Off the top, you need to know that this isn’t about Nimble, the storage company that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise bought back in March for a cool $1 billion.
This is about the other Nimble, a work productivity application maker based in what’s becoming known as Silicon Beach–Santa Monica, Calif.
This smaller company on Nov. 8 launched Nimble Contact, which it describes as a smart, easy-to-use contact relationship manager for individuals and teams. The application consolidates company contacts from Microsoft Office 365, G Suite, Gmail and iCloud; social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; and more than 50 SaaS-based sales, CRM, marketing, customer service and accounting applications into a single system of record.
Contact works natively with applications such as Salesforce CRM, Oracle Sales Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company said. The complete list of supported business apps is available here.
Helps Cultivate Business Relationships
The application enables teams to cultivate relationships and work better together by automatically generating complete contact and company records that enable users to discover missing email, phone numbers and address data on the fly, Nimble said.
Direct access to Nimble’s social business insights within sales enablement, marketing automation, accounting and customer service applications enables:
- salespeople to turn marketing qualified leads (MQLs) into sales-qualified leads faster and cultivate genuine relationships that help drive opportunities and sales tracked inside Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Oracle Sales Cloud,among others;
- marketers to get complete MQL profiles, such as highly engaged website traffic or email respondents, scored in leading marketing automation systems such as Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Constant Contact, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, OntraPort and Marketo;
- accounting teams to save time and errors by sharing business context within popular accounting software such as Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Sage Live and Xero; and
- customer support teams to project a positive brand image and signals they care about clients tracked in Zendesk, FreshDesk, and Help Scout by engaging customers based on common areas of interest.
CEO Founder Thinks CRM ‘Broken’
Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara, who previously founded GoldMine, one of the early pioneers in the sales force automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software categories for small to medium-sized businesses, told eWEEK that he thinks CRM and contact management generally are broken.
Ferrara said he created Nimble Contact because “it’s difficult to cultivate relationships amidst the chaos of people’s de facto contact platforms, business apps and social platforms. Critical contacts and engagement history are strewn across stacks of scribbled-on business cards, hastily added email contacts, multiple email accounts, social media streams, and unviewed calendar reminders.”
Ferrara said that companies face an even bigger challenge when departments lock their contacts into specialized sales, marketing, customer service and accounting silos.
“Effective team contact management is at the heart of every business, but it’s missing from Office 365, G Suite, typical CRM’s and social media, where people communicate most,” Ferrara said. “There are too many silos of contacts distributed among the disparate business apps companies use to manage sales, marketing, customer service and accounting. That’s why we built Nimble Contact.”
Availability and Pricing
Nimble is available in three editions: Nimble Contact ($12/user/month) provides relationship management for individuals and teams that work with existing cloud-based systems via email and contact and business apps. Nimble Business ($25/user/month) offers sales CRM for teams of any size, providing a simple, all-in-one contact management solution, with marketing automation and sales enablement built into it.
There is also a stand-alone, freemium Nimble Add-In for Microsoft Outlook Desktop, Outlook Mobile (iOS and Android) that allows profiling of email contacts.
For more information, go here.