We are now almost fourty years after the first CRM tools were introduced, initially as helpers for the sales force, but then with an ever increasing scope. We have seen ‘CRM’ systems start as point solutions that morphed into suites – and back to what is called ‘best-of-breed’ to witness the rebirth of the suite. We have seen CRM as a strategy, as a tool. There has been social CRM, and more recently we have seen customer engagement management (CEM), even customer experience management (CXM). Regardless of the name and scope, the goal has always been to help businesses and their representatives on one side and customers on the other side to build lasting and profitable relationships. Amazingly, many users, especially salespersons, still hate CRM. Why? And how can this be overcome?

A little history of CRM

In the early days we have seen activity management tools, contact management tools, and account management tools, the latter as a kind of shared electronic rolodex. One of the important tools at this time was Goldmine, that successfully combined activity-, account- and contact management for teams, as a first of a kind. Amazingly, founded in 1989, Goldmine is still around. Salespersons used some of these tools and hated the fact that they weren’t integrated. They had to use and live with many different tools, which improved some aspects of their lives – or not. As a consequence we have seen the emergence of sales force automation (SFA) tools that targeted at integrating and streamlining sales processes from lead to order and to establish a common repository of data that could get used by whole, distributed, teams. This was the high time of boutique vendors like Kiefer und Veittinger (later acquired by SAP) or CAS, which originated in Germany, and the then Rockstar Siebel. From here the thought of integrating marketing, sales, and service in one suite emerged and there was CRM, an integrated tool, that intended to cover all relevant customer side processes. Add some analytics (to create analytical CRM) and not only salespersons but also management were happy. Only that especially salespersons weren’t. They weren’t happy, because CRM software made them enter lots of data into the system, making ‘their’ personal assets and contacts corporate assets and contacts. On top of that, by entering ‘their’ data into the system, they feared to become transparent, without getting anything back. They felt like being controlled and like working for the system, instead of having a system that works for them. Most CRM tools traditionally do not have a decent email editor. Also, email clients were needed then and continue to be needed now, anyways. Salespeople live on the phone and in their email client. They are communicators. Social media emerged and quickly became mainstream. People started to publish lots of valuable information, information that is extremely helpful for building relationships. The ‘social animals’ that salespersons are, pounced on this chance to understand people, their interests, relationships, and affiliations. Naturally, CRM software didn’t keep pace with the ever evolving social media, which quickly became one of the most important information sources and communications channels for salespersons. Of course specialized vendors, solving this gap, emerged quickly; from social media engagement platforms like Hubspot to more SFA-like tools: one of the latter being Nimble. The big vendors jumped on the wagon. A new term was born: social CRM. But only few vendors truly realised – and acted upon this realisation – that CRM, especially sales, is and always was, social. And most of the solutions still distinguished between social media as channels and email as another channel. And, being point solutions, initially mostly with poor APIs, they did not help in creating a consistent account and contact database, let alone the all-important 360 degree view of the customer. Even if they had a decent API, IT departments often refused to invest the effort needed to integrate yet another point solution. Obviously, the result was a decrease of data quality, making salespersons even more unhappy, as working off unreliable data is not effective, let alone efficient. In summary, salespersons hated, and still hate, their CRM system.

So, what’s the problem?

CRM systems were, and are, built with the best of intentions. Still, they suffer from more than one problem, really. But there are three genuine CRM challenges, that stand out.

1. Originally, CRM systems were built more with a control focus. While their inherent emphasis on process also helped structuring work the systems obviously gave management a better insight into the individual salesrep’s performance and activities.
2. Entering data into a system makes ‚their personal information’ organizational information, which is something that can create the fear of losing an advantage instead of raising the awareness that a team is usually stronger than an individuum.
3. CRM systems regularly force their users to work inside the system as opposed to being available where the users work.

At the same time CRM implementations often fail to demonstrate tangible value to the salespersons. On top of this, they regularly need to switch applications, if not even devices, to do their job. The salesrep’s experience is far from seamless.

The way out of this dilemma

Salespersons are social animals. And they do not have time to spare. So, interactions and activities with their contact persons need to be logged without their explicit interventions and the tool itself needs to offer its services wherever they choose to work. Wherever being meant literally as well as digitally. The CRM system is only one of many tools that salespersons use. By nature it is a tool that ingests and aggregates data, enriches it for use to a purpose, and then disseminates information – not data – to its users. Looking at the bigger picture, CRM systems by nature are rather a platform than a mere application. Basing on this thought and the salesrep’s needs the system must offer is services across channels, be available within social media tools, productivity tools and especially within the used email client. The latter part being fairly easy as probably 90 per cent of all business users use either Outlook or GMail. Still, what this means is that the system must embed itself in the tool of choice, either by means of a chatbot or by offering a user interface that becomes a part of the social media tool or mail client. This is something where in particular Nimble excels. The mobile part is a given, too. No CRM system that is worth a grain of salt comes without mobile capabilities. What they are lacking, though, is the ability of being used in a hands off fashion, e.g. using voice as the interaction channel. How about getting a call from your friendly CRM system after a customer visit, asking for a visit summary while you are driving to your next appointment? Last, but not least, making the UI of third party tools part of the own UI is not enough for a CRM system. Instead, in order to be really useful, the CRM system needs to be able to ingest and combine – within legal and ethical boundaries – data from these different sources it embeds itself into. This combination of data leads to new and helpful information and thus insight. There are only few systems that really do this. This is, what makes particularly salespeople successful. The combination of behavioural, social and transactional data that helps social animals to be exactly that: Social, and to speak to people as people, and not members of a target group.

