The year 2018 is coming to an end, which means it is high time for some interesting product and roadmap news. Here’s some Nimble news (ok, not THAT fresh anymore, I have been incredibly busy recently). For starters, Nimble released its long awaited Mobile 3.0 for Android, complementing the iOS version that got released earlier this year. Nimble unifies contacts from teams’ mobile, cloud-based, and desktop records into an all-in-one relationship manager. With minimal taps, sales and marketing professionals can prepare for meetings by quickly scanning social insights, sales intelligence, and contact engagement history from their portal device. To keep the momentum going, Office 365 and G Suite users can send personalized responses using template, trackable emails, and monitor opportunities across all deal stages from their portable devices. “People buy from the people they know, like, and trust,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. “We therefore designed Nimble Mobile to give users the insights they need to build confidence, engage in productive discussions, and follow through promptly anytime, anywhere.” With this milestone, Nimble has now truly achieved a vision of being a simple, smart ‘CRM’ for MS Office and G-Suite users that works for the user. I put the CRM into quotes as this term for me and most other people relates to a stragegy or system that includes marketing, sales and service capabilities and not only Sales Force Automation (SFA). And SFA, particularly contact management, is what is at the core of Nimble. Still, Nimble combines key ingredients of the digital workplace that a mobile, sales person needs, into one single place. It provides the user with vital information about the next person to interact with. The ongoing redesign around the contact person and the Nimble Today page, that makes Nimble more enterprise ready helps, too. It is targeted at making it even easier to view, edit, enter, and report on data. All this is recognized by a good number of well-reputed analysts. The re-hosting from AWS to Azure is completed and Nimble now embeds PowerBI and PowerApps as well as the ability to significantly customize the various screens using PowerApps. This is an important capability for enterprise support.

So, what comes next, Jon?

In brief: A lot! And it is mainly geared towards enterprise support. Nimble did already offer some marketing and campaign management elements, which will be extended into offering more marketing automation. There will be automation capability on segments/profiles that enables triggering workflows on entering or leaving defined segments. This allows for real-time interaction that works in the customer’s or prospect’s context. This has become an extremely important capability in the past years. As this is also necessary to support multi step campaigns it would be interesting to see this in detail. Nimble is also slated for scaling into larger teams, therefore closing the gap between Nimble’s SMB focus and Microsoft’s enterprise focus. The goal here is to allow customers a seamless growth from small to enterprise, while using the same CRM tool that grows together with them. Further, Nimble will be fully ported to the Azure stack. That way the app will be able to take full advantage of the power of Microsoft’s extensibility capabilities and later on also the full power of it’s AI stack. Additionally, there is an ambitious plan of adding more Microsoft resellers to the ones that are selling Nimble as part of their Microsoft reselling agreement. The for me most fascinating news is that there finally will be an embedded version of MSDynamics that adds Nimble functionality to the MS Dynamics contact person and puts the Nimble UI on top of MS Dynamics.

MyPoV and Analysis

Founder Jon Ferrara has continuously and skillfully evolved Nimble from a simple contact management application to a serious SFA application with enterprise ambitions. Doing this he followed the blueprint he created himself during his Goldmine days: He embeds Nimble deeper and deeper into the Microsoft ecosystem with the goal of offering an integral value proposition for both, resale partners and Microsoft. Being of value for other parties increases the value of Nimble. This outside-in approach creates a virtuous circle. One of the key strengths of Nimble is that it can be run as a layer on top of other business applications as well as inside a larger, already existing social sales and marketing application itself. That makes it extremely versatile and almost the perfect tool to start off with and grow. Both, Microsoft and Nimble have an MS Outlook add-in that gathers and provides users with additional information about persons they are interacting with: Microsoft’s Outlook Smart Contact add in and Nimble’s Sidebar. Given the strength of Nimble and the strength of the Nimble – Microsoft partnership I suggest replacing the Outlook Smart Contact add-in with the Nimble Sidebar. Two tools are one too many and the Nimble sidebar seems to be far more powerful than Microsoft’s own Smart Contacts add in. In addition the Nimble Sidebar is available for more platforms than just Outlook. Using Nimble here would also increase the probability of getting more customers as a great user experience, as the Nimble side bar offers it, is always convincing. By using Nimble this way Microsoft, with the help of Nimble, can cover the entry levels of CRM up to enterprise class CRM. This is a very powerful value proposition that none of the other tier one players can or does offer. Neither can the other ones. Having said this, it might be interesting for at least SAP, Salesforce, and Oracle to have a closer look at Nimble as they also cannot offer (yet) the power of Nimble’s integration into Outlook. I have said times and again that Nimble needs more marketing capabilities. In times of account-based marketing this becomes even more crucial. So, here we are. Adding some lead-scoring mechanisms that assures a smooth handover from marketing qualified leads to sales out of the box will be a good next step. I have also said a couple of times that Microsoft should acquire Nimble, e.g. here and I cannot but repeat this assessment. Nimble is the perfect complement for Microsoft to cover the small business end of the SFA market. This also makes Nimble a perfect target for the other (aspiring) tier one vendors. Looking at it this way, it is paramount for Microsoft to cover its flank. Just a thought from Down Under, of course.  

