Many financial professionals like myself are now using Nimble to manage our contacts and nurture customer/prospect relationships. Finding the right CRM seems to be a big challenge with companies. Everything in the business world is going the way of the cloud and CRMs are no exception. What are the basic parameters people look at when evaluating whether or not a CRM is the right one for them?
- Price
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ability to collaborate
There are probably more but these seem to be the basic ones. The truth is I have looked at many CRMs myself in the past year. Most of them do the same basic things. Of course they all let you track all of the contact information you ever need to. That is the core of a CRM. When I had lunch with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, a while back he reminded me that building a business has always been about “who you know.” Back of this is the well-known phrase – “it’s not what you know, it’s whom you know.”
Another way of saying this is that it’s all about who is in your Rolodex. A CRM is just a modern day Rolodex with the ability to store a lot more information about a contact — including information about conversations that are ongoing, the progress of the relationship – how close you are to closing the deal, and how much you expect that deal will be worth to you.
How do CRMs work?
In my research I have found that every single CRM does all of the same basic things. They all let you track the same information about a person – all contact info, company info, conversations, and deals. With one single exception. In order to track the conversations, you must write up your own notes or copy and paste information from e-mails and messages into the CRM to keep track. With all of the different social platforms this can be a tedious process. I know that I have some contacts with whom I communicate on every major social network — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter — and then of course there are the messages we send in good old fashioned email.
Using tags to group contacts
A key feature of the best CRMs is the ability to “tag” people and companies. This is an especially useful way of grouping contacts. For example let’s say you have many contacts from a big company like Intuit? A fortune 500 company like this has many divisions and locations. In the basic infrastructure of a CRM, you get to assign a contact to one company and there is really no way to add “sub-companies.”. This is where “tags” can come in really handy. Use tags to describe the divisions within a company like “Intuit-Mountainview.”
What if there was a CRM that did all of the heavy lifting for you?
Remember how I described above that in most CRMs you have to track down your messages with people everywhere that you communicate with them and manually feed that information into your CRM? This is where Nimble can really save you a lot of trouble. It allows you to connect your email client along with all of your major social networks — LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook — so that all of the correspondence you have with all of your contacts on all of these sites is right there.
Does your CRM help you identify opportunities?
Nimble does! By connecting all of my social networks together it is very easy for me to see what is going on with any or all of my contacts. I can see exactly what people are talking about across all networks. This gives me the information I need to cultivate and nurture the relationships.
Why do financial professionals like Nimble?
Simply put, most of us financial professionals are passionate about being organized and efficient — and required by law to be that way, in fact! Nimble helps me improve in both areas and the fact that it is cloud-based makes it that much easier to collaborate and stay organized across my whole organization.
When I add it all up, the fact that I can assign contacts to a deal or a company and see all of my correspondence with those people across all networks makes it so easy for me to keep track of what is going on. In fact, I just learned that a prospect of mine will be at a particular meetup in a couple of weeks. I can see this right on Nimble and now I can look into arranging to be there myself and then while in Nimble I can send a message to him through any social network and let him know I would like to meet him there to discuss business.
Sweet.
Seth David is at the forefront of accounting services, harnessing the power of video technology to revolutionize the way businesses acquire knowledge and practical skills.