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.

The News

In the past 5 weeks or so, there have been quite a few news items about Nimble, with the biggest product news dated September 28 and the most interesting business development dated October 11. The headlines include Nimble’s deeper collaboration with Microsoft and its channel partners, as well as product innovations intended to increase the value delivered to Office 365- and G Suite users. In particular, Nimble:

• Now integrates with Circleback, an AI-powered contact capture and cleaning tool as well as their business card scanner. Nimble is now able to extract high quality contact information from email signatures and to add it to the Nimble contact record. This way it becomes easier to keep contact information current.
• Has partnered with NeoCloud. NeoCloud is a managed cloud services company that deploys and manages Office 365. The company now bundles Nimble into all its Office 365 deals and thus offers business applications on top of its infrastructure- and productivity-focused solutions. This is based on the (valid) assumption that Office 365 users benefit from having a simple and powerful contact management platform that resides on top of the productivity suite.
• Has become selected by Microsoft to join its Seattle Accelerator program.
• On the product front released Nimble Prospector, a ‘powerful email/phone and address discovery engine that enables Nimble users to build outbound prospects’. According to Jon, prospector draws upon dozens of sources (not LinkedIn, so much he volunteered) to deliver contact information based on a company or domain name. Nimble also introduced an Add-In for Outlook on Android and, not surprisingly, support for Microsoft's Edge

Nimble also continues to pursue the strategy of embedding Microsoft products into the solution for efficient development of enterprise features as well as enabling channel partners to generate additional revenues. Addressing the Nimble Prospector first I, I must say that I really love the idea of it. And, judging by what Jon showed me, it is an exciting tool that can make life for salespeople a lot easier. Fellow analyst Rich Bohn – President and Chief CRM Analyst, Sell More Now, LLC is right when saying that “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. Nimble already does the best job of automatically finding your contact's social connections. Now, with the launch of Nimble Prospector, the program unearths even more valuable information about your contacts and automatically adds it to your contact record. Of course, my favorite is the email address that I need to have a genuine dialog with my contacts. Now, instead of searching my brains out, Nimble just finds the email address for me." But, having been offered a test ride, I also have a challenge with it as, being a browser plugin, it seems to work only if pop-up- and ad blockers are disabled. I think this is a high price to pay, unless it is sufficient to only whitelist nimble.com and app.nimble.com.

The Bigger Picture

All this shows that Nimble continues to pursue its "Trojan Horse" strategy to become the premier choice of ‘CRM’ system for SMBs. I have written about this earlier, most recently here. Apart from continuing on its path of simplicity and usefulness, Nimble strives to achieve this objective by becoming ubiquitous on the infrastructure and software stack that is very likely to become the premier business platform: Microsoft. Nimble’s close partnership with Microsoft helps to integrate the company deeply in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. As evidenced by the partnership with NeoCloud and by Microsoft’s decision to bring Nimble into its Accelerator program for late stage startups, Nimble’s deep integration with Microsoft’s tools makes it a natural choice for Microsoft Dynamics users. The next logical step after having embedded Dynamics, is to create a ‘Dynamics version of Nimble’ that is basically the entry point to Microsoft Dynamics business applications, offering a clear growth path from (SMB) Nimble to (Enterprise) Dynamics. On a side note, the partnership with Circleback is interesting. Circleback so far seems to have focused on Salesforce. In this case, Circleback’s partnership with Nimble – and by extension with Microsoft – could be considered a message about the growing strength of Microsoft’s ecosystem of business applications.

MyPoV and Advice

Jon Ferrara is repeating the strategy he pursued with Goldmine. He is betting on the Microsoft infrastructure becoming the dominant business fabric, surpassing AWS while keeping Google at bay. Deep integration with Microsoft enterprise applications and tools creates incentives for the channel to co-sell Nimble in order to sell more first party software. In combination with an easy-to-use contact manager and social sales tool that benefits Office 365 users, this strategy can rapidly build broad distribution. Getting selected into Microsoft's Accelerator program gives quite an additional boost, because Nimble can tap into Microsoft's vast technical and business resources, building broader access to its partner and customer bases. The deep integration into Microsoft’s go-to-market strategy and execution should be the biggest program benefits for Nimble. I have speculated earlier that Nimble is on course to be acquired by Microsoft. Now the company has taken another step closer to this possibility. And, Microsoft has opened the crucial door even wider into the S- end of the SMB market. The enterprise CRM market is largely saturated; the SMB market of companies with growth potential, which is still underserved, is where the opportunity lies. I would still label Nimble as a contact management solution rather than as a CRM but it is certainly a very valuable sales automation and intelligence tool that efficiently helps sales and marketing professionals acquire and nurture contacts. The system helps them to get over the hardest part of their job: getting the contact information and intelligence about the people they want to or need to contact with out spending a ton of time doing so. Having said this, if we were still using the term ‘Social CRM’ Nimble would be the archetype. With well beyond 100,000 users, the solution has traction. Business owners that heavily rely on Microsoft productivity tools and have the ambition to grow should certainly consider Nimble but should validate which customer service solutions inbound marketing tools to use integrated with it. Considering Microsoft is an ecosystem player, there should be some options.  

