The administration is still wiping egg off its face after the social-media fueled Shirley Sherrod debacle. Bureaucrats demonstrated they’re human—whipped into a frenzy by unsubstantiated information to achieve a malevolent goal. But despite the government’s textbook missteps, there is growing sophistication in the government about social media, and more agencies are adopting the tools—something many Federal employees might not know.

Those were insights that John Kagia, Research Manager at Market Connections, Inc. shared this week at a conference I attended, Social Media in the Federal Community. Kagia’s 2010 survey of 321 Federal employees revealed that 23% didn’t know if their organization or agency used online social media. But when asked about the expected agency use of online social media in the next 12 to 18 months, two-thirds of respondents predicted an increase. The top social media tools agencies reported using today are non-government specific social networks (26%), Wikis (23%), content aggregators (22%), and online video (21%). Further down the list were agency blogs, podcasts, and monitoring/commenting on blogs. The top open-source social network for government? Hint: It’s not Facebook.  LinkedIn was the top choice.

It wouldn’t be government without the red tape. Impediments to social media adoption in the government mirror the private sector. According to the survey, 73% of respondents cited security concerns, 62% cited legal/governance issues, and 61% cited privacy concerns with open networks. Other adoption challenges reflected concerns frequently mentioned in the commercial world. “Aligning a social media strategy to the organization’s overall objectives” and “measuring ROI and developing performance metrics” were mentioned by 46% and 40%, respectively. Curiously, “inability to control the message” (31%) resided near the bottom of the government list—after “lack of resources to maintain social media presence” (34%) and “identifying which channels to invest in” (33%).

Predictably, Federal contractors have joined the social media dance, but it’s hard to know whether it’s tango or spin dancing. Kaiga’s survey revealed that among contractors, adoption of online social media tools is also growing, but the goals are different from the government agencies they serve. Topping the list for purposes of contractor use of social media: Customer engagement and communication (59%), marketing campaigns (59%), generating leads (48%), and recruiting/retaining employees (42%). Near the bottom of the list was “product development” (14%).

Bev Godwin, Director of New Media and Citizen Engagement at the General Services Administration, and a panelist at the conference, explained some of the agency/contractor disparity. In a related Federal ComputerWeek article, she said “nearly all federal agencies are on the first level (of social media adoption), using social media for promotion and marketing, and many agencies are on the second level, using it for public participation and discussion. She added that only a few agencies are operating at the third level, which involves using social media tools for co-creation and collaboration.” For contractors, Wikis represented the greatest current and future use of social media. Seventy-two percent of contractors use them now, and 28% plan to use them in the next twelve months. Non-government specific social networks (39%/10%), Corporate Blogs (25%/17%), Monitoring/commenting on blogs (28%/11%), and Government-specific social networks (GovLoop) (20%/15%), followed on the list.

Odd bedfellows, social media and government. Imagine! The authors or Sarbanes-Oxley and the Patriot Act using freewheeling, open-source tools like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Fittingly, The Washington Post reported this week (GSA Could Impose Rules for Facebook, July 27, 2010), “the General Services Administration is attempting to become the first civilian federal agency to codify how workers should behave on Facebook and Twitter . . .” According to the article, “Tim O’Reilly, a social media expert and leading advocate for offering more government services online, said the public sector has struggled with adapting to new technologies for years. He recalled trying to convince lawmakers in the 1990’s that they needed to use e-mail to reach constituents. ‘Some listened, others didn’t, and the ones who didn’t listen lost . . . There are organizations resistant to using social media or any of these new technologies, and they’re going to be less effective from the people who do, and they’re going to lose.’”

Although the Market Connections survey identified adoption challenges, the findings reflected more realism than the phobia that O’Reilly described. Beyond examining concerns about social media use, policies, accepted tools, government-compliant licensing agreements, and who “owns” social media function within agencies, the Market Connections study asked where government social media investments are headed and what are the adoption rates. Sounds like work in progress.

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Asking your customers to share new ideas and letting all customers vote is one of the most powerful customer engagement methods. You get the most direct Ranked Feedback and create a sense of ownership for your customer base.

Xeesm/Compete is now starting Beta tests.

