Staying with the alignment theme, marketing and CRM go together like your car and its tires. Without your tires your car isn’t going anywhere. And, without your CRM system you’re going to have a hard time targeting your marketing message to the right audience. CRM is crucial to marketing because data is crucial to marketing and your prospect and customer data resides in your CRM. Your tires are where the “rubber hits the road” and your marketing data is where your CRM system hits the road.
Who’s navigating and driving your marketing database? Their understanding of the system and ability to drive it makes a difference in your success. GoldMine provides you great marketing capabilities including but not limited to: filters, groups, SQL queries and other ways to segment and target your database, a center to store and access your letter and email templates, a knowledge base for marketing & sales information and materials, reporting and analytical tools to evaluate marketing data and activities, a way for your marketing, sales, and administrative support staff to interface, an automated processes center where you can build “drip campaigns” to stay in touch with prospects and customers, and much more.
Unlike stand-alone marketing systems, GoldMine is fully tied in with the activities of your sales force and provides access to the same contacts, companies, etc. Leads are easily distributed to your sales people, even on an automated basis. And, GoldMine provides an easy means for your sales people to collect information that is vital to the marketing side of your business.
Sales and marketing professionals have different roles and responsibilities. However, there is supposed to be a strong synergy between sales and marketing. This is often lacking! But I can assure you that when you align your marketing and sales in your CRM you have surely achieved one of the most significant factors needed to thrive in 2010!
Knowledge is power – the problem is who can remember it all? That’s why it’s more important today that you have an effective and efficient way of storing and accessing information. One the key roles of the marketing department is to supply the sales people with key product information such as sales sheets, product requirements, frequently asked questions, scripts, etc. Since information changes on an ongoing basis it is helpful for everyone to have a common place to access the latest documentation.
Fortunately, GoldMine has a fantastic tool that is highly under used to help you in this area. It’s called the “Knowledge Base” or the “Info Center.” The Knowledgebase can be launched/opened from the Navigation Panes in the left nav area or from the “Go To” menu in GoldMine Premium and the “View” menu in the classic GoldMine menu found in older versions of GoldMine.
The Knowledgebase has a relatively intuitive tree structure consisting of books, folders and pages. There is both a shared section as well as a Personal section for each user. Books, folders, and pages offer properties that allow Master Rights users to control access from a read and write perspective.
The content related to any folder or page can be viewed in the Knowledgebase native window as well as stored in linked files that are “attached” to any entry. The native content window, which is selected from in the left navigation of the Knowledgebase, supports rich text and HTML, and offers simple editing features.
There is a handy “search” tool that gives users a fast and easy means to find content based on topic name, key words, topic text, and even the name of a linked file. Plus there are a few lesser known features available such as:
Link a topic to a record in GoldMine – imagine linking a folder about a vendor to the vendor’s GoldMine Record
Email topic – right click on a page in the knowledgebase and select “email topic” and GoldMine will carry the content of the page into GoldMine’s email client. It can even merge information from the active record if you have merge fields in the topic content window.
Audit – Let’s you see who and when a topic was added and edited
Question: If your consumers are buying less should you market less? My answer is NO!! You market better!
That’s not to say you should be spending more on advertising. You may find you can spend less and get greater results.
There are several reasons for this including but not limited to:
Media and event promoters have to discount more aggressively to compete for fewer advertising dollars
Pay-per-click is an auction market and bid price along with budgets of your competitors may be shrinking
What’s more, your competition may be thinning out or choosing to cut back their budgets so your ability to gain some dominance may improve
By the same token marketing is a very broad subject and advertising is only one aspect. Marketing encompasses positioning, branding, product and packaging design, distribution, and much more. Technically, even the area of sales comes under the marketing as a channel for distributing the product or service.
Your marketing database, that is your GoldMine database, can and should be one of your most prized marketing tools. As such it should get a lot of use – in good times and in bad. When times are slow it’s an excellent opportunity to improve the design, function, and use of your GoldMine system. Here’s some things you can do to start off:
Delete or archive old and useless data
Clean up your field properties and lookup lists
Redesign your screen layouts
Get rid of irrelevant things you don’t use – old groups & filters, outdated templates, unusable reports, knowledgebase entries, and scripts, etc.
Improve system performance with hardware and resource upgrades or simply do maintenance on workstations that will speed up machines (e.g. defrag, virus scans, remove applications and other measures)
Better incorporate your use of GoldMine into your business processes so you improve office operations and team work
A lot of these steps may come under the category of “sharpening the saw” which is certainly a good thing to do when a slow economy gives you a break to do so! After all, if you don’t take advantage of slow times for such things, you won’t find the time when the market picks up eventually.