The News

In the past few weeks there have been two interesting announcements by Nimble. First, on June 14, 2018 Nimble announced a partnership with Velosio, one of the largest Microsoft Dynamics VARs in North America. Velosio and Nimble entered into a global reseller agreement. As a part of this agreement Velosio’s 200 channel partners can purchase, manage and resell Nimble CRM bundled with Microsoft Office 365. Velosio is the latest prominent name in among the growing number of Microsoft/Nimble partners. One week later, on June 20, 2018 Nimble announced a revamp of its application homepage with the Nimble Today page. This dashboard page gives the user a clear and customizable view of their sales pipeline, calendar appointments, tasks and social signals with relationship insights directly embedded in the widgets. As a start the page offers 6 widgets

• Deals
• Events
• Tasks
• Highlighted Contacts
• Signals
• Stage Funnel

that can get freely rearranged. The Today Page is also available for iOS users now and will be available to Android users soon.

The Bigger Picture

The enterprise CRM market is saturated. There are at least 4 tier one players for every major CRM function that are competing for supremacy. Customer demands have evolved from requiring transactional applications to getting high value solutions that allow the delivery of high-end customer (and user) experience. The market itself has morphed from a suite market to a best-of-breed application market, and now to a platform and ecosystem market. In this market it is important to excel in two, maybe three areas:

• Platform as a Service (PaaS). The platform itself must support current and future technologies that enable the fast and easy creation of value through applications that are developed within its ecosystem
• A broad ecosystem. This creates the reach and relevance that is necessary to become and remain a relevant player in the enterprise software market.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). While IaaS in itself is a commodity, it can become an asset when it is combined with a strong application platform (PaaS) and ecosystem. The right combination affords the tremendous opportunity to provide (anonymized) data for machine learning models that can then provide value to all customers

This is exactly the chance for young and hungry SMB players with enterprise ambitions like Zoho or Freshworks to become significant players, to name just two. The risk for enterprise software makers is to be disrupted from below – similar to what Salesforce did to the Oracle’s and SAP’s of the world when CRM was still more of a suite game turning into a cloud-based best-of-breed application market. The big players have understood this. All of them. And they are pursuing different strategies to achieve, maintain, or protect their respective leadership positions.

