Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,100 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Chattanooga, Tn -  Patricia Egen Consulting (PEC), a Sage Platinum business partner and ACT certified consulting firm specializing in small and midsized business consulting has named Tony Berastegui Director of Client Services and Channel Management.  Mr. Berastegui will be in charge of managing customer and channel partner relationships and increasing PEC’s’ add-on product sales and social media practice.

“The expansion of our channel and business practices further strengthens our ability to meet the needs of our customers,” noted Patricia Egen, President of Patricia Egen Consulting. “Tony’s understanding of selling and dealing with salespeople will greatly benefit our sales channel, network, and clients.”

Mr. Berastegui has over 18 years of marketing and sales experience and has extensive expertise in client needs analysis with an amazing consultative approach.  He is an expert presenter, negotiator, trainer and business person, able to get straight to the heart of customer requirements. In addition, he is a long time ACT user in the sales world and brings a “used it in the field” perspective to our organization.

Tony and his wife Angelica, along with their two children live in Phoenix, AZ.

About Patricia Egen Consulting

Patricia Egen Consulting is a computer consulting firm with over 120+ combined years of experience in the computing industry. Our organization is a full service company committed to providing quality IT services to our clients.  We have expertise in project management, systems analysis and design, CRM, Lotus Notes, and custom programming. View our details at our company website. http://www.egenconsulting.com

Recently I upgraded my iPad (version 1 – no 3G) to IOS 5 and found the multi-tasking feature.  You grab the screen with all fingers and slide up.  Presto – you have a multi-tasking bar where you can switch around to other programs running or close them.  Ok, that’s cool.

I was typing an email and accidentally hit the space bar twice and up shows a period and my sentence ended. Not exactly what I wanted, but cool enough to make me go, hm, ok, that’s cool.

Reading books on my iPad has become one of my favorite things to do (other than the Angry Birds game – “hi, I’m Pat, and I play Angry Birds.”).  When I hit the screen to move a page sometimes I hit too long and the circle comes up. So that led me to find out what that meant and it’s to copy text.  Or go even further and look up the meaning of the word.  That sort of takes reading to another whole level.  Can you imagine what it would have been like when you read a book in school – you clicked on a word – and a dictionary popped up. Besides jumping clear across the room from fright, you have to admit it would have been pretty cool.

Delving even further, tapping and holding a key on the keyboard brought up other ways the key can be represented.  That was cool.

Tapping and holding an icon make it start shaking and wiggling.  I finally figured out that it meant I could move things around.  What I do is move things down to the bottom so I can then slide over a page and move the item to that page.  I’m sure there is a better way, but for now that works for me.

Coming soon to my postal mailbox is an adapter for VGA that I will use with KeyNote.  I can take my Powerpoint presentations, and put them into Keynote, then using my new adapter, plus into an overhead projector, and show my presentation.  Like how cool is that.

Finally, and this is what really brought this device home to me, I was attending a conference in July.  I had the Instant Messenger app, Twitter,  Facebook, my Gmail into the email and my Keynote app.  A message would pop up when one of my staff sent me an IM.  A box would also pop up if a Facebook or Twitter message came in, I could move over and read my emails on the mail app, and then type up notes in the Notes app.  I could upload the notes into Dropbox so the rest of my staff could read them later.  Using Safari, I went online to Sage ACT Connect to look at my ACT details – I’m liking that more and more.  Oh, and I could play Angry Birds if I got bored.  With a device that weighed a lot less than my laptop. And used a lot less battery.  And was cool.

Ok, I’m hooked.  Now, I just need to go find out what other apps I need to download from the Apple store.  All this from a died in the wool PC-holic.  My friends at Apple must be laughing their hearts out.

Moral of the story…iPad’s can really make a difference in a business person’s life.  Don’t discredit them. Tablets are here to stay.

Today I am at a conference listening to awesome people with amazing ideas.  One of the ideas is about automating lead management.  By now, you all should have figured out we work with Sage ACT.  It is a great tool for managing contacts, including leads.  But you need a way to get the leads into the database in the first place.

We also work with Swiftpage, the eMarketing aspect inside of ACT.  One of the things included in ACT eMarketing is the ability to build surveys.  These surveys can be fill in the blanks to capture data such as name, address, phone number, areas of interest, etc.  And….this is the cool thing … they can be placed as a web form on a website.

