Research shows that 20 percent of the average database consists of long-lost contact information. That means that either many of your contacts have information that is old and outdated, or you neglected to contact those people on a timely basis.
What if you could find all the contacts that you haven't contacted in the last two years? Chances are that many of those contacts would be glad to hear from you. Maybe they lost your contact information or chose a company other than yours that they weren't happy with. Suddenly those "lost" contacts have become a virtual treasure trove. Or maybe you'd like to find those outdated contacts and either update their information or remove them entirely from your database.
You can look for the contacts that either have or have not been changed within a specified date range. You can create a lookup of contacts based on the last time that you made any changes to their record, or contacted them through a meeting, call, or To-do.
The Contact Activity lookup is extremely powerful because you can look for "touched" or "untouched" contacts. In other words, you can search for all the contacts that you contacted in a certain timeframe or for all the contacts that you haven't contacted in a certain timeframe.
- From the Contacts Detail or List views click the Lookup menu and select Contact Activity
- Select either Not Changed or Changed in the Look for Contacts that have: area of the Contact Activity dialog window. The following screenshot shows you what the Contact Activity dialog window looks like:
- Select a date. The date tells ACT! to look for records that have been changed—or have not been changed—since that date.
- Select one or more options in the Search In area to narrow your search. You can search in the Contact fields, Notes, Opportunities, Histories, or Activities areas of ACT!. If you decide to search through your History and/or Activities tabs, you can even indicate which specific types of histories or activities you want to include in your search.
- Click OK.
ACT! searches for the selected field or activity that was/was not modified within the specified date range. Because ACT! has to scour through so much data, the results of your search may take a few seconds to appear on your screen. The results of your search will appear in the Contact List.
In order for this search to work, you have to input information in the appropriate spots. For example, you can't look for modified opportunities if you never created any in the first place, or look for histories if you don't schedule and clear activities or create histories of your various activities.
If you are not happy with the results you receive in the Contact Activity lookup—or if you'd just like to find an easy alternative—you can also search on any of the system fields that update automatically as you use ACT!. These fields are easily identifiable because they're grayed out. Although you can't change the information in these fields, you can create lookups on them. For example, every time you change any of the information for a contact, ACT! automatically updates the Edit Date field. You can right-click the Edit Date field and create a lookup based solely on the contents of that field.