You create your own competition, contest or voting initiative and ask your contacts to provide suggestions or vote on already existing suggestions. For instance:

The Agile-500 Contest
This is our first project using Xeesm/Compete!
1) We created the contest and provided some description what the contest is about.
2) We invite people to provide suggestions. In this case companies they feel should be an Agile-500 company list
3) Everybody can make suggestions and vote for their own and for other suggestions.

We will see the number of votes to determine the most agile companies in accordance to the customers voice.

You can do your very own contest, just create one.

1) Click on create a competition and explain what this is about
2) Invite all your contacts to provide suggestions
3) Everybody can vote on suggestions from everybody

Now – This is still in beta. Two things we are still completing:
1) To limit the number of votes a user may have (20)
2) The embed code generator, so you can add the contest page to your own website

Of course a user has to be logged in or register in order to vote.
Multiple votes on the same suggestion is not possible.

Some examples you may consider for your business
* Ask your customers about webinar topics they may be interested in and let them vote
* Ask your customers what kind of service offerings they’d be most interested in and let all customers vote
* Ask your partners what training they are most interested in and let them vote
* Ask your customers about product features and let all vote
* Ask your partners for programs they like to see and let them all vote
* Ask your customers what they think need to be added to your service portfolio and let them all vote
* Ask about product documentation…
* Ask about ease of doing business with you…
* Ask them to share their biggest concerns…

* You can ask pretty much anything and you will get the most direct ranked feedback ever. It’s not only an opinion from an individual – but actually ranked by your ecosystem based on their collective interest. Whether this is your customer base, your partners, vendors, consultants, your media connections or your own team.

Use Xeesm/Compete! for a technology contest, an idea competition, feature requests, event venues, leadership, partnership or many other topics to gain ranked feedback – let your audience compete for what’s important to them.

How do you get onto the Beta?
You either install Compete! from the Xeesm Apps world or contact us and we are helping you to get there.

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Certain automotive products use risk disclosures strategically in fine print:
“Do not attempt. Really. Do not do this. Stunts performed at sanctioned events. Specially equipped rally vehicle. Professional driver. Closed course. Obey all traffic laws, always drive safely and wear your seatbelt.” Right! Where can I get one to test drive? Such statements are motivating when the target buyer is male, 18 to 29 years old.

In a different, far away sales universe, the B2B salesperson sells his or her product to an older, equally risk-aware buyer, but without testosterone’s helpful property of making risk seem wildly appealing. B2B buyers avoid stupid risks. But salespeople frequently toss all risks into the same negative bucket, and choose not to discuss them. Finding risk transparency in B2B sales is about as common as finding a teenager without a PDA.

It’s easy to say you’re transparent, but harder to be transparent. Here’s a personal example for how not to do it: One prospect I worked with had installed—and de-installed—two mid-range ERP systems in four years. I was there because the company was preparing to yank #3 as well. As vendor-victim #4, the company’s CEO told me point blank, “we need you to tell us everything that could go wrong with your solution.” “What don’t you already know?” was the unsaid reply that flashed into my mind. But even that sarcastic response would have been better than the feeble one I offered. I was totally unprepared for the conversation he wanted.

Why? Risk discussions weren’t part of my sales tool kit. My kit had the expected implements: Problem/Solution/Benefit statements, features and capabilities collateral, key differentiators, and a smidgen of Return on Investment fluff. No risk insights adding weight to the bag. Salespeople are rewarded for mowing down concerns about their own products, and for raising them about competitors.

Would a street-smart salesperson disclose that just yesterday, his company’s chief software architect took an unannounced sabbatical to go mountain biking in Peru with his girlfriend? Or that his CEO has discussed selling the company in the next 12 months? Stuff happens, and it’s classic FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt) material. When our sources are credible, we spread this about the other guys, never about ourselves.

How transparent a salesperson should be about such sensitive matters tiptoes into the shadow of the Ethical Elephant, and I’ll stick to the periphery. Anyway, there’s a more pragmatic side to this discussion. Prospects aren’t deer in sales headlights. Not anymore. They’re fully capable of learning about risks. But as many salespeople know from we’re-putting-this-on-the-back-burner-for-now conversations, prospects are also prone to the stasis of no-decision purgatory. Could risk confusion be one cause? Could salespeople be more valuable by intelligently guiding buyers to recognize and consider the risks that change creates—even if it means discussing their own?

