Let a group of the First Direct Singers entertain you as we wish you all a joyous holidays and a prosperous & healthy new year!

Bob Ritter, President

GoldMine Premium introduced a powerful new search tool with GoldMine Premium 8.5 that is called Universal Search.  Universal Search is a one-box search engine that allows you to quickly access a summary view of the information you are looking for, along with links to more detailed information.

Universal Search is not your "everyday" search engine tool because it delves very deeply through your database and will find many more results than you'd want to return for when you were simply searching for one of your Primary View fields.  In other words, if you just want to pull up a GoldMine Record based on ordinary fields like the Company, Contact, Phone1, etc., you'd be much better off using the Contact Search Center.

When you want to do a more thorough search of your GoldMine database to find an obscure value, or something that you may not know where the information is exactly located, Universal Search is perfect.  It can be a real time and "life-saver."

To learn more about using Universal Search there is a very helpful video you can watch.  Click here watch this training video.

First Direct can assist you with deploying or configuring your Universal Search.

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GoldMine Premium 9.x saw the introduction of a reporting medium known as Dashboards.  Dashboards  offer benefits for both management and users.

Dashboards function real-time with interactive access to data in GoldMine, as well as external MS SQL data on the server which may be stored in another system such as an accounting application.

Dashboards provide the ability to view your data graphically (in a chart) along with the means to drill down (click)  into elements of the chart in order to view that actual data in a  grid/table view.  One can dig further with "links" in the table that will launch the actual window and data the grid is based on.  For example, you could go from a graph of your sales pipeline to a list of the deals and then to the actual forecasted sale pending in a specific GoldMine record.

GoldMine supplies approximately 10 pre-designed dashboards consisting of numerous sub-reports.  Because a dashboard consists of many "parts," an individual dashboard can present many alternative ways to view information.  Data "binding" creates a dynamic result where the information in a report updates as you drive from one selection (click) to another within the report.  Dashboards can contain a drop down filter within them so one can control parameters the reader wishes to select, such as a date range or  territory.

There is also the capability of copying and modifying the stock reports or creating new reports.  A "design" view that is open to Master Users features many tools for creating custom reports tailored to your business processes and how you use GoldMine, your users' needs, and your security concerns.  Security functions within the dashboard allow administrators to control the user's ability to view, print, or output the information.

Within the parts of a report a user can modify the view in order to select a different graph style or to change the colors, hide the legend, etc.  The local menu for these functions is available from the "right click" in the report section or from an available "toolbar."

Management has obvious interests in reporting.  Dashboards can enhance decision making.  By the same token, dashboards can also provide highly useful work-flow advantages.  So your organization would do well to create dashboards which help users at every level of your organization to be more productive and effective!

As simple as they are to use, the one major drawback of Dashboards is the complexity involved with creating them!  They are very difficult to learn and even an experienced programmer will find that creating & modifying dashboards is hard to figure out and do.   On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the hardest I would give GoldMine dashboards a 9 and Crystal Report, which also ships with GoldMine, a 7.5.  But once a dashboard is created, it ought to be very simple for the users to run!  An alternative add-on tool that makes it simple to create robust reports with graphical abilities is MasterMine.

First Direct Corp. offers professional assistance on this subject and can even create dashboards for you.  We also conduct a GoldMine Dashboard training class to introduce your organization to the features and benefits of GoldMine dashboards.  Request a free, no-obligation demonstration of either GoldMine dashboards or MasterMine if you're interested.

Managing Failure on the Road to Success:

In the competitive arena of sales, and generally where people’s activities are concerned, most of the emphasis is on recognizing and rewarding success.  There is little attention given to failure.  We tend to reward success and tell people to “keep up the good work.”

Failure is success inside out:

It may seem strange to talk about failure, but what success story doesn’t have a prologue about failure?  Failure is as much a part of success as creativity, hard work, and timing.  In the area of R&D the part failure plays in success is widely known.  IBM's rumored motto about mistakes is legendary: “Fail Faster.” Such high importance has been placed on learning from failure that it has be said that the need is to "fail faster to succeed sooner."

