Well, we've done it: we've started using Goldmine after just a scant period of pilot testing. I figured that even bare-bones, Goldmine is better than what we were using. So far, that's been a good call. It does leave me with many things to do yet, like populating fields and implementing features. If I had too many features ready, I think they would have been overwhelmed (which means I would have been overwhelmed with questions).
The biggest learning curve has been with email. Part of what I liked about Goldmine is the ability to see emails sent or received by others to customers, which makes it easy to cover for each other, which we do a lot. To do this, Goldmine needs to become a primary email tool. So we are letting people wean themselves off of Outlook. The feature people seem to miss the most is the 'auto-fill' of addresses. The ability to link emails to contacts is great, but it makes it a more complex tool, worthy of its own training class, I think.
How am I weaning off of Outlook?
- Sending all customer correspondence from Goldmine is an easy way to start.
- You can view your Outlook email from within Goldmine, and then just drag relevant emails to the Goldmine Inbox for linking to a contact. I can't do this because my Outlook inbox has over 7000 emails, bogging down Goldmine.
- I've set my Outlook email to leave messages on the server for one day. If I get an email from a contact, I can then check email from within Goldmine (manual check, not auto check) and import the message by dragging to the Goldmine Inbox. Goldmine actually shows you what email is on the server and doesn't upload it until you've dragged it to the Inbox. I've been emptying my deleted items folder in Outlook regularly, which also removes those items (spam) from the server (this is an Outlook setting) to keep Goldmine less crowded.
I think I may stay in this configuration for a while, as I still see to many advantages to having Outlook handle general correspondence.