Let’s take that a bit further.  The tool allows data that comes in from a survey to be added to an ACT database as a new contact, in this case, a lead.  What a great idea.  Build a survey, put it on the web, have it automatically added into ACT and then build a group in ACT that shows all the leads that day.

Once this is built I have a process in place that took a little bit of time to implement, but very little time ongoing.  And I can now focus on those leads and turn them into customers.

I’ve been working with this tool forever, but sometimes you don’t see the forest for the trees.  It just takes a nudge to have you look at opportunities and be creative with known tools in your sales arsenal.

That’s my tip for the day.  Thanks go out to John Tytus for the great idea.  Next week, I will add this idea to my newsletter going out to my clients to let them know about this and that we can help.  Today has indeed been a great learning experience.

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Let me start off by saying to me blogs are very intimidating.  You need to watch your spelling (although you have spell checker which by the way doesn’t catch the grammar mistakes), not have short sentences and paragraphs, build a lead in story,  have good content or what I’m trying to say is write  something people will be interested in reading or gain some knowledge.

Blogs should be informative and have real meat to them to which the reader can relate or learn from.  There is an art to writing or rattling on about a subject.  I’m stepping out of my comfort zone.  So here I am giving it a shot, blogging about the real meat of this blog article – You call, of course you have questions.

Something I do everyday is work with and take phone calls about ACT!   The calls consist of “I’ve purchased ACT! and I want to utilize it the best way for our business” or “I have an error”, or “how do you do this”, “ can you help me install the wizard I just purchased” and even something like “ I want to upgrade and have to convert my data.”

What I’m leading into is I’m not a geek.  I don’t necessarily have all the answers. I try to ask the right questions and then I know where to look for an answer.    Of course I can ask my bosses, who are, I  might add, the most intelligent, knowledgeable and gracious people I know,  but I usually prefer to try and find the answer on my own.  For one, I learn from it and hopefully retain what I’ve learned.

That’s when I start on the detective work.  I find reading posts on the Sage Act Community Forum to be very helpful and I Google. Other places I do research are on the Act Certified Consultant (ACC) News Group, Sage ACT Certified Consultant Partner Portal (this one can test your patience) and yes sometimes even calling Sage support.

The ACT Community is so important.  Members jump right in to help.  Take a moment and really think about it.  You have ACC’s, Sage Support, and ACT! Users  who  frequent the forums.  You’re receiving information from geeks to just plain users.   Imagine the brain power you are tapping into here, how awesome.  So, my suggestion is start with the Sage ACT Community Forum.

After working with a client I  say  “if you have any questions don’t hesitate to call.”  Always.   And I mean it.  Even if you have what you consider to be a silly question.  Then I’ll say “or check out the ACT! Community Forum.”  To me it’s a no brainer.   Yes, I’m an ACC and I have our internal ACC Community forums.  The public doesn’t  have the ability to view the ACC Discussion board but the Sage ACT Community forum is open to anyone and there are other social sites such as  LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even Youtube..

Oh and by the way my bosses are Pat and Don Egen! Lov’em to pieces.

In closing, the key message here is look around for your answers.  I do. As for blogging, I was inspired to write this and I’m glad I did.  Another day of learning and teaching – I couldn’t ask for more.  In fact, I just heard about the Gotomeeting HD Face feature – ah  that’s another blog article.

Leslie Munson, CSR, Patricia Egen Consulting

(note – great article Leslie – Pat.)

Over 95% of my clients have never met me face to face.  You see, I work in inside sales and most, if not all of my business is done over the phone or by email.  No opportunities for a handshake, lunch, or round of golf here.  Yet, I have very good relationships with my current account base and always looking for new relationships with my new business efforts.  How?  Nothing beats face to face interactions, but there are very simple ways to build that relationship without ever meeting in person.

Video phones would be the easiest solution.  However, I mostly communicate with small to medium business owners where the good ol’ phone is king.  Email is still very powerful when used correctly.  However, the phone is still the best method to build that very important relationship.   My customers buy because they like me.  I sell a very common service in a competitive market and people don’t buy just on price.  They want to work with someone they can trust, so in my case, building a strong relationship is crucial.