Author Sharon Drew Morgen believes they can. In her book, Dirty Little Secrets: Why Buyers Can’t Buy and Sellers Can’t Sell, and What You can Do About It! she wrote, “Until buyers understand, and know how to mitigate, the risks that a new solution will bring to their culture, they will do nothing.”

Risk matters. If it didn’t, the shortest closing sales pitch, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” could not have helped sell tons of IBM iron and services against arguably superior technology. But the sword cuts both ways. One thing I’ve learned: when I haven’t identified my risks, they will be identified for me—never a good thing. Too much perceived risk and my opportunity is toast. Too little, and I might win—but when the first glitch occurs, my prospect will never forget how I over-promised and under-delivered.

Back to “Proving the ROI.” Accounting Professor Bob Kemp told me this year that business decision makers ask three questions about value: what do I get, when do I get it, and how certain are the answers to the first two questions? Déjà vu. That’s what the CEO wanted to know. And because his company was a candidate for the Guinness Record for Most Scrapped ERP Systems, he was screaming for help. But without a clue about my own assumptions and without understanding the CEO’s risks, I was only slightly more useful to his decision process than a Ouija board.

Which risks did he need to learn? Ideally, the causes for the failures of his first three ERP systems. But most salespeople don’t have the luxury of performing detailed project retrospectives. A general rule of thumb: any risk that has high likelihood and high impact on a financial claim, estimated performance improvement, or outcome is a candidate for discussion.

Had Steve McConnell’s 660-page book, Rapid Development, been available at the time, I would have presented this adapted list of project risks:

Feature creep: escalating the project by adding new feature requests

Gold-plating: insisting on the “latest and greatest” technology, instead of “good enough.”

Software defects, interoperability problems, and operating system instability

Schedules developed without factoring constraints

Inadequate software design and poor usability

“Silver-bullet” syndrome: expecting software or technology will solve problems they’re not intended to solve

Weak personnel: not having the right talent in the job at the right time

Communication problems and interpersonal friction between developers and customers.

You’ve probably already recognized the same risks can occur for customers and vendors. But discussing these risks would have provided me the opportunity to describe how my company managed them.

How much better would my meeting have been had I brought these risks to the forefront? How much more effectively would my prospect have been able to make calculations about financial return and estimate time to value? How much more trust could I have fostered in the buying experience? Much. For all three questions.

Oh—the outcome of my sales call? Despite fumbling the CEO’s question, I won the order. After three failed vendors, he was running out of alternatives. Best of all, my software ran on IBM.

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Oil slicks, mine explosions, lost sales opportunities . . .

Risks?  What risks? Woulda, coulda, shoulda! By now we know that engineering shortcuts and bad assumptions come home, biting executives in the backside. Serves them right! Apologies fly. If only the sickening results were confined to the perpetrators. But they never are. Ask a BP shareholder, coal miner spouse, or anyone whose business depends on the unperturbed ecology of the ocean. And images of oil-soaked waterfowl further remind us that risks aren’t only manifest in financial statements.

Thanks lately to BP, risky business practices have bubbled to the top of discussions. That’s healthy for sales executives, because selling strategy is all about risk—and how to manage it. But like BP executives, many sales executives aren’t ready to face it. Who wants to be branded a naysayer? “We want to know how we are going to make our revenue target—not how we’re going to miss it!” An optimistic demand that ignores one of the few certainties in sales: not every prospect becomes a customer.

In February, 2010, Outside Technologies, Inc. conducted the 2010 Sales Risk Survey in partnership with CustomerThink. Over 100 salespeople and executives responded. How they’re coping with risk might reflect how a broader group of vendors see the road ahead:

• Greater uncertainty has a direct financial cost. Compared to last year, sales pipelines and sales cycle times are increasing. Fifty-two percent said that sales pipelines increased relative to last year, ballooning to an average of three times revenue target. Only 23% said their sales cycle times were trending shorter.

