Your Sales Pipeline and Nimble CRM

Previously I discussed how to use Mailchimp to nurture relationships with your list. This is the first level of contact with people. At the next level, you've sparked some conversations, and soon someone expresses an interest in speaking with you. Now it's time to look at your sales pipeline and Nimble CRM.

There are many CRM's out there, so why nimble?

I've looked at a lot of CRM's. Most of them are either too robust and costly, while we don't need that, and the learning curve on top of the cost renders the options useless.

On the other side of the spectrum you have many CRM's that require you to do a lot of the "heavy lifting." By heavy lifting I mean digital heavy lifting. You need to copy and paste conversations, or forward e-mails. You need to log notes, and often times, you need some other system to create reminders about following up with people.

Then you have the CRM's that try to be all things to all people, and we know how that goes. You wind up with part of several solutions, but no one good solution for any of the pieces.

The reason I like Nimble, is ease of use, price point, and the Nimble widget. Nimble is a cloud based CRM, and they have a widget (extension) that you can install in chrome. This extension allows you to use nimble alongside ANY page you have open in your browser.

The other reason I like Nimble is that it does all of that digital heavy lifting for me. I connect my e-mail to nimble, and then, while I am looking at a contact, I can see all of the communications that I've had with that prospect, all in one place. This includes e-mail and all social media.

In short I get a dossier on any individual I am talking to, so I know exactly what we've been talking about, and I have all of the context I need.

There are also many powerful tools and integrations, including an integration with Mailchimp. I can create segments of contacts based on certain criteria, and then I can select everyone in that segment, and tell Nimble to push them into a specified list in Mailchimp. I can also send e-mails from Nimble to multiple contacts, and they go out as individual e-mails, so they're less likely to be trapped in spam filters.

Nimble has e-mail templates you can create with merge tags. This really comes in handy with my sales pipeline, as many requests coming in, are essentially for the same thing. I can apply a template, and then customize my response further if needed, or I can just send.

To manage prospects, I use a tag called "prospects." In two clicks, I can filter my contacts to those tagged as prospects, and then I can sort by last contacted. Nimble knows this, because it has my e-mail and social media connected.

Next I can select everyone I haven't contacted in (eg) 30 days, and send them an e-mail using a template with merge tags, so they are addressed by name. Doing this has saved me so much time, and and earned me a lot of business.

For me, I really don't care about "deals" and assigning values and probabilities. I have no time for that. I just need to know whom to follow up with and when. Nimble does a beautiful job of this, while giving me the context I need, so I don't need to worry about documenting what we've discussed, and when. All of the information I need is right there.