The team behind Nimble is made up of “people who are in the people business,” CMO Eric Quanstrom said. Well then, LA is just the right place for the nearly five-year-old CRM company.
Because their SaaS solution is priced relatively low ($15 per user, per month), “a variety of folks from producers to talent agencies that have found their way to our door,” Quanstrom said. But tech companies actually make up the largest percentage of the over 50,000 businesses that have used Nimble.
Tech companies and SMBs in general are avid users of Nimble. Many tech startups in particular also seem to “get” Nimble, Quanstrom said. Why? Because “Nimble’s heritage is of disrupters, so we think other disrupters respond well to our messaging; we’ve been accused of being bleeding edge.”
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CEO Jon Ferrara has a history of pioneering in the CRM world, which he first did as co-founder of GoldMine Software throughout the 90s. It’s this expertise that propelled Ferrara to establish Nimble’s CRM and differentiate it from the rest by incorporating contacts from lists, calendars, email history, social media messages and by using widgets for Gmail, Outlook and Hootsuite. Through this method, Quanstrom said Nimble essentially serves as an “automatic second brain” for its users.
An average Nimble user has over 4,000 contacts in the system - proving that living without a second brain to keep business interactions would be “a daunting task” for users. Nimble works to give every single interaction “color, insight and context on the fly,” Quanstrom said.
It’s what the Nimble team calls social listening - and the color that Nimble gives to business interactions is a powerful tool that drives sales in a changing market.
“One of the ways we establish trust is repeated interactions; brands can tap into that,” Quanstrom said. “The sales process is changing: the cold call is dead because it doesn’t serve anyone’s purposes well.”
Right now, the “world is finally starting to catch up” with the personalized sales and marketing tactics that Nimble enables. To capitalize on these growing opportunities, the team is seeking the right partner for a Series A round. Nimble’s previous investors, from a 2012 seed round, include Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis and Google Ventures. Quanstrom said the team is prepared to again expand its funding search past LA’s boundaries this year: “it’s not any big secret that institutional capital pales here in comparison to San Francisco. That cycle isn’t as prevalent as it is there.”
Because Nimble is a scrappy startup itself, the team is offering a free 2-user account to startups for 90 days. For more information, email [email protected].
