Here’s why Nimble is so successful
The News In the past few weeks there have been two interesting announcements by Nimble. First, on June 14, 2018 Nimble announced a partnership with Velosio, one of the largest Microsoft Dynamics VARs in North America. Velosio and Nimble entered into a global reseller agreement. As a part of this agreement Velosio’s 200 channel partners can purchase, manage and resell Nimble CRM bundled with Microsoft Office 365. Velosio is the latest prominent name in among the growing number of Microsoft/Nimble partners. One week later, on June 20, 2018 Nimble announced a revamp of its application homepage with the Nimble Today page. This dashboard page gives the user a clear and customizable view of their sales pipeline, calendar appointments, tasks and social signals with relationship insights directly embedded in the widgets. As a start the page offers 6 widgets Deals Events Tasks Highlighted Contacts Signals Stage Funnel that can get freely rearranged. The Today Page is also available for iOS users now and will be available to Android users soon. The Bigger Picture The enterprise CRM market is saturated. There are at least 4 tier one players for every major CRM function that are competing for supremacy. Customer demands have evolved from requiring transactional applications to getting high value solutions that allow the delivery of high-end customer (and user) experience. The market itself has morphed from a suite market to a best-of-breed application market, and now to a platform and ecosystem market. In this market it is important to excel in two, maybe three areas: Platform as a Service (PaaS). The platform itself must support current and future technologies that...
The future of CRM – as seen by Salesforce
The News On June 13, 2018, during its annual Connections event, Salesforce announced a number of additions to their marketing cloud and their ecommerce and service clouds. The announcement goes into three main directions: Based on the strategic alliance that Google and Salesforce entered into in November 2017, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud will get a deeper integration with Google Analytics 360. Starting now it will be possible to combine Google Analytics 360 data and Salesforce Marketing Cloud data in a single customer journey dashboard within Marketing Cloud. Conversely, Google Analytics 360 can now leverage Marketing Cloud campaign data to better deliver targeted content to consumers. Both integrations enable a deeper understanding of customers and their behaviours. Later, in Q3 this year, Salesforce plans to offer a beta release of an integration that enables marketers to create audiences in Analytics 360 and to activate these audiences for engagement within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud Einstein gets a segmentation and a split capability. The segmentation ability enables the uncovering of patterns in consumer behaviour and the discovery of new audiences that then can get reached with personalized messages. The split capability enables marketers to create unique personalized journeys for each customer with simple means, getting an optimized path for them, based on the marketing objective. There are a number of innovations to enable engagement across touch points. First, Salesforce announces their B2B ecommerce ability, second the new interaction studio that enables the creation of contextually relevant engagements and experiences in real time and third, the broadened availability of Service Cloud LiveMessage in 17 more countries. Live Message enables companies to...
SAPPHIRE 2018 – The Return of the Suite
SAPPHIRE 2018. In an Orlando convention center, far away from Walldorf SAP holds its annual conference, boldly going where no one has gone before. But enough of this poor allegation to Star Trek although it reasonably sets the tone. The first two days gave a deep view into the company strategy. Condensed into two press releases the company laid out its vision of the future of CRM and intelligent enterprises. And, doing so, shot a few broadsides at the competition, especially Salesforce. The News “The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer … when you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott. SAP intends to achieve this link of front- and back office by fully integrating an augmented suite of solutions that base on the SAP Hybris Cloud solutions into the digital core, the transactional back end. This integration is done via the SAP Cloud Platform. Additionally, it is fusing the new high profile acquisitions Gigya and CallidusCloud into the solution. C/4HANA; source SAP The Customer Data Cloud is what has been Gigya. This model, as well as S/4HANA, will be supported by the SAP HANA Data Management Suite, which is essentially a beefed up Master Data Management Solution around the SAP Data Hub. The second press release is about AI, IaaS, and more AI. SAP starts to talk more about conversational AI and Leonardo, as well as blockchain get more to the forefront. Mostly on the back end. The bigger Picture The...
Adobe and Magento tie the knot – a great move
The News On May 21, 2018 Adobe announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Magento Commerce. The obvious objective of Adobe is to integrate Magento’s commerce capabilities into their own experience capabilities. According to Brad Rencher, executive VP and general manger, Digital experience, with this acquisition Adobe is the “only company with leadership in content creation, marketing, advertising, and now commerce – enabling real-time experiences across the entire customer journey”. Magento Commerce (Magento) is a ”leading provider of cloud commerce” software to merchants and brands. Magento covers both, B2C and B2B vendors. The company is listed as a strong performer for both, b2b- and b2c ecommerce solutions in this year’s Forrester Waves on Commerce Suites. The Bigger Picture Adobe is all about ‘delivering experience’. You should read the second part of friend Paul Greenberg’s recent ZDNet article on Adobe where he explains customer experience, brand experience, and consumable experiences – and where he sees Adobe in this triple – in his uniquely great fashion. A marketing suite like Adobe’s Experience Cloud needs channels into which the insights, that the marketing solution generates, are pushed. The most important one being e-commerce. E-commerce is also the channel that offers most potential. The technology is no more bound to just a commerce web site. The site is just one possible interface. As is a chat bot in Facebook Messenger. As is Alexa. Or Siri. Or Google Assistant. You get the picture. Further, an e-commerce site is not only the foremost channel to send marketing communications to (and to deliver experiences), but also one of the most important input channels...