If you’re new to GoldMine or an old-time user like me, there’s always something new to learn. This situation was brought to us by a customer recently and they needed a solution. It’s a common practice in many businesses to offer an incentive for referrals from customers. Have you come up with a good way to track them? We have!
Here’s the scenario. Your customer calls and says they have someone in mind who they think would be interested in your product or service. You would like to send that customer a letter thanking them for the referral and letting them know there will be a gift sent to them if the referred prospect actually closes. You then need to track the referral and when it closes, send the gift with a cover letter.
Following these steps, we can record the referral in Goldmine and update it:
- Go to the Customer record that gave you the referral.
- Click on the Referral tab to bring that tab into focus.
- Right click in the body of the tab and choose New
- The Contact Search center appears. Use this box to search for the referred Prospect and click Select.
- The Referral Link tab is exposed. Type in a value in both Reference fields or select from the drop down list provided describing what the referral was for. Also, use the notes for any additional information.
- On this same screen, there are 2 other tabs located across the top. Click on the Status tab to expose it. Here Goldmine gives you the ability to track the progress of the referral by clicking the box indicating where they are in the referral process as determined by your best practices.
- Click OK to record the Referral. It will look like this in GoldMine’s Referral Tab.
From this point, the end user will right click and edit the referral and use the value chosen in the Status tab to indicate where they are in the sales process. When the sale is completed, the box for ‘Done’ is checked in the Status tab and the gift is sent.
That’s all well and good you say. But how do I get to that data so I can send the letter, follow the progress and update them so the next letter can print when it does close? We have designed a Crystal Report to track the progress based on the date the referral was input into GoldMine. Here’s a sample:
In this report, the grid at the right indicates where they are in the referral process. The next Crystal Report also uses a date range to select which letters to print based on the date the Referral was input. Also, you’ll notice the letter is personally addressed with the Dear field used in the salutation. Further in, the referred Prospect’s company name is in the first paragraph.
The final letter is similarly laid out, but the selection depends on the ‘Done’ value being checked and the data range keys off of the Last Updated date of the Referral.
I hope that gives you a glimpse of some of the powerful, behind-the-scenes ways of using the GoldMine you’ve been using all along. If you’re not sure it can be done, give us a call and ask how we would solve your problem!
