The Nutshell Blog

Announcing territories to organize your accounts

2011-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Today we're thrilled to announce the release of three great new features in Nutshell that make it easier to organize your contacts, accounts and leads. Over the past few weeks, we've continued our weekly release cycle, with many incremental updates and fixes, but the majority of our time has been spent on these new features.

Territories

Starting today, you can use Nutshell's powerful territory builder to define the regions that comprise your customers. Once you create these territories, Nutshell will automatically classify your leads, accounts and contacts into them. You can even use them to assign your leads to the appropriate regional teams.

For example, you can create a “New York Metro” territory that includes everything within 50 miles of New York City, or an “Asia-Pac” territory that includes Japan, China, etc.

As you add new contacts – in Nutshell or via the API – they will be placed into the appropriate territory. You could then assign all “Asia-Pac” leads to a specific team, or choose a unique sales process for “New York Metro” leads.

New filtering interface

The leads, accounts, and contacts tabs have been redesigned with a lot of new filters for organizing your data. Your chosen filters are saved for when you return to the tab.

Filter by location

The coolest new filter allows you to find your accounts by location, even if you haven’t defined any territories. With a few keystrokes, you can find every account in Colorado, every won lead in Miami, or any contacts within 25 miles of your layover in Atlanta.

We’re loving these new geographic tools, and they’re just our first step: look for them soon in our mobile apps, in updated APIs, and for even greater progress in the app.

Account & contact ownership

We noticed a pattern where many of our users were creating custom “Owner” fields on contacts and accounts, and learned that we needed to support this out of the box. You can now define an owner for all accounts and contacts – by default it’s the user who created them.

The tabs on the new contact and accounts pages let you see items owned by you or your teams, or you can get more specific with the new “Owner” filter.

Updated design for popups

Finally, we’ve brushed up our hallmark popup dialogs with smoother, more consistent buttons, and room to support ownership and territories.

New tagging features

2011-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

We’ve always worked hard to make it easy to organize your contacts, accounts and leads. Today, we’re releasing new tagging tools to make it even easier to segment items for your company’s specific needs.

Creating tags

To get started with tagging, you’ll first need to create the tags that you use to organize your data. Note that you will use different collections of tags when you’re tagging different kinds of items (e.g. contacts vs. accounts). You’ll find this page under Setup > Lists > Tags.

Add tags to accounts, contacts and leads

When you’re viewing an item, there will always be a tag bar at the top. Simply click inside of the bar and start typing a tag name. You’ll see all available tags, along with a number representing the number of other items with that tag. Once you press enter, the tag will be added, and blink green.

Using tags to organize your data

When viewing the leads, accounts, or contacts tab, with a list of items, you can use tags to filter down to items with that tag. If you’re searching on more than one tag, you can choose between items that have any or all of the filtered tags.

You may also use tags as a filter in custom reports — for example, to see all leads from a specific campaign and the ‘Stale lead’ tag.

Bulk adding & removing tags

You can use the bulk edit tool (from a custom report or the leads tab) to add or remove tags from a large number of leads. This mass editing functionality is currently unavailable for contacts and accounts, but will be built in the future.

We’re really excited about this new tool for organizing data in Nutshell. We’re continuing to build more effective ways of organizing your business — stay tuned for some upcoming features related to regions and territories!

Announcing the Nutshell Android App

2011-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

At Nutshell, we aim to provide the best mobile CRM experience. Our initial release included our iPhone app, providing on-the-go access to your leads, accounts, contacts, and activities. Soon after that, we released the world’s first mobile CRM media logging, pushing the boundaries and experimenting with the possibilities of mobile devices. We’ve received a lot of feedback from customers, and one of the top requests was for an Android app. Today, we’re pleased to announce Nutshell CRM for Android.

Now, from your Android device, you have access to all of your Nutshell leads, accounts, contacts, and activities. You can search across your data, review a lead’s timeline, schedule new activities, and create new records on the fly. If you have your Android phone, you’ll have your business’s most important sales information.

We’re moving fast, planning to release some great new features for both our Android and iPhone apps. We direct our attention towards what our customers need, so we’d love to hear any feedback you have! At Nutshell, we think the best CRM is one that’s as mobile as you are.

