How to use the different activity types in GoldMine to keep yourself organized

New and long-time GoldMine users may find the nine (9) different activity types a bit confusing…

Here’s a brief description and when to use each. I’ll break them down into the “Big 4” which you’ll probably use all the time and then “The Rest”.

The Big 4

Calls – Phone calls, not a “sales call” when you go visit someone, follow up phone calls, introductory phone calls, conference calls, etc.

Next Action – I use these almost as a “To Do” related to a prospect or customer such as writing up a quote, preparing for a demo, doing research or following up via email.

Appointment – Face to face meeting could be for sales, service, or an internal meeting.

Sale – Forecasted Sales are to help you develop and keep track of your sales pipeline up to date so you know what deals you have in your sales funnel.

The Rest

Literature Request – Seldom used portion of GoldMine that lets your delegate the task of sending our literature.

Other Action – Activities that can’t be categorized into one of the other categories.

Events – Multiple day activity such as sales conference or sales meeting. These don’t show up in the timed portion of your calendar in the Day and Week view so it can be easy to schedule over them.

To Do – A generic to do. These don’t have due dates associated with them so I generally prefer to use Next Actions for anything that’s time sensitive. Also, To Dos are not, by default, linked to a contact record.

GoldMine E-mail – An email sent to another GoldMine user via it’s internal email center. These won’t go do Outlook so unless you’re using GoldMine for your incoming and outgoing back you’ll be better off not using these as the message might not get read.

The GoldMine calendar will show a small icon indicating which activity type everything you’ve scheduled is!