Nimble CRM Partners with Reliance Network to Revolutionize Real Estate Sales Engagement

Nimble, the simple CRM for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace teams, announced today that they have partnered with Reliance Network, a website design agency and custom software developer for leading independent real estate brokerages. Reliance Network empowers many of the world's most prestigious luxury brands with designer websites, marketing automation, and CRM.

Nimble CRM Personalizes Real Estate Sales Outreach to Help Close Deals

Reliance Network helps real estate agents build designer websites, as well as capture and nurture leads from various sources. Nimble is an award-winning CRM that makes it easy to build and nurture client relationships by building rich and automatically enriched contact records. All communications and calendar appointments are automatically tracked and can be accessed inside of agent’s inboxes, mobile phones, and everywhere on the internet via Nimble’s inbox and browsers extensions.

"We set out to locate a class-leading CRM for our power users that was easy to use, personal and flexible. What we found was Nimble and its abilities to deliver business lead enrichment that turns every agent’s database into a sales prospecting engine," said Sean McRae, CEO of Reliance Network. "Reliance Network + Nimble is a joint effort to help every agent and team generate more lead opportunities, cultivate stronger relationships, and meet their GCI goals in less time."

Nimble CRM enables a more personalized approach to engaging leads acquired through the Reliance Network platform by enriching contact records with the business insights needed to send highly targeted, trackable emails at scale while still appearing as a one-to-one personalized communication that is sent from work/personal email address.

Supercharge Your Real Estate Business Growth with Nimble + Reliance Network

Unify Contacts - Nimble automatically builds and updates itself by combining contacts across platforms into one unified relationship manager enriched with the business insights needed to take action.

Enrich Leads - Nimble enriches leads discovered through Reliance Network with details about who they are, where they work, where they’re from, their interests, and their complete social profile.

Access CRM Everywhere - Nimble makes it easy to access all the important information about contacts directly from inbox, anywhere on social media or on the web, as well as in cloud-based apps.

Prospect New Leads Smarter, Better, and Faster - Nimble automatically captures new leads from anywhere on the web and syncs them with Reliance to make the most out of every opportunity.

Leverage Group Email Marketing, Tracking, and Analytics - With Nimble, it is much easier to further nurture relationships with leads acquired through Reliance Network by sending personalized, trackable outreach to groups or individuals based on targeted segments built by using social and business insights.

Successfully Manage Your Sales Pipeline - Users of Nimble can create unlimited pipelines and hone in on reports to track the opportunities uncovered through Reliance Network.

Stay up to Date with an Intuitive Relationship Dashboard - Nimble’s Today Page dashboard allows individuals and teams to scan their sales pipeline, tasks, calendar appointments, and track priorities to build relationships with the contacts that matter the most.

"The best real estate agents research prospects before engaging to better prepare to solve customers’ needs. Unfortunately, most agents don’t prepare because it's too much work," said Jon Ferrara, CEO & Founder of Nimble. "Nimble helps Reliance Network Real Estate Agents close more business by making sales prospecting and engagement fun and easy!"

"I needed a CRM that would help me ensure that all my important real estate contacts from Reliance and their information are in one place to help me ensure proper, timely follow-ups. Nimble does not only that, but it also finds additional social and contact information for my contacts," said Jason Decker, Real Estate Agent at RE/MAX United.

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/

Nimble CRM Partners with Reliance Network

Nimble, the simple CRM for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace teams, announced today that they have partnered with Reliance Network, a website design agency and custom software developer for leading independent real estate brokerages. Reliance Network empowers many of the world's most prestigious luxury brands with designer websites, marketing automation, and CRM.

Nimble CRM Personalizes Real Estate Sales Outreach to Help Close Deals

Reliance Network helps real estate agents build designer websites, as well as capture and nurture leads from various sources. Nimble is an award-winning CRM that makes it easy to build and nurture client relationships by building rich and automatically enriched contact records. All communications and calendar appointments are automatically tracked and can be accessed inside of agent’s inboxes, mobile phones, and everywhere on the internet via Nimble’s inbox and browsers extensions.

"We set out to locate a class-leading CRM for our power users that was easy to use, personal and flexible. What we found was Nimble and its abilities to deliver business lead enrichment that turns every agent’s database into a sales prospecting engine," said Sean McRae, CEO of Reliance Network. "Reliance Network + Nimble is a joint effort to help every agent and team generate more lead opportunities, cultivate stronger relationships, and meet their GCI goals in less time."

Nimble CRM enables a more personalized approach to engaging leads acquired through the Reliance Network platform by enriching contact records with the business insights needed to send highly targeted, trackable emails at scale while still appearing as a one-to-one personalized communication that is sent from work/personal email address.

Supercharge Your Real Estate Business Growth with Nimble + Reliance Network

Unify Contacts - Nimble automatically builds and updates itself by combining contacts across platforms into one unified relationship manager enriched with the business insights needed to take action.

Enrich Leads - Nimble enriches leads discovered through Reliance Network with details about who they are, where they work, where they’re from, their interests, and their complete social profile.

Access CRM Everywhere - Nimble makes it easy to access all the important information about contacts directly from inbox, anywhere on social media or on the web, as well as in cloud-based apps.

Prospect New Leads Smarter, Better, and Faster - Nimble automatically captures new leads from anywhere on the web and syncs them with Reliance to make the most out of every opportunity.

Leverage Group Email Marketing, Tracking, and Analytics - With Nimble, it is much easier to further nurture relationships with leads acquired through Reliance Network by sending personalized, trackable outreach to groups or individuals based on targeted segments built by using social and business insights.

Successfully Manage Your Sales Pipeline - Users of Nimble can create unlimited pipelines and hone in on reports to track the opportunities uncovered through Reliance Network.

Stay up to Date with an Intuitive Relationship Dashboard - Nimble’s Today Page dashboard allows individuals and teams to scan their sales pipeline, tasks, calendar appointments, and track priorities to build relationships with the contacts that matter the most.

"The best real estate agents research prospects before engaging to better prepare to solve customers’ needs. Unfortunately, most agents don’t prepare because it's too much work," said Jon Ferrara, CEO & Founder of Nimble. "Nimble helps Reliance Network Real Estate Agents close more business by making sales prospecting and engagement fun and easy!"

"I needed a CRM that would help me ensure that all my important real estate contacts from Reliance and their information are in one place to help me ensure proper, timely follow-ups. Nimble does not only that, but it also finds additional social and contact information for my contacts," said Jason Decker, Real Estate Agent at RE/MAX United.

Source: https://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Nimble-CRM-Reliance-Partnership

How We Can Leverage The Power Of Gratitude To Improve Our Overall Mental Wellness

This Market Veteran is Changing The Way We CRM

Can you shortly tell us how Nimble was born?

I saw that I needed to nurture the conversations I was having on different social platforms into relationships over time. Essentially, I needed to create a social CRM.
We built Nimble to enable people to take their relationship they initiated in social media and convert them into potentially long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships.

Tell the readers about your achievements till today!

The best achievement I’ve accomplished to date is being a present, connected father and husband and raising three beautiful babies, but I suppose you’re looking for a different answer. I can talk about how I’ve done my best to grow my soul in the brief period of time I’ve walked on this planet. Maybe you don’t want to hear about either, so let’s talk about business.
Back in the day, I helped pioneer contact management and CRM before it existed with a company called Goldmine. I sold that company when I was 40, spent ten years raising three babies and got back in the business by founding Nimble.com because I believe relationships are critical to your life’s success. Most CRMs are not about relationships and are more about command, control, and reporting, and I wanted to put the “R” (the relationships) back into CRM. So we created Nimble.

Do you have any daily routines or tactics to be more productive?

My first cup of coffee gets me going!
I think that one of the most important things I do on a daily basis is moving my body. Sitting is unnatural; you have to be moving and flowing, and ideally under the sun or the stars, and being one with nature.
Beyond that, I spend quite a bit of time on a daily basis being a little quieter with myself and my mind, body, and soul for at least a moment out of my day. I think it’s important to exercise each day and get your heart rate pumping.
I also love eating and cooking. And I love napping; I nap for at least 10 minutes on a daily basis. It helps me to reset. I love my bedtime. What’s better than to get a restful night’s sleep?
What is your biggest motivation to be an entrepreneur?

Some entrepreneurs might say, “to make money.” But I don’t believe we’re on this planet to make money. I believe we’re on this planet to make memories out of moments. More importantly than that, I think we’re on this planet to grow our souls. To grow your soul, you have to help other people grow theirs.
My biggest motivator as an entrepreneur is to help people grow their souls at scale. We did that with Goldmine and that’s what we’re doing with Nimble: empowering other people to build the relationships that enable them to achieve success. My greatest business achievement is building solutions that help other people achieve their dreams through better relationships.

Tell us about your company!

At the end of the day, your network is your net worth. Nimble is a relationship management platform for individuals and teams. It delivers the core thing individuals need to manage your contacts.
I believe everyone’s goal is to drive eyeballs and deliver a measurable positive business outcome. People need to put their leads into a system that helps teams nurture them. Most importantly, Nimble is a relationship manager for the whole company. Every company needs a team contact platform where everyone can share the relationships they need in order to connect and grow their company.
The biggest mistake people make about CRMs is thinking that it’s all about their prospects and customers, but it takes more than that to achieve your goals. It’s more than salespeople that do that engagement. At Nimble, we connect all of these channels of generating leads. That’s a holistic approach to your business: you’re treating it like a sustainable garden instead of the “tag em and bag em “approach.
How CRM can find you the right strategy?

What’s the most important thing you’re working on right now, and how are you making it happen?

The most important thing we’re working on is scaling to build something to fulfill people’s needs and help them grow. We’re doing that by inspiring and educating others by telling them how they could grow.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking if they talk about themselves loud enough, and often enough, that people will care. Guess what? Nobody cares about your product. They care about themselves. If you want to grow your company, talk about how you can help people grow better, smarter, and faster. We’re scaling our message about the importance of relationships and enabling people to do that on a larger basis.
We’re very focused on scaling our community of people that are using and are ideally talking about our product. We believe this is much different than traditional CRM.

What’s your take on your segmented/targeted Market?

We’re targeting people that are marching to a different drummer. If you’re looking for a traditional CRM that enables you to shelve leads, and that forces your sales team to pound phones and close business, Nimble isn’t for you. There are plenty of other CRMs that are good at that. Our customers value a higher connection; they build long-term relationships that garner repeat and referral business. I think that really resonates with the shift in the market; social media is transitioning into the world into a small village in which your reputation means everything.
Service is the new sales. Sales had become a “4-letter word,” and companies like Nimble are changing that. We’re targeting companies in which this message resonates with them.

What are the challenges you have faced and what are the current challenges? Mention the top three challenges for both.

We were a pioneer in social selling before it existed, and people didn’t know the value of social media at the time. We enable people to build their own personal brand and to use that brand to scale their business. By the time people became aware of Nimble’s value, LinkedIn and Facebook cut off their APIs. The investment they made in social selling was lessened, so we had to pivot to stay relevant.
We founded ourselves not only as a social CRM but as a layer on top of Google Workspace, making it a more effective contact manager you could use everywhere you work. We became more relevant by partnering with MS365, to the point where Microsoft is our business partner and they’re globally reselling Nimble across the world. We had to grow as social CRM adopted into becoming something more relevant. I think the fact that we’ve now become the simple CRM for MS365 and Google Workspace, and are scaling Microsoft as a business partner, has been a challenge and a benefit and unique differentiator for us.
Most CRM companies generate their sales by using ad words to generate eyeballs and then handing those eyeballs off to salespeople to close them. It’s a race to the bottom, as far as cost. What we’ve done is we’ve shunned paid advertising. We’ve used influencer marketing, guerilla PR, and other means to drive eyeballs which rake in about 75,000 uniques per month, and we convert those people without a sales team.
This model is effective for us. The challenges that some of the competitors face is that they are all chasing the AdWords of “CRM,” having to increase the cost of their platform to pay for this. We’ve been able to go about marketing in a very unique way.

Why have you started up?

Nimble.com was born out of my own need. I think the best products are born out of your own needs because you better understand the problem and are passionate about how to solve it.
My problem was this: when I started using social media in 2008, I saw how it was going to change the way we work, play, buy, and sell. I looked for a solution that would enable me to manage the connections that were being created by the conversations I was having on social media.
I couldn’t find what I needed; I found tools that enabled me to connect conversations in streams, like Tweet Deck and Hootsuite, but I wanted to be able to connect those conversations to people.
So, I created Nimble.

Where do you want to see yourself in the next 5 years?

At Goldmine, we had about 10 million customers. I’d love to double that. We want to empower people across the world to achieve their dreams, and we think relationships are critical to success. We want to empower 10’s of millions of people around the world to realize the success they dream of.
Please share your learning with fellow Entrepreneurs?

As an entrepreneur that has realized massive success by founding a startup on $5000, growing it to the north of $100 million in revenue, and exiting that as 40 yrs old, you’d think my takeaway is that money and success are amazing. And while they are, I don’t believe that (if you’re entering into entrepreneurship) to make money you necessarily have the best goal in mind. You’re not gonna leave this planet with the money you accumulate; you’ll leave it with the moments and vibrations and ripples of the times you’ve been truly present.
They’re not going to write on your gravestone, “made $100 million, pioneered CRM.” They’re hopefully going to say “beloved husband or brother,” if you’re lucky. Invest time on being present with others, nurture critical relationships, and hopefully be an entrepreneur for a higher purpose more than money. Ideally, to help others grow. If you help others grow, you can achieve any dream in your life.

How can people find & follow you?

The best answer is to Google me. Pick the platform to connect with me that’s most comfortable for you. But also, Google yourself. Do you show up on the main page in multiple listings? If you don’t, build a Wikipedia page for yourself, and Google will index that and help with your search criteria.

Learn More: Nimble

Want more motivation? This entrepreneur has a better way to win hearts

Source: https://startingtoknow.com/relationship-crm/

Nimble Crowned CRM Market Leader for Small Businesses, Real Estate, Sales Intelligence and Integrations

Nimble Continues its Reign as a Crowd-Favorite on G2 Crowd for 8 Years Running, Places 3rd on GetApp’s List of Integration Leaders in CRM.

Nimble, the Simple, Smart CRM built for Office 365 and G Suite, announced today that it has ranked an overall CRM Industry Leader and among the Top Five Sales Intelligence Software Tools for Small Business by G2 Crowd, the world’s leading business software review platform.

Nimble has also been recognized as one of the Best Real Estate CRM Software Companies of 2021 by Digital.com and ranked in the Top 3 CRMs on GetApp’s Integration Leaders in CRM round-up.

"We believe that your CRM should make it easy to nurture relationships that grow your business, which is why we’re committed to building a CRM that’s simple, smart, and affordable," explained Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. "We are deeply grateful to the many customers who share their reviews and stories about using Nimble to succeed, affording Nimble a market-leading CRM status."

Nimble Chosen Fan-Favorite CRM for Office 365 and G Suite 8 Years in a Row!

Nimble achieved top customer satisfaction rankings according to verified user reviews and a market presence in multiple categories, including:

• Overall CRM for Small Business Industry Leader (G2 Crowd) - Nimble was recognized as an industry leader in the small business CRM category based on market presence and customer satisfaction ratings.

• Best Real Estate CRM Software Companies of 2021 (Digital.com) - Nimble ranked as one of the top CRMs for Real Estate based on its streamlined lead management tools, client management features, and reporting functionality.

• #3 Integration Leader in CRM (GetApp) - Nimble earned a third-place ranking on GetApp’s list of Integration Leaders for CRM based on review data and overall product ratings from other online sources.

• Leader in Sales Intelligence Software based on user satisfaction (G2 Crowd) - In the small business category, Nimble earned a 93% user satisfaction score, outpacing competitors including Adapt, LeadFeeder, Seamless.ai, and more.

• Leader in Email Tracking Software for Small Business (G2 Crowd) - In the Email Tracking Software for Small Business category, Nimble was acknowledged as an industry leader based on data from product reviews and other online sources.

• Top Easiest-to-Implement Sales Intelligence Software for Small Business (G2 Crowd) - Nimble scored an overall implementation score of 9.04 out of 10 based on ease of setup, shortest implementation time, and end-user adoption.

"Nimble has been an essential part of our company's success by enabling us to evolve with changes in customer and prospect behavior," explains Mellissah Smith, Founder and Managing Director of Marketing Eye. "Since implementing Nimble, we have found our team to be actually using CRM as it’s intended and continually recommending Nimble to clients and other stakeholders to our business."

Nimble Sets the Bar for Simple Smart CRM For SmallBiz and Real Estate

Nimble delivers a set of powerful enhancements to the CRM basics that dramatically improve team relationship management across the organization, including an intuitive contact record, granular activity tracking, contact privacy, and integrations with Office 365, Power BI, and Azure.

Nimble Scales Worldwide as the Simple CRM for Office 365

Microsoft is now reselling Nimble+Office 365 worldwide and their distributors and partners are reselling, implementing, and providing customized Nimble solutions to Office 365 users 24/7 across the globe.

Additional Resources:

• Learn more on our Nimble Blog

• Getting Started in Nimble

• FAQ: Feature Walkthroughs

Get Started With Nimble Today!

We invite you to try a free 14-day trial of Nimble. Stay tuned for more product announcements as we evolve Nimble into the best CRM for Office 365 and G Suite teams.

ABOUT NIMBLE – Nimble is the leading global provider of simple, smart CRM for small business teams using Office 365 or G Suite. It combines the strength of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, pipeline management, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable company and contact insights – everywhere you work.

Nimble has been named "Market Leading CRM for Customer Satisfaction and Ease of Use" and CRM Market Leader by G2 Crowd for eighth consecutive years, #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd for the ninth consecutive time, and users’ choice award winner by Fit Small Business.

Try Nimble’s 14-day free trial today. For more information, visit http://www.nimble.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201222005130/en/

Contacts

Megan Ranger - [email protected]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nimble-crowned-crm-market-leader-110000892.html?guccounter=1

Why it is essential to put the customer first !

When starting a business, defining your value proposition is the most important element of your overall marketing message. For Jon Ferrara, CEO of social CRM Nimble, sharing value is more than just a tactic, it’s a fundamental way of life.

Jon is best known as the founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) categories for small to medium-sized businesses. His latest social CRM venture, Nimble, helps salespeople, relationship managers, business owners, and others to be more productive, effective, and streamlined when handling customer interactions and prospects.

I was joined by Jon on a recent episode of Money Talks. With a passionate drive to help others, Jon has an acute understanding of marketing, customer psychology, and building relationships. Throughout our talk, he emphasized the importance of putting the customer first and getting rid of egotistical sales tactics. If you’re just starting in business, this talk will help you gain clarity and direction on finding your ‘why’. Purpose gives us passion, focus, and motivation, propelling us and others towards our goals. Check out the key takeaways.

Customers aren’t just a number 
In sales, the ego is the enemy of success. By having a ‘me-centric’ approach, you develop an inability to listen, act, or take direction because of unchecked pride. The end goal is getting the sale so you can feel good about yourself and advance your career. Here’s the thing, though. Do you know who else has an ego?

Everyone. 

Remember: people don’t care about what you do. They care about what you can do for them. In business, the goal should not be collecting customers like trophies. It’s about identifying your ideal customers, understanding their needs and problems, and tailoring your offering accordingly. Authenticity is key. With the right customer-focused approach, selling no longer feels forced and self-involved; it becomes a collaborative and honest conversation between professionals.

You can achieve your dreams by helping others achieve their own
Shortly after Jon sold GoldMine Software Corp. for a considerable sum of money, he received some devastating news. At 40 years old with a second baby on the way, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and almost died. Jon was faced with a very stark reality: despite making more money than he’d ever spent in his life, he was facing a potentially terminal illness.When faced with a life or death situation, the definition of ‘success’ can change dramatically. Thankfully, Jon survived to tell the tale. While recovering, he became deeply reflective and contemplated his purpose in life. He said: “I came to the conclusion that [...] my purpose in life is to grow my soul. And I do that best by helping other people grow. You can achieve any dreams you have in your life by helping people achieve theirs effectively.”

Nobody on this planet is totally self-sufficient; we rely on the company and support of others to truly thrive. When running a business, this is so important to remember. Collaborating with and helping others will always be mutually beneficial.

Give away your knowledge 
There is still a lingering attitude that you ‘shouldn’t share what you know’. It’s an exclusionary stance that suggests there are gatekeepers to success.Newsflash: someone else’s success doesn’t diminish your own. There is room for everybody.

By sharing your knowledge and insights, you position yourself as the expert you are. You make prospective customers sit up and listen. You build intrigue and trust.

In Jon’s words: “Imagine if you just drop that knowledge on a daily basis. Imagine it like fishing lures outside of your business. If you’re not dropping knowledge outside of your business into the places where your customers [...] are having conversations, then they’ll never see you.”

In the digital age, this is a must. We can use social media to have conversations, build our network, and inspire people. Nobody wants to see a list of reasons why you’re the best thing since sliced bread; they want to read your pearls of wisdom that they can relate to or learn from.

Put your customer at the center of the story
It’s very easy to say something is amazing. What’s harder is to demonstrate why something is amazing. Think of it this way: we don’t just buy a product or a service. We buy convenience, time, improvements, ease, comfort, organization...the list goes on. The best way to demonstrate this is to put the customer at the center of the story. Make them the hero and show how you can help them achieve their goals.

As we all become more adept at using social media, it is very apparent who is sharing genuine value, and who is there for vanity purposes. People are savvy - they know when someone is relevant and authentic and when someone isn’t hitting the mark.

The former has a magnetic presence because they are engaging with the purpose to serve, rather than sell. The latter will continue with an ego-centric approach and wonder why they’re not scaling at the same rate. If your content seeks to engage, embrace, and empower your prospective customers, you will develop a strong brand identity and network. Jon’s attitudes towards success, adversity, and purpose are something we can all learn from, no matter what stage we are on in our business journey. With passion and purpose, we can do great things not only for ourselves but for those around us.

To listen to the full podcast, check out the episode of Money Talks here Money Talks with Hugh Meyer.Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Achor.

Follow us on Instagram for the latest inside scoops and BTS gems from our expert interviewees @hughmeyerofficial.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-essential-put-customer-first-hugh-meyer-mba/

Nimble Supports Entrepreneurship for U.S. Veterans with Free CRM Software to Help Them Grow

Nimble offers a free year of its award-winning CRM to empower job seekers and entrepreneurs who have so graciously served in the United States military

Nimble, the simple smart CRM built for Office 365 and G Suite teams, announced today that it is offering a free one-year license to all veterans and active-duty members who have served in the United States military.

Our Nimble team admires and respects the loyalty, dedication, and sacrifice of the U.S. service members and wants to support their entrepreneurship goals. Nimble believes that the skills gained from military service are the perfect foundation for business success, as well.

Nimble is Proud to Serve United States Military Service Members

"I strongly believe that discipline, hard work, quick problem-solving, and decision-making that the brave men and women of our U.S. military gained through their years of service are the perfect skill set that makes them great entrepreneurs," says Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. "Nimble is perfect for veteran business owners, entrepreneurs, job seekers, and any veteran interested in managing their professional and personal relationships."

How Nimble Benefits U.S. Service Members

Veterans face unique challenges on top of what most entrepreneurs face as they start growing their businesses. This is why Nimble is supporting veterans with a free year of their award-winning CRM, as well as 1:1 onboarding and training from the Nimble team.

Veterans will be able to access a unified contact database that works for them everywhere they work (including on social platforms, on any website, within their inbox, and within third-party business apps), complete with the business and social insights they need to build better relationships.

Who Uses Nimble CRM?

Veteran business owners, entrepreneurs, job seekers, and any veteran interested in managing their business and personal relationships will benefit from Nimble’s simple cloud-based CRM. Nimble makes it easy to manage business contacts, grow professional networks, and to develop strong relationships with prospects, partners, and customers by allowing their users to focus on selling instead of tasks such as data entry.

Additionally, the Nimble Prospector browser extension makes it easier than ever to prospect and create new as well as to update existing contacts from anywhere you work, like LinkedIn, Twitter, any website, or your email inbox.

"Our team has been using Nimble for over six years to achieve our company goals. I recommend it to any veteran-owned business as it easily gathers business contacts into a single system of record and provides relationship context, engagement signals, and messaging tools within a single view that’s easy to navigate," says Eric L. Mitchell, CEO of LifeFlip Media and one of America's leading advocates for veteran entrepreneurs. "Nimble minimizes the amount of manual contact and company research our salespeople have to do so they can focus on listening and engaging with prospects instead." 

Nimble is privileged to have the opportunity to serve those who have so graciously served this country with their sacrifice, bravery, and honor. They hope to continue to support the veteran community in the future as well.

Additional Resources: 

• How to redeem this offer: information & detailsLearn more on our Nimble BlogGetting Started with NimbleFAQ: Feature Walkthroughs

Get Started With Nimble Today!

We invite eligible U.S. military service members to create a free for 14-day trial and to email Nimble at [email protected] with a proof of their veteran status to redeem their 1-year free license. Terms and conditions apply; please click here for offer details.

ABOUT NIMBLE – Nimble is the simple, smart CRM for small business teams using Office 365 or G Suite. It combines the strength of CRM, contact management, social media insights, sales intelligence, pipeline management, and marketing automation into a unified relationship management platform that delivers valuable company and contact insights – everywhere you work.

Nimble has been named "Market Leading CRM for Customer Satisfaction and Ease of Use" and CRM Market Leader by G2 Crowd for eight consecutive years, CRM Watchlist Winner for three consecutive years, #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd for the ninth consecutive time, and users’ choice award winner by Fit Small Business.

Try Nimble’s 14-day free trial today. For more information, visit http://www.nimble.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201110006251/en/

Contacts

Megan Ranger - [email protected]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nimble-supports-entrepreneurship-u-veterans-224100754.html

Go-To-Market with Microsoft partner success stories: Nimble

By: Microsoft

On CRM: From Salesforce To Zoho, Which Of These 10 CRMs Is Really Best For Your Business?

By: Gene Marks

You're looking for a CRM system for your company. But you're not entirely sure what you want. You are buried in choices. You read reports like this recent one from application marketplace 360Quadrants of the "best CRM software" and you're still not sure.

So let me help you clear things up. My company implements CRM software. In fact, we implement (full disclosure) some of the products - Salesforce, Zoho and Microsoft Dynamics - listed below. We love those products but the fact is I would also love to sell every one of the products listed below. We just don't have the bandwidth to do it all. Rest assured, if you're working with the right people and partners and are willing to make the investment, any one of the ten “visionary leaders” CRM products listed on the 360Quadrants report below would be completely fine for your business.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't some differences that separates these choices. The vendors may argue with my opinions below. But when prospective CRM buyers – mostly from small and mid-sized companies - are looking at these options this is usually the advice I give them.

Freshworks - You want CRM as part of a suite of business applications.
Freshworks is part of a trend (see Zoho) of companies offering CRM modules that are part of a growing suite of applications that they hope their clients can rely on entirely to run their businesses. Freshsales is Freshworks' CRM application and the company offers other modules that do everything from help desk and analytics to project management and collaboration

HubSpot- You want a strong marketing application that has good CRM capabilities.
If that’s the case, then HubSpot is great marketing automation application for small and medium sized businesses with capable CRM features. We recommend this to clients where marketing managers are driving the discussion and when there are good internal marketing resources to use it. If you don’t have a marketing department, or even a dedicated marketing person, this may not be the best option.

Insightly - You want an affordable CRM system with an intuitive user interface.
For the past few years, Insightly has grown in popularity due to its easy to use and affordable CRM capabilities. To me, Insightly is a reliable and workable CRM product that offers a similar feature set of other competitors. It doesn't have a suite of applications like Freshworks or Zoho, but the company has recently introduced marketing automation to its mix and I know of a number of their customers that enjoy Insightly's unique user interface.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 - You want Microsoft.
When a buyer tells me they're a Microsoft shop then this is always my first recommendation. Because it makes sense to insert a Microsoft-built CRM application into your existing Microsoft environment, specifically if you want to leverage Office, Outlook and other Microsoft tools in your business.

Nimble - You want Microsoft but you can't afford Microsoft.
Dynamics 365 can get a little pricey for smaller companies. So welcome to Nimble. Nimble does a great job leveraging social media and communications. But it's best (and most recent) strength is that it's a simple and more user friendly solution for smaller (under 10 users) companies who want a Microsoft-oriented solution because it's currently the only small business CRM application being sold through the Microsoft partner channel other than the company's existing CRM offerings, which are built for larger companies.

Pipedrive - You want a sales tool.
Pipedrive is the anti-suite of CRM. Instead of trying to please everyone the application is really focused on helping salespeople close more deals. There's no accounting, marketing automation, project management or service desk features. It's just about sales. To that end, its opportunity, sales and lead management features, along with its powerful reporting tools, are advanced and well suited for a customer that just wants a state of the art sales automation tool to help grow revenues.

PipelineDeals- You want a sales tool and maybe you don't like Pipedrive.
See Pipedrive. But if you’re not sold on that option then this application, like it's closely-named competitor, is also focused on managing salespeople's pipelines. Like Pipedrive, it integrates with many other cloud based applications, includes self-customizing workflows and developer tools to build more specialized processes.

Salesforce – You don’t want to get fired.
Salesforce is the BMW of CRM. It’s corporate stock ticker is CRM. Salesforce has a wildly passionate community and integrations with just about every application out there. It has the best brand recognition and you’re unlikely to be criticized for choosing it. Unless you don’t need all of its features. Because that’s the catch: Salesforce can be expensive. But if you're willing to pay the higher monthly fees, consulting costs and development time then you'll be able to accomplish whatever you need with Salesforce.

Zendesk - You want a service application with CRM features.
Some CRMs are marketing applications with CRM features. Some are straight sales applications. Zendesk is at its core an excellent service management application. That means managing tickets, queues, issues, cases, problems and other issues that affect a company's customer service. But Zendesk is also expanding into CRM with its recent aquisition of Base CRM. So if you're the kind of company that wants a great service desk application that happens to have CRM capabilities, then this is a good one to consider.

Zoho – See Freshworks.
You like Salesforce but you don't have the budget. Plus, you're a smaller organization that won't likely use 80 percent of Salesforce's features.  You also want to expand your CRM to include accounting, project management, HR and other business functions and you want to do it all on one platform, if possible. Zoho is the next best option to Salesforce and why I always recommend it to smaller companies that are looking for a Salesforce solution but don’t want to pay for a Salesforce solution. And the fact that it comes as part of a suite of other business applications is also a big plus.

***

I’m leaving out a lot of other great CRMs here, mainly because there’s plenty of overlap and these were the ten “visionary leaders” according to 360Quadrants.  My advice, however is not to get caught up in the software. These applications compete against each other and are matching features quickly. Spend more time researching the company, its partners and its community. In the end, it will be those factors that will be determine whether or not you succeed with your CRM software or not.

Nimble Named Top 3 Most Popular Small Business CRM in Capterra’s Top 20 CRM Roundup

Over 1,300 Customer Reviews Launch Nimble CRM Into Top 3 Placement For Most Popular Customer Relationship Management Software Category

Nimble, the Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite — announced that it has been named a Top 20 CRM software product by Capterra, a free online service that helps organizations find the right software.

“We believe that CRM is about making it easy for small business teams and professionals to nurture relationships that grow their businesses, which is why we’re committed to building a CRM that automatically works for you, everywhere your work!” explained Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. “We are deeply grateful to the many customers who share their reviews and stories about using Nimble to succeed, affording Nimble a market-leading CRM status.”

Marketing Technology News: Atento Wins the 2019 Customer Experience Banking Report Award in Brazil

“The Top 20 CRM Report looks at the overall user reviews and ratings from the last year and considers the average monthly search volume for a standardized set of keywords for each product,” said Capterra Market Research Specialist Kelsey Dornfeld. “Nimble not only has great reviews but generates a high volume of web search interest.”

Why Office 365 & G Suite Teams Love Nimble

Based on some of the Capterra reviews, here are some of the main reasons why our customers love using Nimble:

- Organize contacts – Consolidate your contacts across inboxes, social platforms, business apps, and more into one insight-enriched relationship manager.
- Unify interaction history – Nimble unifies conversation histories, calendar appointments, deals, and social activities for every contact across multiple platforms.
- Integrate your apps – Unify contact data from more than 160+ apps into a single platform that’s easily accessible everywhere you work.
- Track your team’s activities – Stay on track with tasks, events, and calls with a comprehensive table of scheduled and completed activities.
- Manage your sales process – Nimble automatically ties your team’s tasks, events, and communications to each deal to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Marketing Technology News: 360insights & The 2112 Group Host Channel Pulse East Live

Nimble Scales Worldwide as The Simple CRM for Office 365

Microsoft is now reselling Nimble+Office 365 worldwide. Its distributors and partners are reselling, implementing, and providing customized Nimble solutions to Office 365 users 24/7 across the globe.

Learn Why Mark Cuban’s Shark Tank Companies Grow Using Nimble CRM

“Nimble is a game-changer for CRM,” saidMark Cuban, Entrepreneur and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks. “It’s simple, integrated with social networks, and makes relationships easy. That’s why Shark Tank companies use Nimble to grow.”

“Too many CRM solutions focus on collecting and counting arbitrary data deemed important by some pinhead manager who never sold a day in their life,” said Rich Bohn, President of Sell More Now. “What makes Nimble CRM unique is that it’s squarely focused on relationship building; this empowers the whole company, not just salespeople, to communicate effectively with all the requisite context and social insights they need to engage at their fingertips.”

Marketing Technology News: Users Reveal Top Five SMM Vendors of 2019 for User Satisfaction Through SoftwareReviews

How to Turn Your Contacts into Gold by Nurturing a Community of Influencers | Jon Ferrara, Nimble

By SEM Rush

Watch the Youtube interview here

5 Lessons I Learned When I Created My SAAS, With Jon Ferrara of Nimble

By: Mitch Russo

Many people make the mistake of having a vision and not really testing it. I think that one of the most important things you can do when considering starting a company is to go out and have conversations with prospects, customers, and their influencers to get some feedback on how your idea resonates and what it might actually become. I did that before I started Nimble; I began to use social media to have conversations about my vision. It helped me start building my brand, get feedback on my vision, and more importantly it made those influencers early contributors to the ideas of Nimble — which got them to buy in.

As part of my series about the “5 Lessons I Learned When I Created My App or SAAS”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jon Ferrara. Jon is a serial entrepreneur and noted speaker about social media’s effects on sales and marketing. He has re-imagined CRM by building the Simple Smart CRM for Microsoft Office 365 & G Suite with Nimble. It is the first CRM that works for you by building and updating contact data for you, then works with you, everywhere you work. Ferrara is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs).

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

My backstory is really all about relationship management. I stumbled into being an entrepreneur in contact management and CRM before Outlook or Salesforce existed because I had my own personal needs. I think the best products come from your own personal needs because you understand the problem. The problem was there weren’t any sales tools to enable me to engage effectively.

Back then, people managed leads by writing notes on a piece of paper, writing appointments in day planners, and forecasting sales on spreadsheets. I thought there had to be a better way but I couldn’t find it, so I started a company called Goldmine.

It actually turned out to be a literal Goldmine and I’ve been doing relationship management ever since.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led you to think of the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

For this “aha moment,” I’d like to talk about my current startup, Nimble. The moment started when I began using social media in 2008. I knew it was going to radically change the customer journey and the way people sell. A lot of that came from my understanding of the way relationships are built.

In the old days, you used to go into people’s offices and see what books they had on the shelves, what they hung on their walls, and what knick-knacks they collect. These clues will tell you what you have in common with this person, what their business is about, and similar interests you might share. You earn intimacy and trust in order to build a relationship. Eventually, that person will open up to you about their business needs and as a professional, you can then solve them.

I saw that social media was going to change the way people connect, build, and maintain relationships. That’s what led to the moment where I looked for a tool that enabled me to connect contacts and social conversations.

I found dashboards like Hootsuite that enable you to manage the conversations, but they weren’t tied back to the contacts. I saw things like G Suite and Gmail that allow you to manage your email, contacts, and calendar, but they weren’t linked. There wasn’t a single contact record that linked all of these things for you or your team to access in one unified relationship manager.

That’s why I decided to get back in the game and build Nimble.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

One of the hardest things was to build demand for a product they didn’t even know that they needed. When we started to pioneer social selling CRM back in 2010 people didn’t know that social could be applied to business. They thought Twitter was a place a bunch of propeller-heads told each other when they were going to the bathroom, they thought LinkedIn was the place you go if you want to get a job, and they thought Facebook was a place to hook up with your High School sweetheart. They didn’t understand that it wasn’t just a place to build personal relationships, but business relationships as well. Business relationships are personal. People buy from other people they like, know, and trust.

By the time people recognized the value of social media, LinkedIn pulled their API because they wanted to build Sales Navigator. Facebook pulled their API because they wanted to have you got to Facebook for advertising. We lost the promise of what our product was. We had to rethink what the value of Nimble was going to be. Right around this time, Microsoft came out with Office 365. I saw that Microsoft would eventually eat G Suite and that by connecting into Office and focusing on business basics that really move beyond social, we evolved in the simple CRM for Office 365. That really helped us get to where we are today.

So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?

We made major bets on Office 365 by making integrations with their products and building relationships with people who gave us access to the Microsoft Global Reseller program. When a reseller sells Office 365, they can sell Nimble along with it. Microsoft is personally walking us into the top distributors globally and paying distributors to push Nimble to their global resellers. In the past six months, we’ve signed up a thousand Microsoft resellers worldwide. Our grit and resilience kept us in the game and allowed us to pivot to evolve from social CRM for G Suite into the simple CRM for Office 365 and G Suite.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

The funniest mistake that we made is that we went all in on social. We believed that social was going to really change the way people work play buy and sell; the funny thing is, I went up to LinkedIn and asked for their public and private APIs — and they gave them to me! This was in 2010, when nobody ever got those. I was able to integrate all of LinkedIn’s functionalities; including DMs, signals, notifications on groups and interactions, as well as synchronizing your contacts and doing look-ups on emails and enriching it with company data. We went all-in on social and we got the rug ripped out from under us.

The lesson I learned is that you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. I learned this only by recognizing that social was going to disappear in the near future. You don’t think about the internet — you just turn on your computer and expect it to work. Ten or 15 years ago, you had to dial up the internet and access it via modem. It was only after the internet became ubiquitous that it disappeared. You don’t even think about it anymore.

