I am sharing my experiences with the SocialCRM tool Xeesm over the course of the next few months. I have made a strategic decision to use a Social CRM tool instead of a contact management tool like ACT! (which I actually deleted from my computer). Perhaps my experience as a BETA tester and a new Business Partner with the Xeesm product will be helpful to other innovative sales professional looking for tools that help with their social business relationships.
This week has been full of success and failures with data entry. In my over zealous attempts to get all my contacts as quickly into Xeesm, I relearned several lessons my mother taught me that clearly apply to getting started with Xeesm Edge.
Patience is a virtue
Although I could enter contacts one at a time into Xeesm, doing that for over 6,000 contacts seemed monumental. I wanted to use the upload feature so I didn’t have to do as much work. In my efforts to quickly get all of my contacts in as quickly as possible, I exported my Gmail contacts and uploaded them into the import tool.
First I was impatient and hit the button twice for submit. Instead of uploading 6,000 contacts, I duplicated them and had 12,000. Unlike Google Gmail contacts or Outlook, there is no “you have duplicates” so you have to delete things. Or start over.
My data was not entirely accurate before I started. I should have at least sorted for those with email addresses and only uploaded those. The data, once you get it into the Contact Manager, is somewhat cumbersome. It would be much easier to manipulate, delete, correct, etc. in a spreadsheet than online.
Tip 1: Export your contacts into a spread sheet prior to uploading into Xeesm. Only upload those contacts associated with an email address, eliminate duplicates, and edit out extraneous titles and certification abbreviations attached to the contact name.
Something worth doing is worth doing right.
If you have the business version of Xeesm you have the ability to setup Categories and Flights (Groups) of contacts prior to uploading. This is something worth doing before you just upload contacts. Doing a little strategic thinking about how to group contacts, partners, prospects, and clients will be important to spend less time identifying them once in Xeesm.
The categories I set up were: professional association contacts (broken down by group name), clients, partners, teams, manufacturing prospects, professional service firm prospects, Wisconsin prospects, national prospects, Social Media Academy Alumni, Integrated Alliances Certified Trainers, and Xeesm Business Partners. The flights I created were more granular and focused on my short and midterm business efforts.
Tip 2: By having the categories and flights created, I can now add a column in the spread sheet prior to uploading the contacts. Now they will go directly into the flight and the category that is appropriate. Definitely a time saver.
Have you created your Xeesm yet? If you are one of my contacts on LinkedIn, search and find your profile, claim it, and add your social links.
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