Nimble Adds Social Data to CRM

I had an intriguing demonstration yesterday from social CRM vendor Nimble. Since “social CRM” could mean just about anything, it’s important to explain what Nimble actually does: it combines traditional contact management with automated access to social media information about those contacts.

That might not sound like much, but in practice it’s pretty darn slick.

Here’s how it works. Say you’re selling a product related to, oh, circuit boards. You can do a Twitter search for messages on that keyword, scan the Twitter profiles and Klout scores of people sending those messages, and push a button to add the interesting people to your contact list. Once you’ve added a contact, Nimble will automatically display their most recent Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn activity every time you call up their record and let you send them messages through any of those products or by email. This is all done in the same system as traditional contact management activities: tagging contacts, assigning tasks and events, sending and receiving emails, tracking deals, building lists, searching your database, and managing your calendar.

Seamless combination of contact management with social media is a big deal: when I showed Nimble to a colleague who runs a public relations agency, her eyes lit up. From her perspective, having an immediate view of each contact’s social activity saved time, made it easier to tailor conversations to their interests, and let her reach them through their preferred medium.  From a corporate perspective, it means the system contains data that salespeople didn’t enter manually – helping to overcome their perpetual complaint that salespeople enter data into corporate CRM systems without getting anything in return.

For the users themselves, Nimble has one more advantage: its lets them stick with familiar communication tools. Integrations are currently available for Outlook, Gmail, Google Calendar, MailChimp email, Wufoo web forms, and HubSpot marketing automation.  An open API to import contacts from other sources is due by the end of February.

The email integrations copy messages from the external email systems into the Nimble activity history, where they're available for searches and list selection. The social media and HubSpot integrations also import contacts from those systems, but display messages and other data without storing them. Users do have the option to manually save individual social comments or assign tasks based on them.

Nimble plans to add more functions, including automated processes that could support multi-step nurture campaigns. But the company is focused on combining information from other systems, not replacing them. The relationship with HubSpot is especially intriguing, since HubSpot itself lacks a CRM component, making the two products highly complementary, and both companies target small-to-mid-size businesses. It’s also worth noting that Nimble recently announced $1 million investment  whose participants included Google Ventures, which is also a HubSpot investor, and HubSpot Co-Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah.

A beta version of Nimble was released early last year. The system is currently available in a free personal edition limited to 3,000 contacts and a $15 per user per month multi-user edition allowing up to 30,000 contacts and some other advanced features. Nimble already has more than 25,000 users across all versions and has a network of more than 250 solution partners.

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Marketo Sales Insight Expands Salesforce Access to Marketing Data

Summary: Marketo's new Sales Insight ranks prospects for sales people, based on recent Web and email activities. It lets Marketo sell seats to sales departments, which could be more lucrative than selling its core demand generation system. But I expect the sales automation vendors to take the business for themselves.

Marketo today officially launched “Sales Insight”, an application that makes prospect activity history directly available to sales people from within Salesforce.com. I had a personal demonstration last week (are you impressed?), but there’s an online demo that seems to cover pretty much the whole product. Features include:

- a ranked prospect list, based on measures of interaction intensity (represented by one, two or three flames) and prospect value (up to three stars). The idea is to help the sales rep decide who to call first. Users can drill into the details of each account, including Web activities, emails and score history.

- a list of “interesting moments” for each prospect, showing activities that the company has deemed significant. The moments are set up as real time triggers within Marketo. They can be linked to a specific campaign or defined more generically (e.g., three Web site visits in two days). I found this the most interesting capability in the system, because it fills a middle ground between summarizing all activities and providing the item-by-item detail. It does depend on marketing setting up the definitions, rather than letting sales people create their own. But, then again, how many salespeople really want to do that?

- a “lead feed” feature that can send “interesting moment” alerts via RSS, SMS, email, iPhone and other mobile devices. Sales people can select the individuals and accounts to monitor and the types of activities that trigger alerts.

- an option to send emails and add prospects to Marketo campaigns.

- ability to track anonymous Web visits within the sales person’s territory, using IP lookup to identify the visiting company and location. This can be integrated with Demandbase and Jigsaw to download the names of contacts at those firms. The system can also open a window to LinkedIn to let the sales rep find network contacts of her own.

It’s irresistible to compare Sales Insight with Eloqua Prospect Profiler, launched two weeks ago (see my review), which also gives sales people access to prospect activities gathered by the marketing system. The products are designed around slightly different scenarios: while Marketo starts with a list to help the sales rep decide who to call, while Eloqua aims to help the rep understand a prospect she has already selected. Still, both systems provide views into the data and both let salespeople receive alerts about prospect activities.

There are some subtle differences. Marketo is a Force.com application that works only with Salesforce.com, while Eloqua works with several CRM products. Eloqua lets sales people define their own alerts rather than relying on marketing to predefine the “interesting moments”. Marketo lets sales reps send emails and add prospects to demand generation campaigns. Eloqua provides interesting graphs of activity trends. Marketo includes the anonymous visitor tracking.
It’s hard to say which product will be more appealing to sales people, but that probably won’t matter: any significantly attractive feature in one product will (and should) be quickly copied into the other. Competitors without any equivalent product are more at risk, but, you can bet they'll quickly add something similar if it becomes an issue.

What really matters is that these products provide an opportunity for the marketing system to integrate more deeply with sales. This is THE big industry trend right now, so much so that we’re probably due for some clever nay-saying. The attraction to vendors like Marketo and Eloqua is quite clear: they can expand the size of their installations by serving new customers within existing clients.

This could have a substantial impact on total revenues. At Marketo’s price of $49 per seat, a 20-user license would bring in another $1,000 per month. (Genius.com's Genius Pro, a somewhat similar tool that helps sales people track prospect activities, is also priced at $49 per seat.)Compare this with maybe $2,000 per client per month earned by most demand generation vendors. Figures like these radically change the economics of the demand generation business. They also explain why some vendors have been willing to sell to new clients at very low prices.

But these figures also raise the specter of sales automation vendors moving in the other direction. An average Salesforce.com seat is around $100 per month these days. From the Salesforce.com viewpoint, adding marketing automation for $1,000 to $2,000 per month per client isn't particularly exciting. But if that same application also justified another $49 for each seat, you're starting to talk real money.

Of course, this has always been the threat inherent in demand generation vendors’ symbiotic relationship with CRM in general and Salesforce.com in particular. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s just a matter of time before sales automation and demand generation / marketing automation do merge – and it will almost certainly be sales systems swallowing the marketing vendors, not the other way around.

That will put the business marketing world pretty much where consumer marketers have already landed: most companies will use the marketing features of their CRM vendors, except for a relatively small number of businesses with marketing needs so advanced that they can really need the special features of a “best of breed” system.

In support of this view, it’s worth noting that demand generation systems for small businesses already routinely include their own sales automation system. This integrated model will likely filter up into larger companies, even as CRM vendors add marketing automation features and move down from above. Vendors offering just marketing automation or just sales automation will be trapped in the middle – rarely a pleasant place for a vendor to be.

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