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!

First Direct Corp.  is now on Twitter.
You can Follow Us on Twitter @ – http://www.twitter.com/1stdirect

About Twitter-

Twitter is a rich source of instant information. Stay updated. Keep others updated. It’s a whole thing.
Customize Twitter by choosing who to follow. Then see tweets from those folks as soon as they’re posted.

Learn more about Twitter and what it can do for your business @ http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/

First Direct Corp. is now on Facebook!

Become a fan by clicking here to join our community and stay plugged into our work. If you don’t have a Facebook account, you can set one up here. We hope to “see” you on our page!

About Facebook Pages-

A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.  When your fans interact with your Facebook Page, stories linking to your Page can go to their friends via News Feed. As these friends interact with your Page, News Feed keeps driving word-of-mouth to a wider circle of friends.

That’s right … I said you might want to “Crash” your GoldMine!   We have a salesperson who uses GoldMine all day long and has done a  ton of personalization to his GoldMine toolbar.  His toolbar saves him a lot of time and helps him to sell more.   The other day this salesperson accidently hit the “Reset” on their GoldMine Toolbar.   He freaked-out at the thought of having to recreate all their personalization, or worse, having to work with the default toolbar.   What could he do to “undo” their problem?   The answer was simple, albeit not obvious.  Here’s an easy trick for GoldMine Administrators to know about if someone comes to you in a panic because they accidently “reset” their GoldMine Toolbar.

Because the users Toolbar settings are stored in the GoldMine users “.INI” file, and because that it written to WHEN they close their GoldMine properly, all you have to do is crash GoldMine and any changes to the users preferences are not stored.  How could we do that you might ask?  Simple, just go into the Windows Task Manager and “End Process” for the GoldMine Executable (GM.exe).  This “kills” the GoldMine software application and the INI is NOT written to with the changes to his GoldMine preferences including the “reset” of the GoldMine Toolbar.  The user’s problem is solved easily!  And he thanked me profusly for saving his customizations!   (NOTE:  This will only work if you do it BEFORE the user logs out of GoldMine!)

First Direct Corp. offers a 1 hour webinar on “Two Terrific Productivity Tools” that goes into how to sell more efficiently with the GoldMine Toolbar and Taskbar.  Visit  http://www.1stdirect.com/events/gmtools.php for information.

We’ve all said it! …  “’I’ll follow-up with you next week.”  Then we go into GoldMine and schedule ourselves a call for the next week so we actually remember to call the person back.

Here’s a GoldMine tip/trick to make that process a little bit easier.

In the Date field when scheduling a call, appointment, next action, etc. etc.  instead of typing in a date, or using the lookup to bring up a calendar, type in 1W.

Then, magically, when you tab or click, to the next field the date will be set for 1week from today.

Assume, then, that you want to schedule the activity 2 days from now, well, just type in 2D, for 3 days 3D.

D works for Days, W for Weeks, and M for Months.  So to schedule something 2 months from now, Just type in 2M!

If you’ve ever taken my basic end-user GoldMine training, you’ve heard me say “do your day.”  One of the key points about a workgroup CRM system for the sales team (reps, support, management, etc.) is that everyone should just do their day, the same way, in GoldMine!

The famous comedian Jack Benny once humored, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice!”

A workgroup of CRM users is like an orchestra in that everyone has their role and needs to play their part well, but no matter how good we all play, it will only sound good if we’re all playing at the same time off the same sheet of music. 

GoldMine Premium provides you many tools for aligning the day-to-day life of your sales people, including but not limited to email and letter templates, fields for collecting qualifying information, a means of tracking activities and planning future follow-up, opportunity management, a seamless basis for providing the data that is needed by marketing and management, and much more! 

It’s important to get your prospects into the hands of an effective salesperson.  But when that salesperson is also a capable user of a CRM system that is aligned to the way they do their job, you have an even greater result.   In addition to that salesperson achieving greater sales productivity, your whole business can thrive as you achieve the synergy that comes from a sales team that is able to function far better with one another, their support staff, marketing, and management!

One of the many advantages of GoldMine® over other CRM applications is the GoldMine® Task Bar.

The GoldMine Task Bar is a great way of having quick, one-click access to common things like:

• GoldMine Main Menu Items
• Launching external applications and web sites (web resources like Google Maps, Dun and Bradstreet, Spoke, etc.)
• Displaying documents and files in GoldMine
• Using and Sharing Macros

In addition, GoldMine users with master rights can customize the task bar to allow all users access to frequently used menu commands and macros.

What’s more, task bars can be Global (for all users) or Local (just for each user).