If all we do is “keep up the good work,” there can be a tendency for entropy to creep in.  Change comes from an effort to make improvements and fixes.  In some ways, more can come from failure than our success.  That’s why there’s a lot to be gained by finding failure in one’s CRM system!

Failures cost you more than you think:

Success has a value, whereas failure has a cost and a lost value. (The cost of doing it wrong and the lost value that was not realized had the failure been turned into a success instead.)  Failure repeats itself.  If you find one failure, chances are there are many.  The cost of failure can be high when it’s fully calculated.  (e.g. leads that are not followed-up, broken links on a PPC search term, forgotten sales opportunities, call backs that are not made, timed follow-ups that are missed, not getting referrals, not fixing undeliverable email addresses, etc.)

Failures hide out in the grass:

Failure hides out! It’s easy to overlook failures.  For one, people boast about their successes, and keep quiet about their failures.  In fact, while the common perception is that salespeople are reluctant to use CRM because other salespeople can “steal their leads,” I believe the main fear comes from their intuitive sense that CRM will reveal their failures.   Truthfully, salespeople have more to gain by embracing a tool that identifies their failures!

Failures often come in the way of omissions which can make them more difficult to spot.  Consider synonyms for the word Omission and you can start to appreciate why it I believe it is so closely tied to failure:  blank, breach, break, cancellation, carelessness, chasm, cutting out, default, disregard, elimination, exclusion, failure, forgetfulness, gap, ignoring, lack, lapse, leaving out, missing, neglect, overlooking, oversight, skip, slip, and withholding. CRM can help you locate meaningful “omissions” so that you can do something about them.

The irony is that the failure I am speaking about finding in your CRM is really about missed opportunities, which is something we’re all interested in.  Therefore, what we have is a whole bunch of missed opportunities that are hiding out in the fields as failures.  If we till the fields we can surely turn up missed opportunities to grow our success!

What might we find when we get our hands dirty and dig into our failures?  Here are some examples of what you can find when you a find a failure:

• An undeliverable B2B Email >> a change in our decision maker
• A missing field value that is the basis for creating a marketing list >> grow our marketing list
• A missed goal learned by finding the raw data >> a prospect that was being overlooked
• An incoming email marked “false positive” as spam >> a lost quote request from someone who got blocked
• A past due open service issue >> a customer that may turn away from us
• A lead that has not been updated >> a lead that’s not been followed up

Out-of-sight is out-of-mind!  What you don’t know can hurt you!

The problem with out-of-sight is that it is out-of-mind which means it is not being addressed.  And too often those oversights cost you business.

In a recent survey First Direct Corp. conducted with a manufacturing association it showed that business recognize that information isn’t a visible as it we’d like it to be:

30% do not believe sales is sufficiently following up on leads

80% have difficulty knowing the status of your leads in the database without personally asking the salesperson

40% don't believe interactions with prospects & customers are tracked and available to others who need the information

80% have to go asking for information that is important for others to collect on prospects & customers

60% find that changes to contact information that salespeople discover about customers/prospects is not supplied to marketing

Failure doesn’t have equal consequences:

Not all failures have equal consequences.  And addressing one failure may have substantially greater or lesser value over another.  The key now is to set your priorities.  Chances are you’ll want to focus on the failures with the greatest potential for improving your ROI.  For example, the consequences of not having someone’s email address are greater than not having some other piece of information.

Each organization’s priorities, needs, and business practices differ.  What is important and useful to one organization may not matter to another.

To overlook failure is to accept its fate!

While actions lead to success or failure. I am especially concerned with inaction.  Because, in my experience, it is not so much what people are doing that is leading to failure, as it is what they are not doing.  In my opinion, it is inaction and omission that are much more to blame for failure!  For example, how would you find a call you forgot to schedule?