So, when dealing with phone calls, I never rely on a script and every call is different.  It has to be.  Not everyone is equal and if you stick to a script, you may guarantee yourself that all the details will be delivered – but at what cost?  Sounding like a robot, maybe.

When I prospect or reach out to existing accounts I always take a minute to find something to talk about before I make the call. Current events, trade news, and yes, the weather are topics that I look for.  ACT! helps me a lot with tracking notes for talking points for both prospects and clients.  For example, Bill the plumber, lives in Alabama and he loves to talk about his son and his golf game.  Well, right before I reach out to Bill to check on his latest order, I check my notes in ACT! and note that the last time we talked, Bill told me his son was breaking in his new golf driver.  With that in mind, here is how I start that call. “Hey Bill!  Tony here.  So is the little guy hitting the big stick 200 yards yet?”    This easily leads into my client talking about his son.  He’s relaxed, the conversation is casual, the relationship maintained.  Soon into that call, with a nice relaxed customer, I ease into the purpose of my call and work on getting a renewal on the account or an up-sell.

You would think it would be easy to remember that Bill the plumber’s son plays golf.  Well, did I mention that I make 80 outbound calls a day?  My memory is pretty good, but my time is spent number crunching, proposal building, prospecting, you name it.  That’s a lot to be thinking about. That’s why I need tools like ACT! to help me “remember” things important to my customer and me.

Take the time to ask about the weather before you get into the business of the call.  Take the time to take note of something that is of special interest to your prospect or client and start the call with that.  The recipient of your call is just as busy as you are, and a little chat about junior’s golf swing is surely a welcome break.

Good luck with your relationship building.  Always remember to not forget the “R” in CRM is Relationships.  Oh, and by the way, Phoenix was 105 today. Not to bad considering we hit 118 this summer.  Happy selling.

Signed Tony Berastegui – guest blogger (who happens to be my son – didn’t he do a great job on this blog post!)

On a trip back from South Dakota, I had three flights.  Flight to Minneapolis, no problem.  Flight to Atlanta, no problem.  In Atlanta, things fell apart.  First we were told nothing.  Then we were told the flight was delayed due to maintenance. Ok. They failed to mention it was the incoming flight.  Around this time, several people (like around 40 or so) showed up at our gate because their flight was now delayed many more hours than ours – again for maintenance issues.  We all sat and waited and waited and then a gate agent says “go to the customer service desk this flight has been cancelled due to lack of crew.” Now, there were 100 people or so shuffling off to a counter, at the end of a very long day (by this time we’d been waiting 6 hours).

The customer service desk was an exercise in futility and frustration.  It rapidly became apparent there were no more seats to be had.  After the first 30 people, The reps were basically saying “you are on your own.”  They all cornered themselves and slowly started disappearing.  The line wasn’t getting shorter but the number of reps was.  Dinnertime appeared to be the solution to the problem. It’s like the all said “We’ll just leave and someone else will figure it out.”

The rep I got told me to call the Super shuttle equivalent and then have them call to get a reimbursement. Ok.  No dinner voucher was offered and this was not a weather delay so they should have offered it. Ok, I can handle that. Off I went to call Groome Transport (the Shuttle) and was told by the very nice rep that they weren’t allowed to call Delta.  It was Delta’s responsibility to give me a travel voucher.

Grr. Ok. So, since the shuttle wasn’t coming for an hour, I got back and line, marched back up to the remaining rep who happened to be the one who gave me incorrect information which as it turns out was the easier one.  I didn’t even give her a chance to argue with me – I simply stated I wanted a travel voucher, thank you mam.  And I got one.  But why did I have to stand in line twice for over 30 minutes when it could have been handled correctly the first time?

Why did it take the gate agent so long to tell us what they knew 30 minutes before – that we were doomed to not get out of town that day.  And why did they let crew lapse?  Why, for the last three series of flights has there been maintenance issues?  Is this company in trouble?

And that made me think this would be a good blog article about how to kill customer allegiance with bad customer support.  I am not sure I trust Delta anymore.  This is happening so often that I question whether they are a safe airline to fly.  Writing letters doesn’t do anything. It used to help.  I’ve gotten free travel vouchers because of particularly bad flight situations.  Those days are gone.  It’s like Delta and it’s staff no longer care.  But they should. They are not the only game in town.  Are they getting complacent and believing they are?  Is this a mistake a company can make – thinking they  are the best or the only game in town therefore they don’t have to have the best support?

