Nimble strengthens its ability to be where the user is

I haven’t written much about Nimble recently; actually I haven’t written too much about anything lately. Now it is time to have a look into some interesting news that hit my desktop.

The News

On June 30, 2021, Nimble announced an integration with Microsoft Teams to streamline workspace collaboration.

The integration offers Nimble users to prepare meetings and provides the tools to help getting information on meeting participants from their contact records, the ability to take notes that will be synched to Nimble as well as the ability to send trackable follow-up emails.

The capability will be delivered via an add-in to MS Teams.

For your convenience, the press release is also copied below.

Nimble Integrates with Microsoft Teams to Power Virtual Business Meeting Engagements

Nimble Offers Microsoft Teams Add-in to Help Teams Thrive in The Hybrid Workspace

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- June 30, 2021 -- Nimble, the simple CRM for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace teams, announced today that they have integrated with Microsoft Teams to give teams a shared view of every customer, and to streamline collaboration between teams.

Improve Collaboration and Build Better Customer Relationships

Customer data is the most important asset for every organization. The success of every customer relationship management application lies in the data accuracy. Business owners and professionals rely on Nimble to offer a 360 view into the relationships with their customers.

Integrating with collaboration applications and seamless synchronization of information and the history of conversations is crucial to improving customer relationships and team productivity.

“Our customers rely on Microsoft Teams to work effectively across their organizations and to build and nurture relationships with customers. It’s necessary that we enable them to easily access existing Nimble contact records and create new ones directly from the MS Teams interface.” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. “It’s the basics that win big deals and we are excited to make it easy for our customers to add notes and send timely and trackable follow-ups.”

Nimble allows its users to be productive while preparing for events by utilizing the Nimble add-in for Microsoft Teams meeting experience. This integration provides Nimble users with the tools that they need to successfully prepare for meetings, take notes, and ensure proper follow-ups.

Streamline Workflow and Close More Deals with Nimble and Microsoft Teams

Prepare for Meetings - Access information on meeting participants from existing contact records including their bios, history of communication, and business insights needed to engage effectively with prospects and customers.

Take & Sync Notes - Take notes during Microsoft Teams meetings and sync them directly to Nimble to ensure completeness and accuracy of contact record history.

Follow-up & Follow Through - Send trackable and templated emails before, during and after meetings and stay on target with prospects and customers.

“It’s your job as a business professional to find out everything you possibly can about the people you are meeting with. Coming into the meeting prepared shows your prospects and customers that you value them and their time. This part is crucial, but what’s even more important is a timely and proper follow-up. Our Microsoft Teams add-in allows you to achieve all that before, during, and after your meetings directly from Teams,” says Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble.

 The screenshot below gives a good idea of Nimble's new capability.

Image source: Nimble

The bigger picture

Virtual meetings have become extremely important for salespeople since the Covid 19 pandemic hit. Initially, the main winner was Zoom with stellar growth numbers. This was soon countered by Microsoft beefing up its Teams software to something that became actually useful.

And teams is widely available, as it comes with Microsoft’s office suite and as said, it has become an essential tool for businesses.

Also, having conversational capabilities as part of the CRM system becomes more and more important. Cases in point are Salesforce having acquired Slack last year or Oracle having entered a strategic partnership with Zoom.

At the same time, accurate data becomes increasingly important. This is, where the automated takeover of data into the CRM system that feeds the ability to provide information that is aggregated from multiple sources, becomes important.

My analysis and point of view

Microsoft’s Dynamics software of course has an integration with Teams. Nimble understands itself as an entry point for small and growing businesses into the MS business software. With its prospector toolset it integrates into MS Outlook for quite some time already.

This move to integrate into MS Teams is a pretty important one as it caters for the increasing importance of virtual meetings and follows Jon Ferrara’s mantra of the CRM software being available where salespeople are working; and they are by far not only working in their CRM software but use e-mail, office documents, web sites and, of course, MS Teams. It covers some main use cases by providing information on meeting participants and enabling note taking and follow-up mails right out of MS Teams. This provides users with an efficient way to take and meeting minutes immediately, thus increasing accuracy and reducing the number of mistakes.

With this ability Nimble addresses two of the levers that are important for the acceptance of CRM systems: The CRM system must be available where the users are actually working, which is not always within the frame of the CRM system. Consequently, the CRM system needs to embed itself into other applications. With MS Teams, Nimble now addressed another crucially important external application.

I would expect the ability to create and manipulate further business objects in the next months, too. An upcoming integration with PowerApps & Flow will likely enable this.