 Susan Clark of Cornerstone Solutions
Our most recent ACT! Certified Consultant spotlight is Susan Clark of Cornerstone Solutions. Susan has been an ACC for more than six years and has over 500 customers with thousands of end-users. Cornerstone Solutions has a team of four ACT! Certified Consultants and one support staff and the team averages over fives years of technical ACT! experience. Their client roster includes sports teams like the Houston Texans, Houston Astros and the Houston Aeros as well as companies from corporate America like Duke Energy, American General, VISX, Life-Tech, CORT Furniture Rental, Brand Scaffold, Chicago Title Credit Services, and Reliant Energy.
Cornerstone specializes in not only configuring and customizing ACT, but also in training sales teams on how to be most effective with a sales force automation software product. Susan has been certified as an ACT! Premier Trainer and has written and published nine books on ACT! that are selling all over the world. In fact, Best Software engaged Cornerstone to write "The Official ACT! QuickStudy Guide" based on their expertise and unique ability to explain how to use features in ACT!, as well as why you would want to use them. Susan also wrote the "The Official ACT! for Palm QuickStudy eBook" for Best.
In addition to her daily duties as an ACT! Certified Consultant, Susan is a SalesLogix Business Partner, she serves as an elected member on the ACT! Advisory Board which meets with the product development and management teams to help guide the future of ACT!, and she facilitates the Houston Area ACT! Users Group. For all of her team's efforts, Susan and Cornerstone were honored with the distinction of membership in the ACT! President's Club for top sales and performance.
We spent some time with Susan to understand her business and the reasons customers rave about Cornerstone.
What types of customers does your organization specialize in servicing?
We have a wide range of customers from single users and small offices to Fortune 100 companies.
However, we primarily work with larger workgroup installations. Our experience in programming and
developing add-on products that work with ACT!, allows us to assist large teams and workgroups in
getting the most out of their contact management and sales force automation application. We can make
ACT! do things you would never imagine.
What is your favorite part about being an ACC?
In addition to working with some incredibly smart people (including our staff), I love helping sales and management
teams focus on defining their marketing and sales process. After our initial strategy meetings, I formalize their
objectives into an ACT! design and a project scope that supports their marketing efforts and helps both sales and
management achieve their goals. It is so exciting to see them realize the benefits that a simple tool like ACT!
can have on their business. Our training then is just as much about spreading the corporate philosophy as it is
about teaching end-users how to use ACT!. The entire process, as we approach it, is what takes ACT! from being a
product that is used as just a Rolodex to being a tool that makes a difference in the operations of the company.
I really love the design work of bringing clarity out of chaos.
What types of add-on products have you developed
Our best selling product is "After Hours Administrator" which compresses, re-indexes and creates backups of your database
late at night when the database is not being used (and while the administrator is at home relaxing). However, we have two
other products that are close runners. "Active Relations" provides a way to define relationships between contacts in your
database, based on your own set of criteria. It also allows you to create correspondence which combines information from
both contacts. "DBRunner" puts icons on your toolbar to open different databases and their associated layouts.
In addition to computer products, we have also developed and market a comprehensive ACT! Administrator's Guide. This manual
was created to give the ACT! administrator the tools necessary to successfully manage the company's database with the least
amount of pain.
What is one of your favorite implementations and why?
In addition to the Houston Texans, I think the most fun implementation that Cornerstone has completed to date was for CORT, the country's largest, national furniture rental company. CORT's mission statement places authority and responsibility locally, with its professional sales reps, "to do whatever is necessary to be the best." To help them succeed, the company also provided each rep with a copy of ACT! and retained Cornerstone to make it work for them. The actual customization part of the implementation was very straight forward with only a few field modifications.
However, what made this job fun was that we have distributed databases to hundreds and hundreds of sales reps without ever having met them. We developed a method by which a sales rep can log on to a specific Internet site and enter the specific data needed for creating a personalized database. When the database has been created and set up to automatically sync with their area sales manager, the sales rep is notified that the database has been posted to a specific web site. Each sales rep simply double-clicks his name on the site to automatically download the database and all associated layouts, Word templates, reports, etc. into the correct location on their laptops.
At the completion of the download, ACT! immediately opens displaying their new pre-synced database with the correct layout and all preferences set to corporate standards. We can even provide tech support over our Internet site without the end user having to have any specific software loaded. Everything we do for them is conducted over the Internet and by telephone, saving time and travel expenses as well as the overall cost of implementation for CORT.
Customer quotes about working with Cornerstone
"Susan Clark's impressive knowledge of ACT!, and more importantly, her ability to share information with us in an easy to understand manner, has changed the way we do business," says Steve Henning, Sales Manager of Avanti International. "Her whole staff goes 'the extra mile' and they have been on site anytime afterwards to troubleshoot problems that arose, whether they were ACT! related or not. It has been such a relief to know that support is just a phone call away."
"We use ACT! to manage nearly the entire business…including strategic planning. Cornerstone has a great staff," says Chuck Bracht, president of Apogee. "Susan Clark is an incredibly responsive person. She and her team get results, and they have helped our company in a number of areas, not only in ACT! support and customization, but also in software training and database programming."
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