The business world is one of supply and demand.  I don’t want to switch to another carrier.  My airport is a limited market.  But nothing stops me from driving or taking a shuttle to Atlanta where there are numerous other choices.  Is that the move I make?  Do I say no thanks to Delta even though I’m close to a million miles of flight time?  Would they even miss me?

Even if you have the very best product if your customer support stinks, people will leave.  They won’t buy your product.  They want to know they are valuable to you as a customer even after they have spent their money.

The lesson here is don’t forget about the customer.  Companies need to ask “what is the price of bad customer support.” People expect their issues to be dealt with quickly – at least my customers do.  Our customers are more than willing to  take their business elsewhere if they are unhappy with the service being provided.

I read somewhere and darn if I can remember where, that the average cost of a lost business relationship is $289 per year.  If the 100 people on this plane are any indication, Delta lost $28,900 during that one day.  That’s hemorrhaging money.  Granted, $289 doesn’t sound like much, but that’s an average.  For some companies, it’s more.  I don’t know about you but I don’t like losing business. At all.
It’s sad what happened to me because I’ve had really good customer support from Delta in other locations. The Atlanta airport is just not one of those places.  And it’s been happening much more frequently.  It is very obvious the support personnel don’t care.  They have upset people’s days and possibly lives because of their lack of caring.  Delta needs to be careful or they can end up in the same situation they were in a few years ago – only this time it won’t be caused by the energy crisis – it will be public apathy.

That being said, the real purpose of my blog today is to talk about cell and smart phones and how they are getting in the way of listening. To anyone – not just our customers.

There is a certain unnamed VP that I deal with on a sporadic basis. He’s not a client – he’s from an organization I have to deal with in my business. I have never had a conversation with him that he is not texting on his phone. He’s not even looking at me. He’s looking around, back down at his phone, and not at me. Not that I think it’s really important, but don’t you think eye contact means someone actually cares about talking and listening to you during a conversation? Well duh. In fact, during the last conversation we had, standing around at a dinner event, I actually said to him, “well, …., looks like you are busy right now, we’ll chat later.” He didn’t even notice me leaving. Guess I know where I fit in his pecking order of importance. The next time he says “we really need you to reach out and bring in more business” I’m tempted to say “you talkin to me?” using that cool New York gangster accent. You get the drift. If you don’t have the time to listen to me why should I listen to you.

Are we forgetting how to interact face to face with people? Smart phone usage has become the next big frontier on how NOT to act. People are forgetting common courtesy. They are becoming more insular and focused on themselves and their interactions with their mobile devices. That’s a really nasty trend.

Ever been on a plane and had someone talking so loud they could be heard from the back? And being oblivious to the fact that the rest of the plane could care less about their conversation. On my most recent flight, a flight attendant asked a person to put their phone away, and that person said they were on an absolutely critical call that had to happen. My question is what did we do before cell phones. We waited until we got off the plane and rushed to a phone. And that was ok. The only reason I think someone absolutely needs to be on a phone when the doors have been shut is for an emergency or to say the airline has once again left late and to tell someone when you are arriving. But even that can be managed without a phone call.

The next time you go to a restaurant, spend some time looking around at the other tables, especially the ones with 5 or more people. Count how many people are actually chatting and how many have their heads down texting/tweeting/whatever-ing. Bet you it’s mostly the latter. One of my favorite things to do is sit around a table with a bunch of friends, sharing good wine and stories. You can’t do that if people are heads down on their phones.

We’ve had friends get new smart phones and spend most of time on them instead of chatting with us. Are we being selfish? I don’t think so. And I refuse to join in the party.  What message is projected by someone who chooses their phone over conversation with you face to face?

As part of my daily life and business I do tweet.  I like smart phones just as much as anyone else.  I don’t text much because of the plan I’m on. I chose that plan on purpose. But I tweet when I’m alone and never during a conversation.  When I go into a client site, my phone goes into stun mode.  If someone is paying me hourly for my time, they get me for the full time. I won’t insult them by getting on a phone with another client.  How can I do a good job of “listening” to the client if I’m busy with my phone. I can’t.

