 What
can CRM do for me?
Contact related information.
GoldMine basically stores information related to your contacts. Contacts are people. They could be prospects, clients, employees, former employees, applicants, vendors, or personal records. This is really more than just the typical phone and address information. Using the standard fields, or ones that you create as user-defined fields, you can store information that will enhance your ability to get and keep clients, or make you more effective at doing your job.
Calendar or pending activities related to contacts.
GoldMine relates scheduled activities to contact records. When you schedule an appointment with a client, the appointment activity is related to the client contact record, and appears in a listing of activities for the day of the appointment. In the Windows versions of GoldMine activities are also shown on a graphical calendar view. All pending activities can be printed so that you can take your calendar with you.
Complete contact history maintained by GoldMine.
When you finish a previously scheduled activity GoldMine automatically removes the calendar item and places it in the contact’s history along with any notes that you made about the result of the conversation or appointment. Having a running history of all work related to a contact enables you to work effectively as a team, and develop strong relationships with clients. The history also provides for continuity in the event that a key person in your organization leaves or is reassigned.
Opportunity management : Never lose track of a potential sale again.
Focus on opportunities. GoldMine’s forecast sale function enables you to record information about potential sales so that you know what’s in your pipeline. Analysis tools are built-in to let you know how much business is expected to close in the next four weeks, the following four months, and beyond. You will find the ability to manage your sales quota and compare your actual results against plan. An activity listing is available in all versions of GoldMine that show all open opportunities so that you can determine what can be done to move them closer to closing.
Customizable fields add to the overall flexibility of GoldMine.
Add fields to hold information that makes sense for your business. You need to keep track of an account number for each client, add a field to hold that information. Need to know the status of a prospect to determine where they are in the decision making process, add a field. You can add character, numeric and date type fields to different user-defined screens. One screen could be available to all GoldMine users, for example. Another could be available to sales and customer service. Another could be created for credit personnel only. This flexibility makes GoldMine one of the most flexible programs because you can create fields and screens that fit your business requirements.
Profile records offer unique ability to add information when needed to certain contacts.
GoldMine uses profile records to add information to records when needed. The customizable fields mentioned earlier are added to all records, whether used or not. Add a profile to record information only when needed or when you need to be able to quickly locate a record based on a profile. GoldMine for Windows 95 adds the ability to create special tabbed sections for profiles, and utilise more fields of information.
Referrals make establishing relationships between contacts easy.
If you’re a manufacturer and provide a lead to one of your dealers, you can make the referral using GoldMine’s referral feature and be able to move quickly between all the contact records of the people you referred to a specific dealer so that you can follow-up and help that dealer close more business. You can also track all the business that was referred to you by a certain company using this feature.
Communicating with the outside world.
All versions of GoldMine have features that enable it to send a template letter to a particular contact, or group of contacts. For instance, you could shoot-out letters to hundreds of prospects \ customers about your new product – by just pressing a few keys. All contact information like Name, Address, Tel No., etc are automatically merged into each document by GoldMine. (For example, a leading hotel keeps track of which of its customers prefer Chinese food, and whenever they host a Chinese Food Festival, an announcement is sent to all these customers informing them about the event.) GoldMine uses links to Windows based word processors such as Microsoft Word or Corel’s WordPerfect. Faxing is handled by programs designed specifically for that purpose. WinFax PRO is one of the programs supported.
Reporting on the information from your GoldMine system.
All versions of GoldMine have reporting capabilities. The Windows 95 version has a built-in report writer – that lets you create your own reports.
Telemarketing scripts add a very slick capability to GoldMine.
This is basically a scripting tool which creates a branching dialog to lead a user through a series of dialogs based on responses entered. Information can be asked that is automatically input into user-defined fields. Counts are maintained that indicate how many times a particular answer was given. And, the entire script, both questions and answers, can be captured as part of the contact’s history. This feature is useful for telemarketing or telesales, but also holds value for data input or specialised functions such as surveys.
GoldMine in action.
Finding records in GoldMine is almost instantaneous. Quickly locate a record based on contact name, or their last name, company name or any of the five user-defined indexed fields. Any contact information is only a few key-presses away.
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