CRM Consultants & Implementation Partners in Glen Dale, WV

Best Business Strategies is a family-run software firm in Glen Dale, West Virginia, that sells, implements and supports Act! CRM alongside Sage 50 accounting. Shirley Byard started the company in 2005 as a one-person operation working from her home.

Over two decades it has grown into a partner whose clients are spread across the United States and dozens of other countries. Today the business is led by Shirley and her son, Allen Byard. Allen is the certified Act! consultant who handles the CRM practice, and Shirley concentrates on Sage 50.

CRM products and add-ons

On the CRM side, the firm resells both editions of Act!: Premium Desktop v27, which is installed on the customer's own systems, and Advantage Cloud, a hosted subscription. A comparison chart and a guide on its site help buyers decide which deployment model suits them. Act! itself is positioned around contact records, built-in marketing automation, a visual view of the sales pipeline and an AI-assisted writing tool. The company also offers several extensions:

• Premium marketing automation upgrades
• A custom table add-on for storing additional data
• Desktop-to-cloud synchronization
• IntegrationLink, which connects Act! with QuickBooks
• Enhanced customer support upgrades from Act!

How they work with clients

Prospective customers can book an Act! demonstration before buying. After a purchase, they can draw on the firm's certified consultant support for setup, configuration and ongoing questions. Face-to-face help is available around the tri-state region, including Wheeling, Weirton and Morgantown in West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Washington in Pennsylvania, and Steubenville and St. Clairsville in Ohio.

Clients elsewhere are served through remote sessions. Because the company is an Act! channel partner for North America, it can sell Act! licenses only to organizations based on that continent. Its accounting work, by contrast, reaches international customers.

Much of the firm's work sits where CRM and accounting meet. Organizations that run Sage 50 or QuickBooks can coordinate customer management and bookkeeping through one vendor. Supporting services include data conversion and repair, cloud hosting so staff can reach their applications from any location, and automated offsite backup through Enveloc. The team also promotes its practice of answering the phone directly, sends renewal reminders ahead of expiration dates, and publishes a monthly newsletter covering product updates.

Credentials and reputation

The company lists Act! Certified Consultant status together with several Sage designations: Authorized Reseller, Certified Partner and Delivery Partner. It also cites Sage President's Circle membership, a 2008 Peachtree Rising Star recognition and a West Virginia Governor's International Commerce Award.

The business states that it is licensed and insured, and its Google reviews, as aggregated on its website, average 5.0 across more than 85 ratings. Customers in those reviews often describe quick, friendly service and successful recovery of older data files.

Buyers looking for a small, owner-operated Act! partner with deep accounting experience and a physical presence in the Northern Panhandle may find the firm a good fit, particularly when CRM needs to connect with financial software.