Salesperson's contact manager - Scherrer Resources' Sales Ally 3.41 contact-management software - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, April, 1993 by Hillary Rettig

Sales Ally

Rating: **

For DOS

AT A GLANCE: A feature-rich DOS-based contact-management program.

DOCUMENTATION: Illustrated and indexed user's manual is complete and clear.

EASE OF USE: Below average. Function-key commands are not intuitive and must be memorized; commands are inconsistent.

SUPPORT: Unlimited, good, and toll-free.

VERSION REVIEWED: 3.41

LIST PRICE: $395

AVERAGE STREET PRICE: $395

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 384K 8088 PC or higher; hard-disk drive; Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA; DOS 2.0 or higher (3.1 or higher for network version); telecommunication requires Hayes-compatible modern

PUBLISHER: Scherrer Resources, 8100 Cherokee St., Philadelphia, PA 19118; (215) 836-1800, (800) 950-0190

Sales Ally is designed to help you stay in touch with those ever-important clients. The program is complex, centered around a main contact information screen, which contains the usual components--your contacts' names, addresses, and telephone numbers--plus such extras as account numbers, nicknames, and categories.

While most contact managers are targeted to sales professionals, Sales Ally hits dead on. There's a rating field, which lets you indicate how "hot" a prospect is (on a scale of 1 to 99) and a built-in order-taking module. You even have popup access to a library of your most-used sales scripts. Sales Ally also includes time- and expense-tracking modules, but these are rudimentary compared with the equivalent stand-alone programs.

Flipping through leads. A great feature of Sales Ally lets you set up both horizontal and vertical links within your database. Horizontal links let you move quickly between any two related entries--for example, people you call every Monday morning--while vertical links let you move hierarchically, up and down through, say, a client company's organizational chart. By setting up multiple links to and from records, you can proceed quickly through your database.

Some of Sales Ally's other features are indispensable. The program autodials, supports fax boards and macros, and offers standard and user-defineable reports and scheduling. Sales Ally can also launch up to three other programs automatically, and uses only about 10K in background mode.

Word processing, too. Sales Ally's word-processing features are surprisingly good; the program offers both a notepad capable of producing simple correspondence and an impressively straightforward Letter Writer module for complex document formatting and mail-merge. There are 20 levels of undelete, more than most major word processors, but no built-in spelling checker (you can buy one separately for $119). Relatively few printers are supported, though, leaving you with the burden of manually inputting printer codes. Fortunately, the program prints to file and exports merge files to WordPerfect and Word for DOS, the simplest solutions for many people.

Some big problems. So, with all this good stuff, why the low rating? Sales Ally isn't as efficient as other contact managers, such as Act/The superfluous main menu constantly takes you away from your important contact screen (other programs incorporate those functions in menus right on the contact screen), and the program's arcane, function-key-based commands left me craving Alt-key combinations. Sales Ally also doesn't recognize industry-standard commands for moving from screen to screen, and the program's commands are also annoyingly inconsistent: Sometimes F10 brings you out of an action and sometimes Esc does, and important keys, such as F2, have different meanings in different contexts.

Unfortunately, Sales Ally suffers from some bewildering omissions. It offers fields for only office, fax, and home telephone numbers--clearly inadequate in this age of beepers and cellular phones. Also, I would have liked to have seen more data-entry automation. For example, to schedule a meeting you must type out the full month, day, and year (or the number of days until it occurs). The program also lacks global searches: You can search for information only in the name, account number, or company fields. And finally, Sales Ally does not alert you to scheduling conflicts, although it can search for free time.

Am I sold? Sales Ally offers most of the core features one looks for in a contact manager, plus a few extra that salespeople, in particular, will find useful. However, I found its user interface tedious, and some of its peripheral modules too rudimentary to be of real value.