• The poor economy is perceived as the greatest risk, with approximately 25% of respondents identifying it as #1, and almost half placing it among the top three risks. “Challenges from competitive forces and new offerings,” “inability to establish relationships with decision makers” and “major changes in buyer preferences and needs” also made the top three, with the latter two tied for third.

• The risk of “no decision” remains formidable. Forty-four percent named “prospect delayed purchase indefinitely or did not make a decision” as the top reason for lost sales opportunities, followed by “price was high relative to competitors” (38%), and “competitor did a better job in marketing and sales” (35%).

• Erosion of “sales control” brings new risks. While the majority of respondents (70%) agreed with the statement “when we lose sales opportunities, we know the reasons why,” a surprising 53% indicated that their companies have [i]less influence[/i] over purchasing decisions than ever before.

• Even though risks are known, many aren’t managed. Over 63% of respondents agreed “we know the greatest selling risks we face today,” but 43% felt that unexpected situations played a role in lost sales opportunities.

• Most are not preoccupied with having cutting-edge products or services in the sales bag. Less than 20% agreed with the statement “our customers only buy products with the latest features or technology.”

• We might not like what’s happening in Washington, but it won’t impact sales strategies. Less than one third agreed that pending legislation could substantially change their marketing and sales tactics.

• Companies cannot afford to lose their top sales producers. Retention of top sales talent was identified as a vulnerability by over 45%, while almost 25% felt their salespeople “lack the basic skills to compete in our markets.”

• Social media plays a role in communications risk. While nearly 60% felt their salespeople were skilled at communicating key value propositions, a whopping 57% percent disagreed that their companies were “effective at using social media for communicating with our prospects and customers.”

• Supporting technologies are not as vital as sales automation vendors would like us to believe. Nearly 72% were neutral or agreed with “if we were suddenly unable to use our sales/CRM applications, it would not adversely impact our sales operations.”

By nature, salespeople are optimists. But the collective observations of the sales executives who took this survey reflect a nuanced view of how people view the economic road ahead. We can infer emerging strategies and tactics based on the opportunities people see and the risks they want to avoid. In upcoming posts, I’ll share the external forces that contribute to selling risks, the greatest risks that executives see over the next 12 months, and how sales organizations are coping with them.

Further reading: Sales Risk Survey Executive Summary (free to CustomerThink registered members

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My tire dealer (Western Tire) and my local car dealer are using social media in an innovative way – different from what people may think and very successful.

First what they didn’t do:
- No fan page
- No online community
- They have both no blog or any major “presence”

Now what they do:
- The majority of their team mates have an account in Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace
- They asked their clients if they are in the social web and if they may connect. In order to make it easy for all parties to exchange the sites and networks they asked them to share their Xeesm (a little free tool to keep all your social sites).

- The car dealer sales people start in the morning and visit all the clients they have so far and visit their profiles to know what is going on in their client’s lives. Some chat about vacation photos or whatever is appropriate. They do that until a client enters the store and then often get back to their laptop and again meet clients in the social web. It shifts the “image” of the ugly car dealer sales guy to a much more caring person. They use our Social CRM system to visit on average 50 contacts a day. With 4 sales people that is about 4,000 customer touch points a month. Is the social car dealer a new chance for the car dealer guild? This one certainly is.

- The Tire dealer is different as they have high noon early in the morning. Once the daily dose of tire repairs is in, they start to connect with clients like the car dealer above. The tire dealer is now thinking about renting an old airfield to let customers on it and “burn their tires” literally. Simply because they found that a lot of their customers are 19 year olds who secretly burn tires on the street and share their photos on Facebook. But only if you care about your customer you know what they actually do – once in a while ;). The guys in that tire shop are very different. The live in their cell phone and push us hard to change the app to make it better work for them. There is only one computer in the shop.

Now this started a few month ago when one of my tires blew up and we chatted about our respective business. The next step now is building a fan page – but with a specific theme, content and purpose – not to just have one.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

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Consider yourself warned – this is not the way you typically apply for a job – but it’ll be a fun ride!

