The Insider Blog

Your staff wants to perform to expectations. The trick is to give them the ability to easily self-monitor as they work, making it easier for you to manage them in the long run.

The key is to set up each user with quick reports that show how they are doing on the performance measures you have set up. One typical performance measure for salespeople is a count of outbound calls, broken out by “result code”. You can set up a report that loads and refreshes, on their screen, with a single button click.

MasterMine users can open the report, check their progress quickly, (and bonus: see and fix data they have entered incorrectly) and correct course immediately. This way, they don’t wait until your weekly meeting with them to find out they aren’t doing something right. You may choose to show them a comparison between themselves and others, or isolate only on their performance.

Setting up MasterMine reports like this and deploying them with your end users should not take more than 10 minutes for a trained MasterMine user.

Creating Date Ranges (Grouping by Date):

With Date grouping, you can automatically set up date ranges that include everything before a date, after a date, between two dates but grouped by year, month, quarter, etc.

Once dates are grouped, filtering or displaying by date range becomes VERY easy.

1. First, make sure the date field you wish to group is in either the Row or Column area of your report.

2. With the field button or ONE date item in the field selected, click the group button ( ) on the MasterMine toolbar.

3. Indicate your desired beginning and ending date for data to include, and highlight the time grouping(s) desired. If a certain number of days (like 7 for a week) is desired for the group, only ‘days’ may be selected.

4. Hit “OK” to create new fields for all highlighted date unit groupings (i.e. Year, Quarter, Month, Day).

5. If more than one date is to be grouped in the report, it is wise to rename date fields appropriately (i.e. Modify Year, Modify Month, Modify Date etc.) in order to distinguish them.

Now you can show or hide any of your new date sub-groups, including all records dated before the “Starting at” date or after the “Ending at” date.
Move the grouped date fields (Year, Month, Day, etc.) to the Page Area and simply select the appropriate times (i.e. “2008″ in the “Year” field, “Qtr 2″ in the “Quarter” field, etc.)
IF you decide to leave these fields displayed in the Row or Column area of your report, simply uncheck or check the desired date parts in the dropdown list associated with the date field.

Note that date grouping requires that ALL items in the field are of the datatype “date” (not character, number, or blank). The MasterMine query ensures this in most templates by substituting the date 01/01/1989 if the date field is null for a given record.

Sometimes you want to select more than one item in the “page” area (the topmost area of the pivot table). For instance, you may wish to see all records where state is either “CA” or “WA” or “OR”. Selecting the states individually is easy enough, and Windows users often expect they can use Control-click to select additional states. But there are good reasons to do it differently.

First, here’s how: In MasterMine (or any Pivot table) we accomplish this by creating a local group of these three states, then select that group in the page area. Here are the steps:

1. Temporarily move any fields from the row area up to the page area.
2. Move the target field (say “State”) down to the row area
3. Select the states you wish to group, using either drag-select or click/control-click
4. Hit the “group” button on the MasterMine toolbar
5. A new field button is created with the same name plus “2″, like “State2″
This field contains all the same items as State, except one called “group1″ that comprises your selected state together.
6. Optionally, rename group1 something that makes sense, like “West Coast”, by selecting and typing over the old name, group1.
7. Drag State2 up to the page area
8. Within State2′s list box, select your group (i.e. West Coast)
9. Now you have your group of states selected and all other buttons, including the original “State” button, can be re-positioned as desired.

Quick and Dirty alternative:
Double-click on any field in the page area and hide all values you don’t want to see. Drawback: There is no visual indication that you have hidden items in your field, so your subsequent use of the report might be misleading. Be careful!

If you send marketing e-mails using the GoldMine e-mail client (as opposed to an external service), you’ve probably learned how to filter out e-mails when viewing your history tab. That crude method can cause you to miss important information. Here’s a great way, using MasterMine and MMUpdater, to more subtly make History tab filtering better at showing you what you need while hiding what you don’t. 

And the result is a history tab that excludes your mass e-mail rows (MEM).

This is great, but what about the e-mails you’ve sent in the past?  What if in the future you forget to apply the activity code and suddenly have thousands of non-coded e-mails in history?  How can you fix these without going to each e-mail record and manually updating the Activity Code?

2) Run MasterMine History to identify target history records

Create a MasterMine history report that shows all completed “E-mails”.  Sort the Reference field (Subject line) descending by the number of occurrences. 

3) MMUpdater makes the rest easy.  Now you’ve isolated the history records that need to have their Activity Codes changed to MEM – the ones in column B.  Simply double-click on any of the numbers in the data area to list out all records that need to have Activity Code changed to “MEM”.  Copy “MEM” down the whole “Activity Code” column on the drilldown spreadsheet.  Then invoke MMUpdater to push the change to GoldMine.

In seconds, you’ve cleaned up a mess that prevents your sales reps from quickly and clearly seeing each prospect’s significant history at a glance!

In the last posting, we introduced simple drilldown and the “roll-up/roll-down” features you can add to any MasterMine summary report. This time, we concentrate on building and using GoldMine groups with MasterMine.

Feature: Building GoldMine groups.
GoldMine groups allow you to designate a set of accounts for processing or for manual action. It’s one of the best tools in GoldMine for mass-managing accounts with the least possible amount of human resources. The trick is knowing how to build groups with the use of filters or queries, skills that many people don’t have.

With MasterMine, this becomes easy because you can easily segment accounts using pivot tables. This is especially valuable because you can use criteria from Activities or from Opportunities to determine whether you want to include accounts in your group. For example, if you want to send an e-mail to everyone who purchased something last year (according to completed Sale records in history) and who does not have an associated Opportunity or Pending Sale this year, MasterMine is the way to go.

From your pivot table, drill down, highlight selected rows or a column, then build GoldMine groups by clicking the “GoldMine Family” button on the MasterMine toolbar. Note that you can be selective about which rows you include in your group. If you gvgroup. If you want only certain selected rows (records), highlight a cell in only the rows you want to include. MasterMine’s group builder processes only rows that contain a highlighted cell.

Feature: Using groups to build better MasterMine reports. 
Sometimes your desired report seems very complicated because you have lots of criteria not necessarily available in Contact1 or Contact2 fields. What if you are creating an e-mail list or address list for export, including main and additional contacts, and your criteria, as in the last example, include “bought product x from us in the past year?” And what if you want to include information from the “Details” tab or “Additional Contacts” in your report?

Break down this complicated task into simple parts by using GoldMine groups recursively. Use one report to isolate records based on one criterion, build a GoldMine group, then use that group as a filter for your next report. The last report in this series will include the fields you want to output, but the earlier reports need only include fields used as narrowing criteria.

In the example above, build a simple report on completed sales, then use the results to find your subgroup of customers who bought last year. Now build a GoldMine group of just those accounts as described above, naming the group “Product X customers 2010.”

If that’s all the criteria you need for your export, go on to your final report. However, if, say, information on the “Details” tab is also relevant to your search criteria, then before creating your final export report, do another pass similar to the first, in which you create a “Details” report filtered by “Product X customers 2010,” set the appropriate details criteria to narrow down your list, drill through and create another GM group. 

Now it’s easy to create another MasterMine report on, say, Main and Additional contacts with full address info or e-mail addresses, clicking on the “Filter” button at the bottom of the MasterMine create dialog to apply the group you just created.