I was privileged to have a demonstration of the system recently by the company founded Jon Ferrara, as part of the BETA program. Jon comes with a very strong reputation, having been a founder of the Goldmine CRM system 20 years ago. What is clear is that he has taken his understanding of the marketing and sales needs of small businesses and re-written the approach to delivering a solution, taking into account the social media dimension.
My assessment, and that of others, is that Nimble has the potential to be a game-changing application for smaller businesses as it provides an integrated and unified system across marketing, sales, social media and CRM.
At the core of Nimble is what Jon refers to as the 3Cs; Contacts, Communications and Calendar.
• Contacts are people, who could be customers, prospects, partners, suppliers, and so on. What you know about people comes partly from internal information, from personal contact and also from external sources. The Social Media element is that now you can glean information from their profiles on LinkedIn and elsewhere, saving you time to capture and update information. There is the added advantage or receiving notifications when people change their profiles, such as when they move company.
• Communications is the outbound and inbound communication that you have with your contacts. You write to, phone and email people, but increasingly you’ll be contacting them through social media, via LinkedIn, Twitter and so on. Rather than keep these as separate inbound and outbound communications channels how much better to have them as an integrated communications channel. By unifying and streamlining communications it becomes much easier to maintain and build dialogue, by whichever means your prospect or customer wants to use.
• Calendar allows you to record and manage activities as part of maintaining and servicing relationships. Diarizing future meetings and call-backs and other events is part of it, leading ultimately to forecasts of when sales may result.
As Nimble is a Web-based application it is easily accessible from office computers, mobile users with laptops and with the new range of smart-phones. The benefit here is particularly that there is a single copy of all the data and linkages, so you and your team are all seeing the same information. Having to take copies for when you work away from the office and synchronizing on your return is eliminated. New versions of software functionality become available seamlessly as part of the central development process, saving technical IT tasks to install and manage software on your own systems.
If you’d like to be kept up-to-date about Nimble sCRM developments and how this could become a game-changing solution for your business then please sign-up on the left. Well also send you a Social CRM White paper shortly.
If you’d like to be considered for the Nimble Beta Program you’ll see a link for that on the ‘Thank-You’ email we’ll send you to confirm your opt-in.
