Contact Management Software For Outlook
Written by Jan Visser on January 21, 2008. Leave a Comment on this Post.
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Previously, we summed up 10 plugins that make Outlook more suitable as a sales tool. Here’s an idea on how you can get more out of those valuable contacts that hide in your inbox.
Xobni Insight - contact management software for Outlook - offers a powerful way to automatically organize emails and contacts and we’ve arranged for you to be able to test-drive the system. More details at the bottom of this post.
We recommend that if you’re a frequent Outlook user, you take a closer look at Xobni.
For one, it installs a sidebar inside of Outlook which displays a profile for each of the people with whom you exchanged emails before - regardless of whether you ever added them as an Outlook contact. Outlook’s built-in contact manager sucks - so this will save you some time right off the bat.
It shows useful information about the person, including automatically extracted phone numbers from signatures and emails, a list of shared attachments between you and your contact and a threaded display of previous emails.
Very cool when you’re on the phone with a prospect and need to take a quick look at the email exchange you had with him last week.
Secondly, with Xobni you can now search through email a lot faster and more efficiently than you ever could before. Xobni offers speed and accuracy that is a night and day different from what Outlook offers our of the box.
Another nice feature of Xobni is that it really simplifies scheduling Outlook meetings. When you’re looking at someone’s Xobni profile and click the “schedule time” link, a new email message opens - pre-composed with your availability. You can modify the suggestions or add your own, but it saves you the time of checking your calendar every time you need to schedule a meeting.
If you’re on Outlook and full blown contact management software is overkill, this may be an interesting alternative.
Xobni is not officially available yet - but we have arranged that 25 SalesTeamTools readers can already download Xobni for free. Simply enter code “salesteamtools” on the download page.
I have been part of the beta program since Xobni was first released and I have found it to be an invaluable tool. The search function is much better than the inbuilt one in Outlook. This is one of the best “plugins” I have seen since “Lookout” which was killed off by Microsoft when they bought it
is it an improvement over Outlook Business Contact Manager?
JD, bit of a different starting point here. Business Contact Manager is a full-blown contact manager, Xobni simply makes it easier to work with email contacts. I think I can think of situations where both would come in handy.
I’d say Xobni is typically great for people that really don’t need a fullsize contact manager with opportunity tracking. Xobni is much less formal and requires less of a commitment - but it obviously also offers less functionality than a full-blown contact manager does. It doesn’t store any contact information for you, it simply makes it much easier to work with the information that’s buried in your inbox somewhere. In that sense, it’s more of a plugin (albeit a very cool one) than a complete application.