I have installed a great free add-in for Outlook which I absolutely love. It is called Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards). One aspect of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is knowing as much about your customers and prospects as possible. Xobni brings in public information from social networking sites which you can utilize in your selling activities. The add-in places a sidebar on the right hand side of outlook. When you select an email, it takes the email address and name of the sender and attempts to find their LinkedIn and Facebook pages. It will bring in the sender's picture from those sites if available along with their company, title and phone number information it finds. From the sidebar you can click a link to add them as a connection in LinkedIn or add them as a friend on Facebook.
Along with bringing in social networking information, Xobni provides a pane showing information about your email history with this contact. It shows recent conversations with the sender and any files you've exchanged with them. It also provides statistical information which includes a histogram showing by hour of day how many emails you send/receive to this contact and where they are ranked in your overall email volume.
Some of the benefits I've found with Xobni have been:
- Getting a prospect's job title when their email didn't include it. This helps you get an idea if the person you are dealing with is a decision maker.
- If I want to see a file I sent to a contact a month ago in order to respond to a new email, I can open it directly from the Xobni pane without having to search my emails.
- It aggregates your emails by conversation (emails with the same subject)
- I've been able to tell if I am already LinkedIn to a contact and click a button to send them an invite if I'm not.
- Via the Facebook information, I've able to find out some of my customer's like and dislikes. It's amazing how much information people have out there for all to see.
- Knowing what someone looks like before you meet with them
There are a few other features I haven't mentioned, but there are other reviews on the net you can read. You can download the add-in at http://www.xobni.com. The only problems I've found with it have been that it's a little bit of a resource drain and I'll sometimes get an error message from LinkedIn when I try to use the Xobni LinkedIn "Add" button. When this happens I can just search for the user from within LinkedIn and add them to my network that way.
If you live in Outlook and especially if you are in sales, I believe you will find this a valuable tool .
--Joey Carabetta