Xeesm is making great progress and is at a stage where we want to expand. We grew from 1,000 users in January to 30,000 in March and over 80,000 in June.

We are hiring agile people who can help grow our customer base even further. Check out our Jobs Page, learn about our Company Culture, and please review our (very unique) Hiring Process (don’t send us resumes).

Xeesm is not your typical company. Already in the hiring process you will learn that you are going to engage with a different beast. Because: selected customers and business partners will be part of the hiring process. yes, we live and breath social media and why should we be different when we expand our team. You will want to know what it is like working with us, our partners and customers and we’d love to get to know you but only in an “interview” but in the way you connect with us and our world. Today we are looking for a

Customer Engagement Manager

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The level of confusion around technology and technology definitions is increasing. The Social Media Academy together with Xeesm worked on a way to resolve confusion and help explain the major pillars of the Social Technology Cloud.

Social Networks
Social Networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Xing and many others serve a variety of purpose in business as well as private lives. They become instrumental in an engagement to create a better customer experience as it allows to meet and to listen to customers where they are. However Social Networks are not exclusive to sales and marketing teams to connect with clients.

Online Communities
While Online Communities had some ups and downs in the past, they will become a strategic play in a companies customer engagement strategy. All businesses will very soon want to provide a dedicated platform for their customers to meet and converse online – way above and beyond the classic support communities. While market leaders including Lithium, Jive and Ning will need to improve their community offering to serve a broader customer spectrum including SMB companies, online communities are an integrated part of a social business engagement.

Social Media Monitoring
A whole different type of solutions are Social Media Monitoring products. While most started out to identify sentiments in the market and learn what customers saying about their brand, Social Media Monitoring became a strategic solution in lead generation and opportunity identification. Social Media Monitoring tools help feed CRM and Social CRM systems and continue to be paramount to monitor brand attitude and brand value. Leading brands include Alterian/Techrigy, Scoutlabs (Lithium), Radian6 or Sysomos and many others. New applications in the SMM field will include influencer identification, business partner monitoring and other more granulate ways to better understand the needs of a given ecosystem.

Social CRM / Social Relationship Management
SRM and SCRM systems are again different beasts. They are built to help teams actively engage with customers, prospects and partners as well as other market constituencies. Sales Teams, Marketing Teams, Product Managers, Service Teams don’t ‘live’ in the SRM or SCRM tool but use it to quickly reach to their contacts and focus on specific objectives or goals while still socializing. SCRM and SRM tools provide the bridge between the external social web and internal systems. While a customer may never have direct access to an ERP or CRM system, they should have access to a Social CRM system. And like the traditional CRM systems also SCRM systems need to have functionality such as Forecasting, Opportunity Management and provide some work flow guidance to the sales, marketing or support teams. Market leader Xeesm.com and young companies like SocioToco or Gist try to enter this market with dedicated solutions to support business teams in their challenge to create a better customer experience.

Social CRM is a solution that supports a “Business Strategy” (not a social crm strategy) that most likely is set to create a better customer experience measured by increased advocacy for brand, products and services. Social CRM needs to interface with Social Networks, Social Media Monitoring, Branded or non branded online communities on the outside and traditional IT on the inside. Only if the actual customer has access to that Social CRM system, the attribute ‘Social’ is appropriate.

Tools
In addition to the four major pillars of the Social Technology Cloud there is a large offering of tools. Currently more than 5,000 tools support the above core systems and many of the core systems establish themselves as platforms to support and host those tools.

An industry in the making
The Social Technology Industry will be a Billion Dollar industry by end of this year. While the majority of the revenue is generated through advertising and sponsorships, many of the services and tools for professional usage is sold as subscriptions or consulting services and trainings.

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Several cool updates on Xeesm!
- New Dashboard for none subscription users
- Report on who is following you in Xeesm
- Updates on XNotes
- Enhancements on Flights with “Space Dominance Report”

1) See your followers / favorites

On the xeesm homepage you see now clickable links to the respective statistics.

One is the people who added you as a contact / favorite.