My PoV and Analysis

Microsoft is one of these contenders. With the help of Nimble, Microsoft has one of the stronger strategies in the field. Here is why, coming from the Nimble perspective. I will write about Microsoft’s side when I refresh my Clash of Titans article. It’s been almost two years since I wrote it and all vendors have moved enough to warrant this update. So stay tuned. But I digress; so let’s get back to our topic. Nimble’s latest partnership with Microsoft channel partners, as well as the revamp of what I would call their app home page, cater to the needs of, but not only, small businesses. They also show that Nimble is quickly maturing as a valuable part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Partnerships like the one with Velosio are a tremendous growth opportunity for Microsoft, Velosio, and Nimble, because they provide high value to their joint customers. This can potentially have a very good impact on Nimble’s growth figures and give Microsoft quite an edge in the contest for winning the race for the fast growing SMB CRM business. Following my definition of a CRM system as an enabler of the marketing, sales, and service pillars, I still wouldn’t name Nimble a CRM system; but then contact management, account management and SFA are some of the core challenges facing every business, especially the smaller ones. So, with the Nimble partnership Microsoft has a solid and credible foot in the SMB CRM market. That foothold is solid and credible for two reasons. First, because both Nimble and Microsoft have strong, smart ecosystems plays and because Nimble’s functionality is maturing at a rapid pace. Nimble is an important entry point for fast-growing companies into the Microsoft ecosystem. Because Nimble can enrich Dynamics profiles and deliver them in the browser, in Office 365 and on social media, these companies can grow via Nimble into the Dynamics suite of software. Second, because Nimble is hungry. The company is essentially following the successful strategy of Goldmine, Jon Ferrara’s earlier CRM play. This includes partnering with Microsoft and partnering with a range of high profile resellers while providing helpful functionality. This is evidenced by both recent announcements: the strong ecosystem play that Nimble is pursuing by partnering with Microsoft, and its announcement regarding the new Today Page. Providing this dashboard seems to signify a move away from the focus on Social Media that was seen until now. This dashboard page makes the application a bit more mainstream but at the same time gives users what they need and want – support for outreach beyond social media. Now, after all this raving, I have some suggestions for Nimble on how to become even better. Although Nimble relies a lot on Azure there could be more usage of Azure’s machine learning/AI capabilities. This holds true especially for lead scoring and opportunity scoring. Providing enabling functionality like this becomes increasingly important with the complexity of deals handled. The goal is to provide even more value to sales representatives and their managers by indicating which customers and opportunities to focus on. Companies like Clari are showing the way here. Salesforce and SAP have solutions for this, too. Azure offers the technology – and Nimble already collects the data for providing pre-learned models that can be optimized for its customers. This sounds like a clear win-win situation to me.

The News

A few days ago Salesforce announced an update to its sales cloud that features Einstein powered predictions, insights, and productivity. The press release is linked above or alternatively you can read it below, along with some comments of mine. Salesforce is (again) addressing the three main issues that plague CRM implementations since Tom Siebel coined this term. Let me paraphrase them>

1. Salespeople do not find the time to do their job, which is selling. Instead they are spending an inordinate amount of time entering data that supposedly only helps their management controlling them a little more.
2. Sales managers do not have enough visibility into what is going on in their area of responsibility, what their team is doing (and why), whether they are doing the right thing. The same problem, of course, applies to the Head of Sales, just at a bigger scale.
3. Sales operations is charged with creating meaningful reports that tell the one single truth. This they need to do using data that resides somewhere, data that is distributed, instead of some central consolidated place. Data that is essentially not fully trustworthy.

Salesforce is doing this using a triple of features:

• The Salesforce resident AI: Einstein to help sales persons identify the most promising opportunities to work upon
• The Salesforce Inbox that increases productivity by attributing emails to the right accounts as well as connecting to the calendar
• Sales Analytics to help salespeople and their management to visualize, interpret, and use the available data

 