More about Nimble

https://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2017/07/nimble-news-from-ms-inspire.htmlhttps://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2017/05/nimble-and-microsoft-are-getting-ever.htmlhttps://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2017/02/a-love-affair-nimble-smart-contacts-for.htmlhttps://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2016/07/nimble-to-crm-or-to-not-crm.html

MS Inspire, the annual Microsoft partner event, has just ended, wrapping up a flurry of news and announcements from Microsoft and its channel partners. Most announcements were interesting; some more than others, especially when considering these items together. I’ve been following Nimble CRM and its founder Jon Ferrara for a while now, so I was particularly interested in hearing about the launch of its global reseller program and its social relationships insights add-in for Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook Desktop/Mobile. Nimble made its announcements within the context of Microsoft’s increasing its emphasis on partner success, as evinced by its One Commercial Partner initiative to bring together partner-focused teams from across the company and its new ISV Cloud Embed services offerings for partners.

Why is this interesting?

Microsoft’s lifeblood is its partner ecosystem.  In all likelihood, the company has the biggest, most robust partner channel around. Microsoft basically sets, and resets, the gold standard with their constantly evolving partner strategies. A case in point is Microsoft’s announcement to incentivize its partner-focused teams to sell   3rd party partner solutions with Microsoft first party solutions, Microsoft is making it even easier for MSP/CSV and ISV partners to leverage synergies and add value to customers, profits to partners and stickiness to Microsoft products. We also see Microsoft’s Azure co-sell program taking further steps with ISV Cloud Embed. This new program allows partners to embed Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps, and Microsoft Flow into their front- and back-office solutions. (I wouldn’t be surprised if LinkedIn were also integrated into this mix in the near future). If you think about it, this co-sell program looks a lot like Microsoft’s embedded Visual Basic for Applications on steroids.  Lots of steroids. This combination of initiatives allows MSP/CSP/ISV’s (Microsoft Solution Partner/ Cloud Solutions Provider/ Independent Software Vendor) partners to develop value faster and, through the partner-to-partner ecosystem, sell with common benefits. Nimble is following an ecosystem strategy, too. The company has been co-developing its light-weight social CRM with Microsoft and integrated into the  Microsoft stack for well over a year now. The latter is showcased by the new social insights add-in for MS Outlook and Office 365, the former by launching its  own global reseller program in combination with becoming a Microsoft Gold ISV Partner. At the same time. Nimble stays committed to the Google stack it was originally developed on, therefore running a two-pronged technology strategy.

My Take

This is a thing. As I have written a few times, Microsoft owns a technology stack that should worry other business application vendors. Microsoft strives to, and has the potential to, become the fabric that connects enterprises of all sizes with their stakeholders. In cooperation with its partners, Microsoft’s reach spans everything from the hardware powering cloud-based and on-premise data centers to the hardware in the hands of users and customers. Microsoft also has the software to connect the two.  After nearly missing the SaaS wave, the writing's on the wall: Azure will surpass AWS as the infrastructure of choice for businesses big and small. From my point of view, there are only two concerns (three, if you count the possibility of a  major strategic stuff-up, which seems to be highly unlikely): First, I still do not see a Microsoft  e-commerce platform that has the potential to compete head-on with the likes of SAP Hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or Oracle’s ATG. With the world going more digital almost by the minute,  I don’t understand why this gap remains. The second concern stems from the innovator’s dilemma. Microsoft is well on its way to crossing the chasm, meaning that it is drifting (or has drifted) into the Enterprise market from Axapta and Navision, the SMB ‘roots’ of Dynamics. This is where Nimble comes into the picture. With its strong Microsoft-centric strategy and solid credibility with small businesses,  Nimble opens the door to SMBs adopting Microsoft’s business applications. Many, if not most, of them are running Microsoft Office and/or Microsoft Outlook already. Nimble is an easy entry point into the business applications market, which in turn offers Microsoft and its partners the opportunity to grow small business customers into the Dynamics offerings as they grow. By leveraging Microsoft’s partnering programs while simultaneously setting up its own reseller program, Nimble is attempting  to create a triple win for Microsoft, its channel partners and for itself. Given that Jon accomplished this previously with GoldMine (GoldMine has over 5 Million customers and 5,000 Reseller Partners, and it was Microsoft’s #1 ISV partner in the 90s), I don’t see any reason why this strategy wouldn’t succeed here as well. . Nimble’s strategy is bolstered by its continued support of the Google stack since both Microsoft and Google are the operating systems of businesses. Google and Google Apps are especially interesting for smaller businesses. The only shadow that I see in this rosy picture is Nimble’s current pricing model.  They shed their free tier a while ago and settled for a $25 per user, per month model. The free Nimble Social Insights Add-In for Microsoft Outlook and Office 365 alleviates this to some extent. However, the free edition is still limited, and, considering Nimble addresses the SMB market with a capital S, there is a sizeable jump from free to $25/month/user. Jon hinted that Nimble will address this with an upcoming edition of a Nimble Contact Manager for Teams without advanced features, which will be priced at around $10/month/user. So, in summary, Nimble is pursuing a sound strategy here, albeit one with a final question mark: Amazon. It will be interesting to see what moves Amazon makes in the Cloud Productivity Platform market over the next years.    

