Nimble

While Nimble is only two years old, it seems like it’s been in the making for the past two decades.  The founder, Jon Ferrara, is one of the pioneers of the industry; he was one of the co-founders of Goldmine (contact management application).  And that experience, along with his passion for relationship building is at the heart of the company, and the product.

Nimble is a web based application that ties together management of contacts, calendar and activities, and direct/indirect communications – along with social listening and collaboration – to create the foundation for social relationship management.  Their philosophy is to tie traditional contact management capabilities to social listening, engagement and collaboration. It does a nice job of making it easy to connect social interactions from Facebook and Twitter back to an actual contact record in Nimble.  You can also create a Nimble contact from a tweet or Facebook post.  And you have the ability to create and track sales opportunities to that contact – bringing a nice combination of traditional CRM/contact management capabilities and social media management.

The interface makes it easy to see direct communications with a contact from Twitter, Facebook, or Gmail.  It’s also easy to see that contact’s social stream in order to really have a good handle on what they are focusing on at the moment.  You can respond to these various communications, as well as schedule activities with contacts, right from within Nimble.  And the Nimble calendar bi-directionally synchs with Google Calendar to make it easier to manage schedules.

Nimble launched in January with their service for individual users, then added the team module in June.  Recently they launched the sales and opportunity management module.

They are currently working on integrations with Wufoo in order to create forms for lead capturing, and MailChimp for email marketing activities.  But one of the more interesting developments is their upcoming integration with HubSpot, which they believe will create a closed-loop marketing automation platform.  This integration will be able to:

·       Create Nimble contacts from visitors coming from Hubspot landing pages

·       Notify sales reps of hot leads as they move beyond certain lead scoring thresholds based on activities from Hubspot pages like webinar signups, whitepaper downloads, # of site visits, etc.

·       Synchronize Data bi-directionally between the two applications

·       Tie HubSpot leads with Nimble to capture sales forecast pipeline of open and closed business and  give analytics back to the marketing department

Nimble’s focus on providing traditional CRM capabilities with social tools and strategies is what makes them standout.  Where most vendors are heavy on one end or the other, they built a platform that brings the two worlds together.  And their approach to building the platform is also unique. The application was built with two things in mind up front: the API and the community.  They built the API first, then they used it to create the actual application.  They did this in order to say to the community of developers they were cultivating that they will be able to build their apps using the same API Nimble was built with.  The philosophy is that by giving the community access to the API up front they will be empowered and motivated to create and extend the application more than the company could do on its own.   And the customizations and apps that this community builds would help populate the Nimble market place they are planning on opening up as a way to build a Nimble ecosystem.

Being a believer in the traditional VAR partner model, Nimble has also signed up 300 solution partners.  Partners can resell Nimble application services and receive ongoing revenue as long as they stay engaged with the customer.  They view traditional CRM VARS, along with sales and marketing consultants and social media consultants as good partners to help add Nimble customers in local markets.

Nimble’s application architecture is built on Python middleware, Google Web Toolkit for front end development, and MongoDB on Amazon’s S3 cloud service – fairly standard cloud architecture.  With 12,000 current users to test its capabilities, this architecture should give Nimble the flexibility and scalability it will need in the future.  According to the company, 80% of the application runs in-memory, making it a very responsive system as well.

Pricing for Nimble is rolled out in the following tiers:

·       Standalone is free

·       Team version - $10 per user per month

·       Sales/Marketing automation - $20 per user per month

·       Complete package is $30 per user per month

Nimble builds on the valuable experience the core management team obtained while building Goldmine.  That experience combined with the organization’s social philosophy has led to a unique application that delivers a nice set of services to SMBs needing to be social and do business.  The approach to creating a community of developers and integration partners – as well as relationships with local resellers from the Goldmine days– provides Nimble with an ecosystem most small vendors don’t have at their disposal.  Nimble also has the financial resources to compete in the SMB market, which puts them in a great position to succeed in the space – that is unless somebody snaps them up in the near future.