Dedicated CRM

Act!

CRM; structured lost reasons, opportunity reporting unresolved

Every verdict, with its evidence

Core objects

In full

Act! exposes Contacts, Companies, Opportunities and Activities as separate first-class entities, listed as distinct resources in the vendor's own API documentation alongside Groups, History, Notes, Products and custom entities. Contacts link to companies, activities are scheduled against known contacts, and the custom tables documentation states that table entries are associated to Act! entities including contacts, companies, groups and opportunities, which is the vendor's own statement that those four are the linkable entity set. Direct documentation of the opportunity-to-company and opportunity-to-activity links themselves was not reachable.

Source: https://apimta.act.com/act.web.api/OData/Index, https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/linking-contacts-to-a-company/, https://www.act.com/products/connections/outlook-integration/, https://www.act.com/products/custom-industry-tables/

Verification: Pending vendor verification

Pipeline stages

In full

An opportunity is advanced through the ordered stages of a sales process. Administrators define a process and add its stages, each with its own probability, and the process is then applied to an opportunity. The API model confirms the structure: an opportunity carries a stage, and the stage in turn belongs to a named process.

Source: https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-desktop/modifying-opportunity-processes-and-stages/, https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/creating-opportunity-processes-and-stages/, https://apimta.act.com/act.web.api/OData/Index

Verification: Verified

Status

In full

An Act! opportunity carries its own Status box, listed among the opportunity's fields alongside and separate from Process and Stage. Status holds Open, Closed - Won, Closed - Lost and Inactive, so whether the opportunity is still live is read straight off the record without consulting the stage it sits in. Reopening is done by setting Status back to Open. The Opportunities tab filter bar exposes a Status list of check boxes, confirming Status is an attribute stored per opportunity.

Source: https://documentation.help/ACT-For-Web-7/Opening_an_opportunity.htm

Verification: Verified

Resolution

In part

The same Status field carries the outcome. Closing is performed by choosing Closed - Won or Closed - Lost in the Status box, with an optional Reason. Because the single field distinguishes won from lost as well as open from closed, the won-versus-lost fact sits on the opportunity record itself rather than on the stage.

Source: https://documentation.help/ACT-For-Web-7/Closing_and_reopening_an_opportunity.htm

Verification: Verified

Actual close date

In full

The opportunity carries an Open date and a Close date as shipped fields, both distinct from the Est. Close Date that is set when the opportunity is created and can be revised while it is live. The documented closing procedure asks only for a Status value and an optional Reason - no date is typed - and a closed opportunity cannot be edited. Reversing the transition is described as system-driven: on reopening, the Open Date is changed to the current date and the Close Date is changed to None. Act! therefore manages the Close Date itself at the status change. The help text does not use the word automatic for the closing direction, so the auto reading rests on the absence of any date input in the close dialog plus the documented automatic reset on reopen.

Source: https://documentation.help/ACT-For-Web-7/Closing_and_reopening_an_opportunity.htm

Verification: Verified

Record preservation

In full

Closing does not remove the opportunity. It stays in the database, can be listed by filtering the Opportunities tab on Status, and can be reopened later. Act! also ships reports built specifically on settled opportunities: Sales by Reason covers closed and won opportunities by reason, and there are Lost Opportunities reports broken out by competitor, by reason and by record manager, plus a Totals By Status report. One caveat worth recording: the opportunity pipeline chart is stated to cover open opportunities only, so that particular view excludes won and lost records even though the reports do not.

Source: https://documentation.help/ACT-For-Web-7/Summary_of_ACT%21_reports.htm

Verification: Verified

Structured lost reasons

No verdict

No vendor documentation reachable during this evaluation states whether a reason can be recorded against a lost opportunity, either as a structured field or as free text. This dimension is neither confirmed nor ruled out.