Social Selling pioneer Nimble has an awesome start into 2017. First it got number 1 in CRM satisfaction by G2Crowd earlier in January, then friend and CRM godfather Paul Greenberg named Nimble a winner of the 2017 CRM Watchlist awards, and now Nimble announces the Smart Contacts add-in for Outlook, a deep integration into Outlook for iOS, with an integration into Outlook for Android coming soon. The Nimble Smart Contacts add-in brings the power of Nimble’s view on contacts to Outlook for mobile users, after the widget and Outlook add-on already offered this functionality for the web- and Outlook clients. The add-on follows the philosophy that for most companies the e-mail account is still their CRM system; given this, this is a straightforward enhancement. Nimble acknowledges that there are two main email systems used in businesses: Gmail and Office365, and now fully supports them both. This integration delivers the profiling data that the Nimble back end gathers practically at any place. The browser add-in already today allows to get profiling information about contacts in other CRM systems, e.g. Salesforce or MS Dynamics and works seamlessly in Google Apps and Office365. Nimble Side Panel “The biggest cause of communication failure is lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their business is about,” says Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. This add-on is closing one missing link in the chain by making it part of Outlook and reducing the need for having yet another app. Relevant business insight about people in a mail conversation and their companies is now directly available in the email client. Nimble Smart Contact Manager The add-on, along with the above-mentioned Outlook Add-in, and the available Dynamcis integration, puts Nimble squarely between Microsofts Outlook Customer Manager and a full-scale Dynamics implementation – an interesting thought that I will continue below. Considering the fact that Jon was on an “intense visit to Redmond” last year, an add-on like this shouldn’t come as a major surprise. The major surprise would rather be if this would be the only piece that is going to come. And it isn’t. In a conversation today about things CRM Jon gave me some more snippets of information. What I can say is this: Nimble is a pilot partner for Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Partner program. With this it is likely that Microsoft Sales can go pitching Nimble to their customers. Microsoft is also funding Nimble to develop applications on Azure. This is an interesting move for Microsoft as it can potentially put quite some additional load on Azure.

My Take

Although on the outset it doesn’t look like it, this can be a big thing. If this partnership goes deeper than a mere add-in to Outlook, then there are quite some benefits for both parties, Microsoft and Nimble. Nimble gets better access to the huge Microsoft customer- and partner base with a corresponding reach, which should translate to a boost of customers and thus revenue. Microsoft on the other side gets access to a Social Sales solution that is placed at the lower end of the market, which is far from being saturated. And Microsoft gets access to a solution that is natural to people who do not yet use a CRM system, as it is built around the Inbox. Together with Nimble’s stickiness (very high user satisfaction according to G2Crowd), the existing integration into Dynamics and the above mentioned Azure development joint Nimble-Microsoft customers also get a clear upgrade path to MS Dynamics. As it is right now, Nimble is positioned between the Outlook Customer Manager and MS Dynamics. Surely there is a big gap between Nimble and Dynamics, but as it stands this is rather a good thing, as said above. Being Microsoft I would consider subsidizing the Nimble add-on instead of continuing to offer their own Outlook Customer Manager.

So why could this be a big thing, you ask?

Imagine the following: The Smart Contacts App, or rather Nimble becoming part of the Office365 fabric, working with the full Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team, Dynamics, Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI. Add the fact that many smaller businesses are still working without a CRM system, but merely use their mail client – and MS Office. Continue the thought with: Salesforce, SugarCRM, SAP, Dynamics are too expensive and too ‘clumsy’, user-unfriendly. Add the idea of a deep integration into the Office Graph/LinkedIn graph, and all of the sudden there is a powerful and affordable social sales application. Mind you, there still would be gaps on the service and especially marketing side, but this is a story for another day. For now I do see huge potential in this partnership.

