by twieberneit | Feb 7, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
Social Selling pioneer Nimble has an awesome start into 2017. First it got number 1 in CRM satisfaction by G2Crowd earlier in January, then friend and CRM godfather Paul Greenberg named Nimble a winner of the 2017 CRM Watchlist awards, and now Nimble announces the Smart Contacts add-in for Outlook, a deep integration into Outlook for iOS, with an integration into Outlook for Android coming soon. The Nimble Smart Contacts add-in brings the power of Nimble’s view on contacts to Outlook for mobile users, after the widget and Outlook add-on already offered this functionality for the web- and Outlook clients. The add-on follows the philosophy that for most companies the e-mail account is still their CRM system; given this, this is a straightforward enhancement. Nimble acknowledges that there are two main email systems used in businesses: Gmail and Office365, and now fully supports them both. This integration delivers the profiling data that the Nimble back end gathers practically at any place. The browser add-in already today allows to get profiling information about contacts in other CRM systems, e.g. Salesforce or MS Dynamics and works seamlessly in Google Apps and Office365. “The biggest cause of communication failure is lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their business is about,” says Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. This add-on is closing one missing link in the chain by making it part of Outlook and reducing the need for having yet another app. Relevant business insight about people in a mail conversation and their companies is now directly available in the email client. The add-on, along with the above-mentioned Outlook Add-in,...
by twieberneit | Dec 1, 2016 | Analysis, Blog |
Finally, the much-anticipated Forrester Wave on CRM Suites for Mid-Sized Businesses Q4/2016 has been published by Kate Leggett and her team at Forrester Research. Besides the usual suspects Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP it covers 7 more vendors that fulfil Forrester’s definition of a CRM suite for mid-sized businesses. This definition roughly is To be considered a suite the software covers at least three of the CRM disciplines Marketing Sales Force Automation Customer Service Field Service E-Commerce Customer Analytics There needs to be prebuilt integration between the products, if they are not within the same system; integration shall be via open standards to allow for integrating other applications. The software needs to be targeted at organizations between 250 and 999 employees. Multiple industries need to be targeted. Of course, the solutions need to be in active use and there need to be customer references. The Forrester Wave has some interesting results, some confirming what other people see, too, others somewhat surprising. Let me start with the confirmations, continue with bits that surprised me, and close with an SAP specific view. The Confirmations Of course, we are talking cloud – cloud and nothing else. As can be expected all vendors strive to deliver a toolset that helps their customers to deliver consistent customer experiences. Now I, and others, would argue that the experience is largely in the realm of the end customer and the users and that there is nothing like a ‘system of experience’. Delivering consistent experiences encompasses far more than a CRM suite. But then it is far easier (and sexier) to talk about delivering experiences than about...
by twieberneit | Sep 24, 2016 | Blog |
Back in June most of us got surprised by the news that Microsoft has acquired LinkedIn. Neither of us deemed this a bad move from a company point of view. There ae just too many potential synergies between MS Dynamics CRM, Office365, Azure on one side and LinkedIn, as the leading business network on the other. At that time many of us, including myself, were musing about when Twitter will be acquired, and by who. #MSFT acquired #LinkedIn – Twitter now the last source of global personal #data. Is it up for grabs? Who would buy? #AAPL? #Google? — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 thinking of it – @SAP might find Twitter a good match, looking at their recent offerings #bigdata #AI #analytics https://t.co/sgUpcLgRBK — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 My initial guesses have been Apple or Google, then suggesting SAP to have a look into it. Thinking of it I could have added Oracle, IBM and Salesforce or media companies including telcos into the mix. In brief, a lot of companies should be interested in the treasure pit of data, behavioral data, that Twitter holds. Why? There are multiple reasons. Twitter is the last remaining independent social media outside Facebook and the big Chinese ones that the big western companies will not get access to; Tencent, Alibaba, Momo, etc. are rather buying it themselves than being for sale (to a western company), Facebook doesn’t need to. Twitter has a profitability and growth challenge, but an interesting technology and, importantly, is a great source of real time information about a lot of topics, from business to consumer....
by twieberneit | Jun 26, 2016 | Blog |
After a long while I had the pleasure of chatting with Jon Ferrara again for some time, covering things CRM and, of course, Nimble. As you may know Jon is a long time CRM veteran who released his first product named Goldmine back in 1990. Jon is also a very vocal advocate of sales and marketing being first of all “human to human”, something that he claims that most CRM systems are not good at. Consequently, he dubs these systems as “Customer Reporting Systems” as they do not excel at helping salespeople giving a good look at the persons they interact with but are more focused on reporting. Being in the CRM world for a long time myself I cannot really disagree with him about this fact itself; we might have a discussion on what CRM overall is and why it went the (wrong) way it took. Some thoughts on what I think CRM is and how Nimble stands in this, along with some thoughts on how to go ahead with Nimble will come below … Historically CRM systems require a lot of data entry. This is where Nimble is somewhat different, which is something that I like. No CRM can do without manual data entry, but Nimble makes this pretty simple. The system is built around persons and interactions with them and strives to merge calendar, email, social media and contact data base into aggregated views, giving context about involved people. Changes done by the contacts in their external profiles can get pulled into Nimble in a semi-automated way. The goal is to always have the context of...
by twieberneit | May 27, 2016 | Blog |
CRM Evolution 2016 – Conference at a Glance CRM Evolution 2016 revolved around two main topics customer experience, customer engagement digital transformation As part of these three main topics many speakers were about how to get there, which includes thinking and talking about machine learning, predictive analytics, and, of course, the Internet of Things. The CRM Evolution 2016 conference, organised by David Myron and chaired by CRM guru Paul Greenberg once more had an impressive lineup of speakers, starting with two highly impressive keynotes, held by Dennis Snow, formerly of Disney on Monday, and Brian Solis from Altimeter Group on Tuesday. As before it was co-located with SpeechTek and Customer Service experience, the latter chaired by Esteban Kolski. This combination guarantees a lot of high caliber attendance and a lot of networking opportunity, something that Paul Greenberg very strongly and actively supports. It is virtually impossible to not network … According to colleague Scott Rogers, although the conference appeared to be bigger than the years before it all seemed more intimate, but not crowded, which probably can get attributed to a good choice of venue. The event being vendor independent is only the icing on the cake. In my eyes this is the one CRM related conference that one must not miss. In contrast to last year I attended CRM Evolution only, which in retrospective was a mistake. But let’s have a look at the conference themes. There is no CRM without Customer Engagement and good Customer Experiences In the opening key note Dennis Snow told us about the Disney way of creating great customer experiences, which basically follows three...