Searched: Searched act.com opportunity training pages for both the desktop and cloud products, the opportunity processes and stages pages, the pipeline management feature page, the sales pipeline page, the customization training pages covering field creation and drop-down lists, and the Act! Web API and OData documentation, for a lost reason, close reason or status reason field on the opportunity. The Act! knowledgebase at help.act.com and support.act.com, which is where opportunity field documentation lives, is a client-rendered application whose article text could not be retrieved by any route attempted.

Verification: Pending vendor verification

Email sync

In full

Email is composed and sent to a contact from inside Act! through the Write menu, and email merges are sent from Act! to a group of contacts with the correspondence recorded to history. In the other direction, the Google integration is configured to automatically capture both sent and received Gmail messages as history records against the matching contact, and the Act! sidebar for Outlook automatically records email history from Outlook. Act! records mail as history against the contact rather than presenting a mailbox inside the CRM.

Source: https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-desktop/creating-emails-and-letters/, https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/recording-gmail-history/, https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/using-outlook-integration/, https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/creating-an-email-merge/

Verification: Verified

Calendar sync

In full

Act! documents two-way calendar synchronisation with both Google and Outlook, with configurable sync preferences, conflict handling and automatic scheduling of the sync. The Act! calendar is the view of the Activity object, and the API exposes Activities and Calendar as the same scheduling data, so it is the activity that syncs rather than a generic date field.

Source: https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/google-calendar-synchronization/, https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/outlook-calendar-synchronization/, https://apimta.act.com/act.web.api/OData/Index

Verification: Verified

Schedulable activity types

In full

Activities are created and scheduled inside Act!, including recurring activities, and are scheduled against known contacts with multiple attendees invited. The supplied types are Call, Meeting and To-Do, and Act! documents creating custom activity types so that activities can be added to types other than those three, which makes the type set user-definable and covers internal operational work.

Source: https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/creating-custom-activity-types/, https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/creating-a-new-activity/, https://www.act.com/training-videos/act-premium-cloud/scheduling-recurring-activities/, https://www.act.com/products/connections/outlook-integration/

Verification: Verified

Opportunity reporting

No verdict

No verdict. A revenue projection is documented: the opportunity carries a first-class estimated close date with its own edit command, the opportunity graph plots forecasted and closed sales across a chosen date range by value or quantity, and an Opportunities Adjusted for Probability report gives the probability-weighted totals. The other two could not be settled, because Act!'s current knowledge base could not be read. The reachable help - a mirror of an older web-edition help set - describes opportunity reports in count and value terms only, lists the report designer's summary calculations as count, total, average, minimum and maximum with no percentage or ratio, and describes the opportunity pipeline as the number of open opportunities at each stage, which is a distribution. That points toward absence but rests on superseded documentation, so the dimension is recorded as unverified and counts toward neither a pass nor a failure.

Source: https://www.act.com/resources/documentation/, https://documentation.help/ACT-For-Web-7/Summary_of_ACT%21_reports.htm, https://documentation.help/ACT-For-Web-7/Understanding_summary_fields.htm, https://documentation.help/ACT-For-Web-7/Creating_an_opportunity_graph.htm, https://documentation.help/ACT-For-Web-7/Changing_the_estimated_closing_date_of_an_opportunity.htm

Searched: Every article fetch against help.act.com and support.act.com returned the vendor's help shell or a login page. Articles identified by title but unreadable include how to run and manage reports in Act!, the data chart dashboard component, what Act! Insight is and how to create an advanced chart with it, customizing and creating dashboards, the opportunity pipeline view, and customizing opportunity fields. The Act! community forum is retired and its threads now redirect to the vendor's home page. Site-restricted searches of help.act.com, support.act.com and act.com for win rate, close rate and conversion rate returned no knowledge base article, only marketing pages. The vendor's published documentation set covers installation, quick start, the web administrator and the Web API, none of which covers reporting substance, and the Web API schema requires a tenant token. Archive and proxy routes were blocked.

Verification: Pending vendor verification