Click on the number of people you are favorited by and you see a list of people that added you as a contact. You can add them to your “Social Address Book” by simply clicking the add button. If you have an active Flight! open, you can add them to the active Flight

(this feature is currently only available to Business Edition Users)

2) Major Enhancements On XNotes

XNotes have now much more details and clickable references. You see them in the Xeesm Dashboard page. References include the Flight! you contacted a person from or the Opportunity in Edge! you worked on.

If you click on a person from within Edge! or Flights! you see the notes that you did from other Flights! or just in general. That way you now have a full view of all the activities with the respective person and the corresponding reference. For instance if you made a note in a Flight and you visit the person later on in Edge! you can see that note and better track other activities.

The other enhancement we made is that we record a visit to a persons site in XNotes as well. That way you don’t have to type like “left a note on LinkedIn”, instead we capture the visit and you’ll see how long ago and in what context.

3) Major enhancements on Flights!

We also did quite some work on Flights! We talked about the “Template Builder” before.

Flight Goals:

We now added an additional field where you can define a “Goal” of any Flight. This is in particular important when you share flights with others. A goal may be “Win 20 prospects” or “Get feedback from 15 top customers” or “Identify 3 top candidates for a sales search etc.

The Goal of a Flight! is copied over to a new flight and also part of the template maker.

NEW: Space Dominance of a Flight:

We now report the space dominace of a Flight. This is a simple yet very strategic report. You see where most of the flight members are and may direct your engagement towards ‘where your customers are’. It shows you the top ten sites where your flight members are.

You may see a number bigger than the members. That is if several members have multiple presences on the same network.

4) Social Finder Update

We updated SocialFinder so it adds photos to a profile if it can find a photo and no photo exists in Xeesm. In the first version Social Finder “updated” social sites if it found a record and another record already existed. We removed the ‘update’ and always ADD a new record if the site URL doesn’t exist.

Social Finder Success Rate

After some first reviews, we’d like to provide some initial feedback:

If you know the persons personal email address the success rate is typically above 80% in the US and around 60+% outside the US. In some areas however it may be rather low.

If you use SocialFinder with a list of webinar attendees you may find the success rate below 20% because often times users provide an email address they only use for registrations but not for their social presence.

Face lifting

We did some minor changes like a bit larger input fields and replaced the “old” buttons with “xeesm style” buttons.

Several Bug Fixes

And as always we did some bug fixes like:

- When going to your Dashboard the active Flight is no longer reseted
- Recognizing the checkboxes in the contact dispatcher
- Fixed some rules bugs when using a non subscription version
- Fixed an intermittent access issue with Notes 2 Contacts
- Added a message if an image can’t be read by Xeesm

And a few others.

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06.09.2010 – Xeesm Corp., a provider of social business applications with over 70,000 users in 24 countries announced today a new and unique service to help business teams understand whether their customers are actually using social media or not.The service scans through 400 Million contacts and returns results with an accuracy of 98%.

Barbara A. Daniels, CSMC http://xeesm.com/wk4coffee, Director of Programs & Communications for the Arizona Small Business Association (asba), who uses Xeesm for customer relationship management, explains the service: “Typically, an organization like ours would need to do multiple searches for each individual prospect in order to find their various profiles across the social web. Once located and identified, we could carefully make the connection and work to further develop the relationship. That process often took weeks, and if you have over 15,000 contacts like I do, it could be a very daunting task. With the release of SocialFinder, it is now actually as simple as the click of a button to get all of the relevant sites for a given prospect and even the prospect’s photo. Xeesm SocialFinder is a huge timesaver and has definitely increased our productivity.”

Antoine Houdaille, http://xeesm.com/AntoineH, entrepreneur and CIO in Sydney Australia, is using Xeesm for his contact management and especially likes the new feature to get immediate insight into his clients and partners online presence. With Xeesm I have all my contacts handy and only need an email address to find a person’s social places. And even though this is all publicly available information, it is a huge help to use SocialFinder and automatically complete the profiles I have.”

Hans Woudboer http://xeesm.com/HansGerlachWoudboer a Germany-based Business Process Modeling expert said: “I had no idea how many of my clients are actually active in social media. The “SocialFinder” showed me a lot of my clients’ presences and even uploaded their photos to my Social Address Book.”