Each icon on the task bar represents a task item (essentially a short cut). You can customize up to 50 task items into one task group. In other words, a task group is a collection of tasks [task item]. Each task grouping is accessed from a pull-down button on your GoldMine Task Bar, and you can have up to 20 task groups.

Here’s how to create a new task bar group:

1. Click on the Customize option on your tool bar task bar
2. Right click on the task bar
3. Select “Add New Group”
4. Give it a name and select “OK.” (Users with master rights can check the box “Global Group” if they want to give all end users access to the task bar)
5. Start inserting items to the new group

Click here to see the benefit of using the GoldMine® Task Bar!

Click here to learn how to take your productivity to the next level with the toolbar/taskbar and templates

What image do you conjure up when you think of someone who’s selling?  Possibly you pictured someone talking on the phone.  Surely you’ve heard the expression “dialing for dollars” as a way to describe the daily efforts by salespeople and telemarketers to reach prospects and customers. 

Whether you’re cold calling, introducing yourself to new web leads and referrals, following up on active prospects and customers, or fielding incoming inquiries, a large ratio of sales activity takes place on the phone.  And, when you’re on the phone you should be on the record. 

As a GoldMine trainer my number one basic principle for success with GoldMine is to “be on the record!”  Look over the shoulder of anyone in my office who’s on the phone and you’ll see what organization they’re talking with because that’s the GoldMine Record on their computer’s screen.  You have to be on the record you’re talking with in order to use GoldMine for the reasons you purchased it, not to mention to improve the quality and accuracy of the information you have.

For my organization, and others, the use of the phones is a big enough factor that we believe it warrants having tight integration between your phone system and your GoldMine database. 

Apart from the features of your phone system alone, here are compelling reasons for tight integration between GoldMine and your phones:

• Screen pops based on incoming caller ID can save time searching for the GoldMine record
• Automated capture of incoming callers phone number can prove very useful
• Speed dialing with GoldMine reduces wrong dials and increases productivity as much as 15%
• Power dialing outbound call campaigns to a call list where you can lift productivity by as much as 30%
• Automate tracking calls by automatically initiating a “completed call” and capture the actual call duration
• Automate scheduling follow-up with a Macros on a record of frequent call outcomes to reduce data entry time and increase selling time
• Better call tracking in the context of your CRM records means enhanced reporting and greater accountability

The bottom line – you’ll sell more!

It just makes common sense – if you’re going to put people’s phone numbers into your GoldMine database you should let your GoldMine database dial the phone for you!  Once you start dialing with GoldMine you’ll wonder why anyone would want to otherwise.

Let us give you a demonstration of what you can do with GoldMine using your existing phone system.  That’s right, your existing phone system! 
Register for our online event – Telephony Integration – GoldMine and Your Current Phone System – what you don’t know that you can do! 

Great News - First Direct can integrate GoldMine with just about any phone system! If you’re a small business looking for a new phone system I’d be happy to tell you what phone system we changed to recently and why I chose it. We’ve reduced our phone bills nearly 50% in the process!
FEATURED ADD-ON:

Tapi Link for GoldMine – Once installed, Tapi Link for GoldMine becomes an integral part of your GoldMine and enables users to dial directly from within GoldMine and present a caller’s contact details when the telephone rings.

Here’s an effective way to give a “mass email” a personal touch and thereby lift response.   In other words, if your firm has developed fancy HTML email templates in your GoldMine Document Template library this is an easy way to enhance them when you want to give them a ‘one-to-one’ tone.

Start by making a clone (copy) of the template so that the original is not altered.   In the new template simply add lines (using your “return key”) above the designed template.  Then you can edit the top of the email with GoldMine merge fields to enter the first name and perhaps a short message — the shorter & sweeter the better.  I like to keep such a message to two or three sentences at most and to make the tone of the message feel like it was written to just one person. 

Because the formatting at the top of the email, where you want to add the text, will be dictated by HTML coding inside the template, you probably will need to alter the font and even the alignment of what you’re adding.  This can be done inside the GoldMine email client without altering the style of the actual template below.

With a personal salutation and the right personal note at the top of an HTML template, even if you broadcast this to group or filtered list of GoldMine records, this approach will still create the sense that you wrote to the recipient individually.   Doing so tends to invite a dialogue that doesn’t occur generally with mass broadcast emails.  So whether you send to one contact or a thousand records, this method can trigger a level of response that may pleasantly surprise you. 

Given the “personal feel” of the message, you’re apt to get responses which may not even relate to the primary marketing message.  Recipients may take the occasion of your email to ask you for something or to tell you something that was on their mind.  Either way, any response is an interaction that marketers want and sales people need!

(NOTE: If you’re managing replies to your campaigns with GoldMine Email Rules, you may need to pay more attention to what the respondent is saying.)