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 customisable
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.
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