The latest version of GoldMine, version 9.0 due out in June or July 2010, includes two major new capabilities: Dashboards and Outlook Integration. This article addresses the dashboards – Outlook integration may be discussed in a later post.
Sample GM 9.0 dashboard
The dashboards piece is aimed directly at those tempted by SalesForce.com, a “cloud” CRM system that touts its management-friendly interface as a major selling point. Because the decision-makers at many CRM-using enterprises are not necessarily the same people who use the system day-to-day, this was a canny move on the part of GoldMine to match what is often only a cosmetic advantage for SalesForce.com. Since GoldMine has some other clear advantages over SalesForce.com as a practical selling tool, we think the new dashboards will improve GoldMine’s competitiveness in the marketplace of small-to-medium sized business, and that’s a good thing.
So how does this new capability affect MasterMine users? Managers DO need to be able to get good information quickly and easily, and GoldMine 9.0’s new dashboards provide potentially a handful of new, useful views into GoldMine data that Management can use to “oversee” their GoldMine-based processes. By definition, a dashboard is a very high-level view of “what’s going on.” Our take is that this will merely whet Management’s appetite for more and better, more current, more flexibly presented information. A little good information begets more questions than it answers. Fortunately, MasterMine users can be the heroes that answer this need.
Furthermore, out-of-the-box, generic dashboards, like any generic management reports, can only tell you so much. They usually require some considerable tweaking to reflect the unique business model and customized fields of your own GoldMine database. This kind of tweaking needs to be done by someone knowledgeable about both the unique needs of your company and you as a manager, as well as the technical capabilities of the dashboard itself. And except by the most technical users, dashboards can’t be re-configured on the fly as information needs inevitably change.
As managers get one or a few of these dashboards set up to their liking, they hopefully begin to learn something important (in crude, summary form) about the business. For example, suppose one new GoldMine dashboard says sales rep RICH is consistently selling 30% more than any other sales rep on the team, while other reps change their “ranking” on the team from month to month. Another dashboard shows RICH makes roughly the same number of calls (i.e. appears to put forth the same level of effort) as the others in similar time periods. Where do you take it from here?
It’s simply not practical to make a dashboard, or pay someone to do so, to answer each question. Interviews with RICH and other sales reps will tell part of the story. But you need real numbers to back up their explanations. Another dashboard can be created that will show whether RICH gets a lot more appointments than others with the same number of calls. If so, does this explain RICH’s relative success? If not, a number of other factors might need to be analyzed: lead source, timeliness of follow-up, or any number of demographic variables reflected in GoldMine’s “Key” fields or user-defined fields. Even the simplest GoldMine database is a many-dimensional data source!
With MasterMine, it IS practical to go from view to view, from breakdown to breakdown, to get the answers you need. The dashboard will render crude, “gross” numbers that lead to more questions. Without MasterMine, management has no practical way to ask the follow-on questions and get the “ad-hoc” answers it needs to really understand what the dashboards say. With MasterMine, the information trail quickly leads to lessons and information that can have immediate impact on the bottom line.