I saw five years ago that social was going to disappear. Eventually there wouldn’t be that much of a difference between a text message, a facebook message, or an email. They’re all communications. The key takeaway was that being able to recognize early trends and jump on them without riding them until they die and disappear and you’re left as somewhat of a has-been. We were able to pivot from social CRM to the simple CRM for Office 365 and G Suite, which put us in the position of having Microsoft push us globally.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

What makes Nimble stand out is that it is really about relationships. That may sound trite, but

If you think about traditional CRMs, they really stand for customer reporting management. CRMs aren’t really designed to help team members engage; they’re designed for management to keep a finger on the pulse of their business. They’re for reporting. Our focus is more on team relationships; not just the relationships salespeople have with their prospects and customers. You need to engage with more people than that to grow your business.

At Nimble, we engage with journalists, influencers, publicists, third party developers, and the like. Everyone at the company engages with them. What makes us unique is that we’re really a relationship manager for the whole team. We’re designed for the people aspect of connecting. The purpose of Nimble isn’t to bag-and-tag customers, it’s to empower you to help other people grow. I think that’s our purpose on this planet; and the best way to grow is to help other people grow.

I think that sales has become a four-letter word, but were evolving from the bag-and-tag mentality to a higher concept of service. Service is the new sales.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

People talk about work/life balance, and it isn’t always easy to achieve. If you do what you love, then it’s not working.

I think that what I love to do is help other people grow. That includes not just our customers, but also our team members. If you’re busy helping other people grow all day long, then it’s not really work. It’s kind of fun. You’re less likely to burn out. If your goal is to help others grow versus making money, that transposes the way you look at work and your purpose for doing it.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

There’s a guy named Mark Cuban — yes, that Mark Cuban (the owner of the Mavericks). I’ve known Mark since he was a computer reseller in Dallas Texas where I used to work for a manufacturer of network operation systems and he was one of our resellers.

I didn’t really know him well back then; but when I set out to build Nimble, he was one of the earliest believers in our promise and one of our biggest investors. He’s invested in Nimble three times over the past ten years. Not just his money, but his time as well. I could text Mark and he’d respond to me in five minutes. He is actively involved in helping us grow. He may seem like a tough guy, but inside he is a sweetheart who really loves to help people grow. We wouldn’t be here today without Mark Cuban.

Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app or software currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?

Nimble has over 100,000 people who have subscribed to the platform. We’ve got over 10,000 people that pay us on a monthly basis. The three main steps we used to build that community helped to build a movement.

Rather than telling people how great our product was, we taught them how they can become better, smarter, faster. If you teach people how to fish, they’ll figure out that you sell fishing poles. I don’t think people buy great products — they buy better versions of themselves.

We built top of mind mindshare by teaching people how to be better, smarter, faster at social sales and marketing; how to build better relationships; and why their network is their net worth.

We did that by identifying influencers in and around the areas of our brand promise, sharing their content, hashtagging the influencers and the category of their content, and engaging with the people who engaged with us. We did this not for the purpose of asking them to do something for us, but to see what we can do for them.

This ultimately built bi-directional relationships in which people became evangelists of our brand. We have tens of thousands of people are the world who our brand resonates with. They believe in our movement and our cause. They are our storytellers.

If you can tell great stories and get other people to tell those stories, you can build a goldmine.

What is your monetization model? How do you monetize your community of users? Have you considered other monetization options? Why did you not use those?

Our monetization model is per user/per month. We have a two-week trial that we put people through.

We’ve experimented with different things, such as a longer trial (30 days). Two-week trials converted faster and at the same rate. We also had a freemium product that we gave away and worked on converting the users. We chose not to use that because the cost of our services and platform are so high; it just didn’t make business sense to give it away based on the conversions we get after the fact.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know before one wants to start an app or a SAAS? Please share a story or an example for each.

Many people make the mistake of having a vision and not really testing it. I think that one of the most important things you can do when considering starting a company is to go out and have conversations with prospects, customers, and their influencers to get some feedback on how your idea resonates and what it might actually become. I did that before I started Nimble; I began to use social media to have conversations about my vision. It helped me start building my brand, get feedback on my vision, and more importantly it made those influencers early contributors to the ideas of Nimble — which got them to buy in.

When we built the initial product, we built a minimally viable product. Rather than going out and spending weeks, months, or years on building a product, we built it in 90 days and began iterating with our customers to see how it worked for them and how we could improve it. We began to tune Nimble to our customer’s needs.

Let me tell you about a $4 billion based in LA called Cornerstone on Demand. They started out as an e-learning platform similar to Linda. They weren’t getting much traction at first, but there was a set of enterprise customers that began to use their cloud-based learning platform to host their employee training and other materials on. They started listening to their customers and tune to their needs. Eventually, they became the top HR cloud-based platform on the market. That’s what happens when you start small, iterate, and listen to your customer’s needs.

Next, you need to think about your development team. How are you going to do your development? Are you going to have your own in-house team? Are you going to find a technical co-founder who can do a lot of the front- and back-end work to really start small? Are you going to raise a bunch of money and start big? Each of these has a different risk and reward.

With Nimble, I put in my own money because I believed in what we were doing, and then I went and got investors. You should definitely think about your route to market; whether you want to bootstrap it or raise money, whether you want to do development in-house, or if you want to outsource (which has its own pros and cons as well).

The other thing you want to think about is your name and brand story promise. There is a website called BrandStoryPromise.com that can help you with your positioning. A lot of your success will come from your brand story promise and name.

The final thing is the whole website journey and your digital marketing efforts. The customer journey is critical to your business success. A company I really admire in this regard is Monday.com. They are a to-do tracking app. They’ve had incredible success by perfecting the digital journey and touchless model.

I believe if you want to scale massively in revenue, you can’t do the touchless model. You can’t just generate eyeballs with ad words and drive them into a touchless digital journey. I think that to get that 5billion in annual revenue, you have to have other people selling for you 24 hours a day. That’s how we scaled GoldMine, and that’s how we’re scaling Nimble today.

We’ve signed Microsoft as our global reseller. They have hundreds of thousands of resellers that serve billions of users, and we’ve now evolved into the simple CRM for Office. Your go-to-market and channel strategies are critical before starting a SaaS product.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I think that social media has changed the way we work, play, buy, and sell. It’s making the world a small village and bringing back a renaissance of relationships. We all used to live in a small village, and our reputation was built on the promises we make and the experiences we deliver. Then, we began mass manufacturing products and moving to cities for jobs. Salespeople would sell all that product and knock on doors, and then there was the introduction of madmen marketing. All of that made sales a four-letter word. We discounted the value of relationships.

I would start a movement about REALationships. Ultimately, relationships will help you achieve your dreams in life. If you can figure out what your passion is, build a plan to achieve it, and make it your purpose on a daily basis, then you can achieve anything you want. Ideally, it involves helping other people achieve what they want. As Zig Ziggler said, if you help people get what they want, it’s easier for you to get what you want.

I would teach people about the value of connecting. Ultimately, it boils down to a philosophy that I developed after I sold my first company when I was 41 yrs old. I got a head tumor and almost died, and did some spiritual work. I came to the conclusion that we are on this planet to help other people grow. You do that best by being present with other human beings, especially people who love you. If you’re present with people who love you, they will reflect your shit back to you. If you’re willing to look at your shit and work on it and grow as a human being, I think that’s your job here on this planet.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Google me! People are going to google you before they meet you. If you’re not showing up on the first page, you should do something about that.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

Let’s Talk Sales! Sales Success with Jon Ferrara

By: Elizabeth Frederick

Listen to the podcast here

This episode's featured guest is Jon Ferrara.

Jon is the Founder and CEO of Nimble, a CRM solution for small to mid-sized businesses.

He's also the Creator and Co-Founder of Goldmine Software, the first CRM, and has won multiple awards including the Forbes Top 10 Social Salespeople and Forbes Top 10 Social CEOs.

In today's episode, I talk to Jon about CRMs, Sales PlayBooks and more!

Interview with Jon Ferrara

On this episode, Jon talks about the history of CRM and the importance of Sales PlayBooks.

And, he answers questions about:

1. His passion for sales and business

2. Why a CRM is a key element of a robust sales process

3. Predictions for the future of CRM

4, Business growth book suggestions

If you want to listen to the podcast click here

How Nimble’s Jon Ferrara returned to the startup world to revolutionize customer relationships for a second time, all while maintaining a life he loves.

Jon Ferrara was frustrated.

As a young computer software salesman and son of an entrepreneur, he firmly believed that one of the most vital aspects of business was relationship building. But in the 1980s, managing those relationships was a giant pain. He was stuck fumbling with paper leads, appointment calendars, spreadsheet forecasts, and no great way to keep or share records. He wanted to fix the problem, and thought he might just be able to.

Of course, he could have stayed content where he was and raked in a sweet $200,000 a year, while waiting for someone else to solve the problem. But surrounded by aging coworkers who regularly lamented the shots they didn’t take, Ferrara didn’t want to be just another guy with a good idea who didn’t chase his dream.

So at 28, he quit his job to see what he could create.

Three decades and two successful companies later, Ferrara changed the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) game—and then changed it again! Through his work in founding GoldMine and Nimble, Ferrara strives to boost the R in CRM by improving the way salespeople relate to each other and to their customers, first by integrating email, contacts, and calendar, and then by drawing in social media.

“As I went into my career and struggled to sell in the technology arena, I found it hard to scale connections and relationships and pipeline and marketing, and I looked for a tool to do it,” he says. “I couldn’t find it, so I built it. And it turned into a gold mine for me.”

The path Ferrara has traveled has not been a straight line. But thanks to a willingness to pivot, seek partnerships with high-profile businesses, and put relationships before profit, he has built businesses, and a life, he is very proud of.

Striking Gold

With no Windows, Outlook, or Salesforce, the life of a salesperson in the 1980s was an endless wilderness of loose scraps of paper.

The salesperson was handed a lead that they would cold call, making notes on the piece of paper and scheduling further meetings in a separate-but-also-paper appointment calendar.

If the paper was lost, so were the notes. Forget about other team members sharing information to build well-rounded relationships with a client. And the bigger the company got, so grew the problem.

This was the root of Ferrara’s frustration.

“What I wanted was a tool that integrated contacts and email and calendar with sales and marketing automation, not just for me, but for the whole team,” he says.

No matter how hard he looked, he could only find pieces of the tool he sought. A marketing tool here. A calendar there. A pipeline tool way over there. But nothing that brought it all together. So, he set out to create it himself.

Ferrara sketched out the idea for GoldMine, and Elan Susser, a friend from college, made it into a reality. Using the money in their savings accounts, Ferrara and Susser created a CRM that integrated every tool a sales team would need and designed it to be accessible across a network.

They had created something revolutionary, and that filled a prevalent need, but they had no money to advertise and no real connections to reach out to.

“There we were, two kids in an apartment with $5,000 in the bank with basically Outlook and Salesforce before either existed,” he says. “So, how do you sell that?”

They say our struggles become our greatest strengths. And it’s in his past sales struggles that Ferrara found the key to GoldMine’s success. During his two-year stint as a software salesman with Banyan, Ferrara was often beaten to the punch by the local resellers of a competing company, Novell.

“The Novell resellers used to kick my butt as the enterprise Banyan sales rep because I had to sell at the top level, the enterprise, all the way down to everybody in the company, and that took months if not years,” he says. “Whereas the Novell guys sold into work groups.”

Rather than focusing on the top dogs at well established companies, Ferrara’s competitors got to know the small groups in coffee shops that would one day form successful startups and eventually large corporations.

With their bottom-up approach, Novell representatives were becoming the trusted go-to software salespeople of small workgroups, allowing them to spread more quickly and eventually become the corporate standard in a fraction of the time it took for top-level executives to make decisions.

So when Ferrara wanted to spread the word about GoldMine, he sought out his former competition. He called top Novell sellers and showed them what a difference GoldMine would make in their own businesses.

As they fell in love with the software, the trusted, local reps recommended it to their customers. Ferrara says that this proto-influencer marketing tactic was the secret sauce that allowed them to reach their first $100,000 in sales.

But as the business grew, so did the needs of the GoldMine customers. While Ferrara’s company initially targeted solopreneurs and small teams, they were rapidly being asked to cater to the needs of organizations with as many as 5,500 people. They needed a more scalable model.

So, when Microsoft approached Ferrara with a deal, he knew it would be mutually beneficial.

“They said, ‘Well, we just built NT Server, SQL Server and Exchange Server, and we want an independent software vendor to help us drive adoption because nobody’s going to buy SQL Server without a business application that calls for it and makes it sticky,’” he says.

As Microsoft created new servers, the company needed to find a way to sell them to business owners who were reluctant to leave the comfortable. By partnering with up and coming business applications that would run only using their newest servers, they drove sales of both products.

Ferrara decided to create a new version of GoldMine that supported the needs of larger corporations by relying on the tools provided by the Microsoft servers. In turn, Microsoft pushed GoldMine to its customers.

“We became corporate standard at 50 of the Fortune 500 companies, and that’s what propelled us to $100 million a year in revenue,” Ferrara says.

But as he stood on the mountaintop of success and looked down at what he had built, he began to question whether he wanted to keep climbing or if it might be time to take another path.

Stepping Back

The life of an entrepreneur can be tough. Building a company, particularly a large one, requires high levels of dedication, brainpower, and time.

“Ten years of scaling a company to $100 million in revenue took everything I had,” Ferrara says, “and it cost me time and moments with everyone around me.”

He started searching for his exit.

It was 2000, the stock market was soaring, and Ferrara suspected it wouldn’t last, so when he was offered $125 million in cash to sell GoldMine, he took the deal.

Four months later, Ferrara says, the dotcom bubble burst, sending stocks plummeting. But even as he sighed with the relief of a bullet dodged and settled into the stay-at-home husband and father life, another much more insidious threat was already growing. One year after Ferrara sold GoldMine, doctors found a tumor in his brain.

“Life is going to hand you blessings, and it’s also going to smack you, and you can’t control that,” he says. “The only thing you can control is how you react to it.”

Ferrara chose to react in the way he knew best: through research and relationships. He visited a variety of doctors while also learning about Eastern medicine, and through a combination of these treatments, he says he healed his body while also taking a deeper look at his soul.

“I came to a simple conclusion about my purpose in life,” he says. “I think we are on this planet to grow our souls by helping other people grow theirs. Rinse and repeat. That’s it.”

Even though he had only planned to be away from the business world for a short period, his brush with mortality caused him to reevaluate where he invested his limited time.

“They don’t write on your grave, ‘kickass entrepreneur,’” Ferrara says with a laugh. “They say, ‘beloved father, friend, husband.’ So I decided to dedicate time to being a present father, husband, and contributor to my community…and to be able to do that at 40 years old was priceless. It was precious.”

So for nearly a decade, Ferrara was almost entirely absent from the world of technology. Then in 2009, as his 50th birthday approached, the rise of a new technological power caught his attention: social media.

Still with an eye for relationship building, Ferrara recognized that social media was about to reshape the way people related to one another and also how consumers related to businesses. He also knew that the current CRM options weren’t built to integrate with social media.

With contacts spread across CRM software, company software, and every kind of social media platform imaginable, salespeople were once again as overwhelmed trying to manage contacts as they were in the days of pen and paper.

“So I said to myself, ‘Imagine if you could build a CRM that worked for you by building itself from the disparate data you already have in your business—the email, contacts, and calendars that you have in GSuite, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn,’ and I built it,” he says.

In 2010, Ferrara built an exploratory team. In 2011, he launched a beta test. In 2013, the paywall went up, and so Ferrara returned to the entrepreneurial world with the creation of the social CRM, Nimble.

Back in the Game

It was like déjà vu. Once again, Ferrara felt he had a valuable piece of software, and once again, he had no easy avenue to market it.

“I’d been out of technology for 10 years,” he says. “Most people in technology have only been in technology for 10 years, let alone out of it.”

No one remembered who he was, or even what GoldMine had done. But while he may have lost name recognition and connections during his absence, there is one thing that had only continued to flourish in his time away: his ability to build relationships.

So, Ferrara dove into social media, sharing and commenting on the posts of thought leaders in the entrepreneurial space.

“Rather than me having to go out and write my own content, I shared content that resonated with me in and around the value that my product provided, which generated eyeballs to my brand,” he says.

Over time, this led to moments of interaction with the influencers whose content he shared. But he avoided diving right into a pitch for Nimble. Instead, he would hop on a call with them and ask them questions based on research about their lives and businesses.

“If you let somebody talk, you’ll learn what you need to learn to add value, and they’ll love you because people love to be heard,” he says.

As the connections grew, he would offer them meaningful introductions or even business ideas. Only when he was asked would he share his current venture, Nimble. And as he shared, some of those he spoke with decided to give it a try. Then those happy customers shared their experiences with their followings.

And while this approach to marketing took time, Ferrara believes you can’t put a price on authenticity.

“Real, solid relationships are one to one,” he says. “They’re heart to heart. They’re relevant and authentic. And when you blast, people feel it.”

His patient methodology led to over 100,000 Nimble subscribers and such high-profile investors as Mark Cuban and Google Ventures, all without a single cent spent on marketing. And, after partnering with Microsoft once again, Ferrara sees explosive growth in Nimble’s future.

With the rise of cloud computing, he has his eye on which businesses are finding the most success in that arena. And Ferrara points out that, according to the numbers, it’s undoubtedly Microsoft. He says that while G Suite has about 7 million users, Office 365 has 175 million.

“Essentially it’s really game over in the cloud productivity wars, and Microsoft dominates and will grow from here. “Most businesses that use Microsoft products rely on their local reseller to facilitate their adoption and implementation. Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of them around the world, and nobody has that.”

With Nimble’s status as the simple CRM for Office 365, Ferrara says they’ve signed up 30 of the 50 top Microsoft distributors and over 1,000 Microsoft resellers in just the last six months. And it’s only onward and upward from there.

But even though lightning has struck not once but twice in Ferrara’s journey as a tech entrepreneur, he feels that his greatest achievements are those he has made as a husband, father, and member of his community.

“Life isn’t about money,” he says. “It’s really more about the moments that create the memories. All you leave are the moments you’ve been truly present with the universe around you—with other human beings—and the ripples that you leave behind.”

Key Takeaways

• Why Ferrara believes in valuing relationships over everything else

• How Ferrara pioneered the world of CRM with his first company GoldMine

• Why you should avoid the “shoulda, coulda, woulda” mindset

• The 10-year journey to scaling GoldMine and selling it for $125 million in cash

• How a serious illness shifted Ferrara’s perspective and led to his current life’s mission

• The transition from 10 years out of the tech game to building leading social CRM platform Nimble

• How Ferrara rebuilt his personal brand and Nimble’s brand

• His best advice when it comes to building strategic, high-level partnerships

• Why Ferrara recommends focusing on moments, not money

ABOUT NIMBLE CRM

Nimble’s pioneering social sales and marketing CRM helps teams and professionals turn relationships into revenue, without the time-intensive busy work. Every day, people use Nimble to successfully nurture their business relationships across email, social networks, and more than 130 cloud-based business applications.

Nimble’s simple, smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite has been named best CRM in Market Leadership, Ease of Use and Satisfaction by many experts including: 2017 CRM Watchlist Winner for three consecutive years, CRM Market Leader for Small Businesses by G2 Crowd in Fall 2018 for the sixth consecutive year, #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd for the sixth consecutive time, and #1 Small Business Sales and Marketing CRM by Fit Small Business.

Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable relationship insights everywhere you work. Try Nimble’s 14 day free trial today, or learn more at Nimble.com.

CONTEXT

Nimble had the need for a marketing automation solution to handle broadcast emails and automated drip email campaigns.  The ideal solution would leverage Nimble segments and tags as the source lists for campaign members, without requiring contact record synchronization.  Additionally, Nimble needed a way to track and visualize partner engagement across the onboarding process concerning program communications via email send/open, link tracking and lead capture history in Nimble on the contact record.  An additional requirement had to do with the functionality to add a contact to a drip campaign sequence directly from the Nimble contact record, and then to see the send & open history in the native interface as well.

Nimble is an outstanding CRM and provides a very powerful and unique Group Messaging feature that puts the power to send group messages in the hands of the user, without requiring any marketing or IT support.  However, it was not intended to orchestrate broadcast email campaigns to large groups and manage marketing content assets required for other cross-channel communications. That’s where a specialized marketing automation platform complemented Nimbles personal one to one relationship capabilities.  366 Degrees made the investment to integrate its marketing automation solution with Nimble on many different levels, extending the benefit of Nimble and creating an end-to-end solution for many different use cases and applications.  While other marketing automation solutions work very well with Nimble, it is highly beneficial to not have to move or sync records via manual or other third-party apps.

SOLUTION

366 Degrees is a relationship marketing and sales outreach platform specifically designed to help emerging enterprises market and sell across digital channels. Primary channels include email, landing pages, social and video. Secondary channels include personalized direct mail and utilization of personal gifts in the sales and customer lifecycle.

366 Degrees, through its robust Application Interface (API), built a standard integration for Nimble via its own marketplace to allow Nimble and Nimble CRM customers to seamlessly connect Nimble CRM to 366 Degrees. The service makes all Nimble contact and lead data available for segmentation and targeting at the time of campaign execution. Nimble is now able to use standard tagging, saved searches and other Nimble information available to target and automate partner communications.

Nimble via 366 Degrees Open Campaign functionality can create content related to the partner communications in the 366 Content editor and build workflows and sequences to automate delivery of multiple step communications based on behavioral triggers, actions or dates. Once set, 366 Degrees Open Drip campaigns are made available on Nimble contact record where Partner Managers can simply click a button to add or drop new Partners into drip campaigns, speeding the process and automating campaigns based on partner status.

366 Degrees allows Nimble Content and Brand managers to easily create email templates, social posts, landing pages and video messages. Then, assets are made available for one-off campaigns or drip cadences to be used by the Nimble Partner and Sales team via Nimble direct.

RESULTS

After implementing 366 Degrees, Nimble was able to significantly speed up and simplify the Partner Onboarding process by automating sequences of communications via the 366 Degrees Open Drip Campaign functionality.

The Nimble Partner team can now execute partner communication sequences directly from the Nimble contact record. All engagement and interactions are live on the contact record providing visibility to the Nimble Partner team to measure the effectiveness of the partner on-boarding process.

Nimble Marketing and Brand Managers can leverage 366 Degrees Content Builder to design and implement workflows to be used by the Nimble Partner Team as needed based on the Partner life cycle directly from Nimble.

FEEDBACK

“Nimble gained efficiencies from 366 Degrees because it expanded the types of strategies we could execute right from our Nimble database. Our partner community has grown dramatically, and 366 Degrees gives us the ability to execute larger campaigns and leverage automation across our diverse and Global community. We plan on taking advantage of 366 Degrees’ other content mediums like landing pages, social posting and video management to enhance the partner experience.”

Nimble CRMKevin Turner, Head of Strategic Partner Development

AMAZING BUSINESS RADIO JON FERRARA
By: Shep Hyken

A SOCIAL CRM
Growing Your Business by Growing Your Soul
Shep Hyken interviews Jon Ferrara. They discuss his company Nimble, the history of CRMs, customer service philosophies, and life.

In Shep’s Opening Monologue…

He considers the balance between the digital and the human experience in customer service.

The Interview with Jon Ferrara:

Jon Ferrara created GoldMine, the pioneer CRM program, by synthesizing existing technologies at the time. His goal was to make it easy for companies to manage not only their customers, but their team collaboration and relationships.

Previously, less than 1% of companies used CRMs because they focused more on reporting data rather than the relationships between employees and customers.

Good customer service begins from the inside; employees need to be unified in their mission to enhance the customer’s journey.

CRM’s help you create positive personal connections, which can only have a positive affect your business.

Ask yourself how you can add value to every interaction you have with a customer or an employee, even if it’s as simple as a smile. That attention and focus will help grow your business and fulfill you personally.

Quotes:

“We grow by helping other people grow.” – Jon Ferrara

“A brand is built on the promises you make and the experience that you deliver. People don’t buy great products, they buy better versions of themselves.” – Jon Ferrara

“Service is the new sales.” – Jon Ferrara

“When it comes to relationships, people connect on the five Fs of life: family, friends, food, fun, and fellowship.” – Jon Ferrara

“Life is like a Beethoven symphony. There’s high and there’s low notes, and you have to accept both.” – Jon Ferrara

About:

Jon Ferrara is the founder and CEO of Nimble and a CRM expert, having created and co-founded GoldMine. He is also a technology entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Sales and Marketing.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and your host of Amazing Business Radio.

This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions … and more:

1. How can companies best utilize digital customer service technologies?

2. What is the history of CRM software?

3. What are some philosophies behind customer service?

4. How does the customer experience start from the inside out?

5. How does emotion affect the success of a business?

A full 2-Way Sync: Get the most out of Nimble and Office 365
By: Claudia Martinez

Nimble is one of the best social CRMs around. Through a user-friendly interface, it enriches your contact information to help you build better relationships with customers and prospects. Nimble can be used as a stand-alone CRM or enhance the value of other business applications.

This CRM is the perfect complement for G Suite and Office 365. Within Nimble’s settings, you can choose to seamlessly track email communications, stay up-to-date with events, and even import the contacts from your Outlook address book into Nimble. This feature, however, only works one-way. That means that if you modify the information on Nimble, you won’t see the change reflected on your Office 365 address book. Need to keep these apps in sync rather than push data? That’s where PieSync steps in!

A 2-way sync between Nimble and Office 365/Outlook

Nimble and PieSync have an in-the-box integration to provide a 2-way contact sync solution with 160+ cloud-based applications, including Microsoft Office 365, Business Central, and many others.

You can access the PieSync dashboard within Nimble’s Settings under “third-party integrations” or in the Networks and Imports page. Once there, select “Contacts,” and then run a search for the app you’d like to connect with Nimble.

Wait… what’s a 2-way integration?

A 2-way integration or bi-direccional sync, implies that whenever you add or modify a contact’s information in either connected app, you’ll have it automatically up-to-date in the other, in real-time. No matter who entered the data or from which device.

The first time you create a sync between Nimble and Office 365, PieSync will consider the historical data of each app, and if you want, it will merge your duplicate contacts. Then, the software will be constantly checking for changes in either application to make sure the information is always up-to-date.

“Having the PieSync two-way data synchronization capability embedded in the Nimble platform delivers seamless connections between Nimble and over 160+ Saas based apps and truly extends the power of Nimble CRM,” said Ewout Meyns, Founder and CEO of PieSync. “This ensures that users have the most up to date contact information right where they need it most. Delivering the right data at the right time in the right app deepens and strengthens relationships with end customers.”

TRY PIESYNC FOR FREE

Create your own workflow

PieSync offers you two features to optimize and customize the way your data is kept in sync between your applications.

The first one is called “Intelligent Sync,” and it allows you to set rules or conditions for the data to flow between apps. That means you can keep in sync any subset of contacts you have under a tag, label, list, category, etc. Keeping your segmentation across your different apps.

The second feature you might find useful, is what we call “custom mapping.” PieSync maps by default the classic information fields on each app (name, address, phone, email, etc.). Additionally, you can map any custom-made field you’ve created in either Outlook or Nimble.

The Benefits

•Keep in sync all the contacts’ insights collected by both application such as: name, phone, company name, title, biography, location, keywords, work experience, education, social identities, industry, company type, revenue, ticker, business address, and more.

•Avoid duplicates and out-of-date customer and prospect information.

•Save hours of time on manual data entry.

•Share contacts from multiple accounts between the entire team.

•Keep your one single segmentation in both Office 365 and Nimble.

•Have access to a 360-degree view of your contacts from any device.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is also available!

Another tool from the MS Dynamics 365 suite, you can easily integrate with Nimble via PieSync is Business Central. This connection will empower your business management tool with the unique social insights Nimble offers. The results? An immediate boost in your customer engagement.

Elevate Your Team’s Customer Engagement to Spectacular

On April 24th, you’ll have the opportunity to join Sarah Mouton, Partner Success Manager at PieSync and Jon Ferrara, CEO at Nimble for an interactive and practical webinar!

Learn how to manage interactions with customers and prospects more effectively by creating a simple, integrated relationship system with Nimble and PieSync. Join these experts and empower your team to engage contacts in much more personalized, informed ways.

REGISTER NOW

Microsoft’s Newly Launched Commercial Marketplace Enables Nimble to Scale Globally by Selling Directly and Indirectly Through Microsoft to its Billions of Customers

SANTA MONICA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 16, 2019–

Nimble, the Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 – today announced that its team relationship manager is now available to Microsoft’s billions of customers and hundreds of thousands of resellers through Microsoft’s new Commercial Marketplace. Microsoft’s Commercial Marketplace makes it easier for customers to discover, try, and buy cloud-based software and services from its global partners or directly from Microsoft.

Nimble Helps Microsoft Pioneer New Customer Delivery Channels

Nimble has been participating as a launch partner in the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace pilot for the past two years. Within that time, they have helped to pioneer a new distribution channel for its partners and customers and create partner-to-partner co-sell opportunities to grow customers.

One of Nimble’s key benefits of being a Microsoft Commercial Marketplace pilot partner is the significant global reseller foundation and momentum already created. Nimble has signed over twenty of Microsoft’s top distribution partners and on-boarded over 1,000 Microsoft CSP partners to bundle Nimble as the Simple CRM for Office 365.

“The cloud has enabled unprecedented partner-to-partner collaboration opportunities for companies like Tech Data and Nimble,” explained Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Commercial Partner Channels & Programs, “we are delighted that when bundled with Office 365, SMB customers get more flexibility and choice than ever before.”

Nimble’s Business Case for Microsoft Partners is Simple

In order to capture a larger share of the $15.6 billion cloud computing market, Microsoft has become a strong advocate and enabler of partner-to-partner collaborations that give customers more flexibility and choice. To meet this market reality, Microsoft is empowering its partner ecosystem to earn incremental licensing and services revenue by combining its first-party offerings with third-party business solution offerings to help drive adoption and retention of Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and the Power Apps family of products.

“The close relationship Nimble has with Microsoft makes it very easy for Tech Data to engage and take those products to market,” said Stacy Nethercoat, Tech Data Vice President of Americas Cloud Computing.

Customers can purchase Nimble through Microsoft’s marketplace in one of four ways:
1. Direct from the publishers like Nimble through Microsoft
2. Through the Microsoft field sales team
3. Direct from Microsoft cloud solution providers (CSP)
4. Through Microsoft’s global distribution channel

“We’re delighted to team up with Microsoft and its leading global partners to help drive partner-to-partner motions to increase sales, create loyal customers, and boost revenue by empowering them to resell Nimble and Office 365 integrated within their partner portal,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. “Microsoft CSPs worldwide recognize that they need to start selling simple business solutions like Nimble today to prepare to sell Microsoft’s crown jewels like Power BI, Flow, PowerApps, Dynamics and Azure tomorrow.”

Why Nimble is the Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 Teams

Nimble is unique in that it is the first CRM that automatically builds itselffrom your company’s siloed contacts and works with you everywhere you engage: inside Office 365 & Outlook desktop, Outlook Mobile, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics CRM. It builds your CRM for you by connecting your companies Office 365 contacts, emails, and calendars into a unified team relationship manager enriched with the business insights you need to effectively engage.

Nimble helps make Office/Microsoft 365 sticky and is a gateway to PowerBI, Flow, PowerApps, Azure, and Dynamics. Integrations with Common Data Services, Azure, and Power BI help Nimble deliver detailed reports and visualization, enabling teams to keep their finger on the pulse of their business engagements.

In essence, Nimble enables growing business teams who may not be ready to adopt Microsoft Dynamics to grasp the CRM basics. Nimble can be used as a primary CRM, or in conjunction with Dynamics CRM to bi-directionally sync Office 365 and Dynamics contacts, allowing you to use those shared contacts to prospect smarter – everywhere you work.

“We started selling Dynamics 365 early on, and noticed that some SMBs didn’t have the processes in place yet to realize its full value,” said Rosalyn Arntzen, President and CEO of Amaxra. “These customers needed a simpler CRM solution that also integrates with Office 365, and we found that with Nimble. Nimble 5.0 works beautifully on its own, introduces customers to the power of CRM, and gently eases them into Dynamics 365.”

Nimble’s Solution Partner Program Empowers Resellers to Grow

Several of the world’s leading Microsoft distribution partners have joined Nimble’s fast-growing Solution Partner Program and are helping resellers transform their practice and sell business solution bundles to Office 365 users; including Sherweb, Giacom, Tech Data Corporations, Velosio, and AppSmart.

Resources
● Nimble – The Simple CRM for Office 365 Brochure
● Nimble – Blog Post
● Partner Program Overview
● Partner Program Sign Up
● Microsoft’s Marketplace Post

ABOUT NIMBLE – Nimble is the leading global provider of simple, smart CRM for small business teams using Office 365 or G Suite. It combines the strength of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, pipeline management, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable company and contact insights – everywhere you work. Nimble has been named “Market Leading CRM for Customer Satisfaction and Ease of Use” and CRM Market Leader by G2 Crowd in Spring 2019 for the eighth consecutive year, CRM Watchlist Winner for three consecutive years, #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd for the eighth consecutive time, and users’ choice award winner by Fit Small Business. Try Nimble’s 14-day free trial today. For more information, visit https://www.nimble.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190716005804/en/

Nimble
Megan Ranger
(805) 908-2694
[email protected]

How Azure and co-selling with Microsoft helped Nimble scale with its customers
By: Microsoft Partner Network

Nimble, headquartered in Santa Monica, California, provides an intelligent and simple-to-use social sales and marketing customer relationship management (CRM) system for its customers.

Working with Microsoft, Nimble’s CRM solution integrates into the business applications and tools users already leverage daily, including Office 365, Teams, Edge, Power BI, and Dynamics 365 systems built using Azure.

Building a scalable solution

First launching in 2009 (pre-Azure and Microsoft Office 365), Nimble’s CRM app was first built on Amazon Web Services and sold through the Google Apps ecosystem. The solution was quickly embraced by small teams looking for an innovative CRM that could integrate into both their client and social networks. As those small teams began to flourish and expand into larger businesses, they realized that making the shift from Google’s G Suite (Google’s collection of office management applications) to Microsoft 365 was essential to accommodate their growth. Nimble knew to keep up with its growing base of customers, they needed to offer a solution that could scale along with them.

Nimble eventually switched to the Azure platform and engaged with the Microsoft channel partner community, which offered the technical and transactional support Nimble needed to make the transition and better serve its customers. By porting its CRM solution to Azure, Nimble was able to leverage the platform’s Common Data Services while integrating with solutions such as Power BI to add further value for their customers.

"We’ve found the best way for Nimble to reach customers is through their trusted resellers. Once resellers recognize the value Nimble offers, they walk us right into their accounts. At the same time, resellers use Nimble as a Trojan horse to access their customers’ business decision makers and sell them Microsoft’s crown jewels, Azure, Power BI, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and Dynamics 365."—Jon Ferrara, Founder and CEO of Nimble

The move to Azure enabled Nimble to transform its simple CRM into a scalable team-management solution that worked seamlessly with the familiar Microsoft products that customers already knew. Following its move to Azure, Nimble also needed to align its sales and marketing strategies to match. 

Rather than growing sales and support internally, Nimble chose to take advantage of the global reach of Microsoft to take their solution to market. In doing so, the Microsoft channel partner community became Nimble’s global team in the field.

Partnering for promotion

Nimble partnered with Microsoft GTM services and was able to quickly gain widespread adoption among distributors and partners in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Northern Europe, and South America. Using Nimble, these resellers were given another solution they could offer customers—one that eased customers into the value Dynamics 365 could offer. 

In addition to fostering relationships with distribution partners and resellers, GTM Services helped Nimble develop co-marketing programs with its distribution partners and launch the Modern Workplace 365 Academy. This webinar series for cloud solution providers (CSPs) offers partners the opportunity to use Nimble in combination with Office 365 to develop new digital practices while bringing in modern sales and marketing practices. 
GTM Services also helped Nimble develop the Modern Workplace 365 Project, a blog series, social conversation, and webinar series devoted to helping small business teams thrive in business environments driven by cloud, social, mobile, big data, and AI. The blog series offers a platform for industry leaders to share their perspectives with small businesses—with participants including Microsoft executives, channel partner leaders, CSPs, sales and marketing experts, leadership and customer experience experts, industry analysts, and the customers themselves.

Seeing improved results

Partnering with Microsoft and working with Microsoft partners has provided a massive boost to Nimble’s business. After moving to Azure and working with the Microsoft partner community, Nimble has seen its net-new accounts increase by 20 percent and has grown its average account size by 22 percent. Current clients have also recognized the benefits, as customer lifetime value has grown by 43 percent with retention rates improving by 25 percent.

“We started selling Dynamics 365 early on and noticed that some small medium businesses didn’t have the processes in place yet to realize its full value. These customers needed a simpler CRM solution that also integrates with Office 365, and we found that with Nimble. It works beautifully on its own, introduces customers to the power of CRM, and gently eases them into the power of Dynamics 365.”   —Rosalyn Arntzen, President and CEO of Amaxra

Nimble’s Got News: Introducing 5.0
By: Michael Zunenshine

A front runner of modest size

When small and medium-sized businesses peruse the charts for the best-rated CRMs, they’ll see Nimble sitting comfortably near the top of many lists. 

For ten years since its Santa Monica launch, the platform has been offering SMEs some of the simplest and cleanest CRM solutions: unifying email, contacts, calendars, and social media. 

Growing alongside one’s clients

As Nimble’s customer base grew, so too did many of their customers’ businesses expand in size and scope. In the process, many of Nimble’s customers moved their operations to more enterprise-scaled platforms, and as CEO Jon Ferrara observed, the majority were using Microsoft Office 365. 

While Nimble already offers an Office 365 add-in (alongside its popular G Suite extension as well), Ferrara recognizes his customers’ “needs are more complex.” 

Nimble 5.0 sends the signal that the CRM platform is ready to meet those complex needs, doing so firstly by strengthening their ties to Microsoft by migrating its software from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure. 

Through the gates of intelligence

The new integration with Azure means Nimble can now take advantage of working alongside Microsoft’s AI tools and other services. Ferrara minces no words when he claims: “We’re a gateway to Microsoft’s crown jewels: Power BI, PowerApps and Azure.”

This collaboration will be a serious leg-up for not only analytics and reporting but many other tasks that benefit from AI assistance, like customizing visuals to creating workflow automation.