The problem is that working up a smart way of identifying let alone managing failures is often beyond the skill set of the typical CRM user.  It begins - like many aspects of CRM - in the planning, design, and implementation of the system.  By simply providing a process and means by which one can find their failures, can go a long way in helping them do their job better.

To overlook a failure is to accept it as fate.  And because we’re going to see that the failures which a CRM system can expose occur on a perpetual basis, you need to develop solutions for handling failure which are driven by a process.  You could think of it as “Managing failure on the road to success!”

Take proactive steps to mitigate failure:

Managing failure is about being proactive.  Day in and day out we’re reactive, but in the process things slip by us. Things that should be done are overlooked and, once they are, if we don’t have a system for handling those overlooked situations they fall into an abyss and are lost.  Before we know it, we are onto the next hot thing.

We all have things that are falling through the cracks.  The difference in the way one can use CRM to pull up a list of what’s falling through the cracks and organize the information in ways that allow them to work from that.  Some examples:

• Ability to search based on multiple criteria to find a missed activity.  (example of a missing source)
• Ability to use search results as an action list
• Ability to delegate and/or get assistance on leads from support staff (example of Susie making my calls)

Leverage your CRM Functions:

• Queries & Reports to find details
• Create quick tasks and automation to help with productivity and proper lead follow-up
• Automatically update one field based on the value in another.   Validate a field entry to ensure entries will match up to searches

Answers to the best questions:

The best professionals ask the best questions.  Whether that professional is a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or a salesperson or marketing director.

Databases are used to store and use these answers.  Management tends to be selfish when it comes to reporting.  They want their reports, and often overlook their subordinates’ need for reports, including administrative staff.

Signs of failure in field information, activities, outcomes, etc:

1.     Missed date – Call, renewal, etc.

2.     Empty field – that could be the basis for a marketing list or report

3.     Lack of scheduled follow-up or in-activity in a relationship

4.     A changed classification – review lost deals for insights

5.     A goal or objective not achieved (20 calls a day)

6.     An negative outcome to a prospecting call – could provide an opportunity for coaching to improve effectiveness

7.     A lack of communication internally and externally  (E.g. An RSVP not responded)

Analyzing former prospects and customers to reveal competitive decisions

Compare Lead source figures from one year to another year may show a declining campaign

Qualitative Understanding:

What’s behind the numbers?  When you look below the surface of your failures, the information in your CRM can often provide a deeper understanding.  Here you hope to find the notes and explanation that provide a narrative for a more meaningful understanding.

• Comments – he said, I said
• A reason or response to a relevant follow-op question
• Raw data is seldom as insightful as graphical representations
• Clicking Into the Results - Anytime a user can act off the data with less steps, the more likely they are to do so and the more productive they can be
• Everything is relative and therefore when you are considering how you want to analyze things context is an important consideration.  A result in one place in a database often needs to be put in context with data in other places in a database.  Failure to follow-up may really be just a matter of honoring a request to not call or email. Lower volume in one area may be due to lower volume in another.  An external factor could have an impact.  A new rep may need time to come up to speed

In Conclusion:

There is no question that there are little and large failures taking place within every organization virtually every day.  If you accept that those same failures could be the seeds of success, then you have a simple choice to make.  Either you find and manage the situation in order to produce more desirable outcomes, or you accept failure as fate.

GoldMine software has long offered a very useful automation capability know as "Automated Processes."  Just the term automated processes conjures up something elaborate, powerful, and complex to set-up.  Frankly it's fair to say those are true adjectives.  But there are some rather simple, yet efficient and effective ways to use Automated Processes.

To begin with I'd actually like to take your expectations down a notch.  I believe one of the problems GoldMine administrators and organizations with GoldMine run into regarding the capabilities of Automated Processes is that they try to do too much too soon with it.   There are also unrealistic expectations.  So I want to offer a few simple examples of how I use Automated Processes that you might use as well.