Xeesm CEO, Axel Schultze http://xeesm.com/Axels explained the impact for businesses: “Most companies still don’t know whether their clients are engaged in social media or not. A typical sales person with 3,000 contacts may need months to search through all the networks. And only then, would they know if an engagement in social media would be meaningful. Many company leaders shy away from social engagement because they simply don’t know. For the first time business managers get an instant report for their customer’s social media engagement. The SocialFinder in conjunction with our ‘Social Address Book” provides that answer in just a few seconds. Businesses now have a very valuable tool that can help facilitate the decision on whether to engage in social media or not.”

Xeesm not only helps to find clients, but provides technology to store all the various sites for each individual person. Unlike in the traditional address book, whether it be electronic or in paper form where people usually store a name, phone number, physical address and email, the Xeesm Social Address Book stores all the various social sites each individual is presently engaging in. Xeesm currently supports over 100 social networks worldwide. The next challenge is to keep all that data up to date. The Xeesm Social Address Book is actually a social application in itself. Users update their records and all users are connected, so everybody benefits from each other’s update. While the company had only 1,000 users in January of this year, it had quickly grown to include more than 30,000 by the end of March, currently stands more than 70,000 users strong and continues to grow.

SocialFinder is available at: http://xeesm.com, and is integrated into both the free version of Xeesm as well as the Xeesm Business Edition.

In 140 Character:
SocialFinder by Xeesm.com lets you find social profiles of your customers, partners and friends – stores it into your social address book.

Xeesm.com enhances Social Relationship Manager with a new SocialFinder to enhance social address book information.

Want to know all public social media sites your clients are on? Xeesm.com SocialFinder gets you the data/adds them to Social Address book.

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The brush-off all salespeople have experienced: “No thanks. We’re completely satisfied with our current provider.” Years ago, a sales trainer recommended this follow-on question: “Would you like to know if your loyalty is costing you anything?”

Logical.  On target.  Helpful, even.  And I couldn’t deliver that question the right way to save my life! Many of the answers I received can’t be repeated.  I’m sure my prospects heard “would you like to know why you’re an idiot?”—but that’s another story, for another day.

Loyalty numbs the senses in a pleasing way.  From The Brush Off, we know people can selectively shun facts and information.  There are real costs and opportunity costs, but that doesn’t stop customers from craving the loyalty chemistry.  Similarly, vendors crave loyal customers, but the costs are less apparent.

My neighbor, who runs a media organization, recently cited a compelling example.  He reviewed a sales proposal during a pre-call meeting with one of his salespeople.  My neighbor shared that parts of the proposal were poorly written, and he was concerned how that would reflect on his organization.   The salesperson’s response?  “But they know me!”  Does his client sound like one that’s ripe for competitive picking?  It happens every day.

Today’s salespeople and prospects work within a web of social-media enabled connections.  Outside of sales engagements, we overlap in FaceBook, LinkedIn, alumni groups, kids’ sports, civic organizations, board affiliations, and more.  While this social glue tightens sales relationships, an unwanted byproduct can stain the sales process: sloppiness.

When it comes to selling to friends, salespeople are prone to delivering a less-than-best effort.  And I’m not just throwing mud.  I’ve done it too.  “Eeks.  I’ve got to take care of another problem right now.  Alex’s proposal can wait one more day.  He’ll understand.”   “The 12:00 lunch meeting with Cathy?  I’ll get there at 12:45.  Hey—I was never on time for anything in college, either.”  The casualness continues.   In a recent blog, Dave Kurlan highlighted why it’s important not to appear disheveled for a face-to-face sales call, explaining, “nobody will ever refuse to buy from you because you are dressed well.”  Amazing that he had to point that out.

Earlier this year, over 100 sales professionals responded to the <em>2010 Sales Risk Survey, conducted in partnership with CustomerThink.  Forty-three percent agreed with the statement, “Unexpected situations often cause us to lose sales opportunities.”  Another blindside tackle on the sales gridiron.  Sideline staff, coaches, and trainers rush out to assess the damage and to offer aid.

One question to ask in the post-decision review:  how tight were our connections?  The strongest ties are also the most vulnerable.

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