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Tech Review – Nimble CRM a Few Weeks In

Nimble is a CRM system for businesses looking to run an integrated social media communication component into their marketing and sales strategy. By collating all social media communications, contacts and activities into one central CRM system, businesses will have more control over both generating leads and driving communications.

I recently wrote a review found at http://jasonhutty.com on this product, written after only a week’s use, but wanted to expand upon that, now the system is bedded in.

My fear with systems designed to take advantage of specific tasks is that so much effort goes into ‘differentiation’ that the core of the application is given only cursory effort. Well, Nimble has wisely focused on the core and while the system continues to evolve, it is evolving rapidly and is clearly a customer-centric process.

Those familiar with the setup of a new CRM would be well aware that importing various database elements into a new system is no fun at all, and for the most part Nimble is better than average. Using basic systems like Gmail makes it nice and easy, but getting my .mac account to sync was about as much fun as a colonoscopy. The ease with which Nimble collated all my social media accounts made up for this difficulty though, and i was soon up and running.

I quickly reached a point where I was adding a series of new contacts to the system, and here it started to get less fun. Nimble will attempt to go and find the social media feeds of new contacts for you, but it seems to lack the logic required to come up with sensible suggestions. Clearly some logic exists though (It kept suggesting Australians to me because of my origins – reminds me of people asking if I know Gary in Brisbane, like there are only 10 of us) and I am sure this will both improve, plus require a certain amount of patience from the user to get set up.

From there on out, it provides all the functionality you could ask for from such a system, and is more intuitive than many CRM systems I have used in the past. I love the display and interface, as one of my primary complaints with CRM’s is that they don’t generally look elegant enough to tolerate for 40 hours a week. Nimble’s combination of intuitive control, great looks and organization of data make it a pleasure to use. There are some gaps. The biggest is a lack of a smart-phone application or mobile site, though the regular site is servicable on the iPhone, just. It lacks the shared noticeboard that collaborative sales management can use to ensure notes are collated, but this is covered by the task facility to a large extent.

The things that really SELL the product are terrific – such as unified communications streams (email and social media merged make for incredible efficiency gains for the marketer or sales exec), and the notification of changes to status from platforms is something truly valuable if you are looking to stay connected with a large volume of prospects.

http://www.nimble.com/whats-new-in-nimble-2-0/

Each company has it’s own requirements, and Nimble is certainly an off-the-shelf solution – but for the Marketing professional, it has integration with a range of platforms that close many of the gaps in the repertoire. For those looking to get organized quickly, efficiently and want to ensure their communication reach beyond email, this is a fantastic place to start. Price wise it is competitive to Salesforce, and has more functionality (if less scope for growth) than it’s competitor. I would suggest that for a company with an immediate need to get up and going, a strong social media component to their business and a desire to employ a tool that will enable immediate results, Nimble is well worth considering.