Nimble Targets Team Management with Version 5.0
CRM provider Nimble today announced version 5.0, which includes a host of enhancements designed to improve team relationship management across the organization, including updated contact records and a new way to log, schedule, and view activites.
“I believe contact management is broken because when you go to a contact record in Office 365 or G Suite, there’s no context or insights on that contacts; basically it’s just a record with a name, and it’s not connected to the conversations that you’re having or to the activities that you’re driving, and every team member in your company has a separate contact database,” says Jon Ferrara, CEO at Nimble. “Every business has sales or marketing or customer service or accounting, and every single one of those platforms has a contact database, and each of those are separate and none of them talk to each other. What’s missing in the company is a team relationship manager, and that is really the heart of what we decided to fix with Nimble 5.0.”
To that end, Nimble 5.0 has a redesigned contact record that allows users to see, update, and search for important relationship information in a single, actionable view. Users can also log activities, view contact and company information, scan social signals, send trackable email templates, and apply tags from the contact record. “I think the biggest cause of failure of CRM is lack of use because you have to force people to do it and if they do it, it’s bad data because data decays,” Ferrara says. “The heart of Nimble is a contact record that automatically works for you by building itself. With this new contact record, we brought the history of interactions right up to the top and made it much easier to see and interact with.”
Another enhancement is a new activities listing tab with custom activity types. “We made it easy to log and schedule custom activities, because if you’re just logging a generic phone call, you can’t get granular reporting of a specific action against deals and results. Now, you can log granular activities, and then with our new activities listing view you can go in and drive through the things you need to do,” Ferrara says.
“The two basic views of a CRM for a sales rep are the contact record, where you’re interacting, logging, and scheduling, and the task list where you’re pounding through the things that you need to do. That’s what we spent the time redesigning,” he adds.
Other enhancements include a redesigned smart contacts app that supports calendar, tasks, deals, and custom views; the ability to send tracked email templates from contact records, the system’s Messages tab, the system’s Today Page, on mobile, and within the smart contacts app; and support for contact privacy with user group controls, which allow managers to assign lead ownership, appoint contacts to specific users, create user groups for privacy that can be edited in bulk through segmentation, set privacy at import, and add new contact types (lead and account).