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| Posted: 31-10-2007 | Comments: 0 | Views: 7 | Rating: (53)

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Both Prophet and Goldmine build comprehensive contact/opportunity files that include key contact data, related notes and activities, so you can see at a glance the entire history about a particular opportunity and what else needs to be done to turn a contact into a sale - literally a "goldmine" of information when it comes to managing your sales leads. This capability that both Prophet and Goldmine provide is generally referred to as contact management or sales management (also known as contact managers or customer relationship management (CRM) applications).

Goldmine and Prophet use office productivity tools to simplify routine tasks that are common to most sales offices such tools as calendars, task lists, email and notes. You'll find however, as you read below, that Goldmine provides these tools in a very different way than Prophet does.

Goldmine and Prophet both link these productivity tools to the contact/opportunity files, so when you look up a contact or specific opportunity, you see all your notes about previous calls, related emails, documents, appointments, scheduled tasks, and more. You also see what the profit potential is, how likely you are to close the deal and estimated close dates.

In addition, Prophet and Goldmine offer a variety of pre-formatted and customizable sales management reports that include sales forecasts, pipeline activity and key opportunities, to name a few. These reports can be sorted by sales rep, region, product, customer, company, dollar value, anticipated close date, likelihood of closure, etc. They help you see where you are, where you're going and, most importantly, where the greatest opportunities lie, so you can focus your resources and activities on those with the highest profit potential.

To sum it up, both Prophet and Goldmine equip you with the information and organizational tools that a sales office needs to make the most of every business relationship and to turn those relationships into sales.

What are the key differences between Prophet and Goldmine?

The first and most important difference between Goldmine and Prophet is that, unlike Goldmine, Prophet works within Microsoft Outlook, the best-in-class office productivity program and the one chosen by more businesses than any other.

This means that Prophet uses your Outlook contacts, email, task manager, calendar and notes. With Prophet, you don't need to learn a new interface; you don't need to recreate records in your sales management application; and you don't need to synch up to Outlook to coordinate calendars or update Outlook contact files - as you do with gldmn.

Goldmine comes with its own set of productivity tools: Goldmine contact manager, Goldmine calendar, Goldmine task manager, Goldmine email client, etc.

If you are currently an Outlook user and plan to use Goldmine, you would either need to switch your entire office over from Outlook to Goldmine, recreating your contact files in gldmn. Alternatively, you could use both Outlook and Goldmine, but this means you would have redundant contact files in Outlook and Goldmine, redundant task lists, calendars and email systems. You would need to synchronize your Goldmine and Outlook files on a regular basis. You would need to learn the Goldmine interface and you would not be able to create contact or opportunity files from within Outlook. Goldmine is its own separate application.

The second key difference is related to the first. Goldmine is significantly more complex than Prophet.

Goldmine has more complicated to install, requiring more sophisticated IT support.

Goldmine is more challenging to learn, resulting in a longer ramp up time till you see results.

Goldmine is comprised of several modules that need to be purchased and installed separately, depending on the functions and type of hardware configuration you have.

Goldmine also offers some capabilities that other sales management applications do not, such as call center integration and lead-generation marketing campaigns, making it more functional, but also more complicated than you need, if what you want is a clean sales management application.

Finally, Prophet is the only contact management/sales management application that supports peer-to-peer data sharing, without going through a centralized server. Goldmine does not offer peer-to-peer data sharing. Goldmine supports a variety of server environments, which allow users to share data on a central database, but require additional hardware and software modules…adding to the complexity of the Goldmine application. Prophet also offers a server version, but unlike Goldmine, Prophet is able to add this function onto your existing hardware.

About Avidian Technologies:
Avidian Technologies is a software company specializing in creating software solutions for users of Outlook and Exchange. Prophet, developed by Avidian Technologies on the .NET platform, is the leading contact management and sales CRM software built in Outlook. The company is headquartered in Redmond, Washington. For more information, please visit http://www.avidian.com or call 1-800-860-5534.

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Article Tags: CRM Software, Sales Force Automation, Contact Management Software, Act Software, Contact Management System, Sales Management Software, Business Contact Manager

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Many of today's most successful large and small businesses have chosen Avidian's CRM Software as their sales management and contact management software.

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