On January 24, 2017 SAP released its results of their fiscal year 2016 – and the fourth quarter thereof. In a nutshell SAP:

• Delivered to its increased 2020 guidance
• Had an increase of 31 per cent in cloud subscription and support revenue, while still being able to increase the software license and support revenue. Cloud revenue increased especially in Q4 and promises to stay at a high level with a very healthy backlog
• Increased its full year operating profit by 20 per cent to 5.12 Billion Euro (IFRS)
• Has a strong backlog of cloud bookings

This success has a slightly negative effect on the company profitability while it negotiates the shift from license revenue to subscription revenue while being in an investment mode. It, however, seems to be driven by an increasing adoption of S/4HANA, a strong increase of the Hybris set of CEC solutions, including e-commerce and increasing traction in the HCM space. So it is broad. Based upon the strong delivery of 2016 SAP expects the cloud business to increase by up to 34 per cent in 2017 (all numbers of course at constant currencies) and increases its guidance of revenue and profit for 2017. In line with this the company is also bullish in its mid term outlook to 2020, which it increases, too.

My Take

Of course the big increase in revenues, expressed as a percentage, is partly owed to the fairly low number. In comparison Salesforce reported 2.14 Billion dollar for their third quarter alone, as opposed to 2.99 Billion Euro for SAP’s fiscal year. Oracle reported 798 million dollars in their FY Q1 report, so should be roughly on par with SAP. Unluckily it is hard to compare Microsoft numbers as they mix their cloud and business software numbers differently and they did not give numbers other than a 13 per cent increase for the Dynamics range of products. Still it seems that SAP has finally found a strategy that the company is able to express convincingly and execute upon. I think the below diagram taken from the release slides shows it pretty succinctly. Based upon a strong platform – the SAP Cloud Platform – SAP helps its customers to use insights to fuel transactions to gain more insight. Customer experience is only one piece of this picture, which correlates with my observations over the past 15 or so years. It also correlates with what then board member to be Bernd Leukert told the attendants of the Wispubs SAP CRM event in Orlando: “SAP is a Supply Chain Company”. Very much to the dismay of the attending CRM people, I must say. The focus of SAP clearly lies within the company and its supply chain. Add security, and industry orientation then one sees a company that is all about business processes and their effective and efficient execution. Published APIs are key for a thriving ecosystem, machine learning and blockchain represent technologies that open further avenues down the road. SAP Digital Business Framework - Source: SAP Sensors and the (Industrial) Internet of things are playing a major role here. SAP acknowledges and embraces this with its massive investment into what has become Leonardo. There is a notable topic absent on this diagram. Artificial Intelligence. This is a strong statement, as I cannot imagine that this is by accident. It is also straightforward. For SAP the intelligence lies within the applications. What is important is the input – loads of data – and the ability to provide and deliver models that can be trained to support specific business processes – machine learning. In any case this absence turns the minds away from a hyped technology to being outcome driven. AI is a means to an end. Simple as that. Friend Paul Greenberg recently searched for Optimus Prime. I think SAP now has established itself as a very strong contender – although I would still be very wary of Microsoft. The company shows a vision for its customers that embraces the whole value chain, with a focus on internal processes and the supply chain, but not neglecting customer facing processes. Combining the technologies that it created (and acquired) over the past three to five years to business applications that enable a real time ‘control’ and intelligent forecasting abilities, combined with efficiency gains is a very compelling vision for business leaders. I am looking forward to observing SAP in the coming years.

Finally, the much-anticipated Forrester Wave on CRM Suites for Mid-Sized Businesses Q4/2016 has been published by Kate Leggett and her team at Forrester Research. Besides the usual suspects Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP it covers 7 more vendors that fulfil Forrester’s definition of a CRM suite for mid-sized businesses. This definition roughly is

• To be considered a suite the software covers at least three of the CRM disciplines
  • Marketing
  • Sales Force Automation
  • Customer Service
  • Field Service
  • E-Commerce
  • Customer Analytics
• There needs to be prebuilt integration between the products, if they are not within the same system; integration shall be via open standards to allow for integrating other applications.
• The software needs to be targeted at organizations between 250 and 999 employees.
• Multiple industries need to be targeted.

Of course, the solutions need to be in active use and there need to be customer references. The Forrester Wave has some interesting results, some confirming what other people see, too, others somewhat surprising. Forrester-Scores Let me start with the confirmations, continue with bits that surprised me, and close with an SAP specific view.