Keep in mind that an Automated Process can be applied to a record very easily once it's created.  A couple of key strokes and it "does what it is designed to do."  So that might include:

• Record in GoldMine that you called and left a voicemail message to confirm an appointment and send a reminder email
• Queue up an email to follow-up a proposal
• Print a cover letter and schedule a literature follow-up call
• Mark a record for "Do Not Email" and notify your sales rep that their customer/prospect "opted out"

The possibilities for handling simple everyday tasks and recording them in your CRM system are as endless as the imagination.  But be practical.  Focus on the most prevalent needs you have -- those things that can immediately save time, reduce training, add consistency, and increase productivity.

First Direct conducts a 4-hour workshop on Automated Processes in which we cover much more detail and address more uses.  To look into that click here.  If you'd like one-on-one assistance with planning and implementing Automated Processes, just contact First Direct at 845-221-3800.

GoldMine has a Tab in a GoldMine Record called "Details" which is used to store a wide range of information.  Because GoldMine displays email addresses and Web Site addresses in this tab by default, the Details Tab can end up being a bit cluttered.  Here's a helpful tip for a simple way to filter what you see in the Details Tab such that you hide those entries.

From within the Details Tab first make sure you have the "Filter Grid Control" checked on.  Now you can drop down the Detail Column and select "Custom" in order to access your filtering options. Then choose to display Details that do NOT EQUAL "E-mail Address" and do NOT EQUAL "Web Site."

See image below:

By the way, in GoldMine Premium active Grid Control Filters are NOT cleared when you log out, so when you log in you do NOT have to repeat this process.

Confused about Social Media and tools like Twitter? You're not alone.  Some liken it to the early days of the Internet when everyone felt they had to have a website but didn't know why.

Eventually social media tools will be just another component of the overall media and communications construct, which doesn't make them any less significant!  In fact, as they become more "mainstream" they also become more essential.  And, as such, the experts in this field will find their place.

In the meantime, there's still a whole bunch of folks, in and outside business, who are rather confused about the social media scene.  I like it when you find someone who "gets it" and finds a way to communicate that understanding to the masses in ways that help others to "get it" too!  Here's such an example...

Here are links to two short YouTube videos that make a couple topics simple -- really simple!

Have a look at these two short videos and a list of ideas for Twitter:

• Social Media in Plain English
• Twitter in Plain English
• Ideas for Using Twitter

How are you leveraging Social Media in your organization?  I'd love to see your comments!  Or, contact me personally, Bob Ritter, at First Direct Corp. (800) 935-4386 x 101 if you'd like to discuss this topic.  I'd especially be interested in how you're integrating social media with your use of CRM and your website.

I could plug a few other experts in the social media field that I've come across and may do that in a future post.  Meanwhile, I hope to hear from you!

Email Campaign Tracker allows you to quickly and easily create mailing lists for your marketing needs. Segment members of your list into groups for improved targeting. Compose HTML or plain text messages with ease then send your messages and monitor the results. The moment your campaign is sent you have access to a range of reports that show you exactly how your subscribers are interacting with it. See who is opening it, what parts of the campaign they are interested in, who forwarded it on to a friend, unsubscribed, bounced out or even marked it as spam.

Using an email template from Email Campaign Tracker is easily done by adding any type of content you like without the risk of messing with the original template design. We worry about the look and feel, you worry about the content.

Learn more about what Email Campaign Tracker can do for you, sign up for your account. Our pricing is setup so that you NEVER PAY any monthly, yearly or hidden fees and you only pay when you actually send a message. Test messages are free!

We hear the word repetition used over and over again in marketing. Especially from anyone trying to sell us advertising! Maybe they’re just trying to sell us something, or maybe they know something. Here’s eight (8) smart reasons to use repetition with your marketing communications and what it can do for you:

