Totall Manager. (computer program) (Reviews) (evaluation)
by Charles Idol

Your desk and files bulge with names, addresses, and phone numbers of prospects; the history of your dealings with each; data on current products; and on and on. Can you handle it? To be a successful account executive, you must. With Totall Manager, you can.

The program provides easy management of a number of separate but related databases. The central feature is the contact menu, through which you process information about prospects and contacts. When you add a record to this database, Totall Manager leads you through the process of entering the phone number, name, address, and title of the individual, as well as the letter salutation. Other noteworthy items are Source (how you encounterd this person), Origin Date (when you started working with this person), and Progress (where you are in the sales cycle). When you bring up a client's record, the program automatically presents the local time at the client's office.

Once you've entered the client record, use the Track option to help you record your last contact with the client. You can indicate the type (call, letter, meeting), date, objective, and result of the contact. You can also enter your next planned contact by date and time, objective, and priority, as well as tasks to be performed in preparation for the contact. After you've made your plans, you can call up your agenda, which shows your planned activities by day or week.

Conveniently, you can at any time bring up a calendar, point to the date desired, and enter it into the record. You may also specify a minimum time between activities, which will automatically keep you from making too tight a schedule. A pop-up calculator lets you enter the results of a calculation into the field of a record.

Many other options in the contact menu show just how flexible and handy this program can be. You can set up filters to screen tour database by state or ZIP code or any field you wish, Write a letter, check the spelling, and send it to the printer or print queue. Choose to make a form letter, and vary the paragraphs in it. View the entire history of dealings with a client. Keep records of orders from a client.

In menus other than the contact menu, you can create a multistep marketing plan for a product. You can also create a database of expenses, orders, or goals.

Totall Manager is a very powerful program. It's entirely menu driven (though it lacks mouse support), and you can become quite at ease with it after spending a few hours with the tutorial and getting a little practice. The program is a bit pricey, but with all Totall Manager can do to keep you afloat in your business's ocean of information, it could be well worth its cost.