By the same token, you can market better by making better use of your GoldMine system. Here are some ways to do that:
Identify features in your software that are available to you that you’re not using which may add value and give you immediate and greater return on your GoldMine investment
Consider add-on products that answer needs your organization has
Use queries to find contact records that warrant greater personal attention by either sales or administrative staff
Provide users with training and other assistance to help them operate more productively and properly
Implement the reports you require to evaluate operations and markets so you can make more objective and better business decisions
Use the system to market more effectively and repeatedly to your prospects and customers
Integrate with you phones (see our featured products TAPI LINK and Power Dialer) to incorporate speed dialing and power dialing with an in-house telemarketing project to give sales productivity a big boost
Doing these things can counter the effects of poor economy. The capacity you gain will help you manage more efficiently in both good and bad times. And, when things turn around, you’ll be far better ready to handle the growth. Plus, since there’s a pretty good chance that your competition will choose “flight” over “fight,” you have the potential to gain market share as a result of your response to the crisis. Wouldn’t that be a nice bonus – winner!
One of the basic lessons for a journalists learns is the “five W’s” of journalism (who, what, where, when and why). Marketers could take a lesson from this adage as it relates to their CRM database. Can your database answer the “five W’s” about your business? Let’s consider this.
A database is worthless without the information it is designed to store. And that information is more valuable if everyone does their job, from your webmaster to your sales force to your administrative staff in collecting details that need to go into your CRM database. If all goes well you’ll be able to dig into your database to answer important questions such as:
Who are your new prospects this month? What is the source of the leads that have been entered into your database? Where are they located? Why are they interested in your product or service? The more valuable or useful the knowledge is, the more you’ll want to be able to rely on your database for the answers! Don’t stop with the “W’s” — for example, how many prospecting calls or sales visits has each member of our sales force completed this month? How much is in our sales pipeline? Has anyone followed up on new leads from last month? When was the last time anyone spoke to a particular prospect? Which competitors’ products or services are our prospects using today?
Of course your ability to get the answers to intelligent questions depends on several factors including:
The effectiveness of your reporting skills and resources
The efforts by your database administrator and webmaster to capture data from sources such as list services, website forms, tradeshow traffic, etc.
The diligence of your sales team in entering information after their research and sales activities
GoldMine Software offers the features you’ll need to capture the information necessary to answer questions about the marketplace, your business activities, and more. You’ll be able to use:
Fields and tables to capture information
Web import capability to capture completed web forms from visitors to your site
Scripts that your telemarketers and sales people can use to capture information and automatically update fields
Tools to track interactions (calls, appointments, actions, emails, etc.)
Forecasting functions let you manage your sales pipeline
Various reporting tools (Native report writer, Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services, add-ons) will enable you to push our the answers you need to evaluate results and make decisions
Like a journalist who has a story to tell, a CRM databases has a lot of insights to offer up! Ultimately, this is the end result of a well designed database that is used properly and diligently!
From surgeons to carpenters, from police officers to accountants … every profession uses tools. And, so it is with sales professionals. CRM is far and away one of the most important tools in a salesperson’s toolbox!
Professionals need to know the terminology, trends, and facts in their field. They need an understanding of their customers’ wants, needs, and objections. They must also be familiar with best practices, pitfalls, and patterns which lead to success. But all this is not enough! They must also be highly skilled on the tools of their trade.
There’s an applicable expression, which I’m not a fan of, – “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” This expression gives all teachers a bad rap because many teachers are talented professionals who can easily work in the field that they teach, and have. They just love to teach. Nonetheless, this saying does make a point – if you know a lot about a field, but you can’t use the “tools of the trade,” you might have a career as a teacher, but not as a practitioner.
CRM technology is a chief sales tool, and a skillful CRM user has a competitive advantage. Yet most salespeople barely use a fraction of their CRM’s capabilities and many struggle to use even the basic features, regardless of what CRM product they have. Why is that?
I’ve heard all the excuses … I don’t have the time or I’m out of the office. It’s too hard to use. It doesn’t do this or that. I’m not good at computers. These are cop outs! Here’s why salespeople aren’t skilled CRM users:
1. Lack of Effort – You can’t expect someone in your office to spoon feed you CRM knowledge. It’ll never happen. The rest of the office already thinks salespeople are spoiled and they’re tired of cleaning up salespeople’s mistakes and sloppy paperwork. Break out the manual and make the effort to go through the application on your own. Skills take time and practice to develop.
