Is Outlook your CRM program? - DANGER
The Contenders
Outlook - The most widely used Personal Information Manager in the world.
GoldMine CRM - Program created in the early 90’s as a workgroup, shared, contact manager, unlike it’s early rival ACT! which was a personal (single user) contact manager. Has grown and evolved over the years to be an excellent Mid-Market Customer Information manager. About 1.5 million users.
General Features:
Outlook - Gives the user a vehicle to manage an address book, calendar, task list and communicate via e-mail. In an Exchange Server environment, some of this information can be shared with co-workers, most notably the public calendar is of value for scheduling group meetings. Public address book can also be shared, but typically each user maintains their own book of contacts. There is little collaboration of information. Remote access available in an Exchange environment allowing web access, e-mail, calendars and address book can be synced to other systems using Outlook or Entourage (Mac). Cost for stand alone $110 as part of MS Office around $450 for a new license.
Let’s take a closer look at each important aspect of a CIM (Customer Information Management) system and see how each application can support your company.
Sharing information - This is the absolute core of a CIM system.
Everyone who touches the customer needs to be able to quickly access all information relating to that customer. - GM allows all users both on network and remote to access and add to all customer information: Field data, pending activities, history of all activities and correspondence including e-mail, linked documents, projects, sales opportunities, notes, customer service issues. GM also includes a searchable Knowledge base, shared word and e-mail templates. Outlook provides shared address book, public calendar in an exchange environment only. GoldMine shares data to all users.
Everyone who touches the customer needs to be able to quickly access all information relating to that customer. - GM allows all users both on network and remote to access and add to all customer information: Field data, pending activities, history of all activities and correspondence including e-mail, linked documents, projects, sales opportunities, notes, customer service issues. GM also includes a searchable Knowledge base, shared word and e-mail templates. Outlook provides shared address book, public calendar in an exchange environment only. GoldMine shares data to all users.
Winner: GoldMine
Contact Management /Address Book - The most basic level of a CIM is access to complete customer information. Outlook provides basic rolodex information on a contact. The address book is a standalone. There is no linking of calendar, history or emails to contacts in the address book. Outlook has limitations on the number of custom fields available. Also custom fields are not sortable or searchable in Outlook.
GoldMine has a highly customizable user interface allowing unlimited custom field creation. All fields can be clicked on to search or sort or filter the data as needed. GoldMine is based on linking all activities to the related contact record. This builds a databank of all related information for the particular contact in one place.
Winner: GoldMine
Calendar - Outlook delivers a nice looking calendar. In a shared environment you can look at multiple calendars. You can also check schedules for meetings. Without Exchange this is not as easy. GoldMine offers multiple users on a single calendar, the ability to defien and show different types of activities on the calendar, i.e. Appointments on the calendar phone calls on the to do list, etc. Biggest difference is that activities in Outlook are not linked to the contact record, therefore no history is developed. GoldMine links pending and completed activities to each contact record to build history. This is also shared as part of the customer record.
Edge to GoldMine
Activity Management - Continuing the same concept as seen in the calendar section, Outlook offers a task list while GoldMine offers an Activity list view. It lists the same activities scheduled in the calendar but in a different view. This is more of a user preference for those that like working from a list. Again big difference is connection to contact in GM and creation of history when activities are completed.
Winner GoldMine
Sales Forecasting - GoldMine let’s user schedule a forecasted sale just like other activities. This let’s rep and manager build forecasts and track completed sales by seller. This is not available in Outlook.
Winner GoldMine
Opportunity Management - Full featuerd opp manager takes the forecasted sales concept and provides sales funnel, and a repository to track all aspects of a longer term sale. Outlook does not have this functionality at all.
Winner GoldMine
Sales Process - Not available in Outlook. GoldMine offers several ways to track and report on a sales process.
Winner GoldMine
Customer History - Outlook has notes on the address book record. GoldMine offers complete history of everything related to the company or contact record.
Winner GoldMine
Email Client - A very controversial point. Outlook is a very elegant email client, particularly when integrated with exchange. Excellent spell check, easy to send to multiple people, nice auto fill for entering email addresses. GoldMine’s client is not as elegant, but very functional. The two big pluses for GoldMine are, auto linking of all emails to the contacts history tab. That means no more managing folders. Just go to the contact record and look at history to find any incoming or outgoing email sent by any user. The other advantage is the ability to create templates that insert any info from the database into one or many emails. It’s easy to create a group of contacts with common interests and send personalized e-mails to each of them.
From a single user standpoint Outlook is the winner, but as a business tool and part of a CRM system, GoldMine is a clear winner. Toss up.
Targeted E-Mail Marketing Communications
GoldMine makes it easy to create an HTML email template with links to contact data. Create a filter on the fly, for example all customers in Illinois, and generate a personalized eamil to each customer. A history record is created and a follow up call can be automatically generated.
Project Management - Outlook has no project management capabilities. GoldMine has a fairly extensive component to plan and capture all info related to projects. Multiple users can collaborate and review progress on projects.
Winner GoldMine
Customer Service Issue Tracking - GoldMine has a complete customer service an aissue tracking system built in. Features include; ticket numbering, escalation system, built in messaging, issue become part of customer history, knowledge base to capture case related information. Outlook has not customer service capability.
Winner GoldMine
Data Mgt.-Search, Sort, & FIlter - GoldMine wins again with very powerful yet user friendly searching sorting and list building capabilities. Outlook has the ability to look up based upon a few fields. Not even a contest here. Most importantly, once you have the list of cotnacts you need you can do something with them in GoldMine, like schedule calls en-masse, send an e-mail template, send a letter, run a report, etc.
Document Management - GoldMine again! Create word or e-mail templates with fields right from the database. Easy to do very powerful marketing tool for large or small companies. Merge to one or thousands of recipients. Each message or letter is personalized and there is no long distribution list.
Reporting ... Outlook has no ability to report on anything. GoldMine offers built in reports on many topics; Contact information, calendar information, analysis, and envelopes and labels. In addition it is very easy to create filtered lists that you can export to excel word or the clipboard.
And even more additionally there are great 3rd party programs like MasterMine or Crystal Reports or SQL Reporting services that take information from your GoldMine database and let you run your business with it.
Winner GoldMine
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