Nimble is also partnering with global Microsoft resellers to offer Nimble 5.0 to even more worldwide customers.

What’s new 

Nimble 5.0 rolls out a set of new features. These include more than 160 integrations, improved contact profiles, new ways to view and sort activities, better email tracking, more detailed reporting, and new workflow automation. 

On top of all that, there is a slew of new features on the near horizon, like improved privacy controls, more database field customization, and a new Smart Contact App. How soon is “soon,” however, we don’t yet know.

Business apps syncing

Nimble, like many CRMs, strive to eliminate as much unnecessary window-jumping between different platforms, giving as many people within an organization the same easy access to data and overviews of company activity.

Nimble 5.0 syncs with hundreds of online business applications acting as a hub between the places where one meets contacts—like LinkedIn or Facebook—and the places where one conducts business—like Mailchimp, HubSpot or Quickbooks and Zendesk. 

The company’s “two-way sync” functionality means that whatever updates go down on one business app will automatically migrate into the other platforms, like email or a social media account. This also makes sharing info among teammates that much more seamless. 

Contacts 

CRMs start with “contacts” which go beyond customers and clients but can also include suppliers, contractors, and partners of all sorts.

The original Nimble contact prospector used AI to find and populate contact records and company profiles by scouring company websites and social media accounts like LinkedIn. 

Nimble 5.0’s redesigned record feature makes it even easier to “inline” edit details (no special editing buttons and actions needed), as well as helps zero-in and track specific (“granular”) contact activity. 

Activities 

It always helps to split activities into those completed (and therefore valuable for feedback), and those still yet to take place (and crucial to meeting customer satisfaction). 

With the new activities features, all calls, meetings, tasks and other events can be viewed and organized based on new criteria, like priority level. The info on each activity also gets updated on the contact record, from where you can also schedule upcoming activities. Tasks can also be further tagged and customized for easy sorting.

The new list feature makes it easy to measure the tasks of each employee against expectations and opportunities. This way, anyone with either too much or too little on their plate can be properly assigned tasks, without sacrificing deadlines.

Email tracking 

Nimble 5.0 puts a little extra sumthin-sumthin into their email features now too.

You can send emails either through your email platform, through Nimble’s contact records, or via other less-conventional sources like Nimble’s Messages tab, or even their Today Page—part of the dashboard.

Of course, email templates are tracked, meaning you get notifications when they’re opened, which further boosts engagement-to-conversion opportunities.

Ring it up

At $25 per user per month or $228 for a whole year in one shot, Nimble’s costs are just as light and flexible as their moniker suggests. There’s also a 14-day free trial.

Growth breeds growth

The business plans of CRMs like Nimble are simple: Help companies grow. 

Ferrara realized that truth way back in the early 2000s when he first picked out social media as a whole new space in which CRMs ought to grow.

So now, it only makes perfect sense that Nimble continues to prove to their customers—prospects, existing, new—that they too are still constantly looking for ways to grow. Version 5.0 sends that signal loud and clear.

Microsoft Soft-Launches SaaS Marketplace Connecting ISVs Directly To Its Channel
By Joseph Tsidulko

The Third Party Offers software distribution platform, released through a beta program, has the potential to upend how Microsoft solutions are bundled with those from technology partners and delivered to solution providers.

Microsoft quietly unveiled at its Inspire conference Monday an online marketplace through which its channel can directly provision solutions from the software giant's technology partners, potentially upending the current software distribution paradigm across its vast ecosystem.

The B2B platform, called Third Party Offers, was introduced in a soft launch in the Office 365 section of the exhibition floor of the partner conference in Washington, D.C. The new cloud software marketplace aims to make it easier for solution providers to bundle third-party products with Microsoft offerings like Office 365.

Third Party Offers delivers to partners a catalog of ISV products they can purchase, deploy and manage for customers.

"Third Party Offers helps ISVs with SaaS-ready apps connect and sell through the Microsoft partner channel," reads a Microsoft brochure distributed at the event.

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., will beta-test the commerce portal over the next six months with select partners, according to the brochure.

The soft launch includes channel partners with MSP or CSP business models and roughly 20 ISVs, including popular offerings like Zendesk and DocuSign.

Third Party Offers will greatly enable ISVs to leverage the channel to extend their reach, freeing resources to invest more in their sales and marketing capabilities, said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble CRM, a Microsoft technology partner based in Santa Monica, Calif., that's participating in the trial program.

What Microsoft's AppSource marketplace did to ease selling SaaS directly to the end user, Third Party Offers will essentially do for channel partners, Ferrara added.

Currently, ISVs that want to sell SaaS solutions through an online marketplace must build custom integrations with a hodgepodge of commerce platforms offered by 2-Tier CSPs—large Microsoft resellers that distribute solutions to other partners.

Many are offered by large distributors, like Ingram Micro, which purchased Odin Services Automation in 2015 to power its own cloud marketplace. Others come from telecoms or web hosting companies that have built their own commerce platforms or embed ones from vendors like AppDirect.

Microsoft will streamline that process to drive sales of comprehensive solutions through its channel. Once in general release, Third Party Offers will be available to all Microsoft technology and channel partners, Ferrara said.

ISVs will only have to on board once to the Microsoft platform, Ferrara said, and "once we're in there, we can start selling through any part of that channel, or all of it."

Smaller CSPs will be able to provision Microsoft and third-party solutions directly from that cloud commerce portal. And the 2-Tier CSPs can connect their own marketplaces to the portal through APIs, avoiding the time and expense common in developing an integration with every third-party vendor.

"They [Microsoft] know that when you mix third- and first-party offerings, it makes them both more sticky and gives VARs more ammunition for making additional margins on services," Ferrara said.

Products from ISVs like Nimble CRM are underpinned by Microsoft technology and drive adoption and continued use of Microsoft offerings like Azure, PowerBI, Dynamics and PowerApps, Ferrara said.

The commerce platform will make it much easier for Microsoft's channel to sell solutions to business decision-makers from the front and back office, Ferrara told CRN.

The CSP or MSP will get a line-item bill from Microsoft including all the solutions they sell through Third Party Offers.

"Microsoft is very good at this. If they make a commitment to the market and to the channel to build this, I think it's going to be huge," Ferrara said.

Behind the project is Ron Huddleston, commercial vice president of Microsoft's One Commercial Partner organization, who previously played a major role in developing the Salesforce AppExchange.

Nimble CRM 5.0 Looks To Break Down Business Contact Silos Across Hundreds Of Enterprise Apps

The simple CRM for Office 365 teams, recently re-platformed, on Azure, is catching fire with Microsoft partners with more than 1,000 solution providers joining the startup’s channel in the last six months.
By: Joseph Tsidulko

Nimble CRM has released a major update to its social relationship management platform that aims to further unify business contacts siloed across hundreds of enterprise apps and add value to Microsoft's cloud-based productivity and business intelligence solutions.

The release of Nimble 5.0 comes just a week after the Los Angeles-based startup completed a project to migrate its CRM and team relationship management software from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure.

By re-platforming on Azure, Nimble looks to take advantage of a strengthening partnership with Microsoft and leverage synergies with the software giant that have brought more than 1,000 resellers into its channel since the start of the year, Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara told CRN.

When Nimble was founded 10 years ago, the product was more-closely aligned with Google Apps (now G Suite), with a focus on integrating contacts, calendars, and inboxes from Google's cloud productivity suite with social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

But the advent of Microsoft Office 365 in the years since has changed the dynamics of that business and pulled Nimble squarely into the Microsoft ecosystem.

"We've seen the majority of our customers today are on Office 365. As they sign up, we're noticing they're slightly larger," Ferrara said, and "their needs are more complex."

Running on Azure will allow future development of Nimble's Software-as-a-Service application to take advantage of Microsoft's artificial intelligence platforms, Common Data Service built into PowerApps, and other tools and building blocks, Ferrara said.

Beyond Office 365, Nimble CRM has built integrations with Microsoft Teams, Power BI and Dynamics 365, as well as third-party solutions available on the Azure marketplace.

Nimble 5.0 introduces several upgrades to break down siloes across the disparate systems that store customer data.

A new user interface bidirectionally synchronizes contacts dispersed across more than 200 business apps. Other improvements include a simplified contact record and streamlined task window, a redesign of its mobile app, templated email tracking and messaging, and greater automation and customization features.

All businesses struggle with managing contacts, Ferrara said.

"That makes Nimble a Trojan horse into any business. And that enables a reseller to sell Nimble into any business, regardless of what they have," Ferrara said.

Solving the problem of siloed contacts opens the door for partners to sell other solutions to their customers, he said.

"We're a gateway to Microsoft's crown jewels: Power BI, PowerApps and Azure," Ferrara said.

That message is resonating with the channel—more than 1,000 partners have signed with Nimble in the past six months, most coming via Microsoft's massive network of cloud resellers.

"We recognize [that] to scale globally to millions of Office 365 customers, we need to do that through their partners," he said.

Nimble CRM was among the inaugural group of ISVs participating in a pilot program launched two months ago that, for the first time, allowed Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners to bundle, sell and invoice third-party software directly through the Azure Marketplace.

Hikari Data Solutions, a Microsoft-aligned solution provider based in Dublin, Ireland, that specializes in CRM and business intelligence, is introducing Nimble to businesses across Western Europe.

Office 365 and Azure resellers are eager to find more solutions they can bundle on top of those products to add value and make customer engagements stickier, Hikari CEO Eamon Moore told CRN.

"Partners know they need to add extra layers on top of the services they provide customers," Moore said. "Unifying customer data through a CRM [system] is the perfect layer to offer."

Many of those cloud service providers are both bringing Nimble to market and also using the product internally to manage their own customer relationships, Moore said.

"We're seeing a lot of MSP and CSP partners of Microsoft moving to Nimble," he said.

Nimble delivers that "single source of truth about the customer," Moore said.

"All businesses strive for a single pane of glass and a unified contact manager. Very often that single view of the customer can be muddied through all the systems customers have."

Nimble bundling on Microsoft technologies for SMEs

Nimble has iterated many times and now it is presenting not just new threads but pivoting towards Microsoft, having re-platformed onto Azure. Where are the benefits? Hikari explains
By: Den Howlett

Over the years, I've been quietly following the progress that Nimble has been making in the CRM world. In 2013 for instance I said:
Using publicly available ways to acquire information from services like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google, Nimble builds a picture of what is happening with your contacts.

"Using publicly available ways to acquire information from services like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google, Nimble builds a picture of what is happening with your contacts."

At the time, Nimble positioned itself as a conversational CRM solution as a way of differentiating against the somewhat crowded space of transactional, sales team management that defined early CRM. That conversational idea still lies at the heart of what Nimble offers but in the intervening years, Nimble has undergone significant engineering development.

Most recently it pivoted towards Microsoft and its bazillion channel network of resellers and ISVs. The reason is obvious: in the last five years, Microsoft has rediscovered its love of developers and the channel network through which it achieved desktop domination. Today's name of the game is Azure and mobile but with Office 365 at the center and mostly for desk jockeys.

Microsoft is pouring many millions of marketing and tools dollars into both the channel and developer communities in support fo their hard push of both Office 365 and Azure. This is a smart play given that an estimated 90% of the world and his dog are Office users while Azure offers a competitive cloud platform play upon which to develop 'Softy apps.

And so it was with that in mind I spoke with Eamon Moore, founder of Dublin, Ireland based Hikari Data Solutions. Once an MSP, Moore sold out his pure reseller business to focus on developing vertical market solution bundles that include tools like PowerBI, Nimble, Office365 and Azure.

"We all once lived in email but that's changed. You have to go where your customers are going and that could be on any channel. So how am I going to pull all of that essential data together in one single pane of glass? Nimble provides that but equally importantly, it has the means of integrating to many other applications. Its integration with Office 365 is a huge boost - it's something with which customers can easily identify."

So far, so good but what else?

"Traditionally, SMEs have found it difficult to bring all the data they accumulate to best understand what works and what doesn't. The kinds of analytical bundles we can build today - at relatively low cost - give those same customers opportunities to build valuable differentiated data repositories on which they can take action."

Moore went on to explain that the common data services model across all the applications that are supported by Microsoft technology:

"Represents the most exciting technology development for me. When you look at reporting in general, it no longer sits on single data sources but on top of multiple data sources. But for anyone today, pulling bundles together across the vast amount of choice is hard. That's why we see the better opportunity comes from addressing vertical markets. That vertical focus will come quite quickly. I see a common theme around professional services in general but then each sub-marklet has its own requirements. We have to see where the demand is greatest. right now that's in the legal profession but it could be across adjacent markets."

All of which sounds like good news for industries but why should Nimble be the solution that sits at the center? Referencing the new contact app which has been completely redesigned for mobile first use but which also works equally well on the desktop, Moore said:

"It's much slicker and we can take more actions more easily. That of itself is OK but in my world, we've got partner to partner relationships that become quite complex both with partners and the individuals involved. Seeing exactly who the stakeholders are, seeing the communications between them and who is truly important matters. Being able to readily identify those pieces makes for much smoother interactions. But I keep coming back to data so you want to know what factors led to success, what kind of deal was it, what actions made the deal work."

Thinking broader, I wondered how Moore squared the frequent movement of people between different sales and marketing roles and across organizations:

"No one likes to see their main contact move on but the ability to track them through Sales Navigator means that you don't have to lose contact. Being able to track that in Nimble remains invaluable."

On another tack, I wondered whether the recent Salesforce acquisition of Tableau creates fresh opportunity and how that plays out in bundled environments. Moore agreed that the halo effect of this transaction certainly raises the question but believes customers will need plenty of support at least for the time being. He said for example that the power Excel user may well understand pivot tables and the like but visual storytelling via PowerBI and similar tools is different.

Over the years, I've been quietly following the progress that Nimble has been making in the CRM world. In 2013 for instance I said:
Using publicly available ways to acquire information from services like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google, Nimble builds a picture of what is happening with your contacts.

"Using publicly available ways to acquire information from services like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google, Nimble builds a picture of what is happening with your contacts."

At the time, Nimble positioned itself as a conversational CRM solution as a way of differentiating against the somewhat crowded space of transactional, sales team management that defined early CRM. That conversational idea still lies at the heart of what Nimble offers but in the intervening years, Nimble has undergone significant engineering development.

Most recently it pivoted towards Microsoft and its bazillion channel network of resellers and ISVs. The reason is obvious: in the last five years, Microsoft has rediscovered its love of developers and the channel network through which it achieved desktop domination. Today's name of the game is Azure and mobile but with Office 365 at the center and mostly for desk jockeys.

Microsoft is pouring many millions of marketing and tools dollars into both the channel and developer communities in support fo their hard push of both Office 365 and Azure. This is a smart play given that an estimated 90% of the world and his dog are Office users while Azure offers a competitive cloud platform play upon which to develop 'Softy apps.

And so it was with that in mind I spoke with Eamon Moore, founder of Dublin, Ireland based Hikari Data Solutions. Once an MSP, Moore sold out his pure reseller business to focus on developing vertical market solution bundles that include tools like PowerBI, Nimble, Office365 and Azure.

"We all once lived in email but that's changed. You have to go where your customers are going and that could be on any channel. So how am I going to pull all of that essential data together in one single pane of glass? Nimble provides that but equally importantly, it has the means of integrating to many other applications. Its integration with Office 365 is a huge boost - it's something with which customers can easily identify."

So far, so good but what else?

"Traditionally, SMEs have found it difficult to bring all the data they accumulate to best understand what works and what doesn't. The kinds of analytical bundles we can build today - at relatively low cost - give those same customers opportunities to build valuable differentiated data repositories on which they can take action."

Moore went on to explain that the common data services model across all the applications that are supported by Microsoft technology:

"Represents the most exciting technology development for me. When you look at reporting in general, it no longer sits on single data sources but on top of multiple data sources. But for anyone today, pulling bundles together across the vast amount of choice is hard. That's why we see the better opportunity comes from addressing vertical markets. That vertical focus will come quite quickly. I see a common theme around professional services in general but then each sub-marklet has its own requirements. We have to see where the demand is greatest. right now that's in the legal profession but it could be across adjacent markets."

All of which sounds like good news for industries but why should Nimble be the solution that sits at the center? Referencing the new contact app which has been completely redesigned for mobile first use but which also works equally well on the desktop, Moore said:

"It's much slicker and we can take more actions more easily. That of itself is OK but in my world, we've got partner to partner relationships that become quite complex both with partners and the individuals involved. Seeing exactly who the stakeholders are, seeing the communications between them and who is truly important matters. Being able to readily identify those pieces makes for much smoother interactions. But I keep coming back to data so you want to know what factors led to success, what kind of deal was it, what actions made the deal work."

Thinking broader, I wondered how Moore squared the frequent movement of people between different sales and marketing roles and across organizations:

"No one likes to see their main contact move on but the ability to track them through Sales Navigator means that you don't have to lose contact. Being able to track that in Nimble remains invaluable."

On another tack, I wondered whether the recent Salesforce acquisition of Tableau creates fresh opportunity and how that plays out in bundled environments. Moore agreed that the halo effect of this transaction certainly raises the question but believes customers will need plenty of support at least for the time being. He said for example that the power Excel user may well understand pivot tables and the like but visual storytelling via PowerBI and similar tools is different.

My take

Where once Nimble relied on Google Apps and the social channels to build out relationship profiles, the product has moved on considerably.

Pivoting towards Microsoft while recognizing that it can both benefit and be the beneficiary of many data sources should prove attractive as a way of demonstrating how modern CRM solutions focus on what matters - the people at the center of B2B business decisions.

Aligning with Microsoft's north star should also mean that Nimble benefits from Microsoft's ability to scale applications, reaching much larger organizations than has been the case in the past. 

Hikari clearly believes there is value to be delivered, but it knows that bundling brings its own challenges, not least of which is the problem of managing multiple apps and their attendant UIs. How that is parsed across multiple devices is an open question but one that every ISV and service provider needs to answer. 

Nimble 5.0 CRM Has Small Business Updates
By: Rob Starr

There’s a new team relationship manager from Nimble that syncs with hundreds of business apps and adds personal insights. Nimble 5.0 is a major update to the CRM for Office 365 and G Suite they already offer.

Nimble 5 CRM

The product also offers new integrations. It syncs with Office 365, Teams, Edge, PowerBI, Dynamics 365, and applications built with Azure. Nimble 5.0 also has a better contact record, better activity tracking and more privacy.

Upgrade for Small Business

Small Business Trends spoke with Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara about what it can do for small businesses.

He talked about the big picture.

“CRM systems aren’t just about sales teams. They’re for everybody in the company,” he says. “These should be a centralized contact tool in every business.”

So, what’s in Nimble 5.0 that will make a difference to small businesses?

Front and center is the built-in contact sync. This business friendly feature has a ramped up contacts section.  It does more than just corral in data from business apps. It also allows businesses to share social and personal insights.

Ferrara explains the significance.

“The key thing that Nimble 5.0 delivers to the market is the fact that it’s built for Office 365 and G Suite as a layer on top. It unifies gmail, social and calendar and all of the business apps that every business uses.”

Over 130 Business Apps

That means that your small business can get Salesforce, HubSpot and even QuickBooks under one roof. In fact, Nimble syncs with over 130 business apps

“These apps can be otherwise siloed in today’s businesses,”  Ferrara says.

The redesigned contact record allows you to get info on contacts in one view.

Bringing everything together this way prevents the need for toggling back and forth. This contact record is a one stop tool for everything from trackable email templates to log activities. You can even scan a contact’s social media interactions from here.  This new feature is at the heart of the redesign.

Add The Basics

The new revamp has moved a prospect’s history position too. The over all theme is about allowing an entire organization to have access to the data and not just the sales team.

“More importantly, with the new Nimble you can easily add the basics like adding notes and scheduling tasks.”

There’s more.

The Activities Listing Tab and Custom Activities Types feature builds on the momentum created. This allows you to schedule the next step with the prospect or contact. Once again, it brings everything together and shows the scheduled activities for your small business. It’s another way of keeping everybody on the same page digitally.

It’s a great way for teams to interact with each other and managers to coach them. This feature and the new contact record work to one end goal.

Activity List View

“With the new contact record and activity list view, it’s easier than ever to schedule and log the custom things you’ve done,” Ferrara says.

The company brought the ability to bring templated email messages over from an earlier version too. That includes the open details plus another feature.

What’s really interesting and innovative is the flexibility of this. You can take advantage of it from wherever you happen to be working. For example, Nimble is able to bring up all the information on a prospect when you’re interacting in social.

How to Get Started

Information about Nimble 5.0 can be found on their FAQ page. Try a trial version here.

CRM Review – Nimble
By: Rich Bohn

About the Company:

Great innovations spring from great needs. Twenty years ago, Jon Ferrara understood that businesses needed more efficient ways of getting and staying connected to their customers in order to succeed and grow. That simple idea led him to co-found GoldMine Software, which grew to become a world leader in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space.

Today, business has changed. With the advent of social media, email, IM, text messages and more, businesses are overwhelmed by the myriad applications needed to listen to and engage with their customers. The question is no longer how to stay connected – but how to efficiently and cost-effectively build business relationships given multiple communication channels. From that new need sprang Jon Ferrara’s latest innovation: Nimble Contact.

After two years of development and feedback from thousands of real world users, Nimble Contact has emerged as the next evolution in relationship management – the only web-based solution that brings together all of your contacts, calendar, communications and collaborations in one simple, free platform.

Nimble Contact’s core benefit lies in its ability to unify email, calendar activities and the most popular social channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), and automatically link this functionality to business contacts. Instead of jumping from application to application, small businesses now have one solution that can help them find individuals relevant to their business – no matter where they are on the Web — listen and engage with those individuals in any number of ways, and build relationships that can lead to opportunity.

The business world has taken note. When it was in private beta, Nimble Contact received kudos from industry thought leaders who immediately understood its value, including Gerhard Gschwandtner, Editor, Selling Power Magazine, who said, “Nimble is a visionary product. Finally, someone has figured out Social CRM and made it simple, fun and efficient. I predict that Nimble will leapfrog all traditional CRM solutions.”

Nimble Contact was also recently named to “The CRM Watchlist 2012” by Social CRM expert and best-selling author, Paul Greenberg. Nimble was one of only seven companies selected by ZDNet for the “Social Mainstream” category from a field of nearly 130 companies. In addition, Nimble Contact was recently awarded the coveted Willy for “Best Social CRM” presented by industry veteran, Rich Bohn, as well as PC Magazine’s “Editors’ Choice” and a Gartner “Cool Vendor” designation. Last but not least, Nimble was awarded “DEMO God” at the popular launch pad for startups sponsored by IDG last year.

About the Product:
According to Jon Ferrara, Founder and CEO, we created Nimble after recognizing that many existing CRM products had become complex and cumbersome. Other CRM systems offer a poor User Experience for the individual users that need an easy way to manage the immense power of social media for business. With the explosion of social media, the way we communicate with each other has evolved, and yet business needs stay the same. Now more than ever before, relationships drive business success — friends, family, classmates, colleagues, partners, prospects, customers, and even complete strangers can positively impact sales in a small business. Those same individuals are talking amongst themselves in countless places on the Web about what companies they like and what products they are going to buy. Traditional relationship building models need to expand to include social channels, and Nimble allows its users to nurture their relationships without having to go to 15 places to communicate and manage contacts.

Relationship Management – Nimble Makes it Easy and Fun to Prospect Better, Smarter, Faster.

• Everything You Need in a CRM – Get the key benefits of Enterprise CRM to grow your business without the cost and complexity. Nimble delivers Contact Management, Sales and Marketing automation, people and company business intelligence, social listening and engagement and mobile/browser apps.
• The Smarter Way to Start Your Day – Every professional needs a dashboard that provides relationship insights and history about the prospects and customers who matter most. Quickly scan your Sales Pipeline, Calendar Appointments, Tasks, Sales Intelligence and Social Signals to track priorities and work effectively.
• Less Data Entry Equals More Customers With Less Work – Spend more time engaging your customers and less time logging CRM data. Nimble automatically syncs your team’s Google Apps or Office 365 contacts, calendars, email and social interactions to give you the most accurate and current information.
• Find People with Smart Social Search & Segmentation – Nimble is the first CRM that updates contacts with the information you need: company name, title, location, experience, education, shared relationships, mutual interests and more. We add social profile links for all of your contacts and companies to help you find critical details to allow you to take action
• Smart Agenda & Activities – Nimble makes it easy to manage your tasks and calendar events. Relate events and tasks to contact and companies or delegate to other team members to know when they’ve followed up with a critical customer.

Turn Relationships Into Revenue

• Sales Intelligence – Business intelligence is critical for your sales success because it helps you identify which contacts and companies to connect with. Nimble will save you time by delivering sales intelligence to every contact with the people and company details you need to be prepared. Details include industry, company size, location, employee count, revenue and more to help target the right companies.
• Discover & Qualify Prospects – Your contact data comes from all over and it’s tough to keep everything up to date. Our Prospector feature uses AI to complete and update contacts with the latest email, phone number, location, title and company. Prospector is available in our Smart Contacts App or our Nimble Web App
• Intelligent Email Tracking – Nimble tracks your message opens and clicks to help you know exactly when your contacts interact with your outreach, making it easier to identify your hottest prospects. See desktop notifications and detailed analytics on the # of times a contact has opened or clicked on your message without leaving your Gmail inbox.
• Pipeline Management – Empower your sales team with our clean and simple deal pipeline. Nimble automatically ties your team’s tasks, events, and communications to each deal to ensure everyone is on the same page with each of your opportunities.
• Sales Forecasting & Analytics – It’s easy to keep your finger on the pulse of your sales team with our deal forecasting and pipeline analytics. Check out your team’s historical or projected revenue, and let us inform you about deals that need your attention.
• Group Email Marketing – Our Group Messaging enables you to send personalized group emails with tracking, analytics and reporting from your personal business email identity, not a generic marketing alias. This ensures that all your outreach appears as a sincere one-to-one conversation rather than a mass email blast, resulting in better opens and clicks.

Nimble

Nimble CRM 5.0 Accelerate Relationship Engagement With A Newly Improved Contact Profile View
Nimble CRM brings a set of powerful enhancements centered on the CRM basics that dramatically improve team relationship management across the organization with the newly released Nimble 5.0.

By: Brad Banyas

Leading Organizations Invest in Sales Enablement Technologies

Empowering sales with the right tools and technology has proven to get results every time when approached with a focus on outcome-based objectives.

Setting the Stage for CRM Success

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is evolving, and is no longer a nice-to-have for today’s modern sales organization. Managing complex relationships across vendors, partners, customers, and leads has been challenging (to say the least) for most organizations who have never had to centralize a structured process around customer engagement, or those with good intentions who have tried and unfortunately failed to adopt technology around the most important asset any business can have: to assure repeat customers.

Before we discuss what we like about the Nimble CRM 5.0 release, it is important to understand why so many CRM projects do not succeed for companies. History has shown the number one reason CRM implementations fail is lack of sales and employee adoption, followed by loosely defined business requirements and no defined business outcome objectives associated with the CRM buying decision. Lastly, lack of cultural buy-in and the ability of the leadership team to articulate the vision of why CRM is critical to the future success of the organization.

What’s changed and why do you need a CRM now?

The customers are in control of the buying cycle.

Businesses no longer have the luxury to say, “oh well that did not work, let’s move on!” Managing relationships on spreadsheets or in email no longer cut it and are not scalable in today’s always on 24/7 market. Businesses must shift from managing records to managing relationships; this means near real-time visibility to customer history, purchases, and ongoing activity between both parties.

Organizing strategy and execution around key customer communications requires modern CRM technology to visualize relationships across the customer lifecycle. Customer-facing teams need tools to help them better manage sales outreach to easily connect and engage with clients in order to scale repeatable processes that are working.

A well-designed CRM with defined business outcomes, a clear company vision, and a structured path for adoption that will ensure your CRM investment will succeed and maximize your return on customer relationship management.

What OMI likes about the Nimble CRM. 5.0 Release

Customer Profile View
# 1 Interactions
Nimble provides a single view of customer via activities, notes, messages, and opportunities from the main contact view. Customer-facing teams can manage contacts and leads with confidence, combining calendars via Office 365 and Google Accounts without having to toggle between other platforms.

# 2 Data Fields
Data fields allow for customization of the Nimble platform for additional fields and layouts that match your exact business needs. The modification and addition of field types such as drop down, text, and other field types are easily created and maintained by non-technical resources.

#3 Company Information
Nimble serves up relevant information about the contact’s company information. Sales and customer service teams can easily research company profiles and additional information required in keeping abreast of customer events, news, and important changes that impact overall relationships.

#4 Contact Social Engagement + Awareness
Nimble’s Social Signals keep the sales team engaged with customers and prospects across social platforms. Customer-facing teams can engage with a post, or direct message customers when appropriate — right from the contact record in Nimble.

#5  Integrations on Contact Record
Nimble easily accommodates integration to third-party data critical to marketing and sales cadence platforms such as 366 Degrees. The interface provides live interactions with customers occuring outside Nimble right in the contact and lead views. Sales can automate sales drips, cadences, and marketing campaigns directly from the Nimble platform with the click of a button.

#6 File Sharing
Nimble integrates with leading file management and document folders like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox; allowing our team to share relevant documents associated with customers or related to opportunities.

Summary:
The Nimble 5.0 enhancements have combined a modern user interface with a single view for customer-facing teams to manage customers and all activities from the contact record.

Nimble’s approach to relationship engagement vs. traditional CRM is where modern sales organizations must move. Nimble 5.0 offers several new enhancements to Microsoft’s Power BI platform to make custom reporting across different data points much easier, making Nimble attractive for larger organizations with unique integration needs. The seamless integration with Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, Gmail, and Google for Work is a plus for organizations adopting CRM and moving away from email-based customer management.

Adopting CRM with Nimble 5.0 has a strong value proposition for customers currently on Office 365, or looking to purchase a CRM for the first time. For teams under ten users, Nimble can be installed and add value in less than a week; and for larger teams (50 users and over) in less than 30 days with minimal customization. Nimble offers a free 14-day trial, and their price point is more than competitive for a small-to-midsize enterprise.

About OMI:
www.omi.co
OMI is the go-to Partner for emerging mid-sized companies that embrace CRM, Marketing Automation and Sales enablement platforms to grow and dominate their niche.

Our Nimble Success Stories:

Native Custom Stone

https://www.omi.co/cases/social-crm-manufacturing-industry/

Nimble Channel Management

https://www.omi.co/cases/nimble-and-366-degrees-a-perfect-match/

How OMI uses Nimble

https://www.nimble.com/blog/case-study-how-saas-provider-omi-uses-nimble-to-enrich-salesforce-contacts-and-why/

Learn more about OMI’s Nimble CRM Practice

https://www.omi.co/expertise/crm/nimble-crm-services/

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara On Growing A Business (2019’s BEST ADVICE)
By: Robert Brown

Welcome to episode 11 of Coffee With Robert. This weeks guest is none other than Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara.

In this episode, Jon talks about how to grow a business from the ground up, how much do relationships play a part in business growth and how to bounce back from setbacks and use them to set your business growth on fire!

You don’t want to miss it!

Jon’s links:

WEBSITE: https://www.nimble.com

GET 40% OFF your first 3 months by using the coupon code: JON40

Nimble Migrates its Award-Winning Small Business CRM to Microsoft Azure, Bringing Relationships to the Center of Office 365 Workgroups
By: MTS Staff Writer

Azure Migration Speeds Time to Market for Nimble 5.0 Release, Which Delivers Team Relationship Management for Microsoft Office 365 Customers

Nimble — The Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 —announced the migration of its market-leading SaaS CRM from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Microsoft Azure. The migration, completed in less than four weeks without a hitch, enables Nimble to tap into Microsoft’s world-class Azure platform and partner ecosystem to scale. With Microsoft as a global Nimble reseller, and promoting it as the simple CRM for Office 365, demand for the easy-to-use CRM for small workgroups is surging.

@gorandersson “Nimble’s use of #Azure PaaS + #Microsoft Resellers as implementation partners is an example of how ISVs can speed time to market for 3rd party solutions that fulfill customers’ needs, drive adoption of 1st party solutions” #MSPartner #SMB

Nimble – The Simple CRM for Office 365

“As our Nimble customer base started to adopt Office 365 for their cloud productivity platform, we saw the opportunity to deliver a simple CRM solution for Microsoft customers and partners that places relationships at the center of their organization,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. “By providing Microsoft Small Business customers with a solution that delivers team relationship management for Office 365, we fill the product gap between Office 365 and Dynamics.”

“Nimble’s use of Azure as a platform and Microsoft Resellers as implementation partners is an example of how Independent Software Vendors can speed time to market for third party solutions that fulfill our customers’ needs and drive adoption of our first party solutions,” said Goran Andersson, Microsoft Director of Worldwide One Commercial Partner Go-to-Market, SMB Sales. “Customers get more out of Office 365 with Nimble as their team relationship manager. As they grow and their needs become more complex, Solution Partners integrate into additional Microsoft products like Power BI, Azure, and Dynamics.”

Marketing Technology News: Cint Appoints SVP of Asia Nicholas Antram to Continue Strategic Expansion Across the Region

“The company that not only helps make Office 365 sticky but becomes a ‘gateway’ to Microsoft’s crown jewels (Azure, Power BI, and Dynamics) will become a GoldMine,” added Ferrara. “We scaled my previous startup, GoldMine CRM, to $100M in revenue by driving adoption of NT Server, SQL Server, and Exchange Server as Microsoft’s #1 ISV, Independent Software Vendor. We are repeating history with Nimble CRM by driving Office 365, Azure, PowerBI, and Dynamics adoption.”

Nimble is accelerating the delivery of its upcoming 5.0 release using the Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) and by integrating Common Data Services, Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow. Targeted for release in June, Nimble 5.0 delivers small businesses a companywide team relationship manager that unifies contacts from siloed departments in sales, marketing, customer service, and accounting for Office 365 or G Suite users.

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Microsoft Partners are the Trusted Advisors to Billions of Customers

Nimble is the only ISV using Microsoft’s CSP cloud marketplace to build its distribution channel globally. To date, nearly 500 CSPs are using Nimble internally to transform their business and, in turn, transform their customers. Partners reselling third-party solutions like Nimble with Office 365 can take advantage of solution bundles entirely integrated within Microsoft’s provisioning and transaction system.

“We are championing the drive to help transform resellers from simply selling Office 365, backup, and security to selling business solutions on top of Office in order to scale Azure and Dynamics,” said Stacy Nethercoat, vice president, Cloud Solutions, Americas, at Tech Data. “Contributing to these efforts, Nimble’s simple-yet-powerful team relationship manager, widely adopted by the channel, empowers resellers to start selling outcome-based solutions bundled with Office 365. As customers’ needs evolve, resellers can scale Nimble with Azure and Common Data Services as well as easily incorporate Dynamics and other Microsoft platforms.”

Nimble Announces Evolution of CRM for Office 365
By: Rob Starr

The CRM company Nimble has announced a better way for business departments to stay in sync. What’s interesting is it works with popular systems like Office 365 and Dynamics 365. That way, everyone gets the same information across departments.

Small Business Trends asked Jon Ferrara, Nimble CEO, to explain. He wrote how sharing information with Microsoft Office 365, G Suite; MailChimp or Hubspot can be an issue.

Customer Relationships
“No one in the organization has a complete view of customer or prospect relationships because there is no single system. Nimble CRM is filling this need.”

Here’s how they’re doing it. First of all, they noticed business teams were getting bigger. This happened as Nimble customers adopted Office 365.

“Three years ago, Nimble was best known as a simple, smart relationship manager for small teams of two to five G Suite users,” Ferrara writes. “They needed to integrate contacts, calendar appointments, inboxes and social, into a single team CRM system.”

Nimble and Microsoft Integration Promote Better Communication

Nimble now works with Dynamics 365 applications. This new PieSync integration syncs data with 170+ SaaS business apps. That list of apps includes  Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. However, not all small businesses can use Dynamics 365 for Sales. These companies can use Nimble instead.

Nimble brings calendar appointments, Office 365 contacts, inboxes and other communications together with over 170 SaaS business app contacts and social media connections (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook).

This saves time and eliminates errors.

Nimble is made for Office 365 teams up to 25 employees. Therefore, it’s an inexpensive contact relationship manager. Most customers are solopreneurs and small teams. However, the CRM  works in bigger companies and sales teams. The product is fast because it runs on Azure.

Although it works well with most industries, the top five industries using Nimble include Advertising and Marketing, IT Services, Management Consulting, Real Estate, Financial Services and Legal Services.

There are three big advantages to this product. First off, it lets sales and business development teams follow-up on information supplied from other staff members. Secondly, it provides complete information inside one app. Lastly, it allows employees to build up customer relationships through daily workflows.

Finally, Ferrara sums this product up.

“Nimble is not an enterprise CRM, though workgroups use the system in any sized company.  The right-sized, ROI-friendly contact relationship manager delivers data and insights to individuals and small workgroups without the up-front investment of an enterprise CRM.”

Nimble Delivers Contact Unification, Automated Data Enrichment for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Partners and Customers
By: PRNEWSWIRE

Nimble — the Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 — announced two-way contact data synchronization and automated data enrichment for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Office 365, and other business data sources. A fast-growing network of CSPs worldwide are reselling Nimble as both a simple CRM for Business Central and an onramp to more sophisticated systems.

Nimble Anncs Team Relationship Management, Contact Unification & Data Enrichment for Office 365 & #Dynamics365 Business Central #MSPartner

“It’s hard to truly understand your customers, partners, and suppliers when your CRM is broken, and critical relationship data and conversations are siloed in Business Central, Office 365, and other front- and back-office systems across the organization,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. “Microsoft users love using Nimble because our automated, instantaneous insights enable workgroups to become smarter about managing relationships across front- and back-end systems wherever they’re working.”

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A company-wide relationship management platform for Business Central customers

Nimble and PieSync provide a complete view of every business relationship within the company, gathering contact data from Business Central, Office 365, and any number of siloed data sources into a single system. AI and automation build, enrich, update, and sync customer records, freeing users from spending endless amounts of time manually keying in or migrating data. Ease of use and universal accessibility help drive an average 80% Nimble user adoption rate, according to verified user reviews on G2 Crowd.

“Nimble powered business data, combined with Dynamics Business Central business management capabilities, is a huge step forward for smart businesses that want to use their data as a competitive advantage,” said Eamon Moore, CEO and co-founder of Hikari Data Solutions.