The Press Release

Ask any rep what their favorite part of the day is, and chances are that their answers won’t involve the words “logging” or “data.” Ask managers what they really want from their sales teams, and I bet you that they’ll ask for more visibility into what their reps are doing and for their reps to spend more time talking to customers, building relationships. As for sales operations? They probably would prefer if answering business questions didn’t involve four systems, two excel sheets, and a pivot table. These traditional systems don’t set sales teams up for success today or in the future. In fact, having all of these disparate systems causes sales reps to spend 25% of their time logging data instead of doing what really matters -- building relationships and selling. Which is why we’re introducing a supercharged Sales Cloud Einstein. Bringing together Sales Cloud Einstein, Salesforce Inbox, and Sales Analytics, to deliver more predictions, insights and productivity gains than ever before. It’s bringing the power of artificial intelligence to every step of the sales process. So how does it all work? Great question. Let’s break it down. AI with Sales Cloud Einstein AI is continuing to take center stage, revolutionizing the way we work. With Einstein, AI prioritizes focus on the most critical areas to help every sales rep increase their productivity and win rates. Features like Einstein Lead Scoring can turn mountains of data into critical signals that have the power of identifying the leads that are most likely to convert, and Einstein Opportunity Scoring can identify a poorly-performing opportunity proactively so a sales rep can keep it on track -- before it falls off. Einstein Opportunity Insights give reps the ability to address at-risk deals and learn best practices from the most successful ones. And, when reps are armed with the right insights about their accounts’ businesses, conversations become more efficient and effective, enabling reps to sell more.   Productivity with Salesforce Inbox Did you know that on average, sales reps spend 64% of their time on non-selling tasks like data entry? With Salesforce Inbox reps can maximize the time they spend selling by taking advantage of automated data capture--all of those emails are logged to the right records, automatically. With built-in email productivity, reps can eliminate the hassle of scheduling meetings. Plus, they can see their top email priorities, right on their phones, and, get visibility into their opportunities, leads, accounts, and contacts.   Reports and Dashboards with Sales Analytics Instead of exporting, collating, aligning and analyzing, sales teams can just click in to built-in analytics, with ready-made dashboards that make it easy to understand and explore whitespace and team performance. Reps can uncover pipeline trends, and take action immediately. Sales leaders can understand how the team is functioning across regions and products, and identify top sellers, as well as those that may need more coaching. And, it’s easy to analyze deals from lead to close with over 40 out-of-the-box KPIs. By combining all three products, we’re able to create a Sales Cloud Einstein that is a predictive data scientist for every sales team. A constant companion that drives productivity through efficiency and insights. No more point systems, no more multiple contracts, no more copy-and-paste, no more switching. Just a clean, easy, modern solution to make every company a smarter, more efficient, more productive, customer-focused company. Sales Cloud Einstein (now including Salesforce Inbox and Sales Analytics) is priced at $50 per user, per month. Click here to learn more about Sales Cloud Einstein.

The Bigger Picture

Artificial intelligence / machine learning will continue to permeate business applications. The good news is that there is less and less talk about AI, if not in a kind of personal way, like Einstein or Leonardo (and yeah, I know that Leonardo does not only cover AI). This shows that the big vendors are more and more going away from a technology narrative to a results narrative. AI is not a means by itself but a means to an end. And this end is doing more with less effort.

My PoV and Analysis

By addressing these three pain points of sales teams Salesforce is partly using some pages out of the Nimble playbook. Especially the mobile app for the Salesforce Inbox looks remarkably familiar to me. I do not say that this is a copy, but that moves like this one are actually inevitable, and that CRM (and CEM) solutions will become ever more similar. The combination of these three features and how they are laid out now tells the same story that I heard about the same time from clari, a company founded in 2013 and that focuses on “transforming the way they sell, make decisions, and grow”. Now, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are telling the same story. This, along with the observation that even small companies are more and more referring to the term platform, reiterates that business applications are commoditizing fast and that the main battleground is becoming the fabric of a business, i.e. becoming the platform of choice. For Salesforce this is an important move as, all Salesforce “hype” taken away, there is a perception out in the market that the Salesforce architecture is aging. On top of this Salesforce is not a bargain (judging by the list prices) nor is the company riding on a high profitability. And the other 3 of the big four can tell end-to-end stories that cover the full value chain. Plus all of the big four are clawing their way from the enterprise market down to the midmarket and eventually the smaller businesses, which is the place where the opportunity lies. With that, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP being able to tell a story of a more modern platform, and being attacked by small and nimble players that can ride on Salesforce’s and other platforms, Salesforce needs to continue to show that it is on the forefront of innovation with the benefits of all user groups in mind. I think that this worked out fine with this release. Salesforce is at least on par with the competition. But is this a super charged sales cloud? No, it isn’t. Unless the previous engine was seriously underpowered – which it wasn’t. The race towards becoming the platform of choice continues.

