One of the things that’s important to do with your CRM system from time-to-time, is to ensure your database is “clean”. What do I mean by that? Well as you and the other users of your system enter data, modify data, and delete data, your database of customers, prospects, etc. can become “dirty” or inconsistent. Some examples of inconsistent or “dirty” data as it relates to your GoldMine system are the following:
Rule 1. For every Primary Contact (Contact1 database table) there should be exactly 1 Custom Fields entry (Contact2 database table).
- Duplicated Contact2 entries – These are where there are more then 1 entry in the Contact2 database table with the same Accountno
- Orphaned Contact2 entries – These are entries in the Contact2 database table where the Accountno is not associated with any Contact1 database entry.
- Missing Contact2 entries – These are Primary Contact records (Contact1) that don’t have a matching Contact2 database entry.
For the above scenarios there are SQL Queries that can be run to analyze your database and “clean-up” the database to remove these inconsistencies.
Another scenario I see quite often are contact records that have malformed email addresses. These are records where there is a value entered for the email address, but its not a valid email address. Some examples of what I am referring to are the following:
- Email address is missing the @ symbol
- Email address contains a ,com or ,net instead of .com or .net, etc.
- Email address is missing the .com, .net, etc. etc.
- Email address contains < > around the email address
- Email address entered is actually a website address and not an email address
- Email address entered is actually a phone number and not an email address.
- Email address is “NA” or “No Email” or some other value
There are many other examples, but the point is that malformed emails can lead to many issues with sending emails in GoldMine. The only value that should be entered into the email address in GoldMine is the actual email address and nothing else. There is a SQL Query that can be run against the entire database to show which contact records have “Malformed Emails”, once the list is generated a GoldMine user has to go through each contact record and either remove or update/clean-up the email address depending the the scenario as outlined above.
Duplicated contact records are records in GoldMine that exist more than once. Finding or identifying duplicated contact records can be both easy and hard depending on what information is duplicated. It’s also important to note that some companies prefer/intend to have duplicated records. GoldMine does have a Merge/Purge “De-Duplication” Wizard which allows you to specify the criteria for determining what a duplicated contact record is, and then you can scan the entire database or just a group/filtered set of contacts to merge/combine the duplicated records. If using this wizard, its important to ensure you have a good recent database backup.
If you are interested in doing some “Spring Cleaning” of your GoldMine database, please contact First Direct Corp for assistance at (800) 935-4386.