The Confirmations

Of course, we are talking cloud – cloud and nothing else. As can be expected all vendors strive to deliver a toolset that helps their customers to deliver consistent customer experiences. Now I, and others, would argue that the experience is largely in the realm of the end customer and the users and that there is nothing like a ‘system of experience’. Delivering consistent experiences encompasses far more than a CRM suite. But then it is far easier (and sexier) to talk about delivering experiences than about systems of record and engagement that help in giving customers a great experience. The CRM landscape has just exploded, yet is quite mature – which sounds like a contradiction in itself, but just shows the power of the cloud and modern architectures – in particular micro services – to drive innovation. Despite lots of consolidation going on in parallel, too, there are suites targeting different sizes of organizations, different industries. All of them deliver different breadth and width of functionality. Then there are plenty of best-of-breed vendors that may or may not commit to one of the major platforms; some of them may or may not be viable, or might just get acquired. In essence, smaller vendors try to eat the bigger vendors’ lunches and to push the contenders upmarket by providing good point solutions with great user interfaces. The contenders are responding by increased modularization, with acquiring functionalities they need to close their functional gaps, and with an ecosystem/platform play. The ‘Triple I’ of Integration, Industry, Intelligence finally becomes key. To me it has been obvious for more than a decade but the concept now gets real traction. Integration and intelligence because of advances in technology, industry due to a realization that no one can be everything for everyone; this only bloats the systems and ultimately makes them clunky, expensive, and unmaintainable. Finally, it is no surprise that the big 4 show up as leaders. Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce are currently a given, and SAP worked hard on their strategy, messaging and delivery. Since 2016 they in my opinion have a very competitive solution set with their Hybris branded products. Salesforce still leads the pack but will feel some real challenge by Microsoft if they get their marketing functionality sorted and finally offered an integrated e-commerce solution. The latter could be a real push. Ah, yes, an improved pricing engine couldn’t harm, either – but that holds true for Salesforce, too.

The Surprises

Yes, there are a few. Starting with bpm’online. I wouldn’t have expected to see them as a leader, but apparently, they have significant strength in SFA and their platform, combined with transparent pricing and very happy customers. Congratulations. Build on these strengths, work on some of the perceived ‘weaknesses’ – I’d recommend e-commerce, marketing, and customer service to start with. Pegasystems is not in. OK, looks like their client base is a bit too far on the Enterprise side. SAP has a low score in e-commerce. What? Given Hybris being one of the strongest e-commerce solutions around, this is a bit of a surprise. Let me resolve this conundrum in the SAP section.

What this means for SAP

Welcome back amongst the leaders! This is long overdue, but SAP’s absence as a leader was largely self-inflicted. Poor strategy, poor messaging, poor products. Finally, this changed. But why the low marks in the e-commerce section? The devil is in the detail. Forrester sees only a loose coupling of e-commerce to the rest of the suite. Hybris Commerce essentially is still seen as a standalone product that can be plugged into the CRM landscape. This, besides being a challenge for in-depth integration also leads to user experience challenges and a few product inconsistencies like having customer service functionality in Hybris Commerce as well as in Hybris Cloud for Service. But again, Hybris Commerce is one of the strongest e-commerce solutions around. Then there are some smaller tidbits, which are mainly around Field Service, platform, and pricing – with the latter being a recurring, eternal topic. Increased pricing transparency would be a real boon. Regarding field service and platform SAP seems to be on a good way with the release of SAP HANA 2 and ongoing work in what SAP calls the high touch service area. In closing, for SAP this Forrester Wave marks both, a success, and a little setback. The success lies in them having managed to make it back into the leaderboard, albeit barely, due to them now having resolved above three issues. The setback lies in the fact that they haven’t been able to fully sell the integration story between e-commerce and the rest of the Hybris branded products. While the cloud for customer and marketing products are built on SAP HANA, Hybris Commerce is not. This is clearly a platform gap. Furthermore, the integration between Hybris Commerce and the other products still is limited. On the other hand Hybris Commerce not being built on SAP HANA can help SAP to sell into non SAP customer bases. So, I personally would not see it as much of a problem as Forrester does. Still, some more work is clearly necessary on both ends, technically as well as from a messaging point of view. For more coverage on SAP, refer to below articles. https://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.co.nz/2016/11/sap-and-machine-learning-strong.htmlhttps://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com/2016/11/sap-hana-2-revolution-or-evolution.htmlhttps://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com/2016/10/clash-of-titans.htmlhttps://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com/2016/09/how-to-get-sap-and-sap-customers-beyond.htmlhttps://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com/2016/05/love-is-in-air-sap-and-ms-deepen-their.htmlhttps://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-may-2016-version-of-gartners-magic.htmlhttps://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com/2016/05/enterprise-meets-sexy-sap-apple.htmlhttps://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com/2016/04/sap-crm-light-at-end-of-tunnel.htmlhttps://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com/2016/02/sap-state-of-nation.html