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

It has been three months since I last talked with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. Back in February, he introduced me to their Nimble Smart Contacts add-in to Outlook Mobile. It delivered people and company social relationship insights for free to over 40M Outlook Mobile users. Since then, he and his Nimble team have been pretty busy working with Microsoft, as one could see from his Facebook posts – having one coordination session in Seattle after the other. Nimble will soon announce that they extended the Nimble freemium Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile add-in to become a free plugin into Outlook Desktop Windows/Mac and Office 365. This move recognizes that the world is going cloud and mobile and that the Microsoft stack of productivity applications is the most widely used set of applications in Enterprises of all sizes. Google applications, with the notable exception of Google Mail, do not stand a chance here. The same holds true for Salesforce, which acquired the productivity tool startup Quip in August of last year, or Zoho’s Docs, or any  other smaller vendor tools. The logical next step is to … … integrate Nimble into Outlook Desktop and Office 365.  I already speculated about this in my February post: 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 and Azure. Add the fact that many smaller businesses are still working without a CRM system, but merely use their mail clients and spreedsheets – 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 and marketing solution for Microsoft Office365 users.Mind you, there still would be gaps on the service, especially on the marketing side, but this is a story for another day. For now I do see huge potential in this partnership. And unsurprisingly, this is exactly what Jon and his team did over the past three months. With this new integration the Nimble Smart Contact Manager comes up within all Office 365 productivity and business applications, plus Outlook, Skype, Teams, and etc., giving users the rich contact information that Nimble gather in real time. This is fully in line with Jon’s vision of Nimble “becoming the world’s individual and teams’ simple, smart and social contact manager”.

My Take

This is Big, for both parties! The E-Mail inbox is still the most widely used de facto contact manager. There are estimations that more than 80 percent of companies worldwide do not use any contact manager or CRM application at all. With this step of integrating deeper into the MS fabric, Nimble comes far closer to Jon’s vision by getting access to a huge number of potential business users who need just a bit more than just e-mail and for whom Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is too expensive and too clumsy, or just plainly not useful to people with simple needs. By staying connected to Google, Nimble rides on the two most prevalent e-mail platforms. But what’s in it for Microsoft, you ask? Microsoft, as the other Enterprise CRM vendors (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SugarCRM, etc.) face increasing pressure by vendors that started off by addressing the SMB market, especially the lower end of it. Salesforce itself concentrated first on smaller companies or departmental solutions that brought them a foot in the door. With this sales approach, based upon the subscription and cloud software models, they disrupted the market – and moved on to become an enterprise player. SAP is clawing its way down with different solutions that target smaller companies than their usual clientele. Microsoft so far did the same upward move that Salesforce did. The origins of Microsoft’s business applications (Axapta and Navision) have been SMB-oriented. Now they are targeting Enterprises, of which there are only so many. SugarCRM currently moves similarly. In brief, these vendors are vulnerable to aggressive SMB vendors like Zoho and others, which can disrupt them from below. Microsoft needs a solution to address this vulnerability. In comes Nimble to add simple social sales and marketing to Office365. At a reasonable price point, Nimble is likely to provide eighty to ninety percent of the functionality that small company salespeople need to grow their business. And this in a very usable way, automating a lot of the data gathering in the background. Not having to collect this data and enter it manually into the contact database adds immediate value. In comparison to learning to ride a bicycle, Nimble “will be like the training wheels” to Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator says Jon, “we will onboard millions of people to Microsoft Enterprise Apps and many will not need more than that”. In summary, Microsoft gains the ability to attract a lot of smaller companies that might otherwise consider another vendor’s CRM, to their platform. With the foot in the door, Microsoft then has the possibility to easily upgrade these customers to Dynamics365 business applications. Let’s see what the next steps are in this partnership. It has the potential to be very symbiotic. It also has the potential of Nimble becoming Microsoft’s entry solution to CRM.

Today’s customer is impatient. They want – and have the right to – get answers to their questions and concerns about a company’s products and services without being in the need to preform lengthy searches or to dig around. This holds true for pre-purchase questions as well as to post-purchase questions. We regularly see or read statistics that tell us that customers are not very forgiving in cases of poor customer service, but on the contrary are inclined to leave when encountering a single instance of poor service. If customers do not get the answers to their questions without difficulties they are moving on, no matter of the company or its size. This meanwhile has become a kind of public domain knowledge. The only way for a company to avoid customers leaving with the first bad experience is by building up and maintaining a good and credible history of helping a customer with solutions to address their needs (aka jobs-to-be-done) and by regularly providing good customer service. At all stations of the customer journey. An important part of this good service is being available to help the customers on their preferred channels, at the time of their choosing, and at their pace. Theirs, not the company’s! This includes that a customer initiating a conversation, or engaging in a conversation that is initiated by a company, may not respond in a while, or chooses to continue using another device, or both. On the other side a customer will not accept the company being unresponsive or losing information during handovers between different service agents. The conversation between a company and a customer is both, asynchronous and asymmetric. Asymmetric no more in favor of the company, but in favor of the customer.