A recent winner of Microsoft’s CSP Partner of the Year Award, Eamon describes three primary use cases for Business Central customers using Nimble and its embedded PieSync integration:

• Unlocking company and relationship data, as well as standard and custom fields from Business Central,allows sales and business development teams to follow up on key information or potential opportunities uncovered by the finance group and other back-office staff members.

• Providing in-app access to a unified database of relationship data gathered from multiple systems, including Office 365 and more than 170 SaaS business apps. Access to unified knowledgesaves time and eliminates the errors commonly associated with maintaining “multiple versions of the truth.”

• Enriched, 360-degree views of every Business Central relationship helps team members cultivate strategic, loyal relationships with key stakeholders within their day-to-day workflows.

“This 2-way synchronization not only saves time, but it also enriches the contacts’ profiles with the information both tools gather,” said Mattias Putman, Founder & CTO of PieSync. “We built a solution that enables users to visualize certain financial details of their customers within Nimble. At the same time, the social insights gathered by the CRM are automatically available in Business Central.”

Nimble can either serve as a customer’s simple CRM for Office 365, an integrated front/back-office solution, or a company-wide clearinghouse of relationship data across multiple cloud-based applications.

“Some of our clients that aren’t ready for Dynamics 365 for Sales use Nimble as a simple-but-powerful contact relationship manager,” said David Gersten, practice manager, Dynamic Consulting, LLC. “Having easy visibility to company and contact information, without having to duplicate entries manually between applications, will improve sales and vendor relationships for SMB customers using both of these offerings.”

“While Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales is ideally suited for businesses that want an enterprise-class business management solution, we recommend Nimble for small teams that want an end-to-end solution with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for its back office, said Rosalyn Arntzen, President and CEO of Amaxra.“As customer needs evolve, Nimble integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, enabling employees to access complete records for every contact, within appropriate workflows and everywhere they engage customers online."

How SMBs Can Think Big on CRM
By: Jenna Dobkin

CIO. IPO. CRM. These are three acronyms that, to those sitting in the big chairs at digital marketing agencies, can seem just beyond the business priority horizon. Sure, a CRM system belongs somewhere on the business growth roadmap, but many people running SMBs assume these terms don’t need to be addressed until that magical critical mass is finally achieved.

There’s an argument here for the first two. In many cases, CIOs can be pre-emptive hires for SMBs (although this is changing in the age of data), and IPOs can usually wait (unless you’re blessed to be running a unicorn). CRM (customer resource management), however, isn’t something that should be looked at as just beyond the horizon—it’s something executives at digital marketing agencies should establish early to influence the data-driven, modern buyer more effectively and even increase cash flow.

Understanding it is important, however, it doesn’t get agency executives out of the woods. Smart managers may intuitively perceive the importance of treating every prospect like a VIP, and realize it requires the same diligence that supply chain management or HR/payroll requires in order to maximize cost-effectiveness and minimize hiccups.

But, and a bit ironically, having a step up on those who don’t even think about CRM can create problems down the line.

Those who appreciate the importance of CRM might mistakenly conflate the action of acknowledgement with the action of application; they might spend time thinking about it before it’s really needed and come to the conclusion that it won’t be a big problem because there are so many SaaS services that can be retained. This approach, however, does not effectively establish a good CRM practice because it’s missing a core tenet. CRM isn’t a piece of software, it’s a core philosophy that needs to be treated with the rigor of any serious business discipline.

CRM the concept.

A Google search of ‘CRM’ nicely encapsulates this problem: most of the results are websites that provide access to third party CRM software. For the most part, software will play into the CRM equation as it will be necessary for your agency to use some kind of software or service (particularly at scale) to ensure continuity of customer management across account and sales teams.

This, however, minimizes the essence of what CRM really is: a business concept—one that should be created on the blackboard before being introduced to the boardroom. Furthermore, the first step of applying CRM should not be comparing software costs or signing up for free trials. It should be whiteboarding the customer journey, the representative touchpoints, and the points of information capture, etc. A representative from every division of your company—marketing, ops, sales, even finance—should be included in the meeting to define all of the interactions your customers and potential customers will have and what data they will exchange with your company.

The goal here is to define what kind of relationship is most appropriate for you and your customers. Hence, it’s extremely important to not only to glean how they will treat you as a brand but who you will attract and how you will retain them. It might seem elementary, but it’s not. Are you a full-service company such as a digital marketing agency, information technology consultancy, or real estate or financial services firm that retains customers because of the service and interaction? Are you a company that biases towards convenience and minimal interaction (e.g., a subscription service where there’s little interaction outside of the app)? Does your product afford for the capability of customization or otherwise bespoke products?Recommended for You

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After these questions are answered, the avenue for what constitutes an appropriate CRM process for your company will be clear.

The Goldilocks CRM

There’s no ‘right’ software for your agency, and relying upon a colleague or friend’s input to determine software can create problems because of the degree of customization required. But starting simple and building up rather than trying to customize an enterprise CRM platform can be much easier and cost much less.

As Eric Brown, CEO of third party order fulfillment and distribution company Fulfilltopia, explained: “Early on, we went looking for some kind of contact relationship management solution, and naturally we found Salesforce online. We later purchased Pardot, Salesforce’s marketing automation product, but despite working with three different development teams, could never get it off the ground.”

“Over the last three years, we spent at least $40,000 on Salesforce development costs alone, plus $600-$700 a month in licensing fees for service,” he explained. “Yet, the easiest thing for me to do at that point was to abandon Salesforce.”

With a clearly defined philosophy behind your business’ CRM approach, even the most elementary of products can be applied to create a good practice. When searching for a sales CRM system to understand pipeline and for forecasting, Brooke B Sellas, Founder and CEO of B Squared Media, tried a number of small business CRMs but several were too small and didn’t meet her needs. “When trying a free CRM, I quickly discovered I would need to upgrade to a costly marketing automation system to access some of the CRM basics we needed, such as visibility into the pipeline, robust reporting, forecasting, and messaging.”

Your system should do everything from organize communications channels to turbo-charge lead nurturing by automating research on prospects, keying in data entry, and enrichment.

Working with an experienced partner can also solve many issues. The right partner will have the specific technology expertise and experience needed to implement a new solution, train your staff, or integrate a legacy system or database into a cloud-based solution.

In practice, less than 1% of the world actually uses any CRM; most use email to track communications and spreadsheets to track contacts. But the best way to ensure you’ve worked out your philosophy is by how seamlessly you can migrate from a multitude of email and social media accounts as well as spreadsheets to a modern CRM platform. You’ll quickly find whether or not you have arrived at the definition of proper customer relationship; most of the time CRM software fails aren’t because of some kink in the machine or improper use, but lack of use. If you find your sales team opting out of the software, even if it’s not optimal, you’ll know it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Nimble Integrates with PieSync
By: Destination CRM

Nimble has integrated its CRM systems with PieSync, allowing users to unify contact data from more than 160 cloud-based applications, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Google's G Suite, MailChimp, Hubspot, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, Salesforce.com, and Quickbooks, into a single platform that's accessible in inboxes, on social media, across the web, and mobile.

Nimble's social business profiles, contact data discovery engine, and smart segmentation are also accessible within SaaS applications.

"Today, people struggle to manage critical business contacts because contact management is broken," said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara in a statement. "Contact details and engagement history are strewn haphazardly across stacks of scribbled-on business cards, multiple email accounts, outdated email contact lists, fragmented social media streams, and siloed contacts in a sea of business apps. Employees waste time and inevitably miss sales opportunities. With Nimble, you spend more time cultivating the right relationships using a highly targeted list of prospects, leads, and customers."

When syncing Nimble with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, users can incorporate Office 365 or G Suite contacts into their all-in-one business management solution. Users can also discover social business insights about contacts in the system and access company contacts from everywhere they work.

Through integrations with email marketing automation apps such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, users can bring segments of Nimble contacts into specific mailing campaigns. They can also discover contact details for bounced emails and assign follow-up tasks based on signups, survey responses, and average email opens or click-through rates.

With marketing automation platforms such as Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, or Infusionsoft, users can translate marketing attributes, such as lead scores, website visitor activities, and form submissions, into actionable Nimble tabs. Based on these tabs, users can create daily call lists and follow-up tasks.

Through CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com or Dynamics 365, sales professionals can bring individual email contacts into the CRM and follow up using CRM workflows. Nimble's Smart Profile Insights reveals common interests, preferred communication channels, and missing contact details.

And finally, through accounting platforms such as Quickbooks or Xero, users can unlock knowledge in accounting systems. Sales can identify upsell opportunities, without having to open separate bookkeeping applications or re-enter data.

PieSync is available for two weeks on an unlimited basis, and with Nimble Business plans, 2,000 contacts can be kept in live sync on an ongoing basis. Upgrades for higher-volume data syncs are also available.

Nimble, Microsoft Gold Partner + Simply Mail Solutions Bring Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 to UK Customers
By: PRNEWSWIRE

Microsoft Channel Partner Fills The Office 365-Dynamics 365 SMB/SME Gap with Nimble

Nimble – the Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite – announced a partnership with Simply Mail Solutions, (SMS) Ltd., a Microsoft Gold Distribution Partner and world-class managed cloud service provider. The partnership addresses small to mid-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) or small to mid-sized businesses’ (SMBs) need for an easy-to-implement, easy-to-use contact relationship manager. Newly available to Simply Mail Solutions’ 4,500 small- and mid-sized customers, Nimble provides an intelligent, intuitive way for teams of 2-25 people to cultivate their sales, marketing, and business networks without the high cost or complexities of an enterprise CRM solution.

Microsoft Gold Distribution Partner @simplyms_status offers Nimble to its 4,500 small- and mid-sized customers, the latest in a series of partner announcements with Microsoft Gold Partners

The partnership is enabled by Microsoft’s partner-to-partner cloud marketplace in Partner Center. In pilot since 2017, the program makes it easy for partners to sell, provision, and bill Microsoft customers for third-party solutions that address specific business needs.

Nimble Contact Management Features for Office 365 Workgroups

Backed by SMS’s latest cloud technology, 24/7 UK Support, and highly-qualified engineers, Nimble enables Microsoft Office 365 users to cultivate relationships in authentic and meaningful ways, without ever leaving their inbox.

• Nimble ties all your contacts together. It combines social contacts with individual email users’ contacts, emails, and calendars from Outlook (desktop and mobile) and Office 365 in an easy-to-use contact relationship manager.
• It fills the gap between Office 365, Dynamics, and more. For customers with more complex environments, Nimble syncs contacts from Microsoft Dynamics, social media, and more than 160 SaaS-based solutions.
• Nimble empowers teams to connect more effectively by enriching contacts automatically with social context and business insights.
• It automates administrative tasks: Nimble tracks email and Twitter engagement history as people work, freeing them from tedious data entry in the CRM.
• Nimble is easily accessible anywhere you need it: Nimble delivers team profiles in the inbox, calendars, and contacts as well as across the web, on social platforms, and in cloud-based business applications.

“Virtually all our customers need a contact relationship management platform like Nimble that centralizes and shares customer knowledge across the organization so teams can treat every contact like a VIP,” said SMS CEO Colin Smith. “Depending on the customer’s environment, Nimble can either work as a stand-alone CRM for Office 365, Outlook and Outlook mobile, or as an intelligent add-in to popular SaaS sales, marketing, accounting, and customer service applications.”

“We are delighted to combine the power of Nimble with SMS’s unbeatable combination of premier cloud technology, 24/7 UK support, and highly qualified engineers,” said Kevin Turner, Nimble’s Head of Strategic Partner Development. “Our partnership empowers customers to gather contact relationship data under one roof, automate data enrichment and data entry, and effectively communicate with customers and prospects within a scalable, secure, and constantly connected environment.”

The Thinking Behind Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
By: Shep Hyken

Jon Ferrara knows a thing or two about business relationships. He’s one of the pioneers of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software industry, having founded Goldmine in 1989 and selling it in 1999 for a reported $83 million. Although he took some time off after the sale, he didn’t sit idle. He started another CRM, Nimble, with a focus on a simple, easy-to-use experience. But don’t think that simple doesn’t mean powerful. Jon is proud to have partnered recently with Microsoft; their mutual goal is to modernize sales and marketing activities using tech that powers the customer journey.

I interviewed Jon on Amazing Business Radio, and learned that he is not only a very savvy businessman, he is also a deep thinker. We started out talking straight business—mostly about CRM and Nimble— but then he brought up a few “deep thinking” ideas that gave me some insight into his personal side. Throughout the interview, I thought, “Let’s tweet that one out.” That said, I thought that sharing several “Jon-isms” in this column might get you thinking about your business relationships. Here are a few of my favorites:

Good customer service begins from the inside; employees need to be unified in their mission to enhance the customer’s journey. We’ll start with one that’s straight business. One of the keys to using a CRM is to give employees access to the customer’s record. Making that available to all employees who have contact with a customer allows them to create a personalized experience. Customers like talking to someone who is knowledgeable not only about the company’s products and services, but also about them. A good, accessible CRM program helps employees understand the customer’s buying history, read comments the customer made in the past, and much more. Obviously, there is some information that can’t be shared with every employee, but what you can share allows employees to deliver better customer experience. It’s worth repeating that customers appreciate when the representatives they talk to know who they are.

Service is the new sales. Selling is about building relationships; there’s nothing new about that. However, today’s way of selling has changed even just from a few years ago. Customer service doesn’t start after the sale is made and the customer needs help. It happens from the very beginning of the sales process. The first interaction the customer has, even if it’s looking at an advertisement, needs to create some level of confidence that causes them to take the next step. And, all the money spent on advertising and marketing to get a customer to connect with the company means nothing if when the customer does finally talk to someone, the experience is less than stellar. Start customer service from the very beginning of the sales process.

We grow by helping other people grow. This is where Jon started sharing some of his personal philosophy. But it’s still sound business advice; it reminds me of the late Zig Ziglar’s quote: “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” Help your customers achieve success and they will reciprocate by giving you their business. That’s being a partner, not a vendor. And you can do the same for your employees. Help them achieve success and they will be passionate about taking care of their customers.

Life is like a Beethoven symphony; there are high notes and there are low notes, and you must accept both. This is sage advice for both your business and personal life. We must accept that not everything that happens to us is going to be perfect. Sometimes it’s just plain bad. Other times, it’s good. When it’s good, embrace it; when it’s bad, accept it and find a way—even the smallest way—to make it better. I’ve always believed that bad days only last 24 hours.

Jon’s personal philosophy pours over into his business. His “helping other people grow” comment above ties into his belief that “we’re all on this planet to grow.” Jon says it’s in the DNA of the company. It’s the way team members treat each other and the way they treat their partners, which translates into the experience that Nimble creates for its customers. It’s all about building relationships and helping others be successful.

I often say that the goal of any and every company is to acquire and keep customers. CRMs have helped organizations do just that for years. That’s where Jon and Nimble come in. By focusing on getting new customers and keeping the old, you will find that achieving any other goal you may have somehow becomes easier. Help others grow, and they will help you—and your business—grow as well. In the end, isn’t that really what it’s all about?

Be Like Jon Ferrara
By: Stefan Lubinski

You may not know Jon Ferrara. He is the founder and CEO of Nimble CRM. I had the privilege to interview Jon years ago when he first started Nimble. 

Nimble was not Jon's first software rodeo. He built one of the best CRM's I had ever had the pleasure to use called Goldmine and had successfully sold it to Microsoft. 

So Jon was kind of a big deal. At the time Jon decided that he would grow Nimble without a formal marketing budget. I know... what?? Furthermore, this was at a time the word "Influencer" (marketing) was not even part of the lexicon. So it made sense that he would take the interview (sort of) with this no-name guy and his podcast/online show. 

Thanks to LinkedIn, Jon and I stayed connected but not really in touch. Fast forward 10 years, and I (still a nobody in the grand scheme of things) I reach out to Jon to tell him that I will be launching The Self-Employed Survival School, online courses and coaching for the growing segment of self-employed solopreneurs and wanted to speak with him about making Nimble the "Official CRM of The Self-Employed Survival School".

Now I knew this took a certain amount of chutzpah to reach out to the CEO after all of these years to talk about Nimble and my little project... .but chutzpah is not something I am short on.

It wasn't until the call that I realized how silly this really was. In catching up Jon told me that Microsoft has decided to effectively bundle the Nimble CRM with Office 365. Um... that is kind of a big deal. At this point I feel like a shmuck, that I am about to pitch my little online course and coaching program THAT HAS NOT EVEN BEGUN... to a guy making multi-million dollar deals.

I even told him that at this point I was embarrassed to even go on. But Jon quickly squashed that notion. He listened intently and supported the concept that people who would be leaving the familiar W2 employee situation to go out on their own would need all sorts of support and training especially around sales and marketing if that was not part of their previous role. Jon also brainstormed some ideas about putting together a road-map of fundamental technology and training in a way that I had not considered.

Jon also enthusiastically offered to do a webinar with me to specifically talk to this market and explain why a CRM and specifically Nimble CRM is such an important part of the Self-Employed Survival Tool Kit in a language that they understand. He could have simply offered me a link to any of the many webinars already recorded. But he didn't. He also invited me to join his partner program.

I am a solopreneur looking to build something special, but it will never be BIG. I likely won't make a big impact o Nimble's bottom line. But Jon didn't care. He gave me time. He listened. He contributed. And he made me feel just as important an qualified as the execs at Microsoft and other large organizations he deals with everyday.

Jon knows that business is about relationships. About people. He did not quantify my relationship as low value and simply send me a link or push me off to someone else. Jon is the CEO of one of the fastest growing CRMs and still made time for a little guy that he met 10 years ago.

I hope more successful CEOs and Execs take a page from Jon's playbook. Be Like Jon!

Relationship Management with CRM Pioneer + CEO of Nimble John Ferrara – Episode 38
By: Nathaniel Schooler

Relationship Management with CRM

Nathaniel Schooler 0:21
Today I’m interviewing Jon, a CRM and Relationship Management entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Media’s effects on Sales and Marketing.

He has re-imagined CRM by building a Simply Smarter Social Sales and Marketing platform for GSuite and Office 365, his most recent venture Nimble.com.

It is the first CRM that works for you by building and updating contact data for you, then works with you, everywhere you work.

Ferrara is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs). He has recently been recognized on Forbes as one of the Top 10 Social CEO’s, Top 10 Social Salespeople In The World and Top 100 Marketing Influencers.

So let’s dig into the show.

Well it’s great to be joined by you Jon. I’ve kind of watched watched you grow Nimble and I’m really excited to sort of learn a bit more about about you and CRM obviously!

Don’t forget to use the link below and the voucher code JON40

Nimble Free Trial and 40% OFF for 3 Months Click Here 

Jon Ferrara 1:35
Well, it’s a pleasure to be with you today. I think that we’re on this planet to grow by helping other people grow and any chance that I have to connect with another human being for conversation especially about how we might inspire and educate other people to achieve their dreams is a pretty great day for me. So I appreciate the opportunity to connect to for this conversation.

Nathaniel Schooler 1:59
Super

Super. You were involved with a company called Goldmine back in the day.

Which was when I had a lady in the office who had a Rolodex.

When I worked at my Dad’s firm, we had a winery, and she would come along and she would say, she was very posh English lady.

And she would say:-

“Oh, Nathaniel, you must you must call this lady this week. She’s got a new buyer in her garden centre, or, you know, whatever. And here’s the number and you must call her and speak to her.”

But the beauty of of the software that you’ve created now which which is called nimble CRM, is it gives me all that information and more right.

Jon Ferrara 2:52
Yes, I mean, if you think about business people buy from people that they like know and trust and in the old days you went into somebody’s office and you got to know them. You looked at the books, and the degrees, and the knickknacks, and the photographs and all that gave you clues into who they were.

And of course, you did research into what their business was about. And you did this in order to figure out a way you might be able to add value.

And then you shared what you had in common with the person in order to break the ice and build the intimacy and trust so if they open up to you about their businesses use which as a professional you can then solve and today you have to do that all electronically you Google somebody before meeting and then you’re supposed to go log that in the CRM.

And then you need to engage with them on whatever channel you can and then you know the past that was that in person and the phone and facts and now it’s email and social and and then you have to go back to the CRM and log it and I think it’s too much work and and I think the reason they called Salesforce have to force sales people to use it.

Nobody in their right mind would use a CRM if they want beat on to do it. And that’s the reason why there’s 225 million global businesses and less than 1%, use any CRM because you work for it, And you have to go to it to use it.

And my belief is that you shouldn’t have to work for your CRM. It should work for you by building itself and then work with you wherever you work. Because if you’re not in the trenches, in the river, having conversations, building relationships, and staying “Top of Mind” with their customer, then they’re not going to pick up the phone and call you when they need their products and services.

And if they don’t, your dead and like a famous actress said:-

“Out of sight is out of mind and out of mind is out of money, honey,!”

And it’s your job to stay top of mind as a trusted adviser to your prospects and customers and ideally, their influencers as well.

Nathaniel Schooler 4:50
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense if you could see me, oh, if we didn’t have a bandwidth problem at this end. But if you could see me you’d see I was nodding away here Jon.

Jon Ferrara 4:59
Well, you and I read from the same hymn book Nate.

And so many of the things I mean, what I just said, we can unpack for 30 minutes. All of those things.

But I think the key thing is, is that relationships matter, and that your network and your brand are your net worth, and we’re talking to not just sales people, we’re talking to any business person that’s listening.

So I believe this conversation that you and I are going to have is applicable to individuals and teams that occur in small, medium, large and enterprise companies, because teams that work together win games and it’s not just sales and marketing people that talk to prospects and customers that grow a business.

There’s a team of people at a company that should be co-collaborating on the conversations and the connections that they’re doing with customers, but today, there are silos in businesses there’s an application for sales, marketing, customer service and accounting in most companies. And then there’s the contact management system which happens to be office 365 or Gmail G-Suite these days.

And every single one of the things I mentioned is a separate island of contacts. And for Office in G Suite. It’s a separate island of contacts for every team member. And that is what’s broken in business today is that there is no central contact platform for the business.

And actually, this is what I invented with Goldmine. God, I don’t even want to say I think it was 30 years ago, I can’t even count but the thing is, is that Goldmine was Outlook and Salesforce combined before either existed. And that’s why things are broken today, because we all live in what is outlook but today, it could be G Suite or Office 365, but we live in our email and social and then we have to go to the CRM to do the work and it’s only sales people that do that. And they don’t even really do it because most people don’t log who people are and what their business is about or even what they did or what they need to do.

And it’s the basics that wins games. And I think that we don’t do the basics because we’re human. And because we waste so much time doing the work for the CRM. And that’s why I got back in the business with Nimble because I think that your CRM should automatically work for you by building this house and work with you everywhere you work.

But then let’s talk about what CRM is CRM is a database. But this database isn’t just applicable to a business that wants to have plumbing for leads, reporting and pipeline.

I think that everybody needs a personal golden Rolodex, because your brand new network or your net worth and if you don’t take care of it, you won’t achieve your dreams in life. So if you’re listening to me today, you should use something other than Office 365 or Gmail or or or G-Suite for your contacts or LinkedIn. All these things separated everywhere.

You should have something that unifies it and then be able to take that network those contacts with you to work everywhere you work.

And you will be more effective that way. And then if you’re a business, you’re going to have all these silos, you need this, you need a central contact platform for your business. And that’s what nimble provides for the business. Because I think that no matter who picks up the phone, you should know who this person is, what their business about the last time you or anybody in the team ever talk to them, and what is pending.

And then what you need to do is after having a conversation logged in and schedule the next task, but 99% of people don’t do all those things because the systems are just too hard.

Nathaniel Schooler 8:35
Yeah, I mean, a lot of systems have have some some of the features that Nimble has, I mean, but so, you know, I kind of spent years just not even thinking that it was that important, but recently I’ve just realized that how important it is you know, so, so for example, like if I’m, if I’m reaching out to say, I’m moving and I’m going to I’m still with the same company.

I’m moving into a new city that might be like six or seven hours away, right. Or even across the world somewhere.

I want to meet people and I want to speak to people who I who I generally get on with quite well already. So how am I going to work out who the hell they are?

Am I gonna waste my time in in LinkedIn or am I going to waste my time you know using a Twitter search or am I going to you know use a Twitter tool or you know I’m not what I want is a find a really easy system that works so I can find the people that I want to either speak to on the phone or speak to on a Zoom call or go and meet face to face.

And it’s the value of your network! You’re completely right it’s but it’s it’s being able to manage more than was it 100 contacts or 200 is that is the amount we can actually manage without having a technology helping us is that what they say?

Jon Ferrara 9:57
It’s called the Dunbar limit and it was an English chap that figure that out that our that our mind can only manage 100 to 200 people at one time, and that most people have thousands of connections.

But let’s talk about a use case that is that you personally are doing today, you are working on a Podcast, your outreach to people that fit a certain criteria globally, whether you know them or you want to connect with them. And somehow you need identify people that matter, reach out in a one to one relevant authentic way, create a connection, start a conversation that results in ideally a mutually beneficial outcome.

And today, if you wanted to do that you need a database a CRM, then you need some type of sales intelligence software that enrich the contact with people in company data, so you can segment them into people that matter.

They fit the criteria of your outreach, then you need some sort of an email template in program that enabled you to send emails either one to one or at scale that were template ID. So they were relevant and authentic. And you had trackable open and click data.

And if you want to do all that, you have to buy at least three different tools that cost $25 to $100 per user per month and they don’t even talk to each other.

And that’s another reason why we built Nimble is that we give you the the intelligent CRM that unifies itself from your email contact and calendar and G-Suite iCloud and office plus Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn plus over 140, SAS business apps so that if you have an accounting program like QuickBooks or Zero or you have a marketing program like MailChimp or or HubSpot, or you have a support program like Zendesk or whatever, Nimble unifies all these contacts and enriches them with people in company data, so you can segment them and outreach to them in a one to one way and Nate every business has some business application and most people have an accounting program that tracks who they’ve sold to.

Do you know how many businesses never follow up with somebody that they’ve sold to in the past?

Nathaniel Schooler 12:08
Oh, how many?

Jon Ferrara 12:10
Most?

Nathaniel Schooler 12:12
That’s your I mean, I’m a big fan of guy called Jay Abraham. You must know Jay Abraham right?

Yes. I’m a massive fan of his and he he talks about that and it’s it’s the they are the easiest people to sell something to as well you know.

Yes,

But it’s like but it’s like your network right? If you if you just spend a little bit of time speaking to them and actually getting to know them, they are your biggest wealth there’s no doubt about it. And if and if for example, you’re looking to reach out to an influencer in I don’t know the Nordics or Israel or America or something in a specific area like I’m doing.

I’m quite lucky because I can actually knock on the door and not everybody will answer but most I would say about 85 to 90% of the people that I contact Answer me. Yeah. The ones that don’t answer me are either competitors or they are egomaniacs or they don’t receive the message that I send to them.

Which is still a risk. Because you know, if you’re sending an email, even if your email gets through to most people, there’s always going to be an email that doesn’t get through. So you know, and by the time I’ve Germany reached out to some of these people, if they don’t respond within a few days, they’ve missed this new quarter. So I’ll kind of leave them on the back burner for the next quarter.

But I think for every person it’s important whether you’re in business, whether you’re inside a business or you own a business, everybody needs to keep up to speed with even their relationships with their friends and family. I mean, you know, my Godfather is really well connected.

But sometimes we get busy and we forget to speak to people. So to be able to like set something that says this person is important to me is super important. I love that I love that feature is great. You can just set it so there’s like this individuals important and say, remind me every month to contact them. You could you know I love that I think it’s great.

Jon Ferrara 14:27
Well you know we were human and we we we forget and relationships are like a garden. So imagine if you went out and tended your garden on a daily basis, what would it be like it would it would be beautiful would produce wonderful things. Imagine if you let the garden go for a week, a month a year, the amount of weeds that would develop at some point you’d have to rotor till it and start over.

And that’s what happens to marriages and really business relationships and so It just takes a little touch periodically. And the more authentic and relevant that the touch is, the deeper the connection that it will be. And the less work it will be in order to maintain the relationship.

Did you know that most of the gas that you use is getting the car up to speed or the rocket up to velocity and the rest of it isn’t really that much. And so how many people develop relationships and they spend all that time to make the connection and then they don’t stay in touch.

What a waste, right?

Nathaniel Schooler 15:37
Yeah.

Jon Ferrara 15:37
And and they and they don’t stay in touch because they don’t have an organized system that enables them to identify people that matter. Reach out in a relevant authentic way and stay in touch and not just on the business side.

So many people think that LinkedIn is the social way to stay in touch with business or to do what they say is social selling but for me, LinkedIn is like walking into my lobby. It’s like you’re going to see my business persona.

But if you want to build a relationship with me, you need to connect with me on the five F’s of like, family, friend, food, fun and fellowships, which means you need to connect on the softer side of my personality in order to that and deepen the relationship.

And the way I see this typically happening is relationships don’t start on LinkedIn, they start where you’ve established yourself as a trusted adviser because you give your knowledge away and I do that daily.

I teach people how to be better, smarter, faster, it social sales and marketing by sharing content. That’s inspiration, educational across the identities where my constituents have conversations, which is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, places like that.

And then what happens is that people then engage with me and they connect and we start conversations.

So those softer places where they start maybe Twitter or Instagram or even LinkedIn, then shift to maybe a LinkedIn connection, which then shifts to maybe a Zoom or Go To Meeting conversation, which is established to email and calendar.

But if you do all that, right, you bring it to places like Facebook and Instagram, and Twitter, where people share the real themselves, the personal side. And this is the way business has been done for millions of years, right.

We take people to the pub, we take them to the game, we take them to our house.

And social is just a way to connect on those deeper levels. But the problem is, is if you want to know all that stuff about a person, you have to go and spend so much time Googling somebody, and it’s just too much work. And I’ll give me an example. So we’re talking about Jay Abraham.

Jay actually lives in Los Angeles. Did you know that?

Nathaniel Schooler 17:49
No, I didn’t know that. He’s super cool. I love him. He’s brilliant.

Jon Ferrara 17:52
Okay, so I’ve heard of him, but I’ve never met him. So I told him and nimble gave me his email. It’s something like Abraham.com. I’m not going to tell you what it is.

It also gave me his Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. And now I can walk in this digital footprint, add value to his conversation. And guess what? After doing that for a little bit, Jay is going to pick up the phone and call me because he’s going to see me as somebody that would be a value to him because I’ve added value to his journey. And he would then see that we share commonalities and that is a warm call, not a cold call.

This is what anybody listening can do not just sales people. They need to establish identity across all the places that are relevant for their constituents, then begin to share content that’s inspiration, educational and not just business content.

If you like to barbecue or backpack or mountain bike or motorcycle ride or whatever you do share that because people would then see who you are and build a deeper connection especially on the commonalities and then when they connect with you, and they start a conversation, you need to reel them in, and we pie and then engage, and then find a way to do a face to face, whether it’s digital or human face to face.

And you should have done your homework before that meeting, so you know who they are with the business about and figure out how you might add value.

They do ask some open questions and shut up and listen. Because if you listen to somebody, they’re going to tell you everything you need to know to find a way to add value, even if it’s simply an introduction. And then when you’ve done that, they will ask you, how can I help you, Nate, and at that point, you have an opportunity to engage with them, whether you want to sell them your products and services, or get them to talk about you or, or whatever.

And Nate you’re an example of that. Right. We built a relationship together because I saw you as a thought leader in social sales and marketing. I started sharing your content. We started conversation together and now we’ve gone on this journey together, we’re we’re adding value to each other as human beings. And that’s what life’s all about.

The problem is, is if you do what I just told you to do, you’re going to get so over connected over communicated, you won’t be able to manage the contacts and conversations whether you’re an individual person or you’re a company because if you want to build a company brand you need to help empower your team members to build the individual brands, which then builds the company brand, which then starts attracting people around your company like a sustainable garden that your team can engage to convert into customers and storytellers for you.

And that’s why IBM is engaging you because they want to build conversations and community around their business, to humanize their brand to stand out from the crowd and be able to serve the community. And so this is really tight short concepts of that CRM isn’t just for salespeople.

It’s not just to attract prospects and customers that every business should have a team relationship manager that that used to be outlook before that it was gold mine tomorrow it might be Nimble, but everybody listening should have their own personal golden Rolodex. I encourage them to go sign up for nimble.

And if they like, what they see, I’ve got a code for you, Jon40 that will give you 40% off your first three months.

Nathaniel Schooler 21:24
Well, it’s super cool Jon! And if you had to Nimble Free Trial Click Here and you can sign up for Jon’s amazing 40% discount three months on Nimble.

I mean, I think I think certainly what interests me the most is is actually communicating with people who you have something in common with and that’s what the bonus of reaching out in the way that you’re describing, because literally if I reach out to someone yeah and for example, they they like football and I like rugby. They like drinking beer. And I like drinking whiskey. They like, I don’t know, swimming. And I like, I don’t know, horse riding.

They’re not going to be an ideal fit for me because we don’t have enough in common. Yeah. So. So and our personalities, if our personalities are the same, we also are not going to get on that. Well, yeah. So that’s what I love about deepening your relationship before you meet people, especially if you’re trying to build a business because you’re going to know who those people are, what matters to them.

And then if you’ve got a team of 100 people, 200 people, whatever it may be, you’re going to be able to match one of your sales people to someone in that company or you’re going to be able to make a friend who might not be might not, you know, be able to buy anything from you or sell you anything or do anything, but they can introduce you to someone who they like, who knows them, you trust them.

And then you building your network and your network to such an extent, you know, it’s insane, isn’t it? Really?

Jon Ferrara 23:18
It is. But I do want to make one point that you don’t have to be friends with somebody to sell to somebody that that you can, you can build a connection with somebody, even if you don’t have any commonalities with them.

But as long as you know who they are with their business about, then you’d be better prepared to serve them. And so relationships do matter, they are critical, they’re so important, but I don’t think we want to necessarily say that you can’t sell to somebody unless you have one commonality or that you’ve built a friendship with them.

Because ultimately what you’re doing as a salesperson is you’re you’re helping that person transform, you’re helping them achieve some goal, right. And what happens is there’s a trigger in a buying cycle where somebody has a need, and you’re trying to fulfill that need.

But if you have established yourself as a trusted adviser in and around the areas of products and services that that person might be interested in, there’s a higher possibility that they’ll pick up the phone and call you.

So the stuff that we’re talking about is applicable, even if you haven’t built a quote, friendship with them. But the friendships are critical to getting through the bumps in life.

So as an example, let’s say you’ve sold to somebody and somebody else comes in and they have a better price or better deliver ability for the products, you’re consistently selling them.

If you have a relationship, there’s a high possibility that that person will call you and say, Nate, we have a little bit of a problem. Let’s find a way to solve that and you have a better opportunity to do that.

So relationships are critical, but they are. They won’t prevent you from connecting with somebody and selling to them.

Nathaniel Schooler 25:11
Right. I agree. I agree. But they’re going to be it’s,

I agree. But they’re going to be it’s, it’s Yeah, they might give you a early warning sign mind that if if you get on with someone and they’ve bought something from you, then then they will say to you, if you get on well with them, they’re going to say to you will look this, this, this competitor of yours has come in and try to sell me this but I thought I just, you know, let you met match the price or explain the differences. Why your products better than theirs, why your services better, etc, right?

Jon Ferrara 25:49
Yeah, so I’ve got a sister in law who sells to Costco. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Costco. They’re one of the biggest warehouse stores and I guess in the United States and she’s been selling to them for, I think 1015 years and pretty much the same stuff. And there’s no way she’d be able to continue to do that unless there was a relationship.

But I believe it’s the basics that wins games, I believe it’s the follow up and the follow through. And I think that’s where we most all fails human beings, because we don’t log the notes after the calls, we don’t schedule the follow up and the follow through. And that’s because we have to go to the CRM to do it.

And we have to do too much work besides that of Googling people and login what we know and logging what we did. And that’s why I think that people love what Nimble is because it takes all that work out of it that enables you to then do the human thing Listen, login note, schedule the follow up and then do what you say you’re going to do. And and and my Dad taught me a few things he said teams win games and it’s the basics that wins games and and that nimble helps you to do those things better.

Nathaniel Schooler 27:00
That’s very cool. I like your Dad’s philosophy. I agree the basics. It is so important. There’s no doubt about that at all, Jon!

But I would love to do another Podcast episode with you at some stage another interview. And I know you’ve been back to back meetings already. So why don’t we, why don’t we finish up now. And, and literally, we’ll, we’ll do another one in a few weeks time.

Jon Ferrara 27:26
Fantastic. I’m going to leave your listeners with one last concept.

Stop talking about your products and services, stop talking about yourself. Nobody cares!

Start talking about how you can help other people become better, smarter faster, because people don’t buy great products. They buy better versions of themselves. And so your job on this planet is to grow by helping other people grow. And if you enter into every business relationship, every personal relationship, every connection that you make, not with the intention of what can get from this person.

But what can I give to this person?

You will get anything you want in life. Because the more people you help grow, the more you will grow.

Nathaniel Schooler 28:11
I’m nodding. Thank you, Jon. It’s been most most interesting and thank you and I wish you a great afternoon.

Jon Ferrara 28:23
Thank you.

Unknown 28:27
Thanks so much for listening. Please subscribe and wherever you prefer, share with your friends. And if you enjoyed the show, drop us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen.

Nimble: CRM for the Social Era
By: Catherine Morin

Nimble, a CRM with a specific focus on contact relationship management combined with powerful social media tools, provides a unified system to give users the most relevant customer insights.

It’s no secret that acquiring customers and keeping them engaged through active communication channels may be the most challenging aspects of growing a business.

The rise of social media has changed the way companies interact with their target audience, and platforms like Twitter and Facebook have quickly become the most critical communication channels for sales and marketing teams.

Besides being the most effective way to relay messages to target markets, social networks allow companies to collect relevant, up-to-date information about potential customers.

While most companies acknowledge that they have to go on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media if they want to learn more about their customers, they may have a hard time managing valuable data scattered across multiple platforms.

When people start engaging with a brand’s online content—whether it’s liking, commenting, or sharing—it can be hard to determine which of these signals matter most.

The Nimble solution

Nimble integrates with Office 365 and G Suite, which allows you to view all messages you receive via Outlook or Gmail, as well as schedule-related emails tied to your Outlook Calendar or Google Calendar, in a single, unified system.

As the solution automatically syncs your Office 365 and Google Apps data, you can update contacts, get customer and company insights, and manage deals directly from within your existing workflows.