2. Selfishness – Heaven forbid a salesperson should have to verify an address, or enter qualifying information about their leads into the CRM fields. The reality is salespeople need to do data entry. Otherwise, marketing can’t target their campaigns to our prospects to support our sales efforts. It’s time for salespeople to shoulder more responsibility for the database. It’s time to turn selfishness into a higher expectation for yourself when it comes to the effective usage of your CRM!
3. Attitude – What do some salespeople do during CRM training? Their email and call-backs. Most salespeople have never read, let alone seen, their CRM’s Users Guide. When salespeople don’t know how to use their CRM software what do they do? Too often the answer is they make excuses for not using it. Or, even worse, undermine the organization’s use of it. Successful salespeople are creative and resourceful problem solvers – it’s time to use some of that on your CRM!
The combination of knowledge and skill is a winning combination. Practice, patience, and persistence are mostly what it takes to develop the skills at anything. Do you have the CRM skills you need? If not, it’s time to work on them!
I hear it all the time: We want to do more marketing with our CRM. We want to pull in leads from our website. We want to automate follow-up communications to qualified leads. We want to be able to maintain a library of template letters and emails and we want to track and see who got what and when. We want to be able to segment our database to get out more targeted promotions with relevant and compelling offers. We want …, we want …, we want. What about do, do, do? GoldMine is capable of all these things and more. If you’re not doing these things now … why not?
I’ve heard all the excuses, and they’re cop-outs: Our data is a mess. The salespeople don’t supply the information. I can’t do it. Here are the reasons firms are not marketing better with their CRM:
1. Fear of Sales – Salespeople play an essential role in generating revenue, and the marketing people know this. Salespeople are also responsible for collecting information on prospects that marketing relies on. After all, salespeople are communicating with leads, prospects and customers. They’re talking with them and researching them on a regular basis, so the salespeople have first hand opportunity to collect and correct the information in the CRM database. Unfortunately, too often the sales force does a sloppy job at best with updating contact information. But marketing often tolerates this because they’re afraid of losing a good salesperson, or pissing off the sales manager. Or, maybe marketing is worried that salespeople will just complain back about the quality or quantity of leads that marketing is generating. Don’t be afraid of the sales force! Keep in mind that sales and marketing teams have mutual interests. It’s up to marketing to gain the support of your sales force and it’s up to sales to give it.
2. Lack of CRM Skills – The marketing director who relies on the CRM for their database should know more about the software than the sales force. In addition to knowing what the salespeople know about maintaining records in GoldMine, the marketing director also has to use powerful database tools that are often off limits to salespeople. What’s more, whereas the salespeople manage the database one record at a time (one relationship at a time), the marketing director also has to be able to apply a macro perspective to the database through queries, reporting & analysis, and global updates.
3. Use It or Lose It – Direct marketing experts know too well that lists depreciate, fast. So it’s “use it or lose it.” The post office or the Internet tells you when an address is undeliverable. Do you have a procedure for cleaning up your data? Do you use third-party service providers to clean and enhance your data? Do you import your web leads, tradeshow leads, and other lists into your CRM database and get communications out to them quickly? There are many ways to use a list to keep it fresh.
Regular marketing communications build brand awareness and generate more qualified leads so the salespeople can focus their time and talents on higher quality leads to produce greater sales results.
Take advantage of telemarketing to qualify leads, update data, or do initial appointment setting. Marketing can do many things that help salespeople close more business. The quality of your marketing lists, including your house file, decline in accuracy if you don’t use them. If your firm isn’t using your CRM for marketing you’re losing money, your salespeople are wasting their valuable time, and your data is depreciating in value.
Marketing facilitates sales so sales and marketing need to work together to achieve synergy and be more efficient! With the cooperation of the sales director, marketing can build resources and functions into the CRM that salespeople can use to be more professional and productive.
Everyone who works with the database must recognize that they play an essential role in maintaining the data. The more that marketing uses the database, the more salespeople will too. It’s time to use it or lose it!
One of the many advantages of GoldMine over other CRM applications like ACT! and Outlook Business Contact Manager is the “Details Tab” that GoldMine has for storing “one-too-many” types of information.
Unlike a “Flat Field” which can only store one entry per field per record, the “Details Tab” stores data in an indexed table row. This means you can enter a type of information once or several times for each GoldMine record. So, when you’re dealing with the need to record information in a Record that may occur multiple times you don’t have the limitations and problems that “fields” has. Here’s some examples of the kinds of “Details” I’ve seen organizations store in Details: Serial Numbers, Parts, Policies, Accounts, Registrations, Expirations, etc.
There are more good reasons to use Details in GoldMine.
For each type of Detail you create in GoldMine, the system automatically gives you the ability to store 10 additional related pieces of information. For example, if you’re capturing a Detail about a Registration, or Serial number, etc., you may want to enter a related date, notes, etc.
