THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO INTEGRATING & CUSTOMIZING

by: In this guide

We’ll cover the best practices for integrating and customizing Nimble CRM. Here are some of the topics that we’ll cover:

Ease of Use, Customizations and System Design: How easy is the system to use, customize and integrate for Nimble users? What are the best features, how do they work and what can they do for your team? This section includes a review of the system’s data model as well.

How to Get Data into Nimble: Focuses on both sides of an integration: pushing your data into Nimble, and then pulling Nimble data out and syncing it with other systems. What integrations are available and how well will they suit your needs?

Syncing Data Out (updating other systems): Sure, you want to make sure that you can get sales leads into Nimble, but what about syncing relevant data back out to your marketing, ERP, corporate database and other systems to inform your team about your sales activities?

Nimble Integration Features and “Hacks”: What does the Nimble integration landscape look like? Are there free, out of the box native integrations? We’ll talk about 3 potential use cases that will make your usage of Nimble much more awesome.

Overall: Bottom line: How good of a system is this for your business.

2. www.bedrockdata.com Introduction

Based on the belief that CRM software was still broken in 2009, John Ferrara founded Nimble. Nimble was not the first CRM rodeo for John Ferrara, however, as he is the co-founder and former CEO of Goldmine, a CRM and Salesforce automation software, which he sold for $100M+ in the ‘00’s. Unlike many traditional CRMs, Nimble acts as a “social relationship management” tool that places emphasis on social interaction and relationship building.

Social context is key for Nimble. While many CRMs have a hard time managing data well, especially social data, Nimble works to bring social relevancy into the context of communication. That means your sales and marketing teams can listen in on your customer and prospects’ social networks and respond when appropropriate. Ferrara explains that “The power of social is that your customers are telling you about themselves and their needs. Instead of sales people spending most of their time on non-selling activities like researching customers and data entry, they can spend more time engaging customers.”

What about all of that manual data entry that a typical contact record requires? That’s been mitigated with Nimble. Nimble goes beyond the basics of a typical “address book” entry to deliver advanced social profiling by pulling in , Linkedin and profiles to a contact record so you can keep updated with prospects’ and customers’ needs and wants.

While Nimble may not deliver the scalability of CRM systems like Zoho or Salesforce. com, it’s a very powerful and intelligent CRM for the small business user!

3. www.bedrockdata.com Ease of Use, Customizations and Design

Nimble is certainly a movement away from traditional CRM tools to focus on sales optimization, social discovery and relevant, timely social engagement. Nimble also takes it one step further to provide lead generation support by allowing its users to identify potential leads through social data, like common Linkedin connections, and Twitter conversations, for example.

It is clear that Nimble’s intent is to humanize the CRM experience by designating its “Accounts” simply as “Contacts.” It’s “Signals” section even automatically alerts you of our your contacts’ birthdays, job changes and future activities, allowing you to reach out to both new and existing connections with a personal message.

Nimble also features several popular email widgets, like GMail, Outlook and HooteSuite, which gives you a brief overview of what email contacts are saying in their social streams directly from your email inbox. And, if profiles don’t automatically show up, you can add them to your Nimble contacts with one click, saving a plethora of time!

Nimble gives you actionable insight with it’s smart “Rules Engine” , telling you who to be in touch with, why they’re important, and when to reach out. This algorithm becomes ever more intelligent the more you use the platform based on your behavior and your assessment of the results Nimble surfaces. This way, you can easily spot “warm” opportunities and enter the conversation with context.

4. www.bedrockdata.com Getting Data Into Nimble

Initially getting data into Nimble is an easy process via an import, where you can simply import a CSV or Excel file into Nimble. But what about ongoing integrations for records you’re generating from your website or other marketing (event, webinar, email, etc…) systems?

Here are some options available to you:

Manual import – Sure, manually importing a CSV into Nimble is ok for the first time you’re starting to use the app, but for subsequent times you need to get data into Nimble, it’s just way too manual and time consuming to do over and over again.