Besides providing the most recent and accurate information, this system reduces the need for manual data-entry, letting you spend more time interacting with customers.

While it offers many useful CRM features, such as sales pipeline, email prospecting, calendar appointments, smart agenda, marketing automation, and sales intelligence, Nimble stands out by using social media management to generate sales.

Going beyond traditional CRM

Like most CRM solutions, Nimble can import basic contact information from Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, Skype, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, it steps up a level by allowing users to integrate detailed data from social media directly into the CRM.

Nimble’s Contact Record feature scans the web to find a social media profile match for each contact you add. The CRM searches for information that is publicly available to provide you with potentially useful biographies on your leads and customers.

Nimble founder and CEO, Jon Ferrara, proudly boasts that instead of ‘Googling’ someone, you can now ‘Nimble’ them.

The Contact Record automatically creates a summary for each contact based on the info included in their social network profiles. It also analyzes shared interests to help explain why each contact is relevant to your company and all the connections you may have in common.

Monitoring your customers and leads’ entire social stream allows you to learn more quicker, tailor your offers accordingly, and generate more sales.

A new way to search

Nimble’s Smart Segmentation feature easily helps you find people and companies that are important for your business. You can use a wide range of filters to search for contacts besides name or company, including location, education, biography, and interests

This feature “automagically” enriches contact records with people and company data. It works by scanning information from all the disparate platforms—like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google+ profiles—and then automatically synchronizes all harvested data into Nimble. 

Nimble’s Smart Segmentation feature aims to provide you with all the data you need so that you can begin to segment into smaller subsets and reach out to prospects with more targeted and personalized messages. 

Empowering social media engagement

Nimble also helps you optimize your own social media presence by putting your accounts into one stream.

The Unified Social Notifications feature consolidates all the likes, friend invites, comments, and other social interactions from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+, allowing you to respond, follow, and engage from a single dashboard.

To give you as many opportunities to reach out to contacts and customers as possible, Nimble sends a daily hit list of the most important news from your social networks—including colleagues and connections changing jobs, upcoming meetings, even birthday notifications.

This feature gives marketing and sales teams an idea of where to start engaging on a daily basis.

Bringing back the ‘R’ in CRM

Nimble founder and CEO, Jon Ferrara, made his mark in the business world by creating GoldMine, an award-winning sales force automation and CRM software. Although he sold the company in 1999, he never really left the business world.

When social media started gaining popularity in the early 2000s, Ferrara, an entrepreneur at heart, quickly recognized the power of these platforms and started looking for a CRM tool that would integrate sites like Facebook and Twitter.

He not only realized that there were no CRM systems that integrated social media, but that most solutions were also lacking the “relationship” aspect of CRM.

Ferrara decided to redefine customer relationship management by building an online tool that grows naturally with the expansion of its users’ contact records and social communities, and Nimble was launched in 2010.

“Available contact management systems were about reporting, and they were broken,” Ferrara explained in a 2017 interview with Peter Banerjea for The Huffington Post, “people were abandoning CRM projects in droves because they required people to spend far too much time logging what they knew and what they did, rather than helping them sell. So I set out to build a contact management system that works for you, instead of you having to work for it.”

Over 140,000 people have subscribed to Nimble since its initial launch.

The platform has received an abundance of praise lately, named as a CRM Market Leader in September 2018 and has received significant backing by eminent investors, including Imagen Capital Partners, Indicator Ventures, and Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments. The company has also raised over $12M in funding since 2010.

Ferrara has been recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Social Salespeople In The World, Top 10 Social Chief Executive Officers, and among the Top 50 Social Business Twitter Accounts You Must Follow.

Bringing the focus back to relationships

At its core, the business of sales is all about relationships.

By giving companies the information and channels they need to build and nurture those relationships, social media has become a powerful sales tools.

Recognizing the vast potential of social networks has allowed Nimble to revamp CRM software and provide companies with an optimized solution that automates the sales force with a renewed focus on relationship development.

#7 - The man who has been recognized for pioneering innovation in the customer management category. Conversation with Jon Ferrara, Founder & CEO of Nimble

Episode 069 : Knowing Your Passion, Plan and Purpose : Adding Value to Other People’s Journey with Jon Ferrara
By: Yanique Grant

Jon Ferrara is a successful serial entrepreneur, he’s top 10 Social Service Salesperson according to Forbes and renown CRM pioneer with a knack for building authentic relationships with customers. Given his shared passion for creating genuine connections and making a positive impact on the lives of others, I believe he would be a very interesting guest for this podcast. And so, he’s going to dive in and share with us some of the journeys that he’s taken. He’s going to share with us some of his core values building products that help others achieve their passion, plan, and purpose and we’re going to identify what are those success indicators.

Jon shared that he thinks our purpose on this planet is to help others grow and we do that by giving a little of value to one another. And through this conversation he hopes that we’re able to add value to your audience and the people who listen. 

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey

• Could you share with us three things that you think help to really build a strong relationship?

• With things being so technologies, do you still believe that the human experience is still necessary?

• How do you stay motivated everyday?

• What is one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you in that journey of growth for yourself?

• What is the one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – either something that you’re working on to develop yourself or people?

• Where can our listeners find you online?

• What’s one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge you revert to this quote to kind of helps you refocus and push forward?

Highlights

• Jon stated that these are all great questions and it really starts with him in some respect his childhood. He grew up with his first computer when he was 16 years old in 1976 and through his journey of understanding technology and his passion for people and relationships, he found himself struggling in his first job in sales, trying to build connections and conversations that drive results and there was no contact management, there was no outlook, there was no CRM, there was no salesforce. In fact, there was no tool that integrated email contact and calendar with sales and more coordination. So, at 29 years old in 1989 he quit his job and he started a company called GoldMine and GoldMine was the first programme that integrated email connected calendar and team relationship platform, they were outlook and salesforce before either existed. He started the company on USD $5,000.00 in his apartment in Los Angeles and grew to about USD $100 Million Dollars in revenue. They’re at about 10 million customers worldwide and he sold that when he was 40 years old and retired for 10 years and raised three babies and in that journey, in that experience of entrepreneurship but more importantly as a present father and husband, he came to really understand and value the gift he got of being able to be a present father and husband and how it helped him grow because he thinks if you’re present with the people around you, they will reflect your weak points back at you and if you’re willing to work on those in life you can grow as a human being. And he thinks that’s what we’re on this planet to do, is to grow our souls by helping other people grow theirs and the process of social media evolving in 2006, 2007, 2008, he started to use it and he saw it was going to change the way we work, buy and sell and he started looking for a relationship manager that integrated social and he couldn’t find it. And then he started looking at CRM systems and he saw they really weren’t about social media, they were really about or even relationships, they were really about reporting and commanding control and so he set out to build a new platform, a relationship manager that incorporated contact management and CRM and social sales and marketing and it would be different in the way it would be different is that you don’t work for it, it works for you by building itself in the data you already have in your business and everybody has contacts and email and calendar as well as contacts and all kinds of business apps like customer service accounting, social media, sales and marketing. And it would derive the contacts by unifying them all together from all the disparate places from the separate departments so that the company would have a unified relationship manager so that no matter who picks up the phone they know who they’re talking to, what’s happened, who’s done it, what’s going to happen, who’s going to do it, who is this person, what is your business about, so they could provide the optimal experience and most importantly to follow up and follow through and that that contact would be available to them in all the places that they work so that no matter who touches, no matter what you touch in a company in sales, in marketing and customer service, in accounting that everybody’s on one page with that customer and in that you can provide the optimal experience. And so, we called it Nimble and so he seems to be back in the saddle in the relationship management game.

Yanique stated, so you’re basically able to have everything all under one roof allowing people to pull information from different sites and being able to connect and also it helps with the sales process.

Jon agreed because he really believes that service is the new sales, that your job as a salesperson is to help other people grow and to do that you need to develop intimacy and trust with that person and so you need to build a connection, a relationship before you can ever get them to open up to you about their business issues which as a professional you can then solve. It’s always easier to build a connection with somebody when you share some commonalities. So, you don’t typically start a phone call with, “Did you sign the contract?”You start it by, “Good morning” “Good afternoon” “Good evening”how about, “How’s the weather in Kingston today?”or some areas of commonality, if he was going to talk to you, he’d talk about some common experiences and he’d share that he saw Bob Marley play when he was 18 years old at UCLA Pauley Pavilion and it was the most wonderful experience he had ever had because he grew up listening to his music and he was inspired by his marching to a different drummer and teaching people to seek out truth in life and freedom and the struggles that people were going through around the world not just African-Americans and that it all unites us, this struggle and this desire for peace and freedom and we would connect on some area of commonality and then we’d dive into learning more about each other, finding ways to add value in business is secondary to all that. So business is just something that we do but friendships last a lifetime and they will get you through any business hiccup and in all businesses hiccups happen but if there’s a relationship, there’s a tendency for more empathy and more forgiveness and more gratitude in the connections and the interactions and that’s really the philosophy behind Nimble, is that relationships are critical to your life’s success and that your network and your brand are so important to that success yet most of us don’t really manage our golden Rolodex and Nimble is a tool not just for businesses but for every individual because every individual’s life success will be through the connections and conversations, relationships that they develop too.

• Jon shared that he thinks that a company’s brand is built on the promises that it makes and the experiences that it delivers.And if you can align those two, you could build a goldmine and a lot of that experience is delivered to your customer facing team members and so you need to empower each of them to deliver optimal experience at the point of connection and conversation whenever they’re interacting with the constituency and he says constituency because he thinks that most companies think about prospects and customers and they think about sales and marketing people but ultimately, there is a team of people at your company that’s interacting with the constituency around your business and you need to unify all of these people into a team and to empower them to make decisions in favor of the customer. How many times have you gone into a business where we the people just say no that’s just the way we do it, we can’t do it. So, he’s going to share an example of that. He was trying to send a gift to somebody who did something wonderful for him, it was a Microsoft team member, they did an interview with a Forbes writer and they talked about how Nimble has evolved into the simple CRM for Office 365 where Microsoft has actually recently Nimble with office globally through all their distributors and resellers and she gave this wonderful interview, she didn’t have to do it, she’s a very busy person and he wanted to do something special for her. So, he looked all over the Seattle area for a particular bottle of champagne, it’s the champagne that he took to dinner when he proposed to his wife 30 years ago. And it’s a special bottle to him and he only had it twice when he proposed to his wife and when they celebrated their anniversary 30 years later and so he found a store that had it and he spoke to the store manager he said, “Yes, I have it. I can send it, but you need to call our customer service phone number.”So, he called them, and they said, “Well, you could just go to the app and order it.”So, he went to the app and the app said it wasn’t available, it wasn’t in. So, he called back to customer service and they said, “Well, our systems don’t allow us to sell when there’s one bottle. We can only sell if there’s more than one. The last one we can’t sell online.”He spent four hours that day trying to get somebody to override the system and make a decision in his favor to actually ship the bottle. And they finally got somebody to do that after five hours with them and then when they went to send it, they couldn’t deliver it, they could only FedEx it and then FedEx the next day wasn’t able to deliver it because the door that FedEx went to was a secure door, they couldn’t get through. And the whole process was so painful. And that’s an example of a customer cutting their hand on the journey through your company and he thinks that to every customer that your business engages with the person they’re talking to is the company, they need to empower team members to make decisions in favor of the customer and he thinks the Apple Store is an example of that. At Apple, he has rarely left the store unhappy, they typically take care of whatever he needs and they’re empowered to make those decisions and so, from his experience in building two global technology brands, he thinks that you have to instill a desire of care, of empathy, of the team members to the constituency and he’s say that because it’s not just prospects and customers those influencers and resellers and other people at touch are involved the customer but they need to really care about the customer, the product, and the company and to be able to make decisions in the time that they’re engaging with that person that leaves that person not only delighted so they come back and buy again but so that they drag their friends with them.

Yanique stated, I have so many experiences myself as you describe, it’s such a painful part of the journey that when you’re finished you don’t even want to have to call the company back again because when you think about the headache that they put you through it just deters you completely. So, as a business as you mentioned in your experience that it’s important to map and to empower the employees. Empowerment is a very, very, big word and it can be a simple act if people know exactly what being empowered means. So, as a leader let’s say you went to this wonderful leadership workshop and they brought in Jon and Jon spoke about empowerment and so these leaders go back to their organizations now and they’re like, “Okay, I’m going to empower my team members.” What are some of the steps that empowerment entails because it’s not just about going back and saying you’re empowered there’s more to it.

Jon agreed and stated that some of it is empowering them to make decisions even when there’s a policy in place that is set. So, he doesn’t think any process should be so rigid that the customer is left unhappy or unsatisfied in some way.Jon thinks that the customer may not always be right but they’re always the customer, so, if you have to let a customer know that you can’t do a particular thing, let them be wrong with dignity and respect. In other words, part of it is the way you communicate and the attitude that you have, and you felt it before, you could feel him on the phone right now and you feel that customer service person when they’re communicating with you, that’s why they put mirrors in front of customer service cubicles because people can feel your smile, people can feel your heart and soul. There’s an energy that interacts between human beings and he thinks that you need to start by hiring people that have a positive energy, good human being, that are good cultural fit and you need to treat them good because if you don’t treat the team members good, they’re not going to be able to treat the customers constituency good. So, it starts with hiring great people and then building an amazing culture and then making sure that they’re empowered to make decisions that leave the customer satisfied and that might even mean them recommending a competitor’s product, it might mean making a slight change in a policy to facilitate a customer in that moment, it might mean taking the feedback from where customers are constantly cutting their fingers on their customer journey with you and making recommendations to change it. So, that connected to your customers journey that they’re collecting feedback just like his journey with this liquor store that has a policy that says, “We don’t sell the last bottle.”Why is that the policy, that doesn’t need to be the policy, that policy could change, it changed by human being making the change and actually selling him the bottle but it could change further by changing the system itself. And so, he thinks it really starts with the people, but he also thinks that our world is getting so automated, it’s getting so digitized and he thinks that the more digital we get, the more human we need to be, and it really takes a human touch to create that experienceand he’s going to share a human touch story. Jon asked Yanique if she has ever shopped at Nordstrom and if she likes shopping there?

Yanique replied, it’s not something that stands out like when I shop with Apple for example. It just seems like another department store they haven’t done anything that really wows me. But yes, I’ve shopped in there before.

Jon mentioned that one of the things that Nordstrom’s does when you buy is, they wrap up your package in the bag and they walk around the counter and they hand you the package, what they’re doing, and everybody’s caught this. What they’re doing is they’re entering your space and creating a momentary connection and he thinks in this over connected, over communicated world a simple human connection can work magic and it’s a simple gesture but it creates a more human experience as opposed to go to Macy’s or someplace else May company but they basically literally fill the bag over the counter at you and that’s a completely different experience than shopping at Nordstrom and it’s the little things that add up to the ultimate experience. Jon thinks that companies that could instill more humanity in the interactions will stand outand he thinks that there’s a lot of companies that do stand out in that experience, certainly Apple Store is one of them but even on a digital basis he thinks that there are companies that have created an experience that really wows him and he thinks Netflix is an example of that. They kind of revolutionized the way we get DVDs and it started with mailing them to you in the way that they did but he thinks their software creates an experience, it just makes it easy to find shows you like and to watch them easily and to catch up where you left off almost to the point where he thinks it’s too easy to binge watch shows.

Yanique agreed, they do make it easy and I love the fact that you say we should keep the human side of things because we actually did an interview last week with another guest for the podcast and that’s one of the questions I had actually asked her which you tapped into before I even got an opportunity to ask is, with things being so technologized do you still believe that the human experience is still necessary and I mean from my perspective for example, let’s take for example the IVR system when you call a company, press one for this and two for that and three for this. And I think at the end of the day when somebody calls whether they’re making a request or they’re making a complaint they really want to speak to a live human being when the phone rings one time without pressing three, four, five, six, seven and then being disconnected and have to do it all over again.

• Jon agreed and stated, how about when they ask you to enter in your account number and you get to somebody and they ask you for your account number. It’s little things like that. There’s a lady named Maya Angelo who said, “People will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel.” He really believes that, another friend of his Shep Hyken. He said, “The greatest technology in the world hasn’t replaced the ultimate relationship building tool between a customer and a business, the human touch.”And so, he thinks that customer experience is the differentiator, it is the thing that will set you apart from your competitors and he thinks that the more businesses look at the entire journey that customers have with their business and to find that the more they’ll grow, and the experience doesn’t just happen when they’re buying. He’ll tell you a journey out of him buying a TV set recently. So, he had a TV set that died, it was a Sony TV and it was the second Sony product that died, he had a receiver that died six months before. And so that was the trigger that started his journey and so he went and did a selection set of what he might consider and he didn’t do that like going to the websites of the TV companies or even the stores, he started to look online and he read reviews of people that are like him or people that are trusted reviewers or advisers, people that review these things, third party people. He built a selection set and only then to actually go into a store because a TV set needs to be seen and then while looking at the TVs, he saw that Sony actually had the best picture, the best features, the best price and he ended up buying it even though he set out not to do that but after that buying, there was a post purchase experience where he kept looking at reviews because he want to make sure he had the made the right decision and he kept looking and he was using the TV and making sure it was the right thing. Jon then asked, “Have you ever done that after you bought something you continue to read reviews?” So that’s the post purchase experience and it wasn’t until you get to the point where you have decided that this is something that you really like that you essentially become an advocate and a whole lot of this that he’s talking about is documented in something called, “The McKinsey Customer Journey” and it’s a PDF that you can put in this show notes that you can share with your audience. But there is a beautiful diagram that talks about the trigger, the initial consideration set, the active evaluation, the moment of purchase, the post purchase experience and then the loyalty loop. So now he’s in the loyalty loop where he now only tell other people how much he dig the Sony team but he bought two more and he has them in his house and that’s what you want to do with your customers is to become a trusted advisor to that entire journey not just in the purchase experience, not just in the post purchase experience but to be involved in the loyalty loop by becoming a trusted advisor to inspire and educate them about how they might become better, smarter and faster because he thinks people don’t buy great products, they buy better versions of themselves and that’s what you want to be able to do is to communicate your brand story about how you put your customer at the center of that hero story and you can then not only get them to come back and buy from you but to drag their friends with them in the loyalty loop.

• Jon shared that when he was 41 years old, a year after he sold GoldMine and he has been so blessed and successful in selling this large business and his second baby was born the day he sold the business and his life was blessed and he found that he had a head tumor and it was pretty serious, he had to do some very severe treatments and lost a lot of weight. He thinks you don’t really value how great it is to be healthy until you’re notand it caused him in the process of getting healed to really go on a spiritual journey and in the process of that he really developed a sense of gratitude and empathy towards others that he hadn’t had as deeply in the past. And also, a sense of purpose of his life and that purpose is as he shared before that we’re on this planet to grow our souls by helping other people grow theirs, that’s it. And so, he does his best on a daily basis to be as present as he can with the people and places around him, to be mindful as much as he can and to try to give something of himself to anyone he’s interacting with even if it’s just a smile because the person in front of you deserves your attention even if you’re in the grocery line put your phone down and connect with that person for a moment, they’re serving you and you need to connect with them. So, whenever he’s interacting with people especially customer service people even salespeople, he tries to connect with them and to just have a moment because we’re all human beings and we’re all just doing our best, and so the thing that motivates him every day is that it’s another day that he might connect with another human being, to learn enough about them that he might blow a little wind in their sales and when two humans connect there’s an energy that connects and he loves that energy, he loves that connection and he must share another story with you. So, the doctor that saved his life, his ear nose, and throat doctor, the one that found his tumor. He happens to be the ENT to the biggest stars, so he was Whitney’s doctor Frank Sinatra’s doctor, Bono’s and he also tweets ordinary people like him. He was walking out of his cubicle, the doctors shoving all those little rooms and he bump into this little man and he looked down and said, “Dang, you’re Mick Jagger.”He didn’t say that to Mick Jagger, but he thought it. And at the same time, he thought, “Gosh, your short and old.” And at the same time, he thought to himself, “Why does this guy get on an airplane 50 times, 100 times a year and go and do a show. He certainly doesn’t need the money?.”He does it because he loves to dance with these other human beings, that he loves to give in what he gets is an energy. He gets empowered, he feeds on this. And so, Jon feeds on growing other human beings through the connections with them and he thinks that’s all we leave this planet with is the moment we’ve been truly present with others and places around us and the ripples in the pond that we create through some type of connection and value-adding, so that’s what gets him every day.

Yanique stated, I mean it’s just like music to my ears. I mean, it’s so good to talk to someone who they’re deeply connected with connecting with another human being because the reality is many of us go through our days in our businesses, in our personal lives and we are not present like fully present. I mean physically, our body is there but is our mind there, are we fully concentrating on the individual that is standing in front of us whether it’s our child or significant other. And I’m guilty of it sometimes, I’m not going to lie, I’m going to stay here and tell you the truth. So, it’s good to hear that you’re really dedicated to being present, that’s a reminder that you tell yourself every day because that’s how you get up and push forward.

Jon agreed and told Yanique that it’s not her fault, our minds are like little puppies and you know how if you try to teach a puppy to sit and what does a puppy do, you tell to sit on the paper, stay and it goes and runs away, it would skip away and you have to like your mind and your thoughts because you’re always thinking about the past or worried about the future instead of being present and that’s your little puppy, your mind and it throw these thoughts at you. And so, you can get angry with yourself and say, “Well gosh, why wasn’t I present with Yanique, I could have had a better experience. I was thinking about my mortgage or my wife,”whatever it is, you just with kindness say okay, come on back, just come on back and eventually if you learn to put a seat in the room in your mind to observe the thoughts that you have, focus on your breathing and learn to enable those thoughts to go by without getting caught on them because typically thoughts come and you get caught and you get strung away on this thought about the past or the present, if you could just learn how to do that on a daily basis and there is process to do that to meditation, you can learn to be more present and he actually recommend an app called Headspace that does that so you can load that on your phone and it’s free for the first lessons, practice with that, it has this thing where you do 3 minutes a day and he recently got back from a retreat in a place called Big Sur.If you ever come to California, you have to check out Big Sur it’s the coast of northern California and there’s a retreat there called Esalen and it’s where the native Americans, the Indians used to gathered for this hot spring and it’s been there for 10,000 years and you go and he went to this mindfulness meditation retreat for 3 days and it gave him enough tools to get started with this, it’s always been something he has been interested in, but he hasn’t made it a daily practice of meditation and mindfulness. So, he’s starting the new year with this to try to make that a daily practice and so he wanted to share that with you and maybe you might find that interesting and practice it yourself.

Yanique then stated, I have heard of the concept of mindfulness, there are people here in Jamaica that I communicate with who actually practice it, but I’ve never actually engaged in it myself but I’m definitely going to check out Big Sur. I’ve been to LA once, I used to be a Flight Attendant with Air Jamaica, which was our national airline before I started my company. And I spent a Christmas and New Years in LA and unfortunately because we were laying over for such a short period of time, I didn’t really get to enjoy the city that much, but I would definitely return for sure.

Jon shared that if you are interested in exploring mindfulness, that app Headspace is a really easy way to try it out and he highly recommend that you load that on your phone in and give it a whirl.

• When asked about the one online tool that he uses every day, Jon stated that he thinks we all live where we’re communicating with other people and that’s your inbox but for him, he loves to inspire and educate other people on a daily basis because he thinks that’s our purpose in life is to add value to other people’s journey. So, he curate content on a daily basis that is in and around the areas of his passion, plan and purpose in life, not just his business stuff, but his personal as well because he thinks that people connect to your heart and soul as much as they connect to your business passions. And then he shares that content on a daily basis. Think of it as dropping fishing lures into the social river around your business to begin connections and conversations that ideally results in relationships. And so, the tool that he uses to queue up content is a tool called Buffer Buffer app enables him to take whatever he’s reading and to share it across his personal and professional identities and he thinks that the biggest struggle that most business people have, whether they’re individuals or a business itself, is to be seen because if you aren’t seen, then people won’t think of you. And there was an actress who happened to be an entrepreneur, her name was Mae West. She said, “Out of sight is out of mind and out of mine is out of money and honey.” So, you need to be seen to be considered and how many times have you walked by a business and looked in the door and somebody sitting there behind the counter and God forbid on their phone and there’s nobody in the shop, you’ve ever seen that? It breaks his heart because he knows how much it costs to open a store and to pay the rent. What about people? He thinks that your network is your net worth, you branding your network will help you achieve your dreams, yet most people don’t really manage the brand in the network effectively. And what he’s talking about is sharing content on a daily basis will help you to build your brand and your network personally or professionally or for your company and so I use buffer to do that but the most important advice he has in regards to content is engagement because imagine if you’re dropping fishing lures, which is content, to connections, conversations in the river and somebody bites on it if you don’t pull the hook, if you don’t wheel it in, then it’s just pointless because you’re not fully finishing the process and so you need to respond to people responding to you and start conversations and the conversations shouldn’t be about your products and services, it should be about how you might add value to that person and if you enter into every connection and conversation with the attempt to serve that other human being, then you can’t but help succeed in life because another great that he loves, Zig Ziglar said, “The more people you help achieve their dreams, the more you will achieve your dreams.”He tries to give his knowledge away on a daily basis, so people see him as a trusted advisor, so when they need his products or services, they pick up the phone and call him and drag their friends with them.

• Jon shared that there’s one book he read early on which was a book called Siddhartha: A Noveland it’s the book of Buddha’s journey. It had an impact on him in regard to seeking your own truth. Another one was a book by Thoreau Walden, and it taught him to march to his own drummer and he thinks that if he hadn’t marched to his own drummer as a young man that he probably wouldn’t have retired at 40 years old. But then beyond that, there’s a book called Think and Grow Rich: or Men and Women who Resent Poverty by Napoleon Hill that taught him to figure out what his passion, plan and purpose in life, which is what is your passion? Are you building a plan to achieve it? Are you making it your purpose on a daily basis? And that’s what enabled him to build Goldmine. Another book is Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Riesbecause ultimately a perception is reality and you need to be able to build a brand and create the perceptions in people’s heads, so people see you and your company and your business and then How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie, because ultimately relationships are key to life.

• Jon shared with us his journey on mindfulness and meditation, it really helps him to focus. The other thing is his relationship with Microsoft, which is really incredible and if you think about it, Microsoft is a huge company with billions of customers and hundreds of thousands of resellers and to have evolved their platform as the simple CRM for office where Microsoft signed a resell agreement and is selling Nimble globally through their distributors and resellers to the customers as a bundle with office, and how they become strategic to not only help sell office and make it sticky, but also as a gateway to Azureand dynamics was quite a feat that took their team years to build the relationships. And interestingly enough, it parallels the journey of Goldmine, so Goldmine started, they were able to start that without any venture capital or any bank loans because they figured out who is the trusted advisor for their customer and back in the day it was the Novell reseller. Now you may not remember Novell, Novell was the network operating system that businesses use to tie together their PCs and hard drives and printers and to share a network business applications. There was no Microsoft network operating system or even windows back in the day. So, businesses used Novell and we were a network application to ride on top of that when they got the Novell resellers to use Goldmine and then start reselling it, but then Microsoft came out with anti-servers, sequel server, an exchange server and they hate Novell and we basically partnered with Microsoft by requiring a GoldMine license, a license of anti-server, sequel server, exchange server, and thereby becoming strategic to Microsoft as well as solving our customers’ needs of a more scalable business solution and that’s how they got to USD $100,000,000.00 in. Interestingly enough, history is repeating itself because they started with Gmail, Gsuite which was the Novella, but if you have PCs and you want to tie them together in the cloud. You started with Gmail and Gsuite, office wasn’t there, office 365, but Microsoft came out with office 365 and when they saw the writing on the wall, they built integrations with that and have basically replicated becoming strategic with Microsoft’s Office 365 with Nimble the way that Goldmine became strategic with anti-server and sequel server and he thinks that if you understand history, you could understand the present and more easily predict the future. And he thinks it’s because of his experience in the past that he was able to see the writing on the wall and to be able to leverage Microsoft in this new era.

Yanique stated, we just crossed over ourselves. We hosted with GoDaddy and they now sell their products with office 365 integration and it was actually a very easy migration and I actually prefer the interface, I was a bit hesitant when they said, office 365 because I’m a Mac user but it works brilliantly with my iPhone and it syncs across all devices. And if I send an email from my phone, I’ll see the same sent message from my MacBook Pro or the same sent message from my iPad. So, I don’t have any issues with it, I’m actually quite pleased, it’s operating better than the platform that GoDaddy had before this integration with Office 365.

Jon stated that before GoDaddy sold IMAP email and before IMAP was pop, these are protocols and most of your listeners today have as their email server, pop or imap, or Gmail or Gsuite or iCloud and maybe a combination of all those things, but ultimately you need a cloud based solution that unifies emailed contacting calendar into a thing that can synchronize across phones, iPads and computers and desktops and both Gsuite and office do that. But he thinks Microsoft has the edge because we all grew up with MS Excel and MS Word and we used to that and so it’s easy to sort of pick office because it comes with those things and works well with those things. But there’s even better reasons for the office in the future, if we think about traditional businesses, they have servers in closets and those servers, have to be updated with the software and firewalls to protect them and he thinks that there isn’t a business today that isn’t, hasn’t been hacked or won’t be hacked if they continue to try to manage all their own IT and that most businesses are going to the cloud. It started with moving their exchange and outlook to the cloud with office, but soon all the other servers well in Azure is a great place for your business systems in the future and that’s why they’re just so excited to partner with them and in fact GoDaddy is a Nimble customer, they use it for their influencer, marketing, outreach and engagement and they’re actually talking to them about bundling Nimble with their office solution sales, when they sell you a domain, they sell you office, the next thing they’ll sell you on top of that will be Nimble.

Yanique shared, I love GoDaddy, their customer service is amazing, totally amazing and one of the things I love about them from day one, when I started this company was when you call them, you can actually get a live person. I remember a couple of years ago I had redone my website and the web developer, even though I recommended that he use GoDaddy, you chose to use a different company, I think it was Blue Host or something, but I had an issue with the website and when I tried to call Blue Host, apparently they don’t have a telephone number, so you have to go into a live chat and one of the most frustrating things that you could ever do to me is send me to a chat room for me to explain to you in words what I could have done if I was talking to you in a voice call. I find it way more stressful to sit down and type out my issue than if I could just explain it to you verbally and I think I spoke with them maybe twice and I just closed the account and I moved everything over to GoDaddy. I don’t know why he didn’t take my recommendation in the first place, but it was extremely frustrating, that’s another issue I have with Magic Jack to this day. I don’t understand if they’re a telecommunication company and they provide services for people to call people all over the world, why don’t they have an actual phone number when you’re having an issue with your Magic Jack?

Jon stated that that brings us full circle to customer journey and experience that we need the human touch because it’s just so much more effective and personal.

• Jon shared listeners can find him at –

Twitter – @Jon_Ferrara

Website –www.nimble.com

Code: Jon40 for 40% to sign up for Nimble

• Jon shared a quote, “This too shall pass.”He really believes that life is like a Beethoven symphony, that there are high and there’s low notes and that you can’t really value the high notes without the low notes and that all of those notes will pass, so don’t get too connected to the highs in your life because they won’t last forever and don’t be so worried about the lows in your life because they won’t last forever too. And he thinks you could learn more from struggles than you can from successes. And so, life is like a Beethoven symphony, don’t let whatever is happening to you bother you too much. This too shall pass, you could learn so much from those moments in your life and he thinks that the biggest cause of pain or suffering is grasping onto highs or resisting or averting low’s, and if you just accepted them both as part of your journey, that you will be more balanced and happier in your life.

Links
• Nimble
• The McKinsey Customer Experience
• Headspace
• Buffer
• Siddhartha: A Novel by Hermann Hesse
• Think and Grow Rich: or Men and Woman who Resent Poverty by Napoleon Hill
• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Episode #26 Your Network is Your Net Worth

Our talk with Jon Ferrara of Nimble brings us to discuss the need for relationships and the effective nurturing of them. The full transcript for Talk Experiential episode #26 Your Network is Your Net Worth is followed below.

#26 Your Network is Your Net Worth

Jon Ferrara on episode #26 of Talk Experiential.

JOEY:                         Welcome back to another Talk Experiential Podcast.  Excited for my guest, Jon Ferrara, founder of Nimble.  Excited to have you on our show today.

JON:                           Thanks, Joey.  I’m excited to be here.  I really think that we’re on this planet to grow, and we do that best by helping others grow.  So any opportunity I can to have a conversation with somebody like you who has an audience of people who want to grow, and we can have a conversation about their growth, is just a pretty effing great day for me.

JOEY:                         Absolutely.  I agree with that.  Well, I’d love to hear your story.  I mean, I currently use Nimble.  I’ve been using it for years.  You founded GoldMine, which I’m excited to talk to you about that.  I remember back in the day that GoldMine was a very advanced CRM for the day, and would love to hear how that all happened.

JON:                           Yeah, I am happy to talk about any part of that journey.  I think that the lessons learned of building GoldMine and Nimble combined would be interesting for your audience, because we actually used influencer marketing to scale GoldMine back before it was a term.

JOEY:                         Wow.  No, that’s cool.  Let’s just start with, how did you become an entrepreneur?  I mean, is this something that you’re kind of born with?  And then how did GoldMine happen?

JON:                           Well, you know, that’s an interesting segue into GoldMine in that I was a reluctant entrepreneur in some respects.  My dad was the number one car salesman in the country back in the 50s with Lincoln Mercurys, and he had the first Subaru dealership, and I grew up on his car lot.  And I swore to myself I’d never be in sales, because my dad was a car salesman and, you know, sales is a four-letter word, and my uncle helped radar and microwave at MIT in the 40s, and he had an aerospace company that built a lot of the communications systems for NASA and all the moon missions and things.  So I wanted to be an astronaut.  So I bought a computer, and I studied computer science, but I didn’t have the money to put myself through college, so I got a job at a computer store, because I knew more about computers than anybody I knew, and it turned out I was pretty good at sales, and I was making $70,000 a year working part-time, living at home, going to college in 1981.  And that was a lot of money back then.  But even then, I didn’t want to do sales, so I got a job at Hughes Aircraft and worked in aerospace for long enough to know I’m not an aerospace guy.  Got a job at a start-up in Boston, and it was there that I started to experience the value of relationships and the need for effective nurturing of them and engagement.  And back in 1987-88 when I was doing this, there was no outlook.  There was no sales force.  There was no term CRM.  We managed relationships with something called a Day-Timer, and we communicate with something called pink “While You Were Out” slips, and we did our forecasts on a spreadsheet.  And I thought that was dumb, and so I looked for a tool that would integrate email, contact, calendar, and sales and marketing automation.  I couldn’t find it, so I quit my job at Banyan and started a company called GoldMine.  We started it in Los Angeles on $5,000, never took a dime of venture, and eventually scaled it to about 10 million customers, almost $100 million in revenue, and we did that by identifying the influencer of our prospects.  So back in the day, we had a networkable business application.  It wasn’t just CRM.  It was a contact management for the whole company because relationships are managed not by sales people but by everybody in the company, and we built the first networkable relationship managers.  So who best to sell that to our customer but the person that sold them the network?  So I cold-called every Novell reseller in the country, and I got them to use it because people sell what they know and they know what they use.  And then they started to recommend it and resell it.  That’s how we got to our first $100,000 a month in revenue.  And then Avaris started asking us for leads, and I didn’t know how to advertise.  In fact, I didn’t really have the money to advertise effectively, so I started contacting the places where our prospects would learn about technology, Forbes, PC Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, etc., and I said, “How can I help you write more stories?”  They said, “Tell us stories about how people are using technology to grow.”  I started telling stories.  They started retelling those stories.  And that’s how we grew to the next level, about $1 million a month.  And at that time, Microsoft ate Novell, so Microsoft doesn’t innovate.  They iterate.  They wait for somebody else to build the market.  Then they come in when it’s big enough with their muscle, which is billions of users and hundreds or thousands of resellers, and they came out with NT Server, Sequel Server, and Exchange Server, and our customers at that time were saying, “Hey, Jon.  We love GoldMine, and that has a built-in database, D-Base, but we need it more scalable.  And we love the fact that it hooks up to IMAP and Pop, but we need a more secure email transport.  And we’re at the enterprise level.  We need something more secure for our operating systems.”  So we built GoldMine Enterprise, which required a seat of NT Server, Sequel Server, and Exchange Server for every seat of GoldMine, solved our customer’s need to scale, solved our partners’ need to make products and services revenue.  But more importantly, we became Microsoft’s number one ISV in the world, and that’s what got us to $100 million in revenue.  At that time, in ’99, I was 40 years old and ran GoldMine for ten years, so I sold it and I retired for ten years and raised three babies.  And I’ll tell you what, Joey.  I don’t know if you are a dad.  Are you a dad?

JOEY:                         Yes, I am.

JON:                           So you know how precious family time is.

JOEY:                         100%, yeah.

JON:                           And so I just feel blessed that I spent ten years being a present father, husband, member of my community.  It was the best thing ever.  Highly recommend spending time with your family and your friends, and especially your spouse.  Quality time is a real good thing.  And that’s the GoldMine story.

JOEY:                         Well, that’s fascinating.  So you started this thing no marketing, it sounds like you were a hustler, cold-calling and then kind of took the PR route, I assume?  That kind of helped?

JON:                           Yeah, yeah.  So it’s really a combination of influencer marketing, so getting other people to tell your story.  So the Novell resellers had a base of customers.  They already sold the network to them, and I had an application that ran on the network to enable them to drive more revenue from the customers, so rather than just selling the operating system, they actually sold a solution on top, and that was a perfect start.  But then, to really scale, you need to build the brand globally, and you need to drive net new eyeballs, and telling stories to the press about how customers are growing using technology really helped to define the whole CRM marketing.  In fact, I’ll tell you a story.  A guy named John Taschek, who’s head of strategy at Salesforce, was the editor of PC Computing back in the day when I was teaching him what CRM was.  Today, he runs strategy for the largest CRM company in the world, and I’m proud to say I think I taught him a lot of what he knew back in the day about CRM and network business applications.

JOEY:                         Oh, man.  That’s really cool.  And then, how did Nimble come about?

