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Wednesday, 07 January 2009
Contents
Contact Management Software
What is Contact Management Software?
Benfits of Contact Management Software
What CMS Solutions are available?
Off the Shelf Contact Management Software
CMS: Lotus Organiser
CMS: MicroSoft Outlook
CMS: ACT!
CMS: Maximizer
CMS: Goldmine
CMS: Filemaker Pro
CMS: MicroSoft Access
Bespoke CMS Solutions
Web-Based Contact Management Software Solutions
Portability/Synchronisation
Make the most of your data
Decide which data you will, and will not share
Data Protection Act
Content
Implementing Digital Signatures
Research
Consult
Plan
Act
Further Help

Contact Management Software

Goldmine

What is Goldmine?

  • Another widely-used contact management solution
  • Strong at supporting remote sales teams

Who is it designed for?

  • The more expensive version of Goldmine can grow to accommodate even the largest of businesses
  • Companies with medium intensity data management requirements - databases with up to 15,000 active customer records
  • Particularly good for companies where remote sales teams are supported

Pros and cons

  • Relatively simple to use
  • Training and IT support may be required
  • Supports the XML protocol, the common language of many business programs, so it is easy to import and export data from many other popular programs
  • Allows export of customer data, eg to a mailing house
  • Allows addition of prospects from external sources

Features

  • Works well with other systems
  • Has its own e-mail client built in, which has many of the features of better-known e-mail programs
  • Business Contact Manager, the basic version:
    • Suitable for up to c. 15,000 records where each record is an active customer file, containing contact details, an order history and other applicable information
    • Customer records can have flags added to them to remind the sales person to call at a particular time
    • templates can be customised for particular business applications including property management, financial and legal services
  • Goldmine Sales and Marketing, the advanced version:
    • Can handle 100s of 1,000s of records
    • Greater report functionality and flexibility
    • Tools to keep data clean and up-to-date:
      • Merge/Purge wizard for identifying and eliminating duplicate records
      • Global Replace wizard for making wholesale changes to the data
    • Simplified synchronisation for remote users
    • Greater integration with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook

Cost

  • Single-user version of Business Contact Manager - c. £165
  • Five-user version of Business Contact Manager - c. £695
  • 5-user version - c. £550
  • Goldmine Sales and Marketing - c. £395 per user
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