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 is on a mission to replace the world’s annoying, interruptive marketing with marketing that people love. HubSpot software is the most powerful, tightly integrated and comprehensive marketing software available, putting personalized inbound marketing into the hands of any business. Over 8,000 companies in 56 countries use our software to create lovable inbound marketing to attract, nurture and convert leads into an accelerating stream of new customers and revenue. HubSpot is also the developer of the popular website...
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 helps businesses unlock the value of their data with unprecedented speed, scale and flexibility. The Infochimps Platform is an innovative managed cloud service that streamlines building and managing complex Big Data environments, and distills analytics to deliver actionable intelligence faster. With Infochimps, companies can feel confident that they have the fastest way to deploy Big Data environments in public, virtual private, or private clouds. Infochimps is a privately held, venture-backed company with offices in Austin, TX and the...
Yammer (www.yammer.com) is an Enterprise Social Network that brings together employees, content, conversations, and business data in a single location. Built for the entrprise and loved by users, Yammer empowers employees to be more productive by enabling them to collaborate in real-time across departments, geographies, and business applications. Employees can create groups to collaborate on projects and share and edit documents. It is a new way of working that fosters team collaboration, employee engagement, and business transformation. The service can...
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