JON:                           So I was starting to use social media in 2006, ’07, and ’08.  And I saw it was going to change the way we work, play, buy, and sell.  And I started looking for a relationship manager that integrated with social.  I couldn’t find it.  I found something called Hootsuite and Tweetdeck which unified social conversations into streams, but it didn’t tie the social conversations to people.  So if I basically saw that somebody was talking about me in Twitter, who is Joey?  When was the last time I talked to Joey, right?  What’s Joey’s business about?  And I’d need to fish Joey out of that conversation and build a record in order to begin to engage.  And then I started looking at contact management, and I saw it was broken.  When I was playing around with that, basically Google was the only cloud contact platform with email, contact, and calendar there in the cloud.  And email, contact, and calendar are three separate tabs in Google, in Gmail, G-Suite.  And so contacts aren’t linked to the conversations you’re having or the activities that you’re driving, so that’s a broken contact management in my regard, because GoldMine did that 30 years ago.  Email, contact, and calendar should be linked, so you have history.  And then you need context.  Who is somebody?  And what is their business about?  So you have to Google them to know what that is.  And the best way to understand who somebody is, is it walk in their digital footprint, to walk in their Twitter, their Facebook, or in their LinkedIn.  And so I saw that not only should email, contacts, and calendar be unified, but social should be linked to all of that.  Not just their identity, but the history of interactions and their business information.  And so I started hearing notes in my head, like I heard in the GoldMine days.  So I picked up my guitar, and I basically put a band together, and we built Nimble.  And basically, Nimble pioneered not just social selling and social CRM, but really the value of a unified relationship manager, not just for sales people but for everybody in the company, because it’s not just sales people that touch the customer, and it’s not just prospects and customers that you need to engage with.  At Nimble, we engage with editors, analysts, bloggers, influencers, third-party developers, investors, advisors, and prospects and customers, and traditionally CRM isn’t a great place to put all of that.  And you really need a team relationship manager.  And today, the contact tools you have, Office 365 and G-Suite Gmail and iCloud aren’t good at contact manager, because basically every team member has a separate contact database, and email and calendar aren’t linked, let alone social.  And so Nimble basically unifies all of that, becomes a team relationship manager, and that could either be your CRM or actually it works with your CRM.  In fact, Microsoft pushes us worldwide as the simple CRM for Office, but we’re actually becoming a gateway to dynamics.  And that’s really replicating what happened with GoldMine.  If you think about it, we started with Novell, and then Microsoft ate Novell, and we basically became the number one driver of sales for NT Server, Sequel Server, and Exchange Server.  We started with Nimble with Gmail G-Suite, which was effectively the Novell of our era, because if you have PCs, you tie it together with G-Suite Gmail.  But Microsoft ate them with Office 365.  Today, there’s 165 million Office 365 customers.  There’s seven million G-Suite customers.  So it’s really game over with email productivity, and the battle is going to be Azure.  Because, if you think about it, ten years ago, companies, corporations said, “We’re never going to the cloud.  We don’t trust it.”  And a few years ago, they started dipping the toe in the water by putting their exchange servers in the cloud with Office 365.  Tomorrow, it’s going to be the rest of the servers, because every company has either been hacked or is going to get hacked, and they can’t afford to manage and maintain their servers and firewalls, etc.  And so Azure’s the place where a lot of businesses are going to put their servers, and the company that can not only drive adoption and sales of Office 365 but retention and adoption of Azure and the other crown jewels of Microsoft like Dynamics will become the next GoldMine, and we’re basically primed for that position, because Microsoft has signed a global resale agreement with Nimble.  They’re pushing us worldwide through all their distributors.  We’ve signed up 30 of their top 50 global distributors, like Tech Data and Ingram and others, and basically are spinning up tens of thousands of Microsoft resellers who traditionally have sold plumbing to plumbers, IT infrastructure to IT decision makers.  But now, we’re getting them to use Nimble to become modern sellers, and to start selling Nimble on top of Office, which will help them become Azure and Dynamics resellers in the future.  And so, history is kind of repeating itself, and it’s really amazing to see.

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JOEY:                         Yeah.  Well, it’s fascinating what you’ve built and how you’ve brought it all into one.  I mean, I think one of the biggest things is data is king, understanding who you’re talking to, but also, you know, kind of what we were talking about offline, just the value of network and relationships.  You know, from just growing my company through marketing and through, you know, the Talk Experiential is just building these relationships.  Now, I’d love to talk a little bit about how you’ve grown this, just through these relationships, and why is it so important for, you know, people to really understand, like, you never know what’s going to happen ten years down the line.  I have a sales guy, a director of partnerships.  We worked ten years ago at a sales job.  We worked with GoldMine, the CRM.  We’ll probably laugh about it a little later.  And now he works with us.  But I’d love to learn kind of on your end, like just through growing your companies, you know, why is relationship so important, and how did it help grow your companies?

JON:                           Well, Joey, I’m going to tell you a story.  Imagine selling a company at 40 years old for more money than you could ever imagine in your life, and getting a head tumor a year later and almost dying, and having two babies sitting there, and a wife, a young life.  How would that feel?

JOEY:                         Horrible.

JON:                           It’d be kind of scary, right?

JOEY:                         Upside down, your life.

JON:                           Right?  And so that’s me at 41, and that was, I don’t know, 17 years ago and, knock on pressboard, and – let’s knock on some real wood.  But in the journey of getting healed, right?  From, like, just from healing the tumor, I also went on a spiritual journey, and I came to the conclusion that we’re on this planet to grow our souls by helping other people grow theirs.  And when you talk about the value of relationships, you know, they just don’t – it’s not just the people you do business with.  It’s everybody around you.  I think that you owe anyone you’re with your presence.  And to try to leave them with something, even if it’s a smile, right?  And so, I think the value of relationships are just critical to your personal and professional success.  Your network is your net worth.  Your personal brand plus your professional network will help you achieve your dreams in life, and I think that that’s what’s helped me to build two global companies, if you think about it.  Nimble was built by identifying the influencer of my prospect and building relationships with them, thereby building the Nimble brand, my brand, and driving eyeballs to our website, which has been as high as 100,000 uniques per month with zero advertising.  And the way that we did that is we identified the influencer of our prospect in and around the areas of promise for our products and services and began sharing their content, attributing the category and their name appropriately which generated eyeballs of people looking to be better, smarter, faster at social sales and marketing, audience of that influencer, and relationships with the influencer themselves.  And that results in traffic to our brand and in sales, but more important, introductions in relationships.  And I’ll tell you a story that just happened last night.  You know Lee Odden, right?

JOEY:                         Lee Odden, yes.

JON:                           Okay.  Lee Odden is one of the top influencers and speakers on marketing.  I get an email from Lee Odden last night.  It says something to the effect of, “Hey, Jon.  Our team continues to love Nimble as an influencer CRM that we use for ourselves, but I was consulting with Adobe and SAP this week in San Francisco, and their heads of influencer marketing could really use Nimble.  Is it okay if I do an introduction?”  I said, “Heck yeah.”

JOEY:                         Right.

JON:                           And I got an introduction, and now I’m having a meeting with the head of influencer marketing at Adobe on Friday, right?  Now, why did that happen?  It didn’t happen because I pay Lee Odden.  It happened because we’ve built and nurtured a relationship with Lee over time, and it’s not just a business relationship.  In fact, it’s really more personal.  I believe in the five Fs of life.  Family, friend, food, fun, and fellowship are the commonalities that we share with each other in order to build intimacy and trust.  And ultimately, that rides through any business connection.  LinkedIn is like walking in my lobby.  But if you want to know who Jon is, walk through my Instagram, my Facebook, my Twitter.  These are the softer places where we’re connected on our commonalities.  A barbecue, or backpacking, or whatever family.  And Lee and I have connected across a lot of commonalities, including the fact that he’s from a small town in Minnesota which is where my great-grandmother gave birth to my grandmother.  And so relationships are so critical, but we’re over-connected and we’re over-communicated.  You could only manage 100 to 200 people in your head at one time.  That’s called the Dunbar limit.  And most people have thousands of connections.  And when you are going to interact with somebody, you need to know who they are, you need to know the history of interactions you and the team have had, you need to know what their business is about for you to be effective in the one-to-one communication.  But the most important thing is to follow-up and follow-through.  People fail at the basics of business.  Follow-up and follow-through is critical, and you don’t do it because you have to go to the CRM to do it, and you work for the CRM by having to look shit up and log it.  I believe your CRM should work for you by building itself and then work with you wherever you are in email, in social, on your phone, so that you can be prepared for every engagement, do the follow-up and follow-through which will result in deeper relationships, will result in you achieving your dreams in life, which I hope involve you serving others and helping them grow, because that is why we’re on this planet.

JOEY:                         Absolutely.  Well, man, I really appreciate this.  This is great.  And I mean, you take it to a human level too.  It’s like, we’re not numbers.  You know, we’re not numbers in a CRM and we’re trying to connect, and you know, I like how it’s just, you can connect on a deeper level, kind of what you’ve been talking about.  You know, and taking it offline, because I think a lot of people out there always put business in front, that this is why we’re going.  I go to a lot of events, really just to build relationships and not have an agenda.  And it frustrates me when someone’s like, “Hey, go directly into business.”  Which is fine, because I understand that’s where they’re at.  But, you know, usually there’s going to be a stopping point for a minute.  But you know, going to a deeper level and understanding, we’re only on this planet for a very short period of time.  It’s like, you go down to like, where are you at and why you are here, so it’s really fascinating to hear your story and how you’ve grown over the years.

JON:                           Yeah.  I really think that they’re not going to write on my grave, “Built – invented CRM and contact management, made millions.”  They’re going to say, “Beloved father, husband, friend, member of the community.”  And that’s why we’re here.  But you can achieve your dreams and be successful in life without eating other people, right?  And so, if you think about it, sales today is a four-letter word, but I believe service is the new sales.  I believe that if a sales person entered into every relationship with the intent to serve and grow that other person, even if it meant recommending a competitor’s product at that particular moment, if that product suited them better, I think that that sales person would become even more successful, right?  But if you think about it, Joey, this is nothing different than what Zig Ziglar, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Brian Tracy, Stephen Covey have taught over the past 100 years.  So if you think about it, I think that social is creating a renaissance in relationship, it’s increasing the transparency and expectations that we have of each other, and is bringing us back to a small village where your reputation was based on the promises you make and the experience that you deliver, and I think that’s a great thing, because the era of bag ’em and tag ’em, Oracle Enterprise, shoot ’em in the head sales, I think, is ending, and we’re getting back into a place where relationships really matter.  And if you do that right, you can have infinite success and be happy too.

JOEY:                         Yeah, absolutely.  Well, Jon, thanks so much.  Our time is up here, but I would really love to follow up with you, and maybe we can get you on another show, and maybe meet in person at some point.  I mean, I like you quite a bit, so.

JON:                           Yeah.  And I’m up in Denver periodically.  Actually, I’d love to introduce you to some of my friends in Denver.  Do you know Joel Cohen?

JOEY:                         I do, actually.  Yeah.  He walks by my office quite a bit, and I’ve met him once.  Yeah.

JON:                           And Mia Voss?  Do you know Mia Voss?

JOEY:                         I don’t think so.

JON:                           Okay.  Well, I have some cool friends in Denver that I’d like to connect you with.  In fact, I have some friends that are influencers in marketing that I think would be great for your show.  So let’s chat about that after we wrap this up.

JOEY:                         Sounds good.  Well, thanks for joining.

JON:                           One last thing?

JOEY:                         Yeah?

JON:                           For your listeners today, I want to offer them a special.  If they go to Nimble.com and sign up for Nimble, it’s free for two weeks, they don’t have to put a credit card in or anything, but if they decide that Nimble will suit their needs for relationships, and it doesn’t matter if you have a CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce or Dynamics, or they don’t have a CRM, Nimble can be your CRM or work within your existing CRM.  There’s a code, JON40, that they can put in, that they can save 40% off their first three months.  So I just want to give them a little bit of incentive to become more nimble in their relationships.

JOEY:                         That’s perfect.  And I’ll have this on the show notes as well.  You guys can click on the link to check it out.

OUTRO:                     If you like what we’re doing with Talk Experiential Podcast, please make sure you five-star it and review it.  Also please share it on Facebook and Twitter, or any other social media outlets.  Please tell your friends who you think that will get value out of our podcast.  Your support will help continue the success of Talk Experiential.

Find the list of full Talk Experiential episodes here.

On CRM: Will Nimble Solve Microsoft's Small Business CRM Problem?
By: Gene Marks

As a Microsoft partner that focuses on small and medium sized companies my firm has had little to offer our clients when they ask about CRM options other than to direct them elsewhere. Their flagship Dynamics products are excellent, but they're pricey for a small company and clearly built to compete against the likes of Salesforce and Oracle.

There used to be (shudder) the Outlook Business Contact Manager but that application was thankfully discontinued after a few years of hair-pulling performance and other issues. Office 365 comes with something called the Outlook Customer Manager which is a shadow of what a good CRM system should provide and frankly has not received much attention from Redmond.

So when Microsoft announced last year that it was partnering with Nimble – a powerful CRM application that’s targeted (and priced) more for SMBs - my antenna went up.  Why is Microsoft doing this? Could this be a CRM answer for small businesses in Microsoft world?

I think it is.

Nimble is already a great stand-alone CRM.  But with its Outlook add-in – released in 2017 - users can live inside of Office, rather than having to navigate to an external application. Leveraging this capability, Nimble provides Office users the features you would expect from a good CRM application - contact, lead, and pipeline management - while using information from both Office and its own database. It's a multi-user, collaborative system that will let a team share emails and contact data from just about any device and provides insights about contacts with just a social handle.

Yes, it's an add-in to Office 365. No, it’s not made by Microsoft. But it's a product that, like other third-party applications, Microsoft is getting behind. It's making Nimble available within its global channel partner network so that its resellers, distributors, consulting firms, and systems integrators can sell and implement it.

So is Microsoft giving up on the small business CRM market? Yes and no. The strategy hinges on letting solutions like Nimble nurture the really small customers and hopefully help them grow into a bona fide candidate for Microsoft's more robust CRM offerings.

"We do have a small business Dynamics CRM package," said Gretchen O'Hara, a vice-President at the company who is working to help grow an ecosystem of solutions like Nimble for its partner channel. "But sometimes when a business is at the very small end, one to seven, one to ten employees, they need to walk and grow really learning how to use CRM at the beginning level. As they need additional capabilities, it (Nimble) is a nice on-ramp into Dynamics."

There has been some progress since the two companies entered into a partnership last summer, but there's still a lot of work to do. Nimble's President Jon Ferrara said that his company has entered into agreements with thirty of Microsoft's top fifty distribution partners and is in the process of onboarding a thousand resellers. "With Microsoft as a reseller, Nimble CRM adoption among resellers has accelerated, since there's no need to negotiate individual contracts, address specific integration requirements, or manage billing (it's all handled by Microsoft)," he said in an email exchange.

The biggest challenge for both companies will be educating Microsoft's partners like me. Many of us still aren’t aware of the relationship and O'Hara is committed to changing that over the next few years. "We're in the middle of the rollout right now," she told me. "The next step is educating our CSP channel to help them understand what Nimble provides, and helping them with hands-on training and enablement."

If you're a small business owner researching CRMs you've probably found that many of the good ones already have integration with Office 365. You can debate whether Nimble's integration is any better or worse than its competitors. But one thing's for sure: Microsoft has chosen this application as its go-to CRM solution for small businesses and is banking on it to ensure that its small business customers not only stay loyal to Office 365 but also have a way to grow into good Dynamics customers too.

Nimble and D&H Team Up to Deliver Simple CRM for Office 365
By: Laura Bergerson

Nimble has signed a global reseller agreement with D&H Distributing through which allied partners will be able to deliver Nimble CRM with Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure services via D&H’s online Cloud Marketplace. Hands-on CRM training and reseller enablement are also available free-of-charge.

Their value proposition includes professional marketing resources, a new transactional service model, dedicated Solutions Specialists, and a webcast training venue. Another aspect of the proposition revolves around readily available reseller engagement events like technology trade shows, roundtable opportunities, training “track” sessions, and hands-on “lab” sessions.

While Microsoft Dynamics 365 is typically better suited for businesses that require an enterprise-level business management system, Nimble is positioned as a proper fit for small business teams needing a more straightforward, SMB-targeted solution. If customers eventually decide to transition to an enterprise CRM, partners can integrate Nimble with Dynamics 365.

“We are excited to partner with D&H Distributing to help channel partners cater to their customers’ evolving journeys,” said Kevin Turner, Nimble’s head of strategic partner development. “Partners embrace Nimble in order to systematize and scale their conversational sales, marketing, and other business processes; in turn, they are well equipped to help their customers to do the same.”

Channel Impact^®
By bundling small business solutions with Office 365, partners will have a new means by which to accelerate their digital transformation practice.

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara: The Beauty of the CRM Beast

Jon Ferrara is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a social sales and marketing CRM company based in Santa Monica, California.

Nimble helps companies identify the right people for their businesses, with the goal of turning conversations into measurable outcomes. Its vision is to make the job of all customer-facing team members easier and more effective.

In this exclusive interview, Ferrara offers his insights on the latest developments and trends in CRM.

CRM Buyer: Why is social context important in CRM?

Jon Ferrara: The reality of relationships is that people buy from people they like, know and trust. In the old days, before we ever engaged in selling, we made a connection by looking at books, things on the shelves, that kind of thing. Today, we're doing that more and more electronically.

Social is the perfect way to know more about somebody, and that's actually your job. You should do that before every call -- you should prep by getting to know someone. Social context helps you do that.

CRM Buyer: What's the most useful kind of social context?

Ferrara: People connect through family, friends, food, fun and fellowship. If you find a place of connectivity, you can share that with the person.

For instance, I had a meeting with someone, and before that meeting, I learned that he was an assistant scoutmaster in the Boy Scouts. Anyone who has done that knows it's an important experience. Knowing that about him gave us instant camaraderie.

In many cases in business people put up walls, and you have to earn their trust. LinkedIn is like walking into my lobby. You'll learn about my business persona and know more about another human being. But people buy from people, not from businesses. This is what Dale Carnegie taught, and today we're just doing it in a new way, in the digital era.

Another example is today, before you meet with someone, you typically google them. That's you working for your CRM, and it's a waste of time.

Most people work for their CRM -- it doesn't work for them. That's the biggest cause of failure for CRM. Even when you do google someone, things change, and that information might be old. Your CRM should work for you and work with you wherever you're working.

CRM Buyer: Why is mobile connectivity important for CRM?

Ferrara: It's not just the mobile phone. Most CRM is not really designed for relationships, but for reporting. If they aren't forced to use CRM, most people wouldn't.

When I think of mobile, I think of portability. You enrich it with email data, and have a plug-in on your browser so you can use it wherever you are. That gives you contacts and insights. Who are they and what is their business? If you have contacts and insights, you'll be more connected.

The ability to have that mobile context wherever you are gives you the insights you need to make connections. Your CRM should work for you. That is the future of CRM. You don't have to go to it to use it. Instead, it will go anywhere you are, where you are connecting and engaging.

CRM Buyer: What role does artificial intelligence play in CRM? How is that role evolving?

Ferrara: You need to enrich the data and then use AI to surface opportunities and engagement. Most people have thousands of connections, and you need AI to listen to signals and surface the ones that matter, and then you need a nudge on your shoulder to follow through and connect and reconnect with people.

AI is like a second brain that helps you follow through and stay in touch with the right people at the right time and the right place.

CRM Buyer: What's the key to effectively enriching data?

Ferrara: You need to be able to take any disparate piece of information and derive additional information. Most sales people are googling people and then logging that information into their CRM. Even if they do that, however, the data changes so rapidly that it decays.

We use dozens of external databases on a business and personal level to enable connections and engagement. The age of cold calling has transitioned from "bag 'em and tag 'em" to establishing yourself as a trusted advisor, and to do that you need to use content to inspire and educate.

CRM Buyer: Why are automatic updates important in managing a CRM system?

Ferrara: People change, and companies change. One of the biggest struggles that salespeople have is creating records and updating records.

If you can take away the mundane things that computers should be doing, it will free the sales reps up for things that only they can do, like logging a note or scheduling a task or connecting on social in a relevant and authentic way. That's what computers are for. They were designed to automate all of this.

CRM Buyer: How is CRM changing? What's in the future for it?

Ferrara: One of the biggest causes of CRM failure is that businesses just give it to their salespeople. It is not just for salespeople. It should be used by everybody in the company.

The first step to success is to have a unified relationship platform that's cross-departmental. Today you have sales, marketing, customer service, accounting -- and Nimble can co-exist with those by unifying contacts and working back inside them, as well. It can be used across departments, so you can see the history of interactions.

CRM is going to evolve to be a company-wide relationship record, and in the future it will be used by all the different team members. It will evolve to become a platform that works with you in any place you are engaging. That will cause it to be used more often.

A lot of people see CRM as a beast and a burden that they have to nurture and feed, but imagine if it actually helped that business' people and the people they're connecting to.

CRM will evolve to be used by outside constituencies as well. Most companies have CRM for salespeople, but other departments use spreadsheets. That's really problematic. CRM will evolve from being a platform used just by salespeople to become a platform used by the entire team.

Turn Your Infuencer Marketing from Blah to Fantastic with 12 Dos and Don’ts (INFOGRAPHIC)

Aug 5, 2018 by Michael Guta

The importance of influencer marketing on today’s digital economy is undeniable — especially when targeting younger customers.

If you are planning on launching an influencer marketing campaign, Nimble just released an infographic of tips to help your brand grow and reach your audience.

Titled, “12 Dos and Don’ts About Influencer Marketing,” the list was compiled after Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara invited the input of 26 industry experts on what works — and what doesn’t.

The result is 12 road-tested best practices and common fails to consider when launching your next influencer marketing campaign.

While top influencers may be beyond the budget of all but large companies, micro influencers with a local presence also deliver a big bang for your marketing buck. This gives small businesses the opportunity to use influencer marketing as part of their overall campaigns too.

The key is to use influencer marketing effectively and not squander the opportunity with the wrong strategy.

Tips for Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Specifically on the infogrphic, Heather Dopson, Community Builder for GoDaddy urges marketers to ‘Put people first’. With this practice in place, you can build long-term relationships mutually beneficial for all parties involved. This includes your audience, your brand and the influencer in question.

Meanwhile, Michael Allton, Brand Evangelist for AgoraPulse cautions not to ‘Treat collaborations like transactions’.

When looking at influencer marketing “It is not a transactional exchange, but rather friends helping friends to succeed together,” Alton adds.

Experts also insist the more you collaborate with your influencer and build a relationship, the more your audience will relate to what you are trying to say.

So Bryan Kramer, CEO at PureMatter cautions brands to ‘Keep it Real’ to make the relationship with influencer marketers natural and fun instead of forced and static.

Today’s consumers are savvy. If they feel the influence is being forced, Kramer warns, you will lose the benefit of word-of-mouth marketing credibility.

To this end, Shane Barker, CEO of Shane Barker Consulting cautions against the temptation to ‘Micromanage influencers’. Remember, influencers have built their audiences through their own creativity. So imposing your own approach on them can be a  mistake.

The 10 Most Important Tech Partnerships In 2018 (So Far)

CRN examines the 10 partnerships that are having an impact on the industry and the solution provider landscape so far this year.

To read the entire article, click here.

Nimble Evolves to The Simple CRM for Office & Dynamics 365

Markus Erlandsson talks to Jon Ferarra from Nimble about Nimble Evolves to The Simple CRM for Office & Dynamics 365.

Listen to the entire episode here.

Bio:
Jon Ferrara is a serial CRM and Relationship Management entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Media’s effects on Sales and Marketing. His most recent venture Nimble.com, has re-imagined CRM by building a Simply Smarter Social Sales and Marketing platform. Jon is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs).

Here's Why Nimble Is So Successful

Four Tips for Office 365 Resellers To Be More Nimble in 2018

Nimble CRM Unveils Today Page To Enable Next Best Actions Based On Sales And Marketing Triggers

Customer Visualization Tool Helps Small Businesses Make Better Decisions, Work More Effectively Using Contextual Relationship Insights

Nimble today launched the Today Page. The customer data visualization tool helps teams and professionals understand and take next best actions based on sales and marketing triggers, as well as project management milestones. The customizable dashboard consolidates critical business signals, including deals pipelines and sales funnels; appointments and to-dos; and social signals into one encapsulated, actionable panel available to all Nimble users, out-of-the-box and at no extra charge.

The Today Page in Nimble CRM- Better Business Decisions, More Effective Communications

In minutes, small business teams (especially those managing contact relationships via email and retaining customer information on spreadsheets) can begin making better business decisions and nurture key relationships far more effectively. Specifically, users can —

Manage Deals in the Pipeline.

Click to access engagement history and current insights on the people involved in all of your deals, update deal status, assign tasks, add notes, or create new deals.

Track the Sales Funnel.

Monitor prospects, leads, and opportunities in each stage. Effortlessly gauge whether there are enough deals in the pipeline to meet your goals. Zoom into any deal to view actionable insights and take next steps.

Follow-Up on Tasks.

Click to follow through on to-do’s to cultivate the right deals and connections, both one-on-one and at scale.

Prepare for Meetings.

Glance through appointments and find out more about the people you’re meeting. Click on their profiles to discover social insights including interests, social media accounts, history of conversations, notes, and more.

Scan Business Signals.

Discover engagement opportunities with customers and prospects such as Twitter conversations, birthdays, and more. Easily access detailed dossiers on people in the network; learn who they are, how to reach them, their interests, history of conversations with team members, account notes, and more.

Network with Highlighted Contacts.

Nimble’s dashboard engine utilizes AI-driven contact data to recommend people to connect with based on preferences such as job title, company, or areas of interest.

Nimble CRM Enables to Treat Every Prospect and Customer like Valued Individuals

“For years, Nimble has been on a mission to develop a simple contact relationship manager that helps small business teams and individual professionals realize ambitious goals by enabling them to treat every prospect and customer like valued individuals,” said Nimble CEO and CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara.

Jon added, “Our core values have guided a rapid stream of powerful innovations, including the visualization of business intelligence and customer data to help them understand and take steps to close more deals at scale.”

Top Sales and Marketing Influencers Love Nimble’s New Today Page

“Nimble’s data visualization dashboard gives me a powerful, holistic overview of my sales signals and pipeline activities,” said Wes Schaeffer, CEO of The Sales Whisperer.

Wes added, “By accessing Nimble’s incredibly rich, auto-generated profiles within the deals pipeline, sales funnel, activities and calendar, I can connect authentically with each individual customer and prospect impacting the success of my business.”

“With Nimble’s Today Page, I have a clear understanding of the lead generation and sales tasks I need to prioritize in order to close more deals,” said Shane Barker, Digital Strategist, Brand & Influencer Consultant.

Shane added, “Single-click access to contacts’ enriched profiles helps me communicate personally and more effectively with all my customer and prospective buyers.”

“I used to think I was always on top of EVERYTHING for my business — but with Nimble I actually am!” said Marcy Massura, President of MM+CO and Convince & Convert analyst.

Marcy added, “Nimble’s new customizable dashboard unifies all the important information about my business including my calendar appointments, follow-ups, social signals, and pipeline signals. Immediately after logging in, I know the most critical actions I need to take.”

Currently, Nimble’s pioneering social sales and marketing CRM helps teams and professionals turn relationships into revenue, without the busy work. Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable relationship insights – everywhere you work.

Nimble CRM Launches Today Page, a Powerful Business Relationship Intelligence Dashboard for Office 365, G Suite

Customer Visualization Tool Helps Small Businesses Make Better Decisions, Work More Effectively Using Contextual Relationship Insights

Nimble, the pioneering social sales and marketing CRM for Office 365 and G Suite, today launched the Today Page. The customer data visualization tool helps teams and professionals understand and take next best actions based on sales and marketing triggers, as well as project management milestones. The customizable dashboard consolidates critical business signals, including deals pipelines and sales funnels, appointments and to-dos, and social signals into one encapsulated, actionable panel available to all Nimble users, out-of-the-box and at no extra charge.

The Today Page – Better Business Decisions, More Effective Communications

In minutes, small business teams (especially those managing contact relationships via email and retaining customer information on spreadsheets) can begin making better business decisions and nurture key relationships far more effectively. Specifically, users can:

•  Manage Deals in the Pipeline: Click to access engagement history and current insights on the people involved in all of your deals, update deal status, assign tasks, add notes, or create new deals.
•  Track the Sales Funnel: Monitor prospects, leads, and opportunities in each stage. Effortlessly gauge whether there are enough deals in the pipeline to meet your goals. Zoom into any deal to view actionable insights and take next steps.
•  Follow-Up on Tasks: Click to follow through on to-dos to cultivate the right deals and connections, both one-on-one and at scale.
•  Prepare for Meetings: Glance through appointments and find out more about the people you’re meeting. Click on their profiles to discover social insights, including interests, social media accounts, history of conversations, notes, and more.
•  Scan Business Signals: Discover engagement opportunities with customers and prospects such as Twitter and Facebook engagements and birthdays, amoung others. Easily access detailed dossiers on people in the network; learn who they are, how to reach them, their interests, history of conversations with team members, account notes, and more.
•  Network with Highlighted Contacts: Nimble’s dashboard engine utilizes AI-driven contact data to recommend people to connect with based on user preferences such as job titles, industries, or locations.

“For years, Nimble has been on a mission to develop a simple contact relationship manager that helps small business teams and individual professionals realize their ambitious goals,” said Nimble CEO and CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara. “Our core values have guided a rapid stream of innovations, including the visualization of business intelligence and customer data, which empower teams to treat all contacts like valued individuals.”

Top Sales and Marketing Influencers Love Nimble’s New Today Page

“Nimble’s data visualization dashboard gives me a powerful, holistic overview of my sales signals and pipeline activities,” said Wes Schaeffer, CEO of The Sales Whisperer. “By accessing Nimble’s incredibly rich, auto-generated profiles within the deals pipeline, sales funnel, activities lists, and calendar, I can connect authentically with each individual customer and prospect, thereby impacting the success of my business.”

“With Nimble’s Today Page, I have a clear understanding of the lead generation and sales tasks I need to prioritize in order to close more deals,” said Shane Barker, Digital Strategist, Brand & Influencer Consultant. “Single-click access to contacts’ enriched profiles helps me communicate personally and more effectively with all my customers and prospective buyers.”

“I used to think I was always on top of EVERYTHING for my business – but with Nimble I actually am!” said Marcy Massura, President of MM+CO and Convince & Convert analyst. “Nimble’s new customizable dashboard unifies all the important information about my business, including my calendar appointments, follow-ups, social signals, and pipeline signals. Immediately after logging in, I know the most critical actions I need to take.”

Nimble CRM Launches Today Page for Office 365 and G Suite

SUDIPTO GHOSH, June 20, 2018

Nimble, a leading social sales and marketing CRM for Office 365 and G Suite, today launched the Today Page. The customer data visualization tool helps teams and professionals understand and take next best actions based on sales and marketing triggers, as well as project management milestones. The customizable dashboard consolidates critical business signals, including deals pipelines and sales funnels; appointments and to-dos; and social signals into one encapsulated, actionable panel available to all Nimble users, out-of-the-box and at no extra charge.

The Today Page in Nimble CRM- Better Business Decisions, More Effective Communications

In minutes, small business teams (especially those managing contact relationships via email and retaining customer information on spreadsheets) can begin making better business decisions and nurture key relationships far more effectively. Specifically, users can —

Manage Deals in the Pipeline.

Click to access engagement history and current insights on the people involved in all of your deals, update deal status, assign tasks, add notes, or create new deals.

Track the Sales Funnel.

Monitor prospects, leads, and opportunities in each stage. Effortlessly gauge whether there are enough deals in the pipeline to meet your goals. Zoom into any deal to view actionable insights and take next steps.

Follow-Up on Tasks.

Click to follow through on to-do’s to cultivate the right deals and connections, both one-on-one and at scale.

Prepare for Meetings.

Glance through appointments and find out more about the people you’re meeting. Click on their profiles to discover social insights including interests, social media accounts, history of conversations, notes, and more.

Scan Business Signals.

Discover engagement opportunities with customers and prospects such as Twitter conversations, birthdays, and more. Easily access detailed dossiers on people in the network; learn who they are, how to reach them, their interests, history of conversations with team members, account notes, and more.

Network with Highlighted Contacts.

Nimble’s dashboard engine utilizes AI-driven contact data to recommend people to connect with based on preferences such as job title, company, or areas of interest.

Nimble CRM Enables to Treat Every Prospect and Customer like Valued Individuals

“For years, Nimble has been on a mission to develop a simple contact relationship manager that helps small business teams and individual professionals realize ambitious goals by enabling them to treat every prospect and customer like valued individuals,” said Nimble CEO and CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara.

Jon added, “Our core values have guided a rapid stream of powerful innovations, including the visualization of business intelligence and customer data to help them understand and take steps to close more deals at scale.”

Top Sales and Marketing Influencers Love Nimble’s New Today Page

“Nimble’s data visualization dashboard gives me a powerful, holistic overview of my sales signals and pipeline activities,” said Wes Schaeffer, CEO of The Sales Whisperer.

Wes added, “By accessing Nimble’s incredibly rich, auto-generated profiles within the deals pipeline, sales funnel, activities and calendar, I can connect authentically with each individual customer and prospect impacting the success of my business.”

“With Nimble’s Today Page, I have a clear understanding of the lead generation and sales tasks I need to prioritize in order to close more deals,” said Shane Barker, Digital Strategist, Brand & Influencer Consultant.

Shane added, “Single-click access to contacts’ enriched profiles helps me communicate personally and more effectively with all my customer and prospective buyers.”

“I used to think I was always on top of EVERYTHING for my business — but with Nimble I actually am!” said Marcy Massura, President of MM+CO and Convince & Convert analyst.

Marcy added, “Nimble’s new customizable dashboard unifies all the important information about my business including my calendar appointments, follow-ups, social signals, and pipeline signals. Immediately after logging in, I know the most critical actions I need to take.”

Currently, Nimble’s pioneering social sales and marketing CRM helps teams and professionals turn relationships into revenue, without the busy work. Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable relationship insights – everywhere you work.

CRM Nimble Signs Reseller Agreement with Microsoft Master VAR Velosio

Nimble and Microsoft North American partner Velosio have announced a global reseller agreement.

Backed by expert assessment, training, community forums and support professionals, Velosio will resell Nimble CRM as one of the earliest participants in Microsoft’s Partner Center Third Party Software Offers pilot, a partner-to-partner marketplace designed to solve specific customer needs.

Beginning in June, Velosio’s 200 channel partners can purchase, manage, and resell Nimble CRM bundled with Microsoft Office 365 to small business teams adopting their first CRM. It can be provisioned from within the online Cloud Marketplace, where the entire Microsoft Dynamics portfolio, Office 365 family, and Azure services are supported.

“While Dynamics 365 is ideally suited for Microsoft customers looking for an enterprise-class business management solution, it’s by no means a self-starter CRM kit,” explained Tyler Bowman, Director of Cloud Sales and Operations for Velosio. “In cases where small business teams manage contact relationships via email and retain customer information on spreadsheets, we recommend Nimble CRM as a step in the right direction. Nimble’s 80 percent end user adoption rate attests to the tremendous value this customer segment realizes when fixing deep-rooted contact management issues.”

Nimble integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to address customer growth as their needs become more complex in order to maximize customers’ investments in cloud services.

“Starting with a simple CRM facilitates an eventual upgrade to Dynamics CRM as their enterprise CRM,” Bowman added.

Nimble enables Office 365 customers to manage relationships more effectively within a single, socially enriched system of record. The contact relationship manager builds a team database from insights available in and around the business. Nimble enriches email, appointments, social media, and SaaS-based connections with social insights and business context. It also delivers contact and business profiles within Office 365, across the Web, in popular SaaS applications, and on mobile devices.

“We are excited to partner with Velosio and its channel partners to deliver immediate value as a modern CRM for small business teams,” said Kevin Turner, Head of Strategic Partner Development at Nimble. “Once Office 365 users have a grasp of Nimble’s ‘what’s in it for me’ factor, they’re far more likely to embrace the modern workplace.”

Nimble Signs Reseller Agreement with Velosio

How to Get Staff to Actually Use Your CRM System

By Jenna Dobkin

Simple ways to ensure that your team adopts your CRM solution and makes it part of their day-to-day. 

People are naturally resistant to change. While that’s not always a bad thing, I’ve encountered my fair share of people resistant to the changes and massive opportunities that social CRM creates for business teams.

They are even less inclined to adopt a CRM that adds time-consuming tasks to their workload. According to Sales Hacker, the average employee spends four hours per week entering data into their CRM, equating to an astounding 25 days per year.

A CRM which requires its end users to manually update conversation histories and contact information is faulty at its core. Instead, it should free up your time to be more effective at customer engagement, cross-selling, upselling, and so on.

Here are a few simple ways to ensure you have a successful CRM implementation right from the get-go:

Pay attention to user needs and benefits

Clearly demonstrate how using the right CRM can vastly improve user productivity. Nimble CRM’s 80% end user adoption rate attests to the intrinsic value business teams see in fixing deep-rooted contact management issues. Once your team has a grasp on the “what’s in it for me” factor, they’re more likely to stick with your newly implemented contact relationship management tool.

If you’ve already picked a CRM that lacks business solutions designed to make end users more effective, look into sales enablement add-ins that deliver intrinsic value to the end user such as:

• Sales intelligence tools like DiscoverOrg or InsideView for people and company information, which saves users time they’d otherwise spend Googling prospects and entering the data they find in the CRM.  

• Email tracking tools like Yesware, which provides the ability to see engagement signals such as opens and clicks to helps end users identify optimal engagement points and improve communications with prospective customers.

• Sync contacts and payment status from invoicing and payment systems such as Quickbooks or Due.com to ensure contact data is current in the billing system, and payment status is communicated among sales and business development team members.

Clearly define company-specific CRM usage protocols

Don’t enter into a new CRM with the mindset that increased sales, productivity, and effectiveness will just happen naturally. That’s like giving someone a desk from Ikea to assemble without providing the instructions manual. Define specifically what features are to be used, when, how, and why to optimize users’ time and efforts.

Decrease your team’s time spent on busy work

On average, a salesperson spends nearly two-thirds (64.5%) of their time on non-revenue generating activities such as administration and data entry. With the right technologies (such as Nimble’s new Prospector tool for sourcing verified contact data, social profile matching and newly optimized Today Page to help you prioritize outreach) and the right processes, you can easily cut time spent on busy work in half.

