Jon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. “We are effectively Salesforce but social,” he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla.
Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle).
“We have spent time interviewing their dev team,” says Ferrara. “A lot of the stuff they are talking about, they don’t have. Even if they were to build a product, their margins are razor-thin and they are getting hammered.”
Not only is Ferrara talking to Salesforce’s dev team, he just hired away the product director who made Chatter Mobile, Jason McDowall, who will now head up the team building Nimble’s mobile apps.
Nimble isn’t going up against Salesforce head-on. That would be stupid. Instead, it is trying to nail the social component of business communications. Nimble is an enterprise social platform built around contacts, calendars, and communications (both internal and external). It ties together email with social streams (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and puts it all into one interconnected database.
“CRM tools are not about communications,” says Ferrara. “It is a management tool, a way for managers to keep a hand around the neck of managers. CRM doesn’t tell you anything, you have to tell it everything.”
A better way to think of Nimble is as a social contact and communications database which ties into other enterprise and social services. Today, it pulls in messages from Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. With its next release, it will pull integrate with HubSpot (which turns website visitors into sales leads), Infochimps (datasets), and WuFoo (online forms).
The list of planned integrations includes Get Satisfaction, Yammer, Zendesk, Assistly, Quickbooks, and Freshbooks.
The more data Nimble can ingest about your customers, the more it can do with that data in the future. Ferrara’s goal is to make Nimble the “Pandora of contacts”—you put in two names, and it will spit put other contacts like those people. It will ingest your company’s social graph and tell you who you are close to, who is slipping away, and who you should be talking to that you are not.
For Ferrara, this goes way beyond CRM. “Hiring a social media person for the company won’t work,” he says. “The conversation is so vast everyone needs to be a part of it.”
Ferrara built Nimble with $2 million of his own money and 20 developers over two years. He just recently raised a $1 million seed round from Mark Cuban, Google Ventures, and others.
Nimble is still in beta and about to roll out a major upgrade in February which it will start charging for (first 500 people to register here will get 90 days free).
Nimble is a Web Based SaaS platform that helps small businesses attract and retain customers by enabling their team to work more effectively together and stay top of mind with their prospects and customers. Nimble was designed to enable small business to attain the same benefits larger companies have achieved with their CRM strategies without the associated costs and complexities. Nimble CRM combines the power of relationship management, unified conversations/communications, social media tools, and team Collaboration under one roof....
Salesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company that provides business software on a subscription basis. The company is best known for its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, and went public in June 2004. Salesforce has been a pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through its innovative AppExchange directory of on-demand applications, and its Force.com “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) API for extending Salesforce.
HubSpot, Inc. offers an all-in-one marketing software platform for small and medium sized businesses. Over 4,000 companies in 31 countries use HubSpot software to increase the number of visitors to their website and convert more of those visitors to leads and customers. Applications in the software platform include website management, blogging, search engine optimization, lead management, marketing analytics, email marketing, landing pages, and social media monitoring. HubSpot is also the developer of the popular website analysis...
Wufoo is an Internet application that helps anybody build amazing online forms. When you design a form with Wufoo, it automatically builds the database, backend and scripts needed to make collecting and understanding your data easy, fast and fun. Because we host everything, all you need is a browser, an Internet connection and a few minutes to build a form and start using it right away.
Infochimps’ mission is to make the world’s data more accessible. Infochimps helps companies understand their data. We provide tools and services that connect their internal data, leverage the power of cloud computing and new technologies such as Hadoop, and provide a wealth of external data sets, which organizations can connect to their own data. The Infochimps goal is to democratize the world’s access to structured data. We make data more usable and more valuable — through tools and systems...
Yammer is an enterprise social network, providing a secure way for employees to communicate, collaborate, and share information. The company was founded by David Sacks formerly the COO of PayPal. Yammer grew out of the genealogy app Geni as a way for organizations to communicate. Employees using Yammer can discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where...
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