Nimble CEO Outlines Vision For Social CRM

Way back in 1989, Jon Ferrara co-founded Goldmine, a pioneering contact management and sales force automation software vendor, before the emergence of what we now call customer relationship management (CRM). GoldMine was also an early networked business application, back when businesses were just learning to exploit the power of local area networks.

Ferrara's new company, Nimble, aims to do something similar with social networks. Nimble Contacts unites email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google Calendar in a Web-based dashboard for sales and customer service people looking to get a well-rounded view of their contacts before they pick up the phone or dash off an email. The way he tells it, that unification is a simple necessity.

"Our contacts, and the way we communicate with them, are scattered across multiple tabs in our browsers, our applications, our desktops, and our mobile devices," Ferrara said. "We keep our contacts in Outlook, Google contacts, Facebook, Twitter, and our phone. We communicate with people on IM, text message, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and email. And the funny thing is none of this is integrated. It's hard to keep track of what you've said to these people let alone what a team member might have said if you work as part of a team -- and, frankly, I couldn't work that way anymore."

The question and answer session relayed below coincided with a product demonstration over GoToMeeting. I had spoken to Ferrara once before and have had an account on the service for months, but what I saw did inspire me to go back and finish the account setup. He was able to go to my profile and quickly navigate among our email exchanges, appointments, and a view of my Tweets and status messages from Facebook and LinkedIn. He could see, for example, that TechWeb's David Berlind had confirmed my connection request on LinkedIn (which was news to me at that moment).

While other social media aggregation tools such as HootSuite bring together communications from many different channels, what they lack from a sales, marketing, and customer service perspective is the link back to a consolidated contact record and contact history, Ferrara said.

The base Nimble Contact product is free, and Nimble will sell upgrades to editions with features for team collaboration and more advanced CRM.

Here is more from our conversation.

Carr: Where does this product fit in the market for enterprise social media?

Ferrara: It's hard to manage your communication by going to all the tabs in your browser. If I see an interesting tweet from someone, I need to be able to jump to the contact record and see who that person is. The idea of Nimble is give people the ability to listen and engage. Today, people use things like [Salesforce.com's] Chatter and Yammer to build internal collaboration.

Carr: What is it you think is missing in an enterprise social tool like Yammer?

Ferrara: Well, why would you do a status update? It's to share business knowledge. I need to be able to share a contact from my contact tool and say, "Does anybody know anything about this analyst or this reporter?" You can do that with Yammer, but if someone has the same question a few months later how are they going to find the answer?

The truth is 90% of the marketplace is still using Outlook and Google for collaboration. And even in Google, if you're in the Calendar, you can't go to the contact record for the person you have an appointment with.

We invented that 20 years ago with GoldMine. We helped pioneer team relationship management -- and the CRM tools of today have forgotten about that. The truth is most salespeople live in Outlook and they only feed the CRM system things they need for their reports so they don't get in trouble with management. Carr: What other sorts of applications do you want to integrate with?

Ferrara: We don't want to be all things to all people. I'd rather be the WordPress of CRM than the Microsoft Office of CRM. So we're going to invite in third-party developers and enable them to share and sell their extensions in our app store.

In my mind, in the perfect world, we would love to embrace the existing platforms people have invested in. That's why Gmail and your Google Calendar activities are integrated into Nimble. And you can see that if I've read a message here in Nimble, it's marked read in Gmail.

I don't think we'll ever be Salesforce, as far as the depth and width of the platform -- I don't want to be that big.

Carr: You talk about Facebook and Twitter and Gmail, but for business use don't you also need to be integrating with Sharepoint and other enterprise collaboration technologies?

Ferrara: For an enterprise play, yes, but Nimble's beachhead is the SMB market. Most of our customers have never heard of Sharepoint. They've never heard of Yammer. They're just looking for something that's going to make them more effective. In the beginning, we will do our own internal collaboration.

Carr: Are you getting any enterprise interest, despite that?

Ferrara: We are. One of the things I learned at Goldmine is that big businesses behave like small businesses at a departmental level. We were a corporate standard at 50 of the Fortune 500, back in the day.

Nimble is applicable back in the enterprise marketplace. We will support Exchange. In the future, we will support whatever customers want us to.

Carr: You will support Exchange -- but not yet? I want to be clear on what it is you will be integrating with, as opposed to competing with. Will we see you integrate with Salesforce?

Ferrara: Right now we connect with Exchange via IMAP. Our integration plans, on a short-term horizon, will be looking to marketing platforms like HubSpot, accounting packages like QuickBooks and Freshbooks, and customer service applications like ZenDesk and Get Satisfaction. These are natural first steps for us.

Now, we do have customers who have 5,000 seats on Salesforce and would like us to map and integrate with Salesforce. So we're going to be looking at that, and it's definitely something we're going to consider.

But our focus will be on helping you understand your customers. Our view is the better you understand your customers, the better you will be at serving their needs.