Top 10 Tips for Finding The Best Investment for Your Company

4 Nimble Growth Hacks for Small Businesses with Minuscule Budgets

By Jenna Dobkin

Based on the collective wisdom of four social sales luminaries, as well as my personal experience growing the Nimble brand, I believe the most pivotal growth hack is the ability to cultivate meaningful relationships at scale. Striving to be an influential thought leader with the best interest of others in mind is a surefire way to become a more nimble salesperson and close more deals, faster.   

Here are four tried and true growth hacks to grow your business today:

Build Your Personal Brand  

“Add value in excess of what you’re asking for in return,” advises Koka Sexton, Senior Manager of Content at Slack. “The best way to do so is to educate and inform people on best practices and solve bigger problems.”                      –

Koka believes that in order to fill the pipeline, customer-facing sales and marketers must first create a personal brand in the context of your brand promise to drive results. In the process of teaching someone to fish, they will also learn that you sell fishing poles.

Building your perceived value and amplifying your voice by inspiring and educating others on what you’re passionate about is the simplest way to do this. Schedule relevant, compelling content using a social media tool like Hootsuite to spur thoughtful conversations, and engage the people who engage you. As a next step, use a sales intelligence tool like DiscoverOrg, InsideView, or Nimble to figure out who among the respondents are people you want to build win-win relationships with.

Engage in Twitter Prospecting

CPP Digital co-founder and CMO Travis Wright knows the value of mining social media to find prospective buyers to grow your business. A great way to find these opportunities is by following relevant hashtags to see who is posting about topics that pertain to your business or industry. There are many different tools to help identify engagement opportunities within the ever-changing social media landscape.

“One of my favorite tools out there is content analytics platform BuzzSumo,” he said.  “You can get a lot of great data from the tool, including who shares certain articles. I take a look at those sharers and sort them by who is most relevant.”

Travis then creates custom lists of the sharers that he uncovers through BuzzSumo in his Twitter, whom he eventually serves relevant ads to as a means to generate leads. He also uploads those same lists into Nimble in order to discover social business insights about his potential leads such as company background, areas of influence, and contact information.

Using enriched data to qualify leads, Travis focuses on building relationships with his most promising contacts. He effectively turns a cold call into a warm handshake.

Build Authentic Relationships with A-List Prospects, at Scale

Prioritizing contacts and having incremental conversations while maintaining a natural cadence with prospects is Shane Gibson’s go-to growth hack.

“…Most salespeople are indiscriminate in their follow-up.” The keynote sales speaker, author, and sales trainer prioritizes follow-ups and ensures he follows-through with critical clients by categorizing people into three buckets: contacts who make up 80% of his business (“A’s”), beneficial contacts who are great to call on but not as revenue-driving as his top tier (“B’s”), and prospects who can be followed up with at the next networking convention (“C’s”).

Shane schedules reminders to send consistent outreach to his “A’s” once every three weeks. He’ll share an interesting article, invite them to a webinar, or even send a lead their way. By scheduling tasks weeks and months ahead of time, this strategy draws its strength from building relationships incrementally and increases conversions.

Connect Meaningfully to Create Value

Service is the new sales, according to People First Productivity Solutions President Deb Calvert. “You can’t help but be successful if you create more value for buyers by achieving mutually beneficial, measurable goals.” She contends that your prospective clients want sellers to be leaders; if you exhibit the behaviors of a leader with authority over your areas of expertise, buyers are more liable to book more meetings to further their relationship with you, enabling you to close more deals. A personal CRM enables you to not only maintain your relationships, but also to conduct targeted outreach to key people within your industry who can benefit from your areas of expertise.

Some would argue that growth hacks are only effective when few people know about them, and that they lose power once they’re adopted by the mainstream. I would argue that while technologies and specific social media networks continue to evolve at a dizzying pace, the fundamental focus on humanity, authenticity, and relationships are here for the long haul.

Jenna Dobkin is an experienced influencer marketing professional with a passion for helping businesses acquire customers, build brands and enhance community relationships, both online and in the real world. Hallmarks of her work include conscientious relationship building; strategic content marketing; and the delivery of multi-platform social media and public relations campaigns from inception through execution.

Currently, she heads up influencer marketing and guerilla PR for Nimble, the simple social CRM for Office 365 and G Suite. Jenna is also a nerd. She graduated top of her class from the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in the early nineties.

Nimble Ranked #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd

AI-Enabled Innovation Drives Astounding 80% End-User Adoption Rate

Nimble, the pioneering Social Sales and Marketing CRM built for Office 365 and G Suite, announced that it has been named the Top Sales Intelligence Software Tool for Customer Satisfaction and overall Market Leader for the 5th consecutive time by G2 Crowd, the world’s leading business software reviews platform. Nimble achieved top customer satisfaction rankings according to verified user reviews and a market presence in multiple categories, including:

• #1 Among Top 20 Easiest-to-Use Sales Intelligence Software tools. Nimble earned a 9.01 out of 10 usability score based on a G2 Crowd proprietary algorithm, which factors in satisfaction ratings regarding how user-friendly the product is, how easy it is to administer, and how well the product meets business requirements. Users reported an 80% adoption rate versus a 71% category average.
• #1 Most Easily Implemented Sales Intelligence Software for Small Business*. Nimble scored the highest overall implementation score with a 9.43 out of 10 based on ease of setup, shortest implementation time, and end-user adoption.
• Leader in Sales Intelligence Software Based on User Satisfaction. In the small business category, Nimble earned a 95% user satisfaction score, outpacing competitors including Winmo, DiscoverOrg, Relpro, ZoomInfo, Lead 411, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• #1 Sales Intelligence Tool based on ROI, according to a real-time analysis of result-related review questions.

Also Read: Nimble Launches Mobile 3.0 CRM, A Powerful Contact Relationship And Pipeline Manager for Office 365, G-Suite

“Rankings on G2 Crowd reports are based on data provided to us by real users,” said Michael Fauscette, Chief Research Officer, G2 Crowd. “We are excited to share the achievements of the products ranked on our site because they represent the voice of the user and offer terrific insights to potential buyers around the world.”

AI-Enabled Innovation Delivers Even Smarter Prospecting

For years, teams and professionals have saved time using Nimble’s instant Live Profiles to qualify contacts based on personal insights, including work experience, social identities, areas of interest, and company data.

Prospector, Nimble’s newly released AI-assisted contact discovery and enrichment feature, introduces added convenience by enabling users to discover verified contact data, including business emails, phone numbers and locations, without having to toggle between applications.

GoDaddy Leverages Nimble Social Insights in Outlook to Successfully Run Their Social Influencer Programs

While GoDaddy helps small businesses build and grow their ventures, they felt they could do more to position their Advocacy and Evangelism team to scale for growth to assist more customers to achieve their goals. GoDaddy added Nimble to their web and outlook workflow to support their strategies and processes.

How a SaaS CRM Startup Found Its Way Into Office 365 – with Jon Ferrara

How a SaaS CRM Startup Found Its Way Into Office 365

Jon Ferrara is the founder and CEO of Nimble CRM. Jon is a serial entrepreneur, who started his first company in 1989 with just $5000 and went on to sell it for $125 million.

Around 2001, a year after selling this startup, he was diagnosed with a tumor in his head. Life and his priorities quickly changed for him.

Thankfully he made a full recovery and went on to launch another startup in 2009. He set out to build a social sales and marketing CRM product in a very crowded market.

He had the vision of creating a product that you would live in for your email, social media and other communication. But that plan didn't work out, so he had to pivot.

He also built great integration with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But after a while, LinkedIn cut off their API access and Facebook severely restricted theirs. So he had to do a mini-pivot again.

In other words, even though he had a very successful exit with his first startup, it hasn't made it any easier for him to build his second company. And he's faced a lot of challenges, like any of us would face or are dealing with right now.

But he's kept going. And recently after years of trying, he has built a partnership with Microsoft which could be massive for his business in the next couple of years.

He was one of the very first guests on this show in 2014. And I'm delighted to have had him back and given me the chance to catch up on the ups/downs of his business over the last 3 years.

Book Recommendation

• “How to Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
• “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams” by  Deepak Chopra

The Show Notes

• Nimble
• Goldmine
• Novell
• GSuite
• Office 365
• Mark Cuban
• Dharmesh Shah
• Geacron
• Jon on Twitter
• Omer on Twitter

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How Nimble is Your CRM?

Rieva Lesonsky, February 21, 2018

As entrepreneurs you know your work is never done. And while it may be easy to connect with clients when you’re sitting in your office, what if you’re on the road? Or sitting at your kid’s soccer game? Or at dinner with another client—or even your family?

Thanks to the new Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0, which was just released last week, you’re never far from the information you need to help you make the sale or close the deal.

Nimble is already a leading social sales and marketing customer relationship marketing (CRM) program for small businesses, which “unifies your mobile, cloud-based and desktop records into one comprehensive relationship manager” that also includes the history of your prior conversations and offers social context.

With this mobile app (available now on iOS, and this spring for Android devices), Jon Ferrara, Nimble’s CEO, wanted to create a way to cut through the clutter of everyday business tasks (stacks of business cards, streams of emails, incomplete contacts added to your current system and overloaded social media platforms) to better enable you or your salespeople to “understand [potential clients’] needs and deliver expedient, relevant responses.”

Ferrara, a pioneer of the CRM industry (he founded GoldMine, a CRM software program in 1989), says they “designed Nimble Mobile as your personal CRM that you can take with you everywhere you work, so you’re better prepared to manage personal business relationships at scale and take appropriate steps to evolve opportunities to help you grow.”

Nimble itself is an amazing tool, that gives your deeper insight—and intel into your contacts and those you want to form relationships with. Nimble Mobile, which works with Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s G Suite, is feature rich. Users get:

• Access to “detailed dossiers,” which include, social insights about clients (potential and current), culled from your email, calendar, contacts and social apps (I love the way Nimble works with Twitter). Contact data sources include more than 100+ cloud-based business apps and social platforms.
• The ability to instantly scan business cards and create a CRM record.
• Work on the go. “Using the iOS Share Menu within mobile apps or browser, users can tap on Nimble to discover people’s social profiles, areas of influence, job title, company description and work experience.”
• Everything syncs. You can review your history with the contact, because every email conversation, calendar activity and social interaction (whether they interacted with your or a member of your team) is automatically (or “automagically” as Ferrara likes to say) synched.
• Save time by taking advantage of templated emails and pre-set attachments. You can also enable message tracking to monitor engagement.
• Increase efficiency by managing sales in multiple pipelines. You can use mobile voice commands, assign tasks and schedule reminders.

Pricing

If you already have a Nimble business account, adding Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 is free—just download it from the App Store or Google Play store. If you don’t have a Nimble business account, look into signing up—it’s that helpful.

You can learn more by watching this video.

Nimble Mobile 3.0 Introduced for Teams on the Go

Feb 15, 2018 by Joshua Sophy

Nimble has just released its new mobile app, Nimble Mobile 3.0.

Nimble Mobile 3.0 works on the same premise as the desktop version of the platform. But instead of being tethered to your desk computer, the app goes with you wherever you or your team goes.

“We designed Nimble Mobile as your personal CRM that you can take with you everywhere you work, so you’re better prepared to manage personal business relationships at scale and take appropriate steps to evolve opportunities to help you grow,” says Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara.

More often, you’re on the road meeting clients and potential new clients to grow your business. And while you’re on the go, the chances of losing files, contact names, phone numbers, emails and other information vital to the future of your relationship with that client hangs in the balance … or maybe it’s tucked under the seat of your car … or you accidentally washed it with the laundry because it was in your back pocket.

“Many professionals lose deals because they either fail to understand prospective buyers’ needs or neglect to deliver a timely, relevant response,” explains Ferrara. “We designed Nimble Mobile to enable people to cultivate relationships and close deals more effectively by unifying critical contact records and conversation histories into a single, easy-to-access system of record that helps you make authentic connections and organize follow-up and follow-through at every stage of the deal pipeline.”

No more, if the new Nimble Mobile 3.0 app does its job properly for you.

Here’s what is new in the app:

No App Flipping

Nimble Mobile 3.0 works inside many of the apps you already use for your business. That means you don’t have to flip back and forth between Nimble and the apps you use every day when you’re on the go. It’ll work wherever the iOS Share menu is supported.

Scan Business Cards

There are plenty of apps to scan business cards you receive but few are smart enough to log that info right into your other apps. Nimble Mobile 3.0 will create a new CRM profile for a new contact by scanning the card and locating all their pertinent information.

Know Your Contacts Right Away

If you’re in another app or using your mobile browser, tap Nimble in the iOS Share menu to discover information about the people you meet. It’ll show you their social profiles, where they’re influential, their job title, and more.

All the conversations your team has with contacts is ready right away from Nimble Mobile 3.0. The app syncs the data and conversations you or your team has with a contact. If someone is at their desk or at the office and you’re on the go, you’ll have updated records with you right away via the Nimble app.

Email Templates and Tracking

You can load in email templates to send messages fast right from Nimble Mobile 3.0. The app also allows you to track those conversations as they’re updated.

Manage Deals

The app allows users to track sales deals across several different pipelines. It also receives voice commands to add notes to a client’s record. You can also add tasks for other team members or yourself to follow-up with a contact later.

Nimble Mobile 3.0 is available on the Apple App Store right now and the company says it’ll be available for Office 365 and GSuite users on Android this Spring. The app is free to use for Nimble Business subscribers. If you’re using Nimble Contact, you’ll need to upgrade to Nimble Business to use the mobile app.

Nimble Mobile CRM Gets Desktop Browser Features

By Richard Adhikari 
Feb 15, 2018 

Nimble on Wednesday released Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0, its contact and pipeline manager for mobile sales teams and professionals. It is available for iOS now. A version for Android device users will be released in the spring.

Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 unifies contacts from mobile, cloud-based and desktop records into one comprehensive relationship manager that surfaces the histories of conversations and provides social context. It also introduces the sales intelligence, sales enablement, and marketing automation features available in our Web app to mobile Office 365 and G Suite users," said spokesperson Jenna Dobkin.

"Our goal is to enable [users] to be as effective and efficient at managing relationships on the road as they are in the office," she told CRM Buyer.

Features and Functionality

Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 offers the following capabilities:

• Gives users access to detailed dossiers about people they're going to meet, including historical email and Twitter conversations and social insights from email, calendar, contacts, social apps and anywhere the iOS Share Menu is supported. Contact data sources include more than 100 cloud-based apps and social platforms, and there's no need to toggle between tabs or mobile apps;
• Adds company insights to contact data, including industry, size, location, employee count, and revenue;
• Creates new CRM records from photos of business cards, logging the contact's name, title, company, email address, street address and phone number;
• Lets users use the iOS Share Menu within mobile apps or desktop browsers to discover a new contact's social profiles, areas of influence, job title, company description and work experience;
• Allows users to review email, calendar and social contact history for sales intelligence. Automatically synchronizes every email conversation, calendar activity, and social interaction for each team member and every contact;
• Unifies Office 365 and Google Apps contact information, email, calendar and social history;
• Lets users send tracked messages and templated emails with custom merge tag and pre-set attachments to save time. By default, every email sent through Nimble Mobile has the "Enable Nimble Tracking" on; and
• Lets users manage multiple sales pipelines from the field.

Nimble Mobile 3.0 soon will add push notifications.

Current Nimble users get Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 free.

Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 runs on iOS 9.0 or later. It is compatible with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Users will need at least an iPhone 5 with 16 GB of memory, Dobkin said.

The Android version will run on any device running Android 4.0.3 or higher. Some of the mobile features, including multiple deal pipelines and smart calendars, already are available on Android, Dobkin pointed out. They can be accessed from Google Play.

Other features for Android currently are in development.

"Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 accesses the same data as the Nimble Web App on your desktop, so we recommend using Nimble's SaaS CRM in addition to the mobile app so you can access all your contacts, and sync new contacts and email and Twitter across platforms," Dobkin suggested.

Nimble works either as a standalone CRM or as a social business add-on to complement users' existing CRM packages.

Nimble Web and mobile data are stored in the cloud through Amazon Web Services.

"Nimble comes from contact management roots," noted Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

"There's a sharper focus on individual sales people -- the 'golden Rolodex' -- than other CRM tools that are a scaled-down model of traditional top-down CRM applications," she told CRM Buyer.

Nimble is "more advanced than most of its competitors in the integration of social capabilities," Wettemann said.

Among its competitors are Salesforce Sales Cloud at the high end, Pipeline Deals, and HubSpot.

"For a lot of customers at this size in the market, it comes down to price," Wettemann observed. "Nimble is very competitive here given the depth and breadth of features." 

Nimble mobile aims to tie everything together

by Ben Kepes

I first met Jon Ferrara, CEO, and founder of Nimble, while he was still in the process of founding the company back in 2009. Ferrara almost invented the term CRM, he was the founder of GoldMine, the company that pioneered contact management and CRM back in the day. Fast forward and many things have changed, but what hasn’t is Ferrera’s view that B2B sales are predicated on relationships. In this world where we have so many communication methods to juggle, managing these relationships is harder than ever before.

And this is where Nimble comes in. The company has built a relationship management solution, designed for teams and individuals, that allows people to nurture both personal and business relationships – whether they happen across email, social networks, or a growing number of cloud-based business applications. Nimble fits into a range of categories – traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation – and brings them all together as a so-called “relationship management platform.”

The interesting thing that Nimble needs to contend with, however, is that increasingly, relationship management is happening on the move, and required a mobile-first approach. This is difficult for a number of reasons, as anyone who has tried to reconcile a desktop CRM user interface into a mobile form factor will tell you. True, the CRM companies are trying to move quickly to be mobile-friendly (witness Salesforce’s Lightning mobile offering) but it is a difficult task.

Given this situation, it is interesting to hear that Nimble is today releasing a new version of its mobile application, one that integrated the two main office productivity suites (Microsoft Office 365 and Google’s G-Suite) alongside the various social networks and a range of cloud applications. The idea is that all of those individual siloes can, once and for all, be brought together into a single consistent platform that gives social context, an overview of historical interactions and allows easy ongoing communication management. This version is (unfortunately for those of us toting an Android device) only available on iOS at this stage, with Android due later this spring.

Ferrara is quick to articulate his view on why both a consistent platform and a mobile offering is critical. In his words:

The  single  most  effective  way to kill a deal is neglecting to understand people’s needs and  failing  to  deliver  expedient,  relevant  responses. We  designed Nimble Mobile as your personal CRM that you can take with you everywhere you work, so you’re better  prepared  to  manage  personal  business  relationships  at  scale  and  take  appropriate steps to  evolve opportunities to help you grow.

So, what has the Nimble team cooked up for us all in this new release? Firstly, Nimble is creating something of a mobile digital Rolodex. It offers up detailed dossiers that give users historical email and social conversations, as well as insights into contacts gleaned from a raft of different sources – both internal and external. Nimble is also including a hand business card scanning offering within the app – obviously, a lot of different vendors offer business card scanning, but building this into the CRM, so it can automatically collect the name, title, company, email, address, and phone numbers for a contact is super useful.

Nimble is also offering email control solutions, like those from Gmail plugins such as Streak and Boomerang. Users can send tracked messages and templated emails using email templates with custom merge tags and they can also pre-set attachments to email contacts. Nimble also enables message tracking to monitor engagement.

In true CRM-functionality, Nimble allows users to manage multiple sales pipelines from the field. They can log notes using mobile voice commands, assign follow-up tasks and schedule reminders to follow through.

MyPOV

Nimble is awesome, and a super-useful tool for those that need to stay on top of contacts and conversations. But it’s not alone in the space. There are so many startups trying to solve mobile relationship management and, perhaps more worrying, every platform vendor under the sun is trying to do this as well.

It strikes me that the real opportunity for Nimble is to stay laser-focused on providing “just enough” for users and avoiding the temptation to become big and bloated like traditional enterprise CRMs are. Ferrara has a long pedigree in the space and has been at it for years – it will be interesting to see where Nimble eventually ends up.

Nimble Launches Mobile CRM 3.0

Mobile CRM 3.0 is the latest version of Nimble's mobile contact relationship and pipeline manager.

Build Relationships, Manage Deals and Grow Your Business The Nimble Way to Connect, Engage, Nurture and Close Customers While Mobile

Contact relationship management leader Nimble released Nimble CRM Mobile 3.0, a social sales and marketing CRM and pipeline manager for mobile teams and professionals.  Nimble’s mobile CRM unifies contacts from mobile, cloud-based and desktop records into a unified relationship manager; delivers sales intelligence and detailed dossiers about people attending upcoming meetings; and enables users to follow up and follow-through more efficiently using Nimble’s visual pipeline manager. Now available on iOS, Nimble Mobile 3.0 for Office 365 and G-Suite users will be available on Android this spring.

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara, previously founder of GoldMine, the company that pioneered Contact Management and CRM, believes that B2B sales is and always have been based on relationships; namely, people buy from people they know, like and trust. Jon designed Nimble’s Mobile 3.0 CRM to help today’s increasingly mobile professionals to nurture relationships more easily and at scale, and simplify follow-up and follow-through while on-the-go using smaller, more mobile devices.

“Many  professionals  lose  deals  because  they  either  fail  to  understand  prospective  buyers’ needs or neglect to deliver a timely, relevant response,” explained Jon Ferrara.  “We designed Nimble Mobile to enable people to cultivate relationships and close deals more effectively by unifying critical contact records and conversation histories into a single, easy-to-access system of record that helps you make authentic connections and organize follow-up and follow-through at every stage of the deal pipeline.”

Nimble Delivers Simple Sales and Marketing CRM to Office 365

Nimble is a social sales and marketing customer relationship management (CRM) app that provides business intelligence about your contacts and their organizations so you can engage effectively with your customers and partners. We’ve optimized Nimble to work seamlessly inside Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We help you easily deploy your CRM by syncing your team’s Office 365 contacts, emails, and calendars into a unified relationship manager enriched with the business insights you need to engage.  

We are on a mission to help companies modernize their sales and marketing to grow their businesses. We also add sales intelligence for teams that rely on Office for their daily tasks and communications through our add-in integrations for Outlook on the desktop, web app, and iOS. This means that Nimble acts as the home base for your email communications, calendars, sales opportunities, marketing campaigns, and sales intelligence data.

How does the Nimble Add-in work with Outlook?

With the Nimble add-in for Outlook, you can get insights on any contact included in Outlook, including broad social profiles, industry, shared relationships, mutual interests, company profile, revenue and more, to help you get prepared for meetings and engage effectively.. If you have an existing Nimble account or trial, you can also view and update records in your CRM without interrupting your email workflow.

Get business insights with the Nimble Add-in for Outlook:

• Automatic matching of social and public details for people and companies
• Instant business and social insights on people and companies in Outlook
• Company insights including biography, industry, number of employees, year founded, keywords, company type, revenue, ticker, CEO name, address, and phone
• People insights including person’s name, company name, title, biography, location, keywords, work experience, education, social identities

“Nimble is a welcome addition to the Office ecosystem, as they clearly have an understanding of the needs of business users in a social, global world,” said Rob Howard, Director, Office Product Marketing at Microsoft Corp. “Providing contextual information about contacts helps business relationships flourish, so connecting that capability through the new Nimble Add-in for Outlook is a logical step.” 

Use the Nimble Add-in for Outlook on iOS and Android to benefit from Nimble’s full and detailed view of any contact’s social business insights for people and companies, next to your inbox on the go.

Built for Microsoft Teams and Edge

Nimble is also better with Office via our integrations with Microsoft Teams and the Edge browser for Windows 10. Add Nimble to Teams to see critical contact details about an account without interrupting your internal chats.

Our Nimble Contacts browser extension for Edge lets you bring Nimble with you everywhere you work on the web.

Hover over a contact to view social profiles, streams, and signals related to that person or company from a single screen. The extension automatically pulls and displays your complete communication history of social messages, emails, notes, and events for every contact in Nimble.

Nimble Prospector Helps Sales Teams Build Prospect Relationship Record

Introducing Nimble Prospector

Nimble, the social sales and marketing customer relationship management company, has just introduced Nimble Prospector to its cloud-based CRM. Nimble gathers your contacts from several popular business platforms like Gmail, G Suite and Office 365 as well as from your social media sites and other business applications.

Prospector even provides an overview of your team’s history of interactions with clients and contacts. For small business sales teams on the go, it’s like having another set of hands helping you to close deals.

“Nimble provides a layer and builds a relationship on email, calendar and ideally social to show a history of interactions for you and your team,” Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara told Small Business Trends.  “It builds and maintains a relationship record.”

In short, it’s a CRM that can help busy small businesses’ sales teams with relationship management by creating and maintaining databases using AI. Nimble is also designed to reduce lost time spent putting this important kind of information together. It also verifies contact details and enriches contact information.

It allows small business sales people to beef up a contact’s info and reach out with a personalized email tailor made for each prospect. It filters and builds on data automatically.

A Closer Look at Nimble and Prospector

Here’s a deeper dive into the new Prospector tool from Nimble.

Company Profiles

There’s no need to look in several locations for the business info you need. You can target business contacts from a single location. Prospector gathers important metrics like number of employees and even revenue to keep everything current.

Auto-Generated Contact Profiles

Getting prospects’ work experience, education and social profiles helps to sort them out and qualify them. Nimble builds these profiles automatically.

Verification

There’s no need to chase down the right contact info with Prospector. The product does it for you and that’s another real time saver.  Verifying business contact details like phone number and emails is done for information coming from any website or business source. It’s another way for small businesses to draw a straighter line to contacts that are most likely to pay off and get in touch quickly.

Works Where You Work

One of the more interesting features is the ability to access Nimble from different platforms.

Ferrara explains, “It works where you work. For example, if you open an email in Gmail, you can see the history of interactions you and the team have had.  You can follow up and follow through from wherever you are.”

The Smart Contacts App

Everything is brought together with enriched contact details in the cloud through this application. Best of all, all the information is accessible from a sidebar with a single click.

You can even build segmented lists with tags and send out one-on-one emails. The Group Messaging feature even tracks emails and when they are opened. It also reminds users to follow up and tracks clicks.

“This application is the key,” Ferrara says. “Essentially it plugs into your browser and works inside your existing email systems or your social and business applications.”

Small businesses can get Nimble Prospector when they buy a Nimble Business License. The license comes with 25 lookups monthly with a pay-as-you-go option after that. The fees for Nimble Prospector start at $9:95 for an additional 50 lookups monthly. You can share them across a Nimble team account.  Nimble comes with both mobile and desktop options.

The tool as already garnered some praise in the industry.

In comments supplied to Small Business Trends, Rich Bohn, President and Chief CRM Analyst at Sell More Now LLC says, “Too many CRM solutions still make the poor users do all of the work. This needs to end! These people are already way over worked. Thankfully, Nimble has been bucking this trend for a while.”

Wes Schaeffer, CEO of The Sales Whisperer, adds, “Time kills deals, so the more I can compress cycles and time frames, the more I can be productive and make more money. For example, when someone follows me on Twitter, I can use Nimble to immediately figure out if I want to connect with that person and how to build a relationship based on our common areas of interest.”

Nimble CRM Introduces Prospector For One-Click Contact Information Discovery

Nimble CRM, an innovative integrator of social platform and CRM data into popular office productivity suites, introduced a tool Thursday that puts almost anyone's contact information directly in front of the user.

Nimble Prospector displays in the corner of the screen email addresses and phone numbers of people encountered on LinkedIn, Facebook, inboxes or news articles.

Nimble founder and CEO Jon Ferrara, who helped pioneer CRM technology at GoldMine Software, said the new offering is intended to facilitate the often-difficult process of first connecting to prospective customers, or anyone else a small-business employee is interested in meeting.

Cloud-based office productivity suites, especially G Suite and Office 365, are the operating systems of modern businesses, Ferrara said.

Nimble unifies that "operating system around your business," he said, culling conversations and prior activities, mapping identity, importing data and synchronizing the entire history of interactions. "Then you can take that with you back inside your inbox or anywhere you're working," Ferrara said.

Nimble then pulls addresses and phone numbers from business data repositories it subscribes to and accesses through APIs.

Prospector enhances the company's core customer-relationship product that ingests data from productivity tools such as email, calendars and contact lists, and integrates information from social platforms like LinkedIn, as well as sales and marketing platforms like Salesforce, to put comprehensive customer profiles and contact histories in front of users.

The startup, based in Santa Monica, Calif., launched a channel program in July to align with more solution providers in the Microsoft and Google channels. Since then, it's been selected to participate in Microsoft's Accelerator program that helps mature startups scale their businesses globally.

Van Murray, CEO of NeoCloud, a solution provider based in Raleigh, N.C., that's bundling Nimble's software into its Office 365 deployments, said Prospector gives solution providers a truly differentiated capability to offer their clients.

"Having a fully integrated CRM and all the tools, contact management, and now Prospector, in my view, it's an outbound prospector's dream," Murray told CRN.

Nimble's CRM, contact history and now contact discovery solutions benefit by bringing information directly into the user's email environment, where most outbound sales professionals still spend most of their working day, he added.

"The aggregation of contact information from different sources, the idea that you could have in seconds a one-click lookup for a contact, to me that's pretty differentiating. I don’t know of any other tool that does that," Murray told CRN.

Nimble Launches Prospector, Powerful Email, Phone, Address and Contact Enrichment for Its Pioneering CRM

Nimble, the award-winning pioneer of Social Sales and Marketing CRM, today introduced Nimble Prospector, a powerful contact discovery and enrichment engine that uses artificial intelligence to enable Nimble users to build and update records for outbound prospects wherever they work, accelerating pipeline and revenue growth. Nimble’s newest AI assisted sales intelligence capabilities introduce the ability to append contact data including verified business emails, phone numbers, and addresses to comprehensive, auto-enriched profiles that can be added to Nimble CRM with a single click.

Key Features of Nimble Prospector — The Simply Smarter Way to Prospect

Small and medium-sized businesses can use Nimble’s end-to-end sales and marketing platform to qualify prospects using auto-generated people and business profiles; discover their verified business contact details; create enriched contact records and manage relationships in their cloud-based CRM; and outreach to prospects to fill the funnel and close more business. Specifically users can:

•  Target Businesses using Company Profiles, including Biography, Industry, Number of Employees, Year Founded, Keywords, Company Type, Revenue, Ticker, CEO Name, Address and Phone
•  Qualify Prospects using auto-generated Contact Profiles, which include Biography, Location, Keywords, Work Experience, Education, and Social Profiles
•  Discover Verified Business Contact Details, including Emails, Phone Numbers and Address information from any website, social network or business web application
•  Enrich Contact Details in Nimble’s cloud-based CRM with a single click from the Nimble Smart Contacts App browser extension
•  Build Segmented Lists using tags
•  Outreach via Personalized One-to-One Emails via Nimble’s built-in Group Messaging feature, which tracks prospect email opens and clicks and reminds users to follow up

“The combination of sales and marketing solutions that small and medium-sized businesses have to use for outbound prospecting are too complex and expensive for 99% of most companies needs,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. “What companies need is a simply smarter CRM that combines social sales intelligence and group email marketing to help sales teams prospect, engage and close customers everywhere they work. This is what Nimble does, and it’s why we’re growing so quickly.”

Sales and Marketing Influencers Love Nimble Prospector

“Nimble is the first and only social CRM that truly understands the salesperson’s everyday workflows,” said Jorge Soto, co-founder and CEO of FirstCut.io. “This one-stop prospecting tool follows you everywhere you go while offering the CRM functionalities you need to do your job. Nimble’s prospecting capabilities enable you to quickly source leads and discover contact details across all your channels as well as export leads to the CRM, update contact statuses, set lead sources and more.”

“Nimble Prospector works on getting you the contact and social data about your buyers so you can focus less on research and more on selling.”
Lori Richardson – Score More Sales

“Nimble’s new email discovery engine, called Prospector, measurably raises the bar on sales intelligence and sales enablement tools for small businesses.”
Brian Moran – Founder and CEO, Brian Moran & Associates

“OMG OMG OMG! How much do I LOVE Nimble’s new Prospector tool? I just started using it a few days ago and already it’s become an indispensable part of my prospecting and outreach. I have mentioned it to every single client (and prospect) I have spoken to since then too. And – for those of you who have Nimble and haven’t been using it as much as you can: This will be a game changer for you, too.”
Viveka von Rosen, Social Selling Influencer, Co-Founder, Vengreso

Pricing and Availability

Nimble Prospector comes built into every Nimble Business license with 25 lookups per user per month with additional lookups on a pay-as-you-go basis. Prospector fees start at $9.95 for an additional 50 lookups per month and are shared across an entire Nimble team account.

Nimble's Social CRM Finds Its Way Into Office 365

Social sales and marketing software provider Nimble and cloud services consultant NeoCloud on Thursday announced a partnership to deliver a simple, affordable contact management and CRM package for Microsoft Office 365 and GSuite users. 

NeoCloud has agreed to bundle Nimble CRM into all of its Office 365 deployments, beginning this month. Small and mid-sized business customers and workgroups in larger organizations will be able to access social business insights on any contact in Office 365 everywhere they work -- across the Web, in popular Web applications, and in personal productivity applications.

Nimble CRM adds employees' individual connections to a shared team relationship manager and enriches them with social insights and business context.

"What I like about Nimble's solution is that users continue to work through their usual tools such as email or social media platforms," said Cindy Zhou, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

They "gain context and information on individuals through Nimble plug-ins to facilitate social selling, adding or augmenting CRM records, and marketing," she told CRM Buyer.

Nimble also tracks engagement history, Zhou noted.

Insights for Everyone

Nimble integrates with first-party cloud-based solutions including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Microsoft Outlook.

NeoCloud will provide sales, marketing and technical support services for the Nimble package.

Office 365 and GSuite are the two key business platforms NeoCloud sells, and virtually all of its customers need a simple relationship management platform that layers on top of those tools, said NeoCloud CEO Van Murray.

Nimble delivers relationship insights to users of the following products:

• Microsoft Office 365
• Microsoft Outlook
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Edge
• Hootsuite
• iOS
• Android

Nimble is available in two versions:

• the Nimble Business Edition, which delivers access to team social sales and marketing functionalities, as well as social business insights on people and companies; and
• a standalone freemium add-in for Microsoft Outlook Desktop and Outlook Mobile on iOS and Android, which allows profiling of email contacts.

Partnership Advantages

The partnership "will give SMBs an integrated, cost-effective way to execute on social selling," said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

"At a considerably lower price point than most other options, this makes social selling more accessible to firms with fewer resources," she told CRM Buyer.

Social selling "increases sales productivity by more than 12 percent on average," Wettemann said.

"As the number of people we work with increases, both internal and external to our organizations and across a variety of tools and channels, it becomes ever so important to provide context to the relationships and history we have with them," Constellation Research Principal Analyst Alan Lepofsky told CRM Buyer.

How Users Will Benefit

The leading CRM challenge for companies of all sizes is the loss of engagement data, Constellation's Zhou said.

Many solutions require users to input contact or associated emails, communications and other data manually, she noted. Tracking and inputting data "becomes a burden on sellers, marketers and services personnel."

The integration of contact management, as well as allowing users to see social context and other features that come with layering contact management software on top of productivity applications, "helps users or companies engage with customers more efficiently and reduces the manual data entry effort," Zhou remarked.

"Integration is key," Nucleus Research's Wettemann pointed out. People "aren't optimally selling if they spend more than 8 percent of their time on entering data into a CRM."

The Nimble Smart Contacts App Just Got Smarter – Introducing Prospector!

If you are not already familiar with Nimble, Nimble is a Social CRM that has revolutionized CRM in a number of ways …

• It does the 3 Cs (contacts, calendar, and communications) right and in a way that is actually usable.
• Nimble will create, and flush out social profiles, contact records for you and it will do so automatically. Or, as Nimble says … automagically.
• Emails sync both ways without the need for a BCC and Google Calendar will do the same.
• And much, much more.

One of the biggest innovations of Nimble has been it’s Smart Contacts App. This browser extension will allow you to take your Nimble database with you literally anywhere on the web, including social platforms and other CRM’s, and it will also reside as a sidebar in Gmail or Outlook 365. It even works within your full Nimble web application

The Smart Contacts App performs dual functions. Highlight a person or company name and, where a record is already in Nimble, it will show you that record, allow you to edit or update it, or even add notes, tags, or tasks. I am doing this outside of the actual Nimble app itself.

Where no record is found in Nimble, a live preview of what that record would look like is generated. Once again, you can edit any information and then … you can add that record directly into Nimble from wherever you are. Pretty awesome. Well, the Smart Contacts App just got … awesomer!

Now you will also have the ability to have Nimble search for additional information such as email addresses, addresses, and phone numbers! Nimble Prospector is an add on premium service for the free Smart Contacts App that is included with every Nimble subscription but, it is certainly well worth the money (read on for pricing)!

Think of all of the time that you spend researching, trying to find, a contact’s phone number or email. These are two of the most important ways that you can reach out to that individual. As an added benefit, that person’s email address is a critical element that helps Nimble to identify and verify that person’s social profiles which are then used to enrich their contact record.

Once you have created contact records using the app, you can then easily group message them from within Nimble. For example, use Prospector in LinkedIn or Twitter to create records for people from the same company or from those people within a conversation. Then use group messaging to send personalized follow-up emails to each participant.

You might also be excited to read about Nimble’s free integration with CircleBack that is also integrated into the Smart Contacts App with Prospector and is used to harvest additional contact information from that person’s email signature line. CircleBack is also used for business card scanning with Nimble’s iOS mobile app.

Nimble Prospector comes built into every Nimble Business Edition with 25 lookups per user per month. After the first 25 free monthly contact enrichment lookups, Prospector fees start at $9.95 for 50 lookups per month, $29.95 for 200 lookups per month, $59.95 for 500 lookups per month and $99.95 for 1,000 lookups per month.  Additional Nimble Prospector lookups are shared across an entire Nimble team account.

You can visit this page to learn more and, as an authorized Nimble Solution Partner, we are here to help you with Nimble training and implementation.

What Pitney Bowes’ Partner Program And Google Android Deal Means For SMBs

Pitney Bowes hasn’t had to stray too far from its century-old beginnings as a business-to-business maker of “hand-cranked postage-stamping machines” with its latest update.

The company, which has long-since repositioned itself brand as a global technology and software company focused on business data, has rolled out Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, a “commerce enabler” that provides access to all its solutions, analytics, and APIs in a simple dashboard.

The announcement was part of a series of product highlights Pitney Bowes previewed this past week at Google’s offices to highlight its partnership with Google on its G Suite on powering Android devices to help manage contact between between businesses.

