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.
· 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 browser.
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.
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