It appears to be demo week for me. After Jon Ferrara gave me a deep dive into the leading social sales application Nimble and I got a dive into the new travel management solution Traform by my old friend Balamurugan Kalia, Sreelesh Pillai introduced me to Freshsales. Freshsales is the new social sales solution by Freshdesk, a company that got founded in the second half of 2010 only and until now focused their efforts on customer service and support. An interesting twist in Sreelesh’s story is that Freshdesk built Freshsales initially to accommodate their own needs and to deal with the demand caused by their growth. Growing at about 50% over the last year or so, the Freshdesk team realized that the applications (yes, plural, including tier 1 solutions) that they used did not really fit their needs. The Freshsales solution covers simple applications for leads, contacts, accounts, deals (opportunities). Leads and contacts can get imported into the system by means of a csv upload. This way it is also possible to migrate Salesforce data into the system. Google contacts or contacts from Office365 are not automatically synced or used. E-Mail and phone conversations that are initiated within Freshsales are tracked against the lead/contact to provide a historic context about what is going on with the person. In case mails are sent directly from an email account one needs to bcc the own Freshsales email address (e.g. sales@aheadcrm.freshsales.io) in order to have the interaction tracked by the system. This then transparently creates a new lead if the recipient e-mail address is not yet known to the system. Using territories and rules on territories a lead can be automatically assigned to a sales team member. Essentially we have here a way into territory management, including territory realignment; simple, yet powerful. Deals are tracked via a Kanban-style view of stages. These stages unluckily do not seem to be configurable, but this should be a very easy fix. A connected Google calendar can get synchronized and shows as an agenda view. This seems to work better for syncing Freshsales appointments into the Google calendar than the other way round. The polling of the Google calendar does not happen frequently enough, which is something that the team wants to work on. Appointments that are created within the Google calendar do not show up in Freshsales in real time, whereas incoming e-mails from leads/contacts show a notification. For marketing purposes there is the ability to send out trackable e-mails including a mail-merge functionality that offers simple mail templates that one can create within Freshsales. Mail-merge recipients can get selected via filtering the leads or contacts using a number of categories. This is enough for building simple one stage email campaigns. Not having telephony connected to my system I assume that this process is the same for generating call lists. Telephony integration is provided via twilio. Freshsales also offers a pretty interesting lead scoring solution, which is probably one of the most distinguishing features of the application. A lead score is a way of ranking leads based upon profile attributes and engagement levels. Freshsales implements this by offering a rule engine and 3 standard views to group leads (hot leads, warm leads, cold leads) along with the ability of creating additional views. This ability is necessary for several reasons, one of them being that a customer’s definition of hot, warm, and cold is different. In this example he delivered views can get modified and stored into new custom views. Configuring lead scoring is very simple. Lead scoring happens by creating and then applying rules that evaluate different attributes of the lead/contact and interactions like email open, e-mail click, etc., as well as activity within a web app or web site. To support the latter in a real time fashion some libraries and scripts are delivered via the Freshsales admin area. These scripts need to be embedded into the web site that shall support lead scoring. They provide real time interaction with Freshsales. This functionality is also used throughout Freshdesk and Freshsales in order to support cross- and up-selling. E-mails are tracked via embedded beacons and web activity is tracked by UTM codes. A number of preconfigured reports exist that can get adapted. Additionally, it is possible to create new reports.

A Fresh Way towards CRM?

The Freshdesk team has built a clean solution here that shows some interesting features with the telephony integration and the territory management. I really like the territory management and the approach to lead scoring. So far the application offers a limited choice of prepackaged integration points, which is in all likelihood due to the solution being, well, fresh on the market. As with Freshdesk there is a more matured service solution already available I would expect fairly fast paced updates to come. As with other young solutions that target smaller companies there is only a rudimentary campaign management at this stage. The built-in territory management and the necessity to upload leads and contacts into the system, as well as the Salesforce migration option, suggest that bigger companies are clearly in scope for Freshsales. Adding on here while making this part of the onboarding even easier could become an important attractor for businesses, especially those that do not yet have any CRM system set up. Overall I think that it is a nifty solution. The automated creation of leads, their automatic conversion into contacts or the automated creation of deals are interesting functionalities that make life for the sales team easier. The same holds true for the automatic enrichment of leads, contacts, or accounts. However, there is some scope for improvement; there always is – else analysts would be out of business ;-). The Google mail and -calendar integration is interesting although I would argue that Freshsales will be configured against a business e-mail, therefore simply should offer all e-mail in the built-in views. Conversely, there should not be a difference when working directly in the Gmail. The same holds true for the calendar. There is a limited social media integration. For newly created leads, contacts, accounts there is an identification process for social media profiles. However, engagements with leads and contacts do not show up in the conversation history, nor is there a view that allows the sales reps to actively engage with them, based upon triggers, e.g., mentions on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. With the advent of chat as an engagement platform being able to integrate the main players here (Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, iMessage, Google Hangouts and -Messenger) becomes an important factor. Having this would emphasize on Freshsales targeting ‘high velocity sales teams’ in the online retail, business services, education areas. Last but not least I would look into an initially simple but extensible multichannel/multi stage campaign management functionality that allows for segmenting customers and addressing them via various channels, based upon different triggers. By strengthening the marketing functionality Freshdesk has the opportunity to position itself as a suite player that offers (limited) best-of-breed functionality across marketing, sales, and service. The current roadmap foresees to enrich Freshsales with functionalities in the following areas:

• Automated email campaigns
• Advanced lead scoring
• Dashboards & reports
• Collaboration on deals and accounts
• Workflow automation based on lead score and events
• Chrome and outlook plugins
• More integrations

I am looking forward to seeing these embedded into processes and more refreshing things coming from the Freshdesk team; I really do.

