Contact management specialist Nimble has strengthened its presence in the CRM market with the release of its Smart Contacts App with support for Microsoft Edge, the web browser developed as the successor to Internet Explorer.
The new plug-in, offered free for the standard edition, makes available the social marketing and business functionality of the contact management app directly within the Edge browser. The add-in version is available for all users of Office 365, Outlook desktop for Windows and Mac and Outlook iOS. Nimble also offers plug-ins for the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers.
A business edition, which provides access for team social sales and marketing functionalities, will be offered at $25 per user per month, and will be available for Outlook Mobile Android users within the next few months.
Jon Ferrara, CEO of Santa Monica, California-based Nimble, believes the plug-in could become a significant market disruptor by replacing market-dominating enterprise CRMs such as Salesforce as a tool for sales staff. He claims that most industry-leading products are better suited to executive-level managers and department heads than salespeople who spend their days communicating via e-mail and customer-facing social networks.
Ferrara argues that contact management should be at the core of CRM products designed for use by ordinary employees rather than managers. Instead, he says, they are really designed as reporting tools.
The Nimble app is intended to enable salespeople to call on their contact list on the go by synchronizing individual e-mails, calendars and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship management system that can be accessed directly in the browser by users of Office 365 and Outlook.
This, Ferrara says, resolves the biggest deficiency of traditional CRM systems: the dispersal of information among e-mail, contact management and calendar apps and tasks.
Nimble’s features include social profile matching and enrichment, matching social profiles for contacts and companies and automatically incorporating additional business and social details; instant business insights on people and companies by automatically building live profiles; and identification of top prospects for follow-up.
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Key Takeaways:
• Nimble believes mainstream enterprise CRM products are better suited to executive managers than ordinary sales staff.
• The Microsoft Edge plug-in makes the Nimble contact management app available to all users of Office 365, Outlook desktop for Windows and Mac and Outlook iOS.
• Ferrara says the system provides an answer to the dispersal of information among e-mail, contact management and calendar apps.