The day I discovered the power of GoldMine was the beginning of our business transformation.
PCDi never set out to become GoldMine resellers - we just wanted to solve our QOS problems.
At that time, several years ago, our main business was (and still is) supplying and supporting our own range of servers and PCs to small/medium local businesses, while providing a "part time" IT department for local companies that were too small to justify their own full time IT staff.
High quality and superb service were what our customers sought - and were what we offered. Yet our success was threatening to overtake our ability to provide the quality of product and service we promised.
We desperately needed a contact management or customer relationship management solution. Sales and marketing automation would be a welcome bonus, but lack of sales was not the biggest business pain at that time.
We investigated and tried many different products including,
- Bespoke Access application
- Telemagic (we are Sage dealers)
- ACT!, Maximizer etc.
- With over 600 applications to choose from there was no shortage of contenders - finding the right one was the problem.
I first encountered GoldMine at a Microsoft Partner Road Show when I wandered into a demonstration by Andy Voss. I left 45 minutes later feeling like I had had a vision - the answer to my prayer. In my hand I clutched a demo disk and a dealer application pack.
After playing with the demo for a few days, my first impressions were confirmed. This was the solution that PCDi were seeking. The GoldMine Reseller offer was the easiest and quickest way forward, so although I had no intention of adding another line to our product portfolio I signed on the dotted line and we said goodby to ACT! without a backward glance.
GoldMine was an immediate hit with our staff - within a few weeks our customers started to notice the improvement to our service. It was not long before they started asking what we had done and asking if we could work the same magic for them - we had become GoldMine dealers after all.
Moving smartly forward to the present day, about 35% of our business is now GoldMine related. We continue to provide our IT supply and support services and are daily finding new ways to enhance the customer experience using GoldMine.
One of our customers neatly summed up the difference that GoldMine had made to his experience as a PCDi client.
"It's nice not to have to play telephone tag with you to be sure of getting my message through. Whenever I call PCDi I can safely leave a message with anyone on your staff and know it will be actioned promptly and accurately."
How does the service your customers receive live up to that test?
If you are going to implement a GoldMine solution it makes sense to partner with a Reseller who really makes use of the product - all day, every day.