The News
On February 14, 2018 Nimble announced the launch of Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0, their new powerful mobile contact, relationship and pipeline manager for Office 365 and G-Suite. The company also announced a bundling of PieSync’s B2B cloud integration platform to become an end-to-end social relationship management platform for all company contact records, regardless of where those records are stored.
The new mobile app “unifies contacts from siloed mobile, cloud based and desktop records into a comprehensive relationship manager. It delivers the history of conversations and social context for everyone you meet, and it enables you to easily follow up and follow through on opportunities …”
Besides introducing important features like business card scanning, the ability to send templated and tracked emails, and a mobile pipeline manager for tracking follow-through, Nimble Mobile 3.0 provides easy access to all company contact records, including social enrichment and history of email and Twitter interactions. In addition, the software introduces the ability to research new contacts on the fly via a deep integration with the iOS share menu. The latter enables users to stay within one app instead of toggling between them, which is a drag on mobile productivity.
The ability to research new contacts on the fly gives teams and professionals valuable sales intelligence by using the iOS Share menu to “Nimble” a person, i.e. discover their social profiles, areas of influence, company, work description, etc. In other words, it is possible to build a Nimble record for contacts in your email, calendar and contacts apps, on the Internet or for a variety of other apps, in real time.
The application is available for iOS now and will be available for Android later this spring.
Bundling of PieSync into Nimble extends Nimble’s ability to sync conversations with contact data from more than 100 SaaS applications.
The Bigger Picture
Salespeople are mobile by definition. They need to have access to all the relevant information to initiate or close a deal at their fingertips. On the road, they are likely to use a tablet or smartphone; fewer rely on a laptop. They surely cannot rely on data that is locked up in a back office database.
Sales is, and always has been, a relationship play. However, in a B2B world the process typically includes an entire sales team, and not just a single person.
There is also more to a CRM than just contact management and sales. A true 360 degree view of the customer needs to include data from all business applications and social sources. To accommodate for this, Nimble has partnered up with PieSync to be able to sync contact data from more than 100 business SaaS apps into Nimble. This allows Nimble to become a part of an ecosystem of applications that enables especially small companies to run their complete business in the cloud, and to grow from there.
My PoV and Analysis
Now, every CRM or only SFA application that is worth their salt offers a mobile component. What distinguishes Nimble Mobile 3.0 is its ability to integrate into the iOS Share menu and to immediately build new contact records for data stored in multiple sources. The new contact is only two clicks away.
What impressed me most, though, was the sheer performance this process showed. Surely, Santa Clara is a lot closer to the big Internet pipes than Christchurch, NZ, but still … I walked away from the briefing feeling impressed.
The ability to build new contact profiles for mobile contacts alone makes Nimble Mobile 3.0 the most powerful contact management tool I have seen so far.
The only minus that I could see is that Nimble customers need to wait a little longer for an Android version.
Nimble is squarely targeting small companies that are looking at a fast growth trajectory. Because they are focused on social contact and relationship management Nimble’s partnership with PieSync is almost as important as the partnership with Microsoft. It makes Nimble part of an ecosystem of SaaS vendors that jointly enable small companies to run their businesses in the cloud, with ample opportunity to grow. This, as well as a growing number of reseller agreements like this one announced earlier this week with Giacom, is an important move that should spur additional growth for Nimble.
It also makes Nimble somewhat less dependent on Microsoft.
All in all small businesses that consider social contact management as a core part of their business strategy and that are pursuing a best-of-breed IT strategy over an IT suite now get even more value. Nimble’s mobile app is very strong, as is the integration capability that is delivered via PieSync. Lastly, growing companies have a clear path to enterprise scale software via Nimble’s partnership with Microsoft.
This is certainly something to look at.
