2.        You can set-up ACT! to access your Outlook e-mail and generate meaningful history for those contacts.

3.        You can synchronize your ACT! calendar with the Outlook calendar — very useful for sharing your calendar information with any non-ACT! users in your company.

  SUMMARY

	ACT!	Outlook
Positioning	Contact Manager	Desktop Information Manager
Target Audience	Sales Professionals and Small Business Executives, especially those who spend a lot of time with contacts outside their company.	All computer users, especially people who spend much of their time with co-workers inside their company.
Purpose of product	·         Build relationships with contacts ·         Generate sales results ·         Grow a business Share customer and calendar information with manager and team	§         Organize information §         Communicate and share information with workgroup §         Integrate with MS Office
Strengths	·         Contact database ·         Linking of information to contacts ·         Automatic logging of history to contacts	·         Group calendars ·         Group task management ·         Ability to manage email