Nimble’s Social CRM Finds Its Way Into Office 365

Social sales and marketing software provider Nimble and cloud services consultant NeoCloud on Thursday announced a partnership to deliver a simple, affordable contact management and CRM package for Microsoft Office 365 and GSuite users.

NeoCloud has agreed to bundle Nimble CRM into all of its Office 365 deployments beginning this month. Small and mid-sized business customers and workgroups in larger organizations will be able to access social business insights on any contact in Office 365 everywhere they work — across the Web, in popular Web applications, and in personal productivity applications.

Nimble CRM adds employees’ individual connections to a shared team relationship manager and enriches them with social insights and business context.

“What I like about Nimble’s solution is that users continue to work through their usual tools such as email or social media platforms,” said Cindy Zhou, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

They “gain context and information on individuals through Nimble plug-ins to facilitate social selling, adding or augmenting CRM records, and marketing,” she told CRM Buyer.

Nimble also tracks engagement history, Zhou noted.

Insights for Everyone

Nimble integrates with first-party cloud-based solutions, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Microsoft Outlook.

NeoCloud will provide sales, marketing, and technical support services for the Nimble package.

Office 365 and GSuite are the two key business platforms NeoCloud sells, and virtually all of its customers need a simple relationship management platform that layers on top of those tools, said NeoCloud CEO Van Murray.

Nimble delivers relationship insights to users of the following products:

• Microsoft Office 365
• Microsoft Outlook
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Edge
• Hootsuite
• iOS
• Android

Nimble is available in two versions:

• The Nimble Business Edition, which delivers access to team social sales and marketing functionalities, as well as social business insights on people and companies; and
• a standalone freemium add-in for Microsoft Outlook Desktop and Outlook Mobile on iOS and Android, which allows profiling of email contacts.

Partnership Advantages

The partnership “will give SMBs an integrated, cost-effective way to execute on social selling,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

“At a considerably lower price point than most other options, this makes social selling more accessible to firms with fewer resources,” she told CRM Buyer.

Social selling “increases sales productivity by more than 12 percent on average,” Wettemann said.

“As the number of people we work with increases, both internal and external to our organizations and across a variety of tools and channels, it becomes ever so important to provide context to the relationships and history we have with them,” Constellation Research Principal Analyst Alan Lepofsky told CRM Buyer.

How Users Will Benefit

The leading CRM challenge for companies of all sizes is the loss of engagement data, Constellation’s Zhou said.

Many solutions require users to input contact or associated emails, communications, and other data manually, she noted. Tracking and inputting data “becomes a burden on sellers, marketers, and services personnel.”

The integration of contact management, as well as allowing users to see social context and other features that come with layering contact management software on top of productivity applications, “helps users or companies engage with customers more efficiently and reduces the manual data entry effort,” Zhou remarked.

“Integration is key,” Nucleus Research’s Wettemann pointed out. People “aren’t optimally selling if they spend more than 8 percent of their time on entering data into a CRM.”