If you’re a sales manager who’s constantly drilling home the importance of follow-up, let GoldMine notify your salespeople, and you if you’d like, if they are failing to follow-up on new leads. GoldMine Automated Processes are useful mechanisms for this.
All automated processes start out with planning.
■To begin with, determine the criteria you believe constitute a “forgotten lead.” It may be a set of factors.
■For example: Contact Type = Prospect, and there is no scheduled call back (Contact2->callbackon is empty), and there is no scheduled next action (Contact2-nextaction is empty).
■Prepare the filter that you will use as the “dBase expression,” which will serve as the “trigger” for an “event.”
■Then determine what action you want your automated processes to perform.
For example, you may wish it to schedule a message to the appropriate person.
In order for this process to notify the appropriate salesperson, there will have to be a field that contains the user login name for the salesperson that is responsible for this prospect. (Tip: Set-up a lookup.ini expression to auto-fill a field with the sales rep login.)
To make sure that the process is applied to prospect records, see to it that this expression is attached to all “prospect” records, also using a lookup.ini expression. And, since follow-up is ongoing, design the properties of your automated process to “restart each time the process ends.” It can be removed using a preemptive event that sees the record is no longer a prospect. Also, to avoid creating a repeating loop in your automated process, which schedules duplicate messages, make sure there is a track(s) that deals with those records that already have pending messages.
Word to the wise – always test automated processes before setting them loose!