Web Forms – Nimble has an integration with Wufoo that allows users to create and place lead capturing forms on their website which then pushes that data directly into Nimble. But this is of course dependent on when leads actually decide to sign up and data is certainly not bi-directional.

“Trigger or Event Based” Integration – This type of integration is only a good option in some basic scenarios. For instance, if you have a very basic use case where you want to get certain form fields from your website into Nimble or another app. However, it’s not a bi-directional, continuous integration that updates your data as it changes and thus is generally not recommended for CRM integrations.

Automated Data Integration (from Bedrock Data) – Let’s face it: the ideal scenario is to configure an automated integration that will continuously pipe contacts into and out of Nimble and update people, companies and deals as they change in your other systems. Don’t believe us? Try it yourself for free

5. www.bedrockdata.com Syncing Nimble Data to Other Apps

Syncing data into your Nimble account is great on the one side, but what about syncing data back out to your Marketing Automation, Finance or other systems that you’re using?

This is especially an interesting question when it comes to Nimble deal data, which your sales reps are updating as deals progress through your sales funnel.

This data can be incredibly useful to inform your marketing campaigns, and generally gauge the level of interest that a lead or contact has with regards to your brand.

Integrations and Nimble’s APIs

If you’re considering engineering an integration with Nimble in-house, you’ll find that their APIs are pervasive across essentially all system objects. This means that you can pull data out of people, companies, deals, custom fields, tasks, etc…

If you’re planning on writing a Nimble integration yourself or in-house, you’ll find an easy to use API and some client libraries that will help your developers get started developing on top of the Nimble platform.

Certain integration systems (like Bedrock Data) will allow you de-duplicate contact records by their email addresses when syncing data out, as well as configure your own custom field mappings at no added cost.

6. www.bedrockdata.com Useful Nimble Integration Hacks

We thought it would be useful to provide a few interesting integration features that you can achieve with a Nimble integration. Let’s jump right in:

Sync (create and update) marketing analytics data into Nimble custom fields Perhaps the most basic use case for a Nimble integration is to simply automate the flow of leads from your marketing team to your sales reps, and make sure that those leads stay updated all the time in Nimble. Many marketing applications, especially marketing automation tools will also provide intelligence or analytics data on the leads that are coming through those systems.

Sync lead updates to marketing automation system The beauty of a bi-directional data integration is that data flows both ways. So, not only can a marketing system inform updates in Nimble for the sales team, but as the sales team adds or updates contacts in Nimble, your marketing team in return is continuously informed of those updates to leverage for marketing campaigns.

Sync Nimble People and Companies to and from your finance app When your sales team closes a Deal in Nimble, how are you planning on getting that new customer data to your finance system? Not to mention keep your finance system in sync as people and companies inevitably change in Nimble? With an automated integration, this problem is solved. Think about it: no more manual exporting out of your POS/Finance system and importing into CRM.

POST Activities from your Support (or email) system to Nimble When a lead or contact submits a support ticket, let your team know! You can create activities in Nimble via the API or an integration based on actions that are happening in other systems.

7. www.bedrockdata.com Overall Takeaways

Nimble remains a very powerful social relationship management tool for the small business owner. It’s designed very nicely and is actually quite fun to use. While the out of the box integration options are limited, Nimble integrations become easy when making use of a Bedrock Data integration.

The objects of the system are simple and aligned with other CRM products geared to small businesses: Batchbook, Pipedrive, Pipeline Deals, etc. While great for small teams, you may find yourself wanting some more automated options like workflows if you’re planning on growing your team quickly.

Nimble’s pricing is also very much geared toward small businesses, with 5GB of space provided for $15/month which can be increased in 25GB increments for an additional $25/month.

The Social Intelligence, Lead Generation and Machine Learning are what make Nimble truly unique. With further growth and innovation from a seasoned founding team, it’s clear that Nimble will only continue to get better. In fact, we recommend it as a CRM product to small businesses that we work with all the time.

EASY-TO-USE BUSINESS DATA MANAGEMENT AND INTEGRATION SOFTWARE

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8. www.bedrockdata.com