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.

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.