A growing list of clients and contacts is a great sign of a healthy, ed growing business. Keeping track of this growing list is GoldMine’s job, and it does the task well — after all, it’s a contact management system!
The first and most basic action you must become accustom to is how to add a new company and primary contact, also called “creating a record”. Once you create the record, you can add secondary contacts, custom fields specific to your industry, and create a paper trail of all the actions you’ve taken with a given record. Here’s the simple 3-step process to creating your first record…
Step 1: Click the “New Company” in the upper left hand corner of the main work area.
Step 2: Choose “enter a new company and primary contact” from the short drop down list.
Step 3: Enter the company name and primary contact’s name in the first two fields. *Note: type the names with capitalization as necessary. When you write a letter or merge data into a word processor from GoldMine, the info will populate just as you’ve entered it into the field.
Consistent field entry format will make your life easy, trust me. Say you’re creating a letter for each client you’ve done business with, to keep in touch and let them know about your new products or services. You create the template, dictate the type of date base contacts that should be included in the template.
You print the templates, each containing the clients first and last name within the intro. If you’ve gotten sloppy with entering the format correctly, your client may get a letter where their name is not capitalized… putting the effectiveness of your marketing efforts at risk now that the client knows it’s an automated letter!
Dealing With Jr., Sr., and III Names
GoldMine automatically assumes the last word of the Contact field is the last name. This works out fine 98% of the time, when the last word is the contact’s last name. In the case of Jr., Sr. or III, GoldMine confuses this as the last name.
Since records are most commonly located using last name, having a bunch of Jr.s or Sr.s will not be helpful. To avoid this, type the entire name as you create the contact, including the suffix. Once the record is created and you’re returned to the main screen, manually edit the “Last” field to the contact’s actual last name.
So take your time, and create a repeatable formatting method as you create new contact records! You’ll love yourself for it as you begin to use GoldMine’s advanced field-based features.