1. Right Place at Right Time – If the timing isn’t right … it may not matter how good your overall message is. Today’s consumer suffers from “information overload.” People are just too overloaded to pay attention to things that are of low or no priority to them. They may buy your product or service in a month from now, but if you are a month early or a month late, you lose. Repetition improves the odds of being in the right place at the right time.
2. Right Message – Life has been called a “moving parade” and at any point in time there’s something new passing by. What interests one, may not interest another. Repetition gives you more opportunities to appear before your prospect with something of interest to them. Each new communication you do affords the marketer or sales person with the opportunity to try a new, albeit congruent, message. What works for one prospect, may not be effective with another. Altering your message gives you a chance to appeal to more people.
3. Easier for the Consumer – Making it easier for the consumer can lift response. Repetition puts your offer in front of the consumer thereby making it easier to find what they’re looking for. (Assuming that they were in the market for your product or service.) Plus, repeating certain information inside an offer, such as phone number or website, makes it easier for them to respond.
4. Residual Effect – Each marketing message has an impact that leaves a residual impression in the mind of our prospective consumer. Even if they don’t act on it, as long as we capture their attention and interest, our marketing can have some lasting, residual effect. This can have a positive influence on the strength of subsequent marketing and sales communications. In other words, past communications can increase our ability to motivate our consumer in future communications.
5. “Top-Of-Mind” Awareness – Building brand recognition is a long accepted mission for marketing. The fact is that purely “institutional” or brand-awareness advertising is out of financial reach for many businesses. Most organizations have shifted over to direct response advertising where the emphasis is on motivating our consumer to take some form of action. With repetitive direct response communications, you can also build “top-of-mind” awareness.
6. Relationship Development – To build and maintain any relationship, you need to stay in touch.
7. Thin-out Your Competition – Studies show that the majority of people who inquire on a product or service do eventually purchase it. In many industries, especially those with a longer sales cycle, the majority of sales are made after 5 or more contacts. Yet, less than 10% of salespeople make five or more contacts. This is one important explanation for why 80% of the sales go to less than 20% of the salespeople in any industry. Therefore, repetitive follow-up alone will thin out your competition.
8. Database Maintenance – As you follow-up you come to learn about changes in information. Key contacts change along with their contact information. You have more opportunity to collect missing information. You increase the value and usefulness of your database through repetition.

GoldMine CRM is a tremendous tool to help you achieve the repetition you need with prospect and customer communications.  Learn more and do more ... contact an expert like First Direct Corp.

GoldMine software allows users to store information in many places.  Where you should put it depends on the nature of what you want to store and track, as well as how you want to search for and report on the data.  The purpose of this post is not to address that decision, rather to provide an answer to a question I am often called about.   And that is, "How do you search for information stored in GoldMine's Details tab"? 

Unlike  the flat fields in GoldMine Contact1 and Contact2 tables, the GoldMine Details tab have a "one-to-many relationship" which offers great flexibility and advantages.  Below, I've listed all the fields associated with a "Detail."  To help with clarity, I will follow one example all the way through - storing and searching for "Serial Numbers" - but this could be anything!

GoldMine Detail Information:

• Detail Name - the category or type of information you are storing (e.g. Serial Numbers)
• Details Reference - the primary look-up (e.g. Product Name)
• Note - a memo field that would allow you to describe and journal the entry
• Custom Fields - GoldMine Premium allocates 12 fields that can be custom labeled, however the field lengths and formats are predefined (eg. Product Version, Purchase Date, Number of User Licenses, etc.)
• Audit Information - GoldMine automatically enters the date the Detail was entered and updated including the user who did so
• Custom Tab - there is the ability to create a custom tab specially for this information

How to Search for a GoldMine Detail:

1. GoldMine Search Center - drop down the "Search By" and select Details
2. GoldMine Details Tab - right click on the specific category of Details and select "Lookup" from the local menu
3. GoldMine Lookup Wizard - to create custom SQL queries
4. GoldMine Universal Search - will pickup data stored in any of the Details fields
5. Report Writers - SQL Reporting Services, Crystal Report Writer, MasterMine, Stonefield, etc.
6. GoldMine Premium Dashboards- in GoldMine 9.x
7. Details Plus- offers filter capabilties and expanded integration with GoldMine Details including but not limited to Email and Letter merge

Have an idea for how you want to use Details and need a second opinion or some professional assistance, or any questions?  Let us know!