Another nice aspect of GoldMine Details is that the system automatically tracks the date a user entered the original information and the date your entry was last modified, each along with the “user” in GoldMine who did so. This “audit trail” is great for referencing and reporting!
Keep in mind that all the data you enter into Details can be reported or used in SQL queries. There are many ways to make uses of GoldMine Details. If you have a situation where “flat fields” just simply are not designed for what you need, it may be time to consider Details.
The features and benefits of the Details Tab can be greatly expanded with an “add-on product” called “Details Plus.” Now with the latest edition of Details Plus, this longtime popular product is even better.
Learn more about Details and Details Plus from First Direct Corporation and give us a call.
With all the PPC spending going on one must assume there’s a lot of websites getting hits. Where do all those web leads end up? It’s one thing to generate a hit, another to keep them from bouncing off your site, and another to bring them into your organization’s house-file.
In a perfect world our website would handle our visitors from the point when they land on our site through to an ecommerce transaction, and even give them the self service they need down the road. Also, in a perfect world, every time that original prospect or future customer needs something they would return to our site, and sometimes even just to check out our new offerings. Yeah right …. You know it’s not a perfect world!
This brings me back to the point of this article. Where do your web leads go and how do they get there? A lot of firms I know receive an email with the information from forms that their visitors fill out. The email is directed to a person who is responsible for entering the information into their house-file and then telling a salesperson to follow it up. I believe there’s a better way – here’s how we handle it:
Encourage visitors to fill out “contact forms” – offer downloads, newsletters, special access to hidden information, etc.
Automatically upload the information captured on these forms into our customer relationship management (CRM) database. In my case, we use the “web import” features of GoldMine software. This saves time and eliminates data entry errors.
Automate distribution and follow-up of new leads according to the nature of the request – in the design of web forms and scripts, you can pass hidden field information to your database so that your leads are categorized as they come into the database. This enables your marketing and sales efforts to be tied to the lead immediately. Your CRM system should do this.
Use Automated Email Responses to speed up follow-up and to engage prospects in a dialogue. This also helps to further qualify the lead, while providing more personalized attention. Your CRM system should do this.
Work new leads into the regular marketing stream so that if they’re not ready to do business at this time, they don’t fall through the cracks. (Naturally, you must provide a means for, and honor opt-out requests.) Future marketing can direct prospects back to your website for information on future offerings.
Catch repeat visitors and dup-check them using their email address – if your customers put in the same email address into future forms on your site, your CRM system should automatically match them up with their existing record in your database. This way, rather than creating a duplicate record, you can append the additional information or inquiry to their current database record. It’s also nice for your customer to not have to “log in” to your site, which some visitors find inconvenient.
The same process can begin with an incoming email as well. Your CRM should be able to create the record and link it to the email, although if there’s no V-card you will have to manually enter their contact information. Even “Chat” conversations on your website can be saved in a CRM record.
Getting a visitor to your site is hard enough. Keeping them on your site is equally difficult. But the last thing you want to do is lose track of them once they do express interest. Your CRM system, combined with intelligent marketing and sales activities will increase the ROI of your site, and your overall business!
A week doesn’t go by that First Direct does not get several “tech support calls” from a GoldMine user who needs help to do something related to marketing and/or sales with GoldMine. Although “support calls” are procedurally directed to our “help desk,” the real basis for such calls is often less of a “tech support” issue and more of a training matter.
Would you agree that most of the software we own can do a lot more than we know how to do with it? Yet, manufacturers are pressured to build more & more functionality into their products even though users tend to under-use what they already have. I include myself in this!
There is also a common misconception that I call “the silver bullet myth” – I define it as follows: Just because the software maker says their product does something, you can get it to do it. Others might call this marketing hype. Let’s just say that manufacturers tend to “over simplify” in their marketing materials.
Lack of knowledge, or skill, translates into lack of use. And when it comes to GoldMine, lack of use means less marketing and sales. Whether it’s creating template emails or letters, building a marketing list using filters or groups, broadcasting emails to primary and select additional contacts, running needed reports or analyzing data, automating a drip marketing campaign, importing leads from lists or web forms, or something else, if you lack the skills to perform this function you’re limiting yourself and your organization’s success.
The simple moral of the story here is this: If you want to market better with GoldMine, learn how to! First Direct is a great place to start. Email me today and let’s review your needs and customize a training agenda. Or, sign up for one of our upcoming topical web-based training events.