Alongside Google G Suite, Pitney Bowes also said it would use the applications associated with with GeoMarketing‘s parent Yext (more details here about our relationship), Acquisio, DocuSign, and Nimble CRM to power its new cloud-based marketing system.

The goal of the new system is to seamlessly assist clients identify customers, locate opportunities, enable communications, power shipping from anywhere to everywhere, and manage payments.

Pitney Bowes Updates Its History

And that’s where the updating of one of its oldest business and marketing functions comes in: Last week, Pitney Bowes introduced the SendPro C-Series, which updates the traditional process of choosing and adding postage to mailings.

The new SendPro system lets offices instantly compare postage prices between Federal Express, UPS, and the United Postal Service. Aimed at small businesses, SendPro helps choose ideal sending option for every parcel, letter and flat a business mails, while also providing full tracking and delivering savings across carriers.

“What’s distinctive about this feature is that 85 percent of small businesses in the U.S. use a combination of FedEx, UPS and USPS, but the rate structure is so complicated,” Mark Shearer, executive vice president and president, Pitney Bowes Global SMB Solutions, told GeoMarketing before a press conference held at Google’s offices. “No normal human being can figure it out. And what all too often happens is that people spend more than they need to.”

Mailing Reinvented

Clients that use this Pitney Bowes solution can also  get up to 39 percent discount from USPS just by using that device, Shearer added.

The C-Series is based on the mobile Android operating system. The new Pitney Bowes Small Business Partner Program, and will allow the companies and their clients to deliver “a broad range of new web and android applications directly and rapidly to the device.”

“Creating this partner ecosystem gives our more than one million small and medium businesses and e-commerce clients the opportunity to use a broad range of cloud and mobile enabled business applications to better reach their clients, manage their operations more effectively and ultimately grow their businesses,” Shearer added. “Our digital platform creates an entirely new client experience and offers the flexibility to quickly add more partner applications and bring even greater value to our small business client base in the near future.”

Clients should view shipping and mailing are the “anchor tenant apps” of the new cloud marketing system, Shearer said. But the most exciting thing is what will come from innovation from companies like Google, Yext, and from small developer shops around the world.

Pitney Bowes is also hosting a hack-a-thon to promote its platform with the grand prize being a job working on our development organization.

“We’re trying to have fun with it,” Shearer said. “My background is IBM hardware and systems. What I found is every time we introduce an open platform, no matter what you have in mind, the industry will run with it in an unanticipated direction. So today’s announcement is really about  trying to encourage innovation on top of the small business platform.”

Pitney Bowes clients will get an Android tablet to manage their accounts and partner apps on the SendPro system.

“It’s the Android application ecosystem that we’re trying to inspire,”  Shearer added. “As an application platform, it’s just ubiquitous. It also has some really interesting impacts. With the old postage meter, every office had ‘Joe’ to manage it. Joe was the only one that could figure out how to use the postage meter. With this new device, anyone can manage their postage and track orders without having to ask someone else for help.”

In keeping with the way Pitney Bowes has evolved its focus on location data over the past two years to meet what it calls “the era of cognition,” the company will also be working with Yext to help manage location information. Earlier this year, Pitney Bowes created a new data unit that promised to make the seemingly infinite amounts of customer insights more manageable.

“We do have a lot of location intelligence assets and I do envision SaaS based applications that help our client’s target their market and better understand how to market to their current client base,” Shearer said. “We are using a lot of these technologies in our own relationships with clients. Now that the new devices are all cloud-based, we’re measuring everything. If clients are having a hard time with certain features, or are not fully exploiting the value, we’ll digitally cultivate their awareness of these features and help them use it.”

How to Grow Your Business without Spending a Dime on Marketing with Jon Ferrara

Jon is a CRM and Relationship Management entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Media’s effects on Sales and Marketing. His most recent venture Nimble.com has re-imagined CRM by building a Simply Smarter Social Sales and Marketing platform. It is the first CRM that works for you by building and updating contact data for you, then works with you, everywhere you work.
Listen to the full podcast with Jon here: https://www.eofire.com/podcast/jonferrara/

How This Entrepreneur Secured a Global Deal with Microsoft

Microsoft's recent decision to motivate its value-added partners to sell third-party solutions has created several openings for small businesses to gain big revenue advantages.

One startup in the CRM space, Nimble, saw an opportunity with this dynamic and recently closed a global Microsoft contract. When I learned about Nimble's win, I wanted to learn how a small startup closed such a giant deal with a giant company. Since I have worked with Nimble's CEO Jon Ferrara, I decided to reach out to him directly to uncover how he did it.

Here are some of the most insightful and actionable highlights from our interview (you can watch the entire video interview here):

What are the strategy and tactics to landing a big deal with a big company?

Ferrara used social media to build direct relationships with Microsoft's Office and Outlook product managers as well as its business team members who were making decisions on channel and distribution of third-party products.

The top performing tactic was to acquire a list of Twitter influencers who attended Microsoft's prior year's World Partner Conference (WPC). Ferrara then segmented the influencers into 200 key contacts for further follow-up. According to Ferrara, he used his own solution to automatically populate email addresses, social profiles and contact information which shaved days off of the typical research effort. From there, he segmented the list, wrote an email with authentic and relevant messaging inviting them to call or email him.

The results surprised him. The outreach emails generated a 50 percent open rate and 25 meetings.

Because of the interest generated across multiple Microsoft departments, Ferrara was able to negotiate a global deal to resell Nimble directly and through its partner channel as the de facto sales and marketing add-on for Office 365, Outlook and Outlook Mobile. Additionally, Microsoft agreed to make Nimble its teacher of social sales and marketing for its partner channel.

How did you convince Microsoft to deal on such a grand scale?

For Microsoft resellers to be successful, they need to start selling front and back office solutions on top of the "plumbing" that they're selling.

"This is precisely what we positioned Nimble to be," Ferrara told me. "We explained that Nimble is the first thing that brands will need after adopting Office 365. Because our simple social sales and marketing system is what enables Office to become increasingly 'sticky' and drive adoption of its Azure cloud services."

What advice would you give to small organizations about creating the trust that would allow them to land their own massive deal?

"The single biggest way for a brand to earn the type of intimacy and trust that enables them to score such a major contract is to go into every meeting extremely prepared, Ferrara told me. "It is vital to understand who you are speaking with and what their business is all about. Additionally, keep your questions simple and then shut up, listen and learn."

Ferrara explained that when you do this, that individual is going to share everything you need to know and everything you need to do to earn his or her trust so that an intimate partnership can be formed.

Ferrara continues, "If you sit there and simply propose ways that you can help them solve their issues, it's not going to go in your favor because that's what every salesman off the street is going to try and do."

Ferrara positioned his company as the primary thought leader in the field. He used his own solution to network at scale, showing Microsoft exactly what the platform can do first hand. Then after securing the meetings and phone calls with Microsoft executives, he came prepared to learn about what the company needed.

What used to take a team of people can now be done by one individual.

Jon Ferrara of Nimble: Social as a Word is Going Away — And We’re Just Going to Get Back to Doing Business

Sep 1, 2017 by Brent Leary

You can listen to this episode here or read the summary below:

It’s hard for me to believe, but this conversation marks the seventh anniversary of this series. And there’s nobody more surprised than I am that this has gone on so long, as I thought I’d do this for a couple of weeks at the most. But the conversations with so many interesting, influential people have made these seven years fly by, and honestly, I never once thought about moving on from having these weekly interviews.

So, to mark the occasion I was really glad that Jon Ferrara, founder of Nimble (and before that GoldMine), was able to join me for this week’s conversation. Because it was Jon who was my very first guest in this series those seven years ago.

A Look at the Evolution of CRM, and Its Future

We cover a lot of ground as we reminisce about the past, dig into what’s changed over the past seven years in the CRM space, and eventually look at what is coming down the pike. So this is a bit longer than usual. But hey, it’s not every day you hit a pretty cool milestone like this!

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the full interview click on the embedded SoundCloud player below. And thanks to all who have read/listened to the series the past seven years. And a BIG THANK YOU to Anita Campbell and the whole Small Business Trends team for giving me a platform for having these kinds of conversations over the years.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: I recently realized that come September 3rd, I will have been doing this series for seven years, which is just mind blowing to me. This whole thing started out with a conversation I had with John Ferrara. As luck would have it, guess who’s back with me to celebrate the 7-year anniversary? Jon Ferrara.

Jon, thank you for joining me today, man.

Jon Ferrara: Brent, I am super excited to be here with you today. I cherish you as a friend.

Small Business Trends: At the time, back in 2010, you had already sold GoldMine. You had taken some time off and had just recently started this new thing that was called Nimble. Now seven years into Nimble, tell us a little bit about what it was and what it is.

Jon Ferrara: You bet. So it’s my feeling that after using social media back in 2008, ’09, and ’10 it was going to change the way we work, play, the way people buy, and the way we need to sell to them. I started looking at contact tools and CRMs and saw they weren’t social. Then I started looking at contact management and saw it was broken because email, contact, and calendar are three separate applications and that CRM isn’t about relationships. It’s about reporting. So I build Nimble to reimagine a CRM as a social relationship manager that layers on top of your email, contact, and calendar. Build the CRM for you, and it’s been an amazing journey because I think the market has woken up to the vision that I had about social CRM and social selling and now I think it’s become ubiquitous that we need to change the way we sell, because customers have changed the way they buy.

Small Business Trends: Here we are in 2017. You’ve seen a lot in terms of not just how customer relationship management has evolved over time, but also how businesses in general ( startups and small businesses) have begun their journeys over that two and a half decade period. Tell me, what’s the biggest surprising change that you’ve seen in relationship building today as compared to when you first got started with GoldMine?

Jon Ferrara: You know, the biggest thing I’m surprised about Brent is that nothing’s changed. I think today people are still, for the most part, doing business the old fashioned way. They’re sending out a quarterly newsletter and expecting people to come knocking on their door. They’re still doing business in the old way of giving a sales rep a CRM and telling them to go get ‘em, and not really helping that sales rep with engagement as opposed to using the CRM for reporting. I think that social is changing the way that we work, play, buy, and sell, and I think that just now today, the market is waking up to that fact and they’re looking for something different.

But I think that the biggest surprise I have is that the thing I fixed with GoldMine … I’m not even going to count how many years ago it was. Hang on. Dang. It’s 27 years ago when I founded GoldMine! GoldMine was the first program that integrated email, contact, and calendar into a team relationship manager with sales and market automation. Today, contact management is broken again and it needs a GoldMine, but more importantly, a social cloud-based GoldMine.

This is what I mean. Today your operating system of your business is the contacts you’re connected to, the conversations you’re having, and activities you’re driving. That’s email, contact, and calendar. Today you have two choices. You’re going to either do that in Office 365 or Gmail/G Suite. And both of those applications, all three of those components are three separate apps and every team member has a separate contact database, which means there is no system or record of relationship for your business, which means that everybody in your company can’t be on one [accord] with your contacts, let alone the history of interactions on email and calendar. And most importantly on social as well.

That’s what Nimble fixes today. The biggest thing is this, if you have to go to your CRM or your contact program to use it, you won’t do it. That’s the biggest cause of failure of CRM, is lack of use. The second one’s bad data, because even if you beat on your sales people to type stuff in the CRM, it’s going to decay so rapidly that it’ll become unusable and so I think that the fact that they call it Salesforce because you have to force sales people to use it, is a testimony to the fact that you work for their CRM. It doesn’t work for you. You have to go to it to work for it. It should work for you by building itself and then work with you wherever you are. You should be in the river with your customer, adding value on a daily basis to set yourself up as a trusted advisor so when they make a buying decision, they know they pick up the phone they call you, but they drag their friends with them.

Small Business Trends: Wow. You’re still talking about the Social River, man. I remember hearing that back in 2010.

Jon Ferrara: I am, but I’m going to tell you something about social, Brent. Social as a word is going to go away, and we’re just going to get back to doing business. Because if you think about it, the term Social CRM has already passed over the horizon and there will go social selling, because ultimately it’s just about CRM and selling. But social’s just a new way of having conversation.

Do you remember when the Internet first came out? Everybody talked about “I this” and” E that”… eToys and iContact. Everybody thought the Internet was going to change everything. And you know what? It did. But you don’t talk about the Internet anymore, because it’s just the plumbing and when you turn your faucet on on your sink, you don’t think about the re-circulation pipes. You just worry about there being hot or cold water.

And so yes, I am still talking about the social river, but we don’t need to talk about social selling or social CRM. We just need to talk about contact management and basic relationship management that still is lacking in the main tools we run our businesses on.

Small Business Trends: With the move to the cloud that CRM applications and their complementary applications have made, how do you look at CRM cloud applications meeting the expectations and needs of the modern business? From a scale of 1 to 10, how well are they doing that today?

Jon Ferrara: Let’s talk about the sales and marketing and social technology tech stack that a business needs in order to manage the customer lifecycle. So, if you’re a business, number one, you get a domain. You go to GoDaddy. Get a domain. Then what you do is you need to get a website. So you get WordPress or something. Then what you need to do is you need email, contact, and calendar. So you buy Office or Gmail or G Suite. The next thing you’re going to need is some place to take the eyeballs you’re driving to the website. So I call that MailChimp to Marketo, right? It’s marketing. So you need to capture a lead, whatever you got, email, name, phone number, whatever you get. Put in to a database, and then nurture that lead till it’s lead qualified. Once it’s lead qualified, whatever that means to the business, you then put it in the CRM and you tell all your sales reps to go get them. So now we got two applications at a minimum, marketing automation and CRM.

So the sales rep sitting there with this lead and the database, and they don’t know anything about that lead, so what do they do? They Google them. They look them up. That’s 60 percent time wasted, looking things up and logging what you know and then logging what you did in email, calendar, and social, and the CRM, and you have to go to it to do it. So instead of doing that, what you do is you buy sales intelligence software. So the sales intelligence software maybe enriches the CRM record with who that person is and what their business is about. Maybe that’s inside view, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Nimble, which happens to be number one in that category in sales intelligence. Once you have the intelligence, you need to engage. And so you think about market automation as the high level bombers of the battlefield bombing the leads with nurturing.

Once you get that done, you need to put boots on the ground. That’s sales people. Sales people need intelligence. That’s sales intelligence, and they need a rifle. The rifle is not market automation. Sales people don’t use Marketo. Sales people use some sort of hand to hand combat tool, which is email templates with tracking. So that’s Yesware, Tab app, whatever email tracking templating software. So at a minimum you got four components. You got market automation, CRM, sales intelligence, and sales enablement. Each of those tools costs $50 to $150 per rep per month, and you give all that to a sales rep, they’re not even going to be able to use it because it’s too complex. So you got to hire a sales administrator for $50,000 to $100,000 a year to run it.

Now, if you asked me how the CRM was doing regarding serving the needs of the customer, I’m going to say you’ve got to buy too many products and too many tools today. I believe you need a blend of social sales and marketing with a blend of marketing CRM, sales intelligence, and sales enablement. Then the thing needs to work with you wherever you work, and I think that’s why we continue to innovate in ways that are unique in the market, because we see that need of too much complexity, too much cost, and too many tools, and that for 99 percent  of the businesses out there, they’re not going to go buy Marketo and Salesforce and InsideView and Yesware, or some other email template program. It’s too much. That’s where we’re at with Nimble, providing that blend of social and sales and marketing to manage the customer lifecycle across an entire organization.

Small Business Trends: All right, so let’s talk about a couple of things that weren’t even a blip on this screen back when we first talked seven years ago and their importance. From a customer engagement perspective, being able to scale efficiently your ability to respond, or to provide a quick answer that could help convert. We hear a lot of talk about chat bots. Talk a little bit about what you feel the importance of chat bots are today to modern customer engagement strategy.

Jon Ferrara: I think if you are not providing a means for your customer to communicate on whatever channel, at whatever time, at whatever moment your customer wants to, you’re going to lose them. Because it’s the people that are doing that today that are going to win that heart and mind. Because let’s face it, you’re out there in the cloud, you’re in-app trying to evaluate some program. You might be doing it on the weekend, you might be doing it in the middle of the night, and you might be doing it wherever, and you want some help. And so chat bots — and I’m not just talking about a chat bot on a website — I’m talking about chat bots within the applications themselves as well, so that your customer can ask a question at any point, at any time, and be able to get an answer. And it’s not just a sales answer, it’s really a customer success answer.

I think that sales has become a four letter word and that service is the new sales, and that you should be empowering you customer base and business team members to be rewarded and focused on customer success. That comes through communication and listening and dialogue. And so yes, I think chat bots are amazing, and that’s why we incorporate them, not just on our own website, but inside our apps as well.

Small Business Trends: All right. Let’s talk about the AI, because chat bots and AI have got to go together.

Jon Ferrara: Yeah.

Small Business Trends: How important is AI? We hear a lot of talk about it. We’re seeing a lot of people say that they have it and they’re doing it. (A) Is it important? and (B) Are you actually seeing it being done?

Jon Ferrara: You know Brent, when we start talking about AI I start saying the more digital we get the more human we need to be. And that yes, you can use computers to discern information across disparate databases to tell you things you don’t know. And that these bots might be able to do some basic conversation, but in the end, you need humans involved through that process. But I’ll tell you what, my first introduction to computers was in the Pan Am building in New York City. It was a teletype that was running ELIZA. ELIZA was a list based AI system that you … It said, “Hey, Brent, how are you?” You’d say, “I’m doing good.” And it says, “Oh, great. You know it sounds like your day is going good. Tell me more.” You tell it more and it interacts with you. It was pretty good back in the day and it’s gotten better, but I don’t really know if there’s truly a program that’s doing AI today as opposed to just some inherent word parsing and suggestions at this point. I don’t think we’re there yet.

We’ll get there, but in the meantime, I think that no matter how much AI you put into it, I think the key thing for business success is to be able to deliver context and insights on the relationships that you’re engaging with, whatever you’re engaging about.

Nimble Disrupting CRM World with Microsoft Edge plug-in

Contact management specialist Nimble has strengthened its presence in the CRM market with the release of its Smart Contacts App with support for Microsoft Edge, the web browser developed as the successor to Internet Explorer.

The new plug-in, offered free for the standard edition, makes available the social marketing and business functionality of the contact management app directly within the Edge browser. The add-in version is available for all users of Office 365, Outlook desktop for Windows and Mac and Outlook iOS. Nimble also offers plug-ins for the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers.

A business edition, which provides access for team social sales and marketing functionalities, will be offered at $25 per user per month, and will be available for Outlook Mobile Android users within the next few months.

Jon Ferrara, CEO of Santa Monica, California-based Nimble, believes the plug-in could become a significant market disruptor by replacing market-dominating enterprise CRMs such as Salesforce as a tool for sales staff. He claims that most industry-leading products are better suited to executive-level managers and department heads than salespeople who spend their days communicating via e-mail and customer-facing social networks.

Ferrara argues that contact management should be at the core of CRM products designed for use by ordinary employees rather than managers. Instead, he says, they are really designed as reporting tools.

The Nimble app is intended to enable salespeople to call on their contact list on the go by synchronizing individual e-mails, calendars and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship management system that can be accessed directly in the browser by users of Office 365 and Outlook.

This, Ferrara says, resolves the biggest deficiency of traditional CRM systems: the dispersal of information among e-mail, contact management and calendar apps and tasks.

Nimble’s features include social profile matching and enrichment, matching social profiles for contacts and companies and automatically incorporating additional business and social details; instant business insights on people and companies by automatically building live profiles; and identification of top prospects for follow-up.

Key Takeaways:

• Nimble believes mainstream enterprise CRM products are better suited to executive managers than ordinary sales staff.

• The Microsoft Edge plug-in makes the Nimble contact management app available to all users of Office 365, Outlook desktop for Windows and Mac and Outlook iOS.

• Ferrara says the system provides an answer to the dispersal of information among e-mail, contact management and calendar apps.

How Nimble Makes You More Agile

Jon Ferrara co-founded the pre-Facebook, pre-Internet, pre-LinkedIn CRM system called GoldMine. His motivation was to connect people at a more personal level—to let them build relationships that build real value. That’s still his mission at his newer company, Nimble. Their product is what many call the “world’s first social CRM.” More than a CRM, Nimble helps companies connect the tools, silos, and customer experiences that many find difficult. Its value goes way beyond CRM. It helps companies operate with greater agility.

Jon is a big customer experience fan and recently he and I had the opportunity to chat in depth about how technology can help (or hurt) the customer experience.

Our world has changed. Customers no longer want to be pushed through a sales funnel (like many CRM programs can lead them to feel). They’re humans and they value relationships, value creation, and good timing.

So I asked Jon about his views on these points. His ideas around deepening relationships by blending CRM into social conversations are worth your attention.

For those of you who haven’t seen Nimble yet, here’s a screen shot (for Atlanta-based Tope Awotona, founder of www.calendly.com,  whom I don’t know yet) showing how robust Nimble’s information curation capabilities are and some of the options it gives you to connect, comment, follow, annotate, save, remind, etc.:

Storyminers: So, besides helping sales people keep track of their selling efforts, how can CRM be used to create more value for customers?

Nimble: Customer Experience is all about aligning the promises you make with the experiences you deliver. Unfortunately, your customer journey is broken whenever your customer-facing employees use disparate systems.  The CRM system is commonly used by salespeople and marketers for outreach to prospects, customers and influencers; front-line CX representatives and customer care teams work within their CX system; and accounting and everyone else in the office works in G-Suite or in Office 365.

What’s missing in most cases is a unified system on a single platform that unifies the six islands of information that surround every business:  sales, marketing, customer care, accounting, social media and email.  Granted, there are enterprise options available from Salesforce and Oracle which unify your engagements, but their complex, costly systems are not accessible to 99% of the business world.

What most businesses need is a simply smart, social CRM that generates people and company records automatically from the data that’s already in and around your business so every customer-facing employee can engage armed with business context and social insights.  This is what Nimble does, and it’s why we’re growing so quickly.

My take: That’s smart design. Once all of a company’s systems are connected, understanding customer intent and anticipating needs lets you deliver higher value service at lower cost. Until those connections are in place, products like Nimble can help you connect the dots, working around the common disconnects that lead to frustrated customers.

Storyminers: How can companies leverage CRM to serve before they sell? (i.e. emphasize creating value rather than just extracting it from clients’ wallets)

Nimble: Imagine this scenario. I am a sales rep and I’m on Twitter, in Outlook or in Gmail, on Instagram, Facebook, and the company’s CRM.  When I’m reading a post on StoryMiners, I want to know who Mike Wittenstein is and whether I’ve ever spoken to or connected with him in the past. I want to know if anybody on my team knows him. I want to walk in his digital footprint to get to know him and what he’s passionate about, and I want to be able to connect within him on whatever appropriate, relevant and authentic channel I can. That’s what Nimble helps people do, by surfacing a customer’s history of interactions with a person or business and displaying the important signals that can help facilitate a genuine connection.

Nimble makes it easy for people to engage authentically with a customer, prospect or lead about what he or she is passionate about, before engaging with them about business.

My take: Putting relationships and service ahead of sales is the difference between a valued experience and a merely functional transaction. As long as you use the information you find out about someone using Nimble to make an honest connection that doesn’t manipulate others, it’s helpful to everyone and contributes to value creation.

Storyminers: What are some of the most common CRM challenges a business needs to overcome in order to be much more responsive to consumers “whenever they want it, whereever they want it, and however they want it?”

Nimble: The biggest mistake companies make when implementing their CRM is asking employees to become data entry jockeys.  Most customer-facing employees continue to manage most conversations and relationships via email, spreadsheets and in social media — and not in a separate contact manager (which requires laborious documentation).  CRMs that require users to log what they did, whom they did it with, and what the possible outcomes could be every time they connect with external constituents are fundamentally flawed. They require a mountain of work that people simply aren’t willing to do.

There is a powerful stat released by Docurated stating: ‘Only a third of sales reps’ time is actually spent selling.  That means the other two thirds is wasted on day-to-day stuff like researching contact details and updating the CRM. With the right technologies and processes, you can easily cut this noise in half.

My take: The more time you give salespeople to sell, the more they’ll sell ? From my personal yet still limited experience with the product, I love the way Nimble seems to capture what’s current and relevant, then lets you do the ‘next right thing.’

Storyminers: How does Nimble overcome these challenges and fundamentally change the way CX teams engage with consumers?

Nimble: Nimble synchronizes individual emails, calendars and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship manager that auto-generates dynamic social and business profiles for O365, Outlook and Gmail users everywhere people work.

Nimble delivers these social business insights within your work window so you can engage authentically on whatever channel your customers or prospects are using. Multi-channel support spans the Web (via Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge plug-ins); in popular Web applications (Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365  and Skype) and in email, calendar and contacts, in the cloud with Office 365 or Gmail, on the desktop (Windows and Mac) and on mobile devices (iOS and soon on Android).

Using Nimble, customer-facing employees can engage authentically throughout the journey, from the time a contact is first identified to the time she becomes a repeat customer.

My take: knowing not only what you’ve done with someone online, but seeing what others on your team are doing with a company or contact is a brilliant feature. This way, one brand, regardless of how many people are in it, can act like and appear as one brand to customers. The left arm can finally know what the right arm is doing ?

Storyminers: How much life does CRM have before it gets eclipsed with more multi-purpose and context-sensitive technologies (like Nimble)?

Nimble: In today’s over-connected, over-communicated world, it’s more important than ever to engage authentically. If you’re not listening and engaging with customers, prospects and influencers about their passions, you’re already dead.

Relationships may start on Twitter, where you can find areas of commonality, then switch over to LinkedIn, before moving to email, and ultimately to the calendar for an appointment or video call. If you’re doing it right, your relationship grows deeper, and you connect on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat as well.

Through these fluid connections, prospects and customers get to know you — not just your business persona — which is key, because the customer journey is largely driven by emotional connections.  That transcends business and moves into the what I call “the Five Fs”: Family. Friends, Food, Fun, and Frolicking. This is where relationships really solidify. The only way to maintain a real relationship with someone today is to stay top-of-mind, and you can’t do that with a monthly newsletter.  You do that by adding value to their journey to become their trusted advisor. They will not only pick up the phone, they will bring their friends with them.

My take: Nimble is perfecting the bridge between professional and personal. We’re all humans. Finding the right human-to-human connection within a business context is something we all can all use to move our businesses forward. 

Storyminers: How do you see customer experience evolving over the next 10 years with AI, chatbots and new high-tech devices?

Nimble: I believe a social CRM that builds itself and delivers social business insights everywhere you work is key to making and managing authentic connections online. Siri may be in the offing, but it’s years away. As processes and systems become increasingly digitized and AI becomes more prominent, we’re focused on helping people be more human, authentic, and engaging when making connections online.

My take: The Kool-Aid^® tastes good and I’d like to see Nimble become an early adopter of machine learning capabilities so that the way I like to work becomes ever more natural.

In Summary

Nimble is a product born from an intense focus on creating value for others. By design, it enhances relationships and brings authenticity to the forefront. My first experience with the product has been comfortable and natural. Knowing more about a person at the start does help you connect in more meaningful ways! Knowing when your important contacts are active on a topic that dovetails with your own interests is magically helpful. If your organization does have all its dots connected when it comes to  communications, Nimble is sure to improve the customer experience!

Making CRM for the Users with Jon Ferrara

In this episode of CRM Rocks, Markus Erlandsson talks to Jon Ferrara from Nimble about making CRM for the users, the discussion starts with how CRMs started and how to get usability and usage. Jon continues to discuss how to sell and where to start with your selling.

Play Episode

Jon Ferrara is a serial CRM and Relationship Management entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Media’s effects on Sales and Marketing. His most recent venture Nimble.com, has re-imagined CRM by building a Simply Smarter Social Sales and Marketing platform. Jon is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs).

By David Roe | Aug 16, 2017

Nimble dug a little deeper into the customer relationship management (CRM) space with the release of its Smart Contacts App with support for Microsoft Edge.

Edge is the web browser developed by Microsoft and included in Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile and Xbox One. Edge replaces Internet Explorer as the default web browser on all kinds of devices.

The new plug-in is free for the standard edition and brings all the social marketing and business offerings of the Nimble contact management app directly into the Edge browser.

Designed For Sales People

Normally, the release of a plug-in would pass as something of interest, but not necessarily noteworthy.

However, this plug-in deserves a little bit more attention because it could conceivably replace big enterprise CRMs like Salesforce for sales people, for example, and also in light of the rapid growth Santa Monica, Calif.-based Nimble, a relative newcomer in the established CRM space, has made in short time.

Indeed, Nimble CEO and founder Jon Ferrara is pitching the Nimble Contact Management app as a disruptor in a space that is dominated by big enterprise-wide CRMs.

These big, enterprise CRMs, Ferrara told CMSWire, are more appropriate for C-Suite executives and department heads, than sales people who spend the days in email inboxes and customer-facing social networks.

“What is missing from most CRMs is relationship management — even though they are called CRM. CRM for these big apps really stands for Customer Reporting because they are really designed as reporting tools,” Ferrara said.

“Contact management, however, should be at the core of CRM but it is not. The big apps and platforms like Salesforce were designed for management and not for workers.”

Nimble Contact Management

The idea behind the Nimble app is a simple one. According to Ferrara, it brings workers’ contacts list with them wherever they go.

Nimble synchronizes individual emails, calendars and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship manager enriched with rich social and business profiles everywhere they work.

About the Author

David is a full-time journalist based in Paris, who spends his time working between Ireland, the UK and France. A partisan of ‘green’ living and conservation, he is particularly interested in information management and how enterprise content management, analytics, big data and cloud computing impact on it.

KAREEM ANDERSON

Microsoft’s Edge browser has a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum going for it as it’s relatively new presence on a relatively new OS hinders it from being a trusted name among internet browsers. Coupled with the fact that it’s predecessor in Internet Explorer has become the butt of many internet meme jokes (for mostly justified reasons) and its largest competitor continues to build enticing lock-in features, Edge has its work cut out for itself.

Fortunately, the developers of Nimble appear to be forward thinking developers who are placing some large bets on the future of Edge and how businesses will want to use internet browsers.

Nimble is the first Social Sales and Marketing CRM that works for you by building your CRM from your existing Office 365 data and then works with you, everywhere you engage. We’ve optimized Nimble to work seamlessly inside Office 365, Outlook, Skype and even Dynamics CRM. We help you easily deploy your CRM by syncing your team’s Office 365 contacts, emails, and calendars into a unified relationship manager enriched with the business insights you need to engage.

Nimble is a fairly comprehensive addition to Edge that pulls and displays a complete communication trail which includes shared emails, notes, and social media messages right from within the browser. Gone are the days of whack-a-mole-like professional communication tracking, thanks to Nimble’s ability to aggregate company CRM listings.

Furthermore, Nimble works outside of the confines of Outlook, Skype or Dynamics as it provides contact insights when surfing social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, AngelList, Twitter, CrunchBase and of course LinkedIn, to name a few. With Nimble, users can pull up relevant contact info while engaging with people on their favorite sites.

Nimble also works for people on the go as it integrates with Outlook mobile to provide a similar communications flow as its desktop counterpart.

To try out Nimble and all of its version 4.0 features, Edge users can head over to www.nimble.com for a 14-day free trial, after which, the price becomes $25 per license, per month. Understandably, it’s the business CRM listings that help make Nimble the successful communications tool it is now, but hopefully, developers will see the benefits in a more consumer oriented version of the service in the future.

Nimble Launches Smart Contacts Add-In for Microsoft Edge

Nimble, the award-winning pioneer of Social Sales and Marketing CRM, announced the launch of Nimble Smart Contacts Add-In for Microsoft Edge. The new add-in delivers social business insights on people and businesses within Microsoft’s Web browser, thusly enabling Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook users to make and manage authentic connections far more easily everywhere they work.

Nimble synchronizes individual emails, calendars, and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship manager, enriched with rich social and business profiles for Office 365 and Outlook users everywhere they work. Multi-channel support spans the web (via Edge, Chrome, Safari and Firefox plug-ins); and popular web applications (Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, and Skype) in addition to email, calendar and contacts, in the cloud with Office 365, on the desktop (Windows and Mac) and on mobile devices (iOS and soon on Android).

“Microsoft Office 365 customers need a simple contact management platform to add on top of Office 365 and Outlook to provide them what’s missing, a simple smart social sales and marketing relationship manager,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. “We founded Nimble to deliver what people loved about GoldMine, great team contact management that sales people love to use blended with social sales and marketing that automatically builds your CRM from your Office 365 data and then works with you inside of Microsoft Edge everywhere you work.”

“Until we found Nimble, our employees primarily managed contacts in their personal email and social media accounts,” explained Mark Fidelman, Managing Director of Fanatics Media. “Our legacy CRM system failed to deliver the business context we needed because employees didn’t have time to log each interaction with every constituent in an isolated CRM system and it was time-consuming to research someone’s digital footprint. With Nimble, we vastly improved our ability to build authentic relationships across the customer journey with dynamic, contextual information in Microsoft Edge and everywhere we work online.”

Pricing and Availability

Nimble is available for a free 14 day trial and offers a Business edition at $25 per user, per month. The Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in extension is available to all Microsoft Edge, Office 365, Outlook desktop Windows/Mac, and Outlook iOS users. The Nimble Add-in will be available for Outlook Mobile Android users within the next few months.

Nimble's New Add-In Takes the 'Cold' out of Cold-Calling
by David Roe

Microsoft wasn't the only company making announcements during its Inspire partner conference last week. 

Its partners got into the action as well, announcing a number of releases and additions for Microsoft products.

Of these, Nimble’s new add-in for Office 365 and Outlook stands out. While add-ins generally slip under the radar, Nimble Smart Contacts App is the latest in an ongoing strategy by Nimble to make itself an integral part of Microsoft's continued push of Azure in the enterprise.

The Nimble Smart Contacts App freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop and iOS delivers business insights on people and companies.

The app doesn't aim to replace the face-to-face contact that drives any relationship, including sales relationships, according to Jon Ferrera, CEO of Nimble. Instead, the app aims to make it easier for people to connect, taking the cold out of cold-calling.

Putting Contacts in Context in the Inbox

Ferrara founded the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Nimble in 2009 to give small-to-medium businesses the advantages of customer relationship management (CRM) that large enterprises enjoy, without the expense.

Nimble is not Ferrara's first foray into CRM. He previously co-founded GoldMine, one of the earliest CRM software companies in 1989. The company later sold for a reported $125 million in 1999.

Nimble pulls together CRM, unified communications and conversations, social media tools and team collaboration in the same application.

The tool aims to create deeper context around your contacts and meetings within the email inbox.

The thinking here is smart. Because despite the rise of social media and networks, workers still spend many hours of their days in their inboxes. While the inbox provides a direct communication channel with contacts, it rarely provides information about them.

The new add-in combines calendars and contacts in the same place so that for every customer, partner or personal email exchange you have, the add-in will provide a wider context for that exchange.

In short, it surfaces social business details about your contacts and companies to help you engage in an effective and informed manner.

“What’s missing is connectivity between Outlook and the calendars and contacts that workers are using now. You don’t get any information from your calendar and social to that you can use,” Ferrera said.

“Nimble solves that by unifying your Gmail with G Suites, or iCloud or Office 365 with your calendar and contact list. It synchronizes individual emails, calendars and contacts into a shared team relationship manager enriched with rich social and business profiles available to users everywhere they work.”

The Coming 'Enterprise Cloud Turf War'

In a wider context, Ferrera noted Microsoft iterates, rather than innovates. It waits for other companies to build the market before moving in with its massive sales and marketing machine to dominate it, he said.

Nimble’s role here, he said, would be to introduce SMBs to the Microsoft products available through the Azure cloud.

Microsoft already provides Nimble to its entire partner channel and will also distribute Nimble's freemium edition to Office 365 users worldwide. Microsoft also named Nimble a Microsoft Gold Certified ISV (Independent Software Vendors) Partner.

“The next enterprise cloud turf war will be decided flat out by ISVs and enterprise developers and where they decide to build applications. So far, AWS is winning with ISV, Azure with enterprises, but that could change,” he said.

Nimble comes in two versions: a free Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in and Nimble Business edition at $25 per user, per month. The new Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in is available for Office 365, Outlook desktop on Windows and Mac and Outlook.

MS Inspire, the annual Microsoft partner event, has just ended, wrapping up a flurry of news and announcements from Microsoft and its channel partners.

Nimble Launches Add-In for Microsoft 365 and Outlook

Nimble, a developer of a social sales and marketing CRM solution for individuals and businesses, has introduced Nimble Smart Contacts App, a new freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop, and iOS that delivers instant social business insights on people and companies.

The Smart Contacts App enables users to create instant live profiles from team and personal email messages, contact list, calendar appointments, and social engagements. The profiles also include company insights such as industry, number of employees, revenue, and more. The add-in provides engagement tracking, reporting, and the ability to assign follow-up tasks and schedule reminders. Multi-channel support delivers people and company sites across the Web (via Chrome, Safari, and Firefox plug-ins), in Web applications such as Microsoft Dynamics, Skype, and Microsoft teams, in addition to email, calendar, and contacts in the cloud with Office 365, on the desktop, and on mobile devices (iOS and Android).

“The biggest cause of business communication failure is lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their company is about,” says Jon Ferrara , CEO of Nimble. “Nimble has reimagined relationship management with a simply smarter relationship manager add-in that works for you, delivering critical contact background details right inside your Office 365 and Outlook inbox.”

Nimble is available in two versions: a free Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in and Nimble Business edition at $25 per user per month. The new add-in is available to all Office 365, Outlook desktop Windows/Mac, and Outlook iOS users. Existing Outlook users can use Nimble to get insights on contacts and companies and upgrade to the business edition to access team social sales and marketing functionalities.

CRM Talk Bonus Episode: Jon Ferrara of Nimble on CRM Switch Podcast

A discussion with Jon Ferrara about managing relationships where you can have conversations.

Jon’s passion is to build relationship platforms that help other people achieve their goals. Since starting GoldMine in the late 1980’s, Jon has believed that the more people you can help grow, the more you’ll grow.

In this episode, Jon identifies the many types of people beyond customers and prospects who businesspeople should be connecting with on a regular basis.

Jon reveals how to stay top of mind with people in many different roles and what you should do to get people to call you rather than you calling them.

We also discuss today’s announcement of Nimble Smart Contacts App, a new freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop and iOS.

Listen to the episode now: https://soundcloud.com/crm-switch/crm-talk-bonus-episode-jon-ferrara-nimble