I’m not sure this trend will end anytime soon. I struggled with what to call this blog article. Is it forgetting to listen or losing the ability to interact face to face? Are cell and smart phones teaching us to be rude? I believe they are. So, I just have to figure out a polite way to say “why don’t we just chat and ignore our phones.” And then watch who starts to twitch first.  Heh heh.  Wish me luck.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 12 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 33 posts.

The busiest day of the year was July 27th with 40 views. The most popular post that day was Project Management and ACT.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were networkedblogs.com, egenconsulting.com, facebook.com, google.com, and ht.ly.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for “data cleanup” “cloud”, pat egen, sql to csv, act project management, and how to open act! premium on web.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Project Management and ACT July 2010
3 comments

Quick SQL Select Trick to add leading zero for zip codes June 2010
5 comments

ACT for Web tips June 2010
5 comments

Output SQL queries to CSV June 2010

Episode 2 – The Motorola BackFlip Saga March 2010
1 comment

When Sage sent me an email saying they were coming to Tennessee and that they wanted me to host the road show, I said – “cool – would love to.”  Then I realized the date they gave me was less than a month away. Yikes.  I knew that the first thing I would have to do is find and cement a location for the event.  I chose Nashville as the location since it was pretty much in the middle of the state.  But that’s not where I live so I’m not on top of locations nor contacts at those locations.  However, I have a ton of clients in Nashville, so I picked up the phone and made a quick call to one of my favorite clients.  He said he didn’t know any contacts, but did remember that he had attended a meeting at a really nice conference center near the airport that had a great amphitheater setup.  He didn’t remember the name but he had the location.

Ok.  That led me to the next step – utilizing my most favorite business tool – Google. I went searching for conference facilities and added in the streets.  I  had already done a search before, but got too many hits.  This search turned up the Willis Conference Center.  Bingo.  I called the facility and was genuinely surprised to find out how affordable the facility was as well as how nice the setup appeared to be.  Got the contract, signed the document and that part was done.  All this was in one day.  I called a person in the same city to get a word of mouth suggestion, then used Google to find the site.

The next step was creating email templates and finally taking the time to learn the drip marketing embedded in Swiftpage (ACT e-marketing).  Again, I called on an outside resource – I called someone who had already done a road show and they very graciously shared with me some examples of templates they had sent out.  I used those as models to build my own templates (saving me hours of work) and put them into my Drip Marketing campaign.

Now I needed a way for people to register for the event. One of the nice features of ACT e-marketing is the ability to create a survey.  I set up a survey with questions that were actually data for a registration form.  It was easy to set up fields for name, company, number of attendees, and a field to ask how they heard about the event.  I get sent emails on a daily basis showing me who has registered.  This gets updated into the history in ACT allowing me to go back later, search for that update, and generate “thank you for registering” letters and afterwards, “thank you for attending” letters. Cool.

I used the same model for the email templates for my Event page on my website.  Since I use Dreamweaver for working on my website as well as my HTML templates it was easy to cut, paste, edit, and save the page quickly.  Webpage done.

I set up a group in ACT that only contained my Tennessee clients.  This would be used by the campaign for sending emails.  The first email blast went out two weeks ago and was stage one in my Drip Marketing campaign.  I was very pleased that 30 people signed up almost immediately. How neat is that.  It was cool as well when the second stage of the drip campaign launched automatically one week later and only was sent to people who had not clicked on the link to register.  That’s a very efficient process that allowed me to spend a few minutes setting up the campaign but then saved me tons of time later.  There are two other stages in the campaign that will send out one last reminder emails and then will send a thank you letter after the event is done asking if they need any additional information.

At this point, I’m in wait mode for the event.  The work is being done for me by tools that were extremely easy to set up.  While I’m sleeping (hopefully and not working late) emails are going out.  Reminders are popping up reminding me to make sure the slicks have been sent out.  All this is happening while I’m working on something else.  Now that’s efficient.

As I have said before, I simply don’t know how a small business can survive without utilizing tools.  We help clients utilize these tools so it just makes sense we use them as well.  I can’t believe I haven’t done more with the drip marketing function.  I will be doing more in the future.  Sometimes it takes a crisis to push us in the right direction.