The GM+View tab is a web-based tab that can provide views of external data or views/reports of internal GoldMine data all within GoldMine itself. For example, use GM+Views to allow customer service reps to access order history and order details. Or, create your own application and link it to GoldMine thru the GM+Views tab. You can even track packages through UPS or FedEx without ever leaving GoldMine!
With the GM+View tab you have the ability to connect GoldMine’s data to the data from other applications in “real time”. Using a GM+View, data from GoldMine can be co-mingled with related data from an accounting program, production control program, shipping program … you name it! You can have as many different Views as you want!
With GM+Views you can create custom views of data, and control access and limit the ability to edit the information. Plus, this way your GoldMine users can stay in GoldMine yet be able to access outside data without having to log into another application.
So now that you know what the GM+View Tab is and what it can do you’re probably wondering how do you make it work. Well that requires knowledge about GoldMine’s database structure as well as the database structure of the application you’re trying to link GoldMine with as well as a good understanding about web programming languages such as asp, .NET, php, and/or java to name a few. In a nutshell its not something your typical GoldMine end user will be ab and its not something that can be setup with a click of a button. With that said, it is still a fairly friendly feature for those with the right skills.
Example: UPS Tracking Number
In the following example we are going to create a simple GM+View which will pull a UPS tracking number from a field in GoldMine and display the UPS Tracking Information on UPS’s website inside the GM+View tab. (See image)
To start lets go to UPS.com’s website and enter a tracking number, dont forget to agree to the terms and conditions. If you entered a valid tracking number you’ll be redirected to a page that has a URL like the following:
Notice the &tracknum=1ZAE56110333009440 this is the crucial part to getting the GM+View to work.
Now open up GoldMine, and inside of GoldMine paste the UPS Tracking Number into the Key5 field. This is the bottom field of the lower right hand quadrant of the GoldMine contact window, be sure to enter just the tracking number ie. 1ZAE56110333009440.
Now its time to create the GM+View.
1. In GoldMine click FIle > Configure > GM+View Tab. The GM+View Tab Settings window will display.
2. Click on the New button to create a New GM+View.
3. In the Template Name: text field enter UPS Tracking Number
4. In the lower white window right click with your mouse and select Edit HTML Source
5. You will see the HTML Source for the GM+View. Look for the following code <DIV></DIV>6. Place your cursor between the two <div> tags and hit enter a few times. The code should look something like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”> <META content=”MSHTML 6.00.2900.2769″ name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
Now we are going to enter our own code to display the UPS website inside the GM+View browser and display the UPS tracking information for the tracking number we entered in to the KEY5 field.
Start by inserting the following code into the space between the <DIV> and </DIV>
<SCRIPT>
window.location.href = ” ”
</SCRIPT>
This is a Javascript to make the website location property of the browser what ever value or web address we enter into the space between the quotation marks. If you guessed it, we’re going to enter the UPS Tracking URL:
However, we want to be able to display the Tracking Number that is displayed in the GoldMine KEY5 field. So were going to replace the Tracking Number from the URL with the GoldMine Merge code for the KEY5 field. The merge code is <<KEY5>>. However, we cant just enter <<KEY5>> in place of the Tracking Number in the above URL. We need to URL encode the <’s and >’s because these have special meanings when entered into the URL. The URL Encoded value for < is < and for > is >
So to review:
< = <
> = >
<<KEY5>> = <<KEY5>>
So now we can replace &tracknum=1ZAE56110333009440 with &tracknum=<<KEY5>>
So the final code for displaying the UPS Tracking Number inside GM+View is:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”> <META content=”MSHTML 6.00.2900.2769″ name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
Save the View by clicking the Yellow Save icon or by right clicking in the window and selecting save. Then close out of the GM+View Settings. When you go to the GM+View tab in GoldMine you can right click and choose the UPS Tracking Number view and you should see the tracking information for the Tracking Number in the Key5 field.
Now if you were to enter a different tracking number for a different contact and view the GM+View tab you’d see the information for that contacts Tracking number. For better use, create a custom field to store the UPS Tracking Number or even Multiple Custom Fields to Track Multiple Tracking Numbers per a customer.
In addition, there is a product that can take a lot of the leg work and time out of developing a GM+View application. It’s called DbNetGrid and its sister product is DbNetEdit.
DbNetGrid is a fully encapsulated HTML grid component designed for use in Intranet and Internet development. It has been designed as a fast and flexible way of presenting and updating database information in a browser environment. DbNetGrid has been designed to fully exploit the features of the IE5+ family of browsers. DbNetGrid can be used as a simple grid component integrated with your own applications, a web-reporting tool or as a fully functional web-application.
For a personal demonstration/consultation and to read more information about DbNetGrid and DbNetEdit please visit our website or email us.
