The Insider Blog

If you’re like us, you have some accounts where a lot of pending activities have accumulated over the years. This is especially true for top customers, employee records, and vendors. It may be due to automated processes, rolling over calls, untended forecast entries, or any number of user habits.

This problem eats into the efficiency of your company. Hunting through a lot of bogus activities under “Pending” can make it hard to find the particular follow-up activity you need. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution with MasterMine Updater.

All you have to do is create a quick MMUpdater report on “Pending” activities (excluding e-mails!). In the report, filter on the particular contact or company you want to clean up. This gives you a full “calendar” of the pending activities for this account. Then adjust settings as necessary to filter out valid activities, leaving only the “bogus” ones in your report.

Finally, double-click on the “grand total” number to drill down to a sheet listing only the unwanted entries. Now use MMUpdater to mass-delete all the rows on the sheet.

After launching MMUpdater, select “Cal (Pending)” in the “update existing data in this GoldMine table” dropdown, then check the box for “Delete records from Cal (Pending) table in GoldMine.”, then click “OK”.

Now your pending tab is suddenly useful again!

Note that you don’t have to delete pending records for ALL rows on the page. You may select only some of the rows on the page, and MMUpdater will delete pending activities only for those selected rows.

MasterMine has numerous templates built in that make creating reports much easier. By using any of the last completed activity reports you can find customers or prospects that have not been contacted recently (or at all). After identifying who needs to be contacted, you can create a “GoldMine group” and assign it to someone to take care of.

Most critically, these reports quickly help you identify high-value prospects and/or customers who are not receiving the level of attention they deserve, if any at all. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding out you lost a sale because of pure neglect, even if it’s due to well-intentioned human error. Not only can you find those neglected sales, but you will be able to quickly improve your processes to catch these errors BEFORE they happen, by identifying incomplete processes and specific sales or customer service reps who are not completing their activities correctly in GoldMine.

Even better, it also allows your sales team themselves to find the prospects they might have forgotten about, or who have never been contacted. With the pivot table, they can filter many different ways to narrow in on contact types, activity types, date ranges, or any client specific information in GoldMine.

Once you have your report filtered to the neglected contacts you want addressed, you can create a “GoldMine group” and assign it to the sales rep you want to make the calls, or complete the activity. You can follow up on this group over time by creating another MasterMine report using the “neglected” group as a filter in the create dialogue.

You can see an example of using a Last Activity Report in the video linked from here. This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page. Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Learning” webpage.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful. A new video will be added at the beginning of each week, so be sure to check for the new video, as well as subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified when a new video is posted. Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.

GoldMine “Groups” and ”Filters” allow you to process multiple GoldMine records with a single action.  Processes like global replace, mass e-mailing, territory realignment, exporting, and many others allow you to use filters and groups.  This is a powerful “force multiplier” built right into GoldMine which many users fail to take advantage of.  Why?  Typically because they don’t know how to create groups and/or find creating filters very cumbersome.

Creating “GoldMine Groups” from a MasterMine report is simple and very nimble.  Using your pivot table, you can easily sift through your contacts using various criteria and create one or many GoldMine groups directly from your drill down sheet in MasterMine.  Even on the drilldown sheet, you have the option of using either all records on the sheet or a fine-tuned manual selection of them.

Since your MasterMine pivot table allows you to ”slice and dice” your data so easily, you can build several parallel groups with mostly similar criteria very easily.  The alternative in GoldMine is to repeatedly create filters from scratch, test the results by activating each filter and looking through the records, then “build a group” from each filter, then move on to the next one. Very laborious!

You can see an example of creating a GoldMine group using MasterMine in the video linked from here. This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page.  Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Learning” webpage.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful. A new video will be added at the beginning of each week, so be sure to check for the new video, as well as subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified when a new video is posted. Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.

Sometimes your GoldMine is set up to store numeric values in “character” fields in GoldMine.  There are many reasons this might be, but an issue is likely to arise when you want to report on that information.  How can you do calculations (like multiplying two fields, or dividing by 15% to calculate commissions on sales?) when you’re working with text instead of a number?

You can copy data conversion expressions from our templates into your own MasterMine reports, using whatever character fields you want to pull numeric data from.   (This one is pretty technical, so ask us for online help if necessary.)

In this week’s video sample, linked from here, our client has created a pay period report for service technicians, calculating hours spent on various types of calls, and needs to multiply hours by rates. Since call “Duration” is stored as a character field in GoldMine, it must be pulled into MasterMine as a number field in order to be useful.  Our trick is to use one of three MasterMine fields that convert the duration into a number: CH.Minutes, CH.Hours, or CH.Amount.

This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page.  Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Learning” webpage.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful. A new video will be added at the beginning of each week, so be sure to check for the new video, as well as subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified when a new video is posted. Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.

Grouping within a MasterMine Report allows you to aggregate information in various useful ways. You can highlight any selection of items within a field, click “group”, then name the new group and use that new group as a single entity.

For example, in a forecast sales report, you might group your users by sales group, so you can aggregate by region, by product group, by division, or whatever makes sense to you. Grouping all of your sales users into several parallel groups in this way allows you to boil down many individual persons’ results into a higher-level, simpler view across the whole team.  Even better, once you’ve made these groups, they persist for every variation of the same report from then on.

You can see an example of this grouping in the video linked from here. This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page.  Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Training” webpage.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful.  Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.