The Insider Blog

Our featured YouTube video this week looks at history references.  While discussing our “last completed call” report, which shows only the most recent call for each account, we offered some tips that generally make the results more useful.  A small change in your thought process as you complete activities in GoldMine can save lots of time and pay off in better reports.

The reference line can be handled in two different ways, with a specific pick-list or with an open rule that allows users to write whatever they want.  Either way, it should contain the result of the call and not the reason for the call, as in “pending”, unless no contact was actually made — i.e. a message was left. Using a pick-list is good for keeping reports simple,  but it may not cover every situation. Having an open rule makes sorting through all of the references in a report more time consuming, but creates a better story when reading through reference lines in GoldMine under a specific record.  You have to choose what works in your own situation.

In the GoldMine History tab, you should be able to read the reference lines to get a brief “narrative” of interactions with a particular company. If the reference line is used in this way, a report that puts together these reference lines from many accounts gives you a great sense of recent accomplishments across a whole set of accounts or prospects, say for the most recent week or month.

You can see an example of what to write in “reference” 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 every other 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.

This week’s blog post is for Marketing managers, or really anyone who manages an e-mailing list using GoldMine.

The fine tuning process for using e-mail mergecodes requires some policy setting and some learning, but it allows you to manage outgoing e-mail mass-communications very well.  Ask your VAR or ask us to help you set up your specific policies and procedures.  Maybe, by now, you’re already familiar with this process in GoldMine, but find it cumbersome to manage mergecodes.  That’s where MasterMine comes in.

Put simply, you want e-mails that are for specific purposes (i.e. your customer newsletter) to go to all of the target accounts (say, your active  and past customers) but not necessarily to all e-mails at those accounts (i.e. not the President or accounting department, in case you have e-mail addresses for them for purposes other than marketing or customer service).  You want your customer newsletter to go to the specific people who can benefit from it.

GoldMine allows you to manage the target recipients for your mass e-mails inclusively via “Merge Codes”.  Put simply, if a targetted account has an e-mail address with “A” in the mergecodes, and you specify “Limit to e-mail merge code:  A” when setting up your mass-e-mail, the e-mail will be sent to that address.

The process is something like this:
0) (ongoing preparation) GoldMine users routinely enter codes that qualify e-mail addresses to receive certain categories of e-mail (i.e. marketing)
1) Create a filter or group to determine the body of accounts that will be targetted.
2) Within that body of accounts, determine whether to send only to the primary contact, or to secondary contacts as well.
3) Specify merge codes to look for within each e-mail address record to qualify it to receive the message.

In this instance, all contacts, both primary and additional, in the filter “Active Customers” will receive the e-mail IF AND ONLY IF they have an “A” somewhere in the mergecodes field of their e-mail address.

What quickly becomes apparent is that you have no way of checking the accuracy or completeness of your list of records whose e-mail address mergecodes contain “A”.  That is, unless you have MasterMine.

And you have no practical way to mass-manage those e-mail mergecodes, unless you have MasterMine and MMUpdater.

You can see an example of updating email merge codes 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.

If you want to show results by week in MasterMine, there is an easier way than specifying a “start date” and “end date” every time you need to specify another week.  This is easy one time but not so easy if you have to do it repeatedly for many week groupings.  The week grouping capability is especially powerful because MasterMine allows you to filter on a particular week, or set of weeks, OR to break up a longer date range into week-long packets (i.e. “Show me first quarter calls and sales broken up by weeks”).

It all starts by Grouping or re-grouping a selected date field by week instead of by year, month, quarter, etc. Date grouping by week in MasterMine is very similar to any other date grouping, with a twist.

Initiate the date grouping as usual by selecting a cell on the date field you want to group.  Then click the “Group” button on the MasterMine toolbar. In the grouping dialog you need to UN-click Months, Quarter and Years and highlight only Days.

Deselecting all other calendar groupings except “Days” allows you to then specify a number of days in the bottom of the dialog, typically 7.  By the way, grouping by days does not automatically lock you into grouping by week, you can choose any number of days to group into, giving you the flexibility to group by weeks, 10 days, 14 days, or any other number of days you choose.

Finally, you need to specify a starting date to indicate the day of week on which you want ALL your weeks to be run.    So for example, if you want your weeks to run Sunday to Saturday, specify a “Starting at:” date that is a Sunday and be sure to leave the box to the left of the Starting at: control UN-checked.  Note that this start date also signifies the beginning of all weeks that will be available in your week selection, so it is wise to choose a date near the beginning of the date range available in your overall data set.

Now in one fell swoop, you’ve sorted your entire data set by weeks, in a field you can use at the top, to filter by week, or in the display area to show a number of weeks side-by-side.

You can see an example of date grouping by week 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.

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.