After a long while I had the pleasure of chatting with Jon Ferrara again for some time, covering things CRM and, of course, Nimble. As you may know Jon is a long time CRM veteran who released his first product named Goldmine back in 1990. Jon is also a very vocal advocate of sales and marketing being first of all “human to human”, something that he claims that most CRM systems are not good at. Consequently, he dubs these systems as “Customer Reporting Systems” as they do not excel at helping salespeople giving a good look at the persons they interact with but are more focused on reporting. Being in the CRM world for a long time myself I cannot really disagree with him about this fact itself; we might have a discussion on what CRM overall is and why it went the (wrong) way it took. Some thoughts on what I think CRM is and how Nimble stands in this, along with some thoughts on how to go ahead with Nimble will come below … Historically CRM systems require a lot of data entry. This is where Nimble is somewhat different, which is something that I like. No CRM can do without manual data entry, but Nimble makes this pretty simple. The system is built around persons and interactions with them and strives to merge calendar, email, social media and contact data base into aggregated views, giving context about involved people. Changes done by the contacts in their external profiles can get pulled into Nimble in a semi-automated way. The goal is to always have the context of persons that are involved in an activity, deal, etc. Of course other CRM systems can do similar things, but most of these systems come with a very different price tag. With the help of plugins for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that offer a widget this additional context about the sender of an email is extended into GMail in the form of a side bar. This neat functionality is also available as Outlook/Office365 plugins, of which the former needs some improvement in the integration and visualization, but still is useful. Of course there are mobile apps for Android and iOS as well. After all, who can live without these today … The system’s philosophy mirrors Jon’s that a CRM system is there to help the person doing the real work, not force them to enter data. This means two main things:

1. Enable the sales persons to have all relevant data about an activity and the relevant persons on one screen
2. More importantly: Automatically aggregate and merge data from different sources, and keep them up to date with minimal human intervention.

There, of course, still is some intervention necessary to make this fully work, just think how common the name “John Smith” is, but it is pretty helpful. In order to get set up Nimble is able to pull data from Google applications, like contacts, mail, and calendar, Google+, as well as Office365, to name a few. This works like a charm. Sadly, LinkedIn has removed its APIs but after the acquisition by Microsoft they should be opened up again, as Microsoft itself will need them for various integrations. This, clearly, will be of help for all other vendors, too. And Nimble already had a LinkedIn integration until the APIs got shut down. With the ability to directly send messages to persons via email, Twitter, Facebook, etc., Nimble serves as a kind of one-stop-shop for individualized communications. Nimble clearly has a focus on one-to-one interactions although one can send limited mail merge as well using a simple segmentation process and offering the use of simple mail templates that can be built within the system. Along with the system’s ability to track opening and click rates there is a simple marketing management functionality. In addition, there is a simple opportunity management (called Deals) that puts the opportunities into stages and allows for customizing the opportunity stages. On top of these deals there are a simple dashboard and graphical reporting. This offers some essential sales intelligence. This opportunity management essentially makes Nimble a social sales tool, instead of a mere contact- and activity management-, and social engagement tool. Overall I think that Nimble is a good tool for the targeted small organizations if they focus on direct communication with their customers and prospects. Looking at the G2Crowd categories of CRM and Sales Intelligence the system fares very good in terms of user satisfaction, which means that the team seems to have hit the right functionality in the right way.

It is CRM, isn’t it?

Which brings me back to the question about what CRM is and where Nimble stands relative to CRM – and to the question of further development opportunities. I do not want to open up the “CRM is a strategy” discussion again and hence will use the definition of CRM that Paul Greenberg coined in his 2015 article on the clarity of definition of CRM, Customer Engagement and Customer Experience. After all I am a suite guy and Paul’s definition is as good as it gets:

"Customer Relationship Management is a technology and system that sustains sales, marketing and customer service activities. It is designed to capture and interpret customer data, both structured and unstructured, and to sustain the management of the business side of customer related operations. CRM technology automates processes and workflows and helps organize and interpret data to support a company in engaging its customers more effectively."

Using this definition Nimble is not a full CRM system as it covers only parts of the processes and functionalities required. There is no dedicated service component and the process and workflow automation are only rudimentary as well, which gives some possible direction for further development; after all customer service is a type of engagement, too. Here is a chance to stand out as outside of the tier 1 systems not all CRM systems offer customer service functionality; and in times of SaaS these modules are often separated out and need to be subscribed to independently. What Nimble does is covering some aspects of the marketing and sales processes, and these very well. The above definition, however, offers some high level guidance in what could be looked at by the Nimble team. Options are to deepen the existing or to broaden functionality. The many reviews on G2Crowd.com offer scope for user driven improvements. I am sure that Jon and team know this as good as I do and that they have their eye closely on this and other sites. Having said that these reviews also indicate a very high degree of customer satisfaction; so Nimble is clearly on the right path. Finally, adding my own two cents, there is some opportunity in enriching the marketing functionality to offer campaign management features and maybe to allow Nimble’s customers to communicate with their customers via a consumer facing mobile app, using technologies as e.g. Epikonic offers. And then there is the topic of messaging apps. Business Insider just reported that in 2015 we have seen the usage of messaging apps surpass the usage of social networks. Messaging platforms have been opened for brands to communicate with people. This is clearly one of the near term trends that the Nimble team needs to take into account to increase the relevance of the solution.