Case Study: Ithaka Leadership Development

About Ithaka

Ithaka Leadership is a small United Kingdom management development consultancy  that uses an innovative and proven model to help clients understand personality, confirm culture and leadership style, and create the right vision and strategies to sharpen decision making to attain client goals. The majority of their business is based on repeat business, so the need for keeping in contact with customers is vital.

The Challenge

Ithaka had a core team working out of one office, but moving into 2013 they onboarded two remote employees. This presented a problem because the legacy CRM system was unable to synchronize unless that user was in the office. They decided to move to a cloud-based system that was simple to use, and that would address their wish list:

  • Keep all existing and new customer records up to date

  • Incorporate social media tracking of LinkedIn and Twitter

  • Tag contacts to arrange into organized groupings

  • Track all correspondence with contacts

  • Have a lead and sales tracking system

Finding Nimble

With these requirements in mind Chris Sturrock, Ithaka’s director, began to research the market for cloud-based CRM systems. After trialling several systems he became increasingly frustrated with the lack of available options.

“I just couldn’t understand why I wasn’t seeing solutions that had an emphasis on relationship-driven contact management. Since our business is driven by relationships, that was essential — and we wanted to see everything in one place, not scattered all over the place.”

Then he came across Nimble, did some feedback research, and was pleasantly surprised by the positive comments and feature tutorials.

The Team’s Assessment

The team found clear advantages to Nimble:

  • Easy upload of  existing contacts from the old CRM system

  • Easy integration between Nimble and Linked / Twitter

  • Excellent user experience due clear and simple navigation around the system

  • Linking to MailChimp – very useful for email campaigns with reviews and feedback

  • Ability to allocate tasks and events for individuals as well as members of the team so that teams can work efficiently and see tracking and deadlines.

  • Lead generation and sales tracking, including information on the account such as invoices due, payments received etc.

Chris found decided advantages: “We were especially impressed with how easy it was to share tasks and avoid duplicating effort. Our workflow and productivity rose — and the integration with MailChimp was just great.”

The Solution They Needed

Chris is happy with the decision: “Nimble is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. No system is perfect, and I have identified and passed on my ideas for things that would improve the system. Nimble has a dedicated team that listens to this feedback from customers and designs new features based on these requests. I think Nimble was the perfect choice for our team.”