In today’s economic environment, it is more important than ever for people to reach out to their existing business relationships and to try and leverage the value of these relationships. The new Contact Relationships feature in ACT! makes this easier than ever before.

The Contact Relationships feature allows you to define relationships between contacts in your database. This provides an additional way for you to relate multiple contacts, in addition to the traditional Company and Group relationships. It also goes well beyond what is possible with the Secondary Contacts feature of ACT!, in that the relationships are defined with other full blown contacts in the system. This allows you to keep track of the relationships and to work with each related contact to the fullest extent possible.

This new feature allows you to:

1. Relate a contact (or multiple contacts).
2. Create a Lookup of the related contacts.
3. Customize the columns that appear in the view.
4. Print the Relationships.

Case Example
Let’s look at Karen Franklin, the owner of KF Real Estate. She has signed a contract with Michael McDeere who is buying a new home. Below is a screen shot of the Relationships tab showing everyone who is involved with Michael’s new home purchase.

Creating the Relationship(s)
When you open ACT! 2009 (11.1) you will see a new Relationships tab. Note: If you are upgrading from a prior version of ACT!, you must add the Relationships tab to your layout. Refer to the bonus article at the end for more information on adding this tab to your layout.

After we enter Michael’s contact record into ACT!, we can navigate to the Relationships tab and click the Relate Contact button. We want to select Karen Franklin, the Realtor involved with this transaction.

We can then type in the relationship that these two people have or select from the drop-down list:

After you click OK, here is what the Relationships tab displays

How to lookup one or more of the related contacts
ACT! makes it easy to lookup any contact record that is related. You can click on the person’s name and ACT! will take you to that person’s record. If you would like to lookup all the related contact records, do the following:

• Press and hold the CTRL button on your keyboard.
• Use your mouse to click on any records that you would like to Lookup.
• Right mouse click and select the “Create Lookup” menu entry.

By right-clicking in the Relationships tab, the additional options will display in the menu. Here you can relate another contact, remove a relationship, edit a relationship, or print relationship information

After the lookup is done, you may send an e-mail to all the contacts, schedule a meeting with all the contacts, or perform other functions as you would from any list view.

As with other Tab views in ACT! you can use Customize Columns to customize what fields you would like to have appear on the Relationship tab.

The Contact Relationship feature now allows you to leverage your existing relationships to more effectively manage and close deals. With easy access to who has done what with whom in your database, you can choose to concentrate on those relationships that are working, foster relationships that need work, or expand your business by seeking out new business from those contacts who are related to contacts that you already have a relationship with. The new Contact Relationship feature puts it all at your fingertips. Have fun exploring this new feature.