As I work with businesses installing, customizing, or training on Goldmine I have found there are features that many companies do not use even though they would find immediately benefit from them. Following is my list of the 5 Most Underutilized Features in Goldmine (most of these are found in Versions 6.7 and greater):
GROUPS
Building groups in Goldmine is a manual process like creating a filter but you can create a group based on anything you can query on. You can create simple groups such as “who are all my prospects” or more informative groups such as “who are all my customers who purchased Product A in the last 6 months”. Once you have a group activiated, you are able to isolate your activities to only focus on that subset of the database.
To kick it up a notch, just add GoldBox (the most powerful GoldMine add-on) and you can have any number of groups auto-built each night ensuring you do not miss a record.
HTML EMAIL TEMPLATES
Most of us know what HTML Email Templates look like. They have color, graphics, backgrounds, logos. In Goldmine you can create and store HTML Templates for the whole company to use. Using just a few clicks, you can send a personalized email to one or many contacts.
GM+VIEW/BROWSER
GM+View is a tab in Goldmine that allows you to view all types of data:
- Launch a Google map based on the contact’s address,
- View data in an external database,
- Open the website of the King County Property Tax Records and fill in a parcel number from a Goldmine field,
- Quickly jump to a client folder on the server to find all your documents insteading of browsing through the network folders.
If you want to start with the basics, write to me and I will send you a few of the standard views for FREE.
AUTOMATIC DATA ENTRY
Have you ever thought it would be great to automatically change a field based on another field? For example, populate a Sales Person field based on the State. This can be accomplished with a file called “lookup.ini”. You can have several rules in this file such as assiging the sales rep, parsing out the first or middle name or even creating a currency format ($ and ,) based on the number that is entered.
CRYSTAL REPORTS
Crystal Reports Designer and Viewer is shipped with GoldMine on certain Corporate or Premium Editions. It is a wonderful program to help create formal reports and charts to analyze the data you have in GoldMine. All Crystal Reports can be set up for users to access within Goldmine without having the program installed on their computer.