Nimble launches version 4.0 to fix customer relationship management’s biggest issue

The common customer relationship manager, or CRM, has been the bane of most salespeople’s lives since its inception.

And traditional CRM solutions are increasingly out of place in today’s mobile, social environment.

Today, Nimble is launching a major overhaul of its social CRM solution, in an attempt to drag the industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century, where the smartphone dominates everything and sales is more than ever about building real relationships.

Version 4.0 of Nimble brings social profiles, sales information, and marketing data into Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, allowing you to automatically create, segment, reach out to, and engage with both prospects and existing customers.

Contacts and companies are enriched within your email platform and elsewhere on the web, such as when you’re viewing a LinkedIn profile, a news story, or a Facebook page. Most importantly, it solves the biggest issue with CRM solutions, the reason salespeople hate them so much.

Data entry.

Because Nimble 4.0 instantly maps contacts to enriched data from social networks and third-party databases, you always have the latest contact information on hand. Company insights are also added automatically, including industry, size, location, employee count, revenue, and more. Nimble keeps all these contact details constantly up-­to-­date.

And it offers direct imports from anywhere. It knows if you’re in Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, or a news article that focuses on a contact, and it allows you to pull in data with a single click. That includes importing multiple contacts from Twitter lists.

As with everything in life, the rise of mobile has changed the sales game.

“Our Nimble Smart Contacts Mobile apps powers social selling relationships on the go by combining a phone’s contacts and calendars with our rich Nimble people and company insights,” Jon Ferrara, CEO at Nimble and cofounder of the original CRM, GoldMine, told me. “Before every meeting, Nimble’s mobile app provides a detailed dossier with contact and company insights on who you’re meeting with. Our mobile apps even remind you to follow up and follow through with your contacts via automated reminders to log notes, tasks, and deals.”

Of course, complex sales environments require multiple contacts in differing but connected roles. How does Nimble help you organize communications in a complex sale?

“Relationships are messy, and we are all over-connected and over-communicated,” Ferrara said. “The legacy enterprise platforms being used today for sales, marketing, and social are siloed, and they don’t integrate into the places our teams engage customers. They are not designed to cross departments, let alone communication channels. Conversations start on Twitter, shift to LinkedIn, then email and calendar, and finally, if you’re doing it right, get into Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. The power of Nimble is how it elegantly manages and empowers team communications and collaboration between a company’s team and its prospects/customers/influencers across all channels and in all places.”

Of course, pure B2B sales organizations will benefit from tools like Nimble, which competes with a vast array of CRM, contact database, and contact enrichment solutions, but which benefits from being able to augment contact data directly within your email client or while you’re browsing.

And outside of that environment, Ferrara believes Nimble 4.0 can offer useful information across many roles and business types.

“Nimble powers human-to-human relationships that drive personal and business success,” Ferrara said. “It’s not just sales people who need help with this, everyone does. I believe that everyone in a successful company communicates with the community of people outside the company required to help it grow. This includes prospects, customers, editors, analysts, bloggers, investors, advisors, integration partners, resellers, and more.”

In addition to contact augmentation, Nimble 4.0 provides email tracking, group email messaging, email templates, and analytics to help you create engaging content and then assess how well it is performing.

Nimble 4.0 is available from today. New customers receive a 14-day free trial, after which accounts are priced at $25 per user, per month. It works with Google Apps, Outlook, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Hootsuite, iOS, and Android.