Deal with asymmetric Conversations

It transpires more and more that an important channel this conversation will happen in is chat; in adding on to my recent article on omnichannel, and whereto I see this poorly named concept move, businesses are well advised to closely inspect how they can help themselves by helping their customers with a useful and consistent chat offering. This chat offering needs to be available in-app, on the mobile web site or on the same web site delivered to a desktop/laptop computer. Increasingly also in generic chat services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, … And companies should not forget to offer a chat button in e-mails. Although I think that the importance of e-mail will degrade it is still an important communications channel for companies. An integrated, intelligent, efficient chat offer is a good way to help customers getting to the information that they want at their pace. Efficient, integrated and intelligent are the key words here. The chat equivalent of holding music is not an option.

Efficient

A reaction to a chat request must be near instantaneous, with an appropriate response that takes into account all relevant contextual information. And the system must be able to scale. As said: ‘Holding music’ will not be tolerated. Neither will the need to repeatedly supply the same information. This takes both, a suitable number of trained human operators – human touch will stay important – and a bot-infrastructure that is supported by machine-learning.

Intelligent

A proactive chat initiation must come at a sensible point of time, with an opening that is appropriate for the customer’s current situation and context. Responses to a customer initiated chat must be useful right from the outset, giving helpful information based upon the given context and the information at hand.

Integrated

The context can for example be identified through the current interaction with the site or app, and previous interactions with the company, if the customer is willing to be identified; and if the chat system is connected to or part of the CRM and analytics infrastructure. Integrating chat with CRM and with advanced analytics allows for efficient and intelligent customer engagement, regardless whether it is a marketing-, sales- or a service scenario. With these three concepts in place and tied into each other the chat can and must go on at the customer’s speed – not at the speed of business (pun at SAP intended; sorry, folks, I couldn’t resist that one). The customer’s speed, along with the possibility of automation via bots, backed by a learning system, is an opportunity for the business, as operators can scale beyond one conversation at a time. This is important for companies of all sizes. But again, the chat itself proceeds asymmetrically at the customer’s pace. The company needs to offer fast and useful reactions at all times.

To Sum It Up

As said before, it is important that the trained(!) operator who picks up the chat already has good information about the customer and her intent. This way the conduct of the chat is immediately positive for the customer. To enable this the customer must be identifiable and her interactions with the site or the app need to be tracked and past interactions need to be usable to the service. As past interactions can include more than just a chat history, the chat service itself needs to be part of the CRM infrastructure.  This way data it generates becomes searchable, ideally also covered by a sentiment analysis, and other data, like purchasing history, personal information, etc. becomes available to the chat session. Tracking of the interactions also allows for two additional, yet important, functionalities.

1. A chat request by the customer can be routed to the right operator. This avoids lengthy Q&A and helps keeping the customer happy. Depending on the sophistication of the implementation and the maturity of the organization the first contact very well can be a chat bot, which enquires missing information and is able to answer initially simple, with growing maturity increasingly complicated requests.
2. A chat session can be proactively initiated in the right context. This allows the assigned operator to come from the right angle, be helpful right away, and to even allow for cross-, and upsell activities. Even more interestingly, this data is useful for future marketing activities.

Some side effects of tracking of the interactions are that it enables the company to identify issues with site or app and to push corresponding information to customers, and to additionally perform automated prospecting, which helps to present the right offers and prepare cross- and upselling scenarios. And remember, although more and more customers are not working from laptops but from tablets and mobile phones the solution must still be able to cover a wide variety of platforms, without adding to implementation cost. Simplicity in installation and usage, as well as interoperability with a wide range of technologies, are key to an adoption in businesses of all sizes.