New sales analytics in Nutshell

2011-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

When we launched Nutshell last November, we had built four stunning reports to monitor the most important aspects of your business. In the following months, we've greatly expanded those reports, making them easier to use, more insightful, and adding brand new data.

Today we’re announcing the release of a brand new reporting tool, Sales Analytics. We’ve built six new graphs and associated metrics that provide insightful information at a glance. We think these new reports are so valuable that we’ve integrated them into the home page of the Reports tab.

All sales analytics share the same date and filter selector – by default you’ll see a rolling 30-day view of all leads and activities. Filters allow you to only see leads from specific sources, for a single product, or assigned to specific users.

The new leads metrics are a simple way of monitoring the quantity of your incoming leads.

Pipeline gives you information on the quantity and value of your open leads – use it to see how healthy your sales potential is over time.

The sales data shows your won leads, and lets you know if your win rate is going up or down (you can choose if you want to include cancelled leads in this rate).

Sales cycle analytics show the average lifespan of won leads – how long they take to close. This is particularly useful to compare across multiple products and sources.

Activity effort is our favorite so far – it shows you the number of activities your reps engage in, and compares it to the activities that actually result in won leads. You can choose if you want sent emails to be included in this data.

Leads on time is pretty obvious – it shows the percentage of leads that haven’t passed their estimated close time, and that do not have any overdue sales process steps.

We’re thrilled to release this new data – check out the knowledge base article for more information on how we calculate it. We’ve incorporated feedback from many of our customers, and we’d love to hear how these sales analytics work for you. We’re still hard at work on other updates, especially in the dashboard, activities, and the upcoming Android app. Stay tuned!

CSV import, Mailchimp, and changelog

2011-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

We've been busy this month! We released our big Google Apps integration, and we're already getting some terrific feedback. We've also rolled out some other equally great features that deserve a share of the spotlight.

CSV import

This has been our most-requested feature for several months, and we took the time to do it right. You can upload a CSV file (i.e. from Excel, Google Spreadsheet, or another CRM), then map the columns to Nutshell. A clean UI with live preview makes this a smooth experience.

Import legacy IDs to maintain relationships and map all of your old data to custom fields. Nutshell can also create new or pending leads for each import, and attempts to match existing accounts.

MailChimp integration

We'll be publishing full documentation on this soon, but we were really excited to ship this to our users. Stay tuned for the full screencast. There are three ways we work with MailChimp:

Export large groups of contacts to MailChimp lists
View MailChimp click & open events in Nutshell timelines
Add a contact to a MailChimp autoresponder upon completion of a step

Public changelog

Check out our new public changelog which is updated every time we release updates. It’s a great way to get an idea of the velocity at which Nutshell is moving forward.

Unified integrations panel

With all of our new third-party integrations, we've streamlined and unified the integration panel, to make it easier to connect Nutshell with other modern web services.

Stay tuned for more updates, including some information from our mobile team, which is hard at work on the Android app!

Announcing Google Apps integration

2011-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Nutshell for Google AppsNutshell has always supported syncing activities with your Google calendar, and today we're excited to announce a new set of integrations to work even better with Google Apps.

The most exciting feature is our Gmail Gadget, which allows you to interact with Nutshell while inside of Gmail. When viewing a message, the gadget will show you the sender’s Nutshell card – and if they aren’t in Nutshell yet, they can be added with one click.

Clicking a card from the gadget will immediately take you to Nutshell to view more information – no need to log in.

The gadget also adds one-click support to import the current message into the Nutshell timeline, without BCCing it to the Nutshell dropbox.

Nutshell for Google Apps also makes it easy to jump to your Nutshell dashboard, without an additional login step, via a universal menu item. Additionally, all of your Google Apps users can be automatically imported as Nutshell users.

We’re really excited about tighter integration with Google Apps – a tool we use ourselves. Please send us your feedback, and stay tuned for some other updates about new integrations with third parties.

Detecting and resolving duplicates

2011-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Nutshell's unique card interfaces help to prevent duplicates as you create new items. As you type in a name, Nutshell is always suggesting existing records.

Still, it’s possible to create a duplicate, especially if you use the API or an import to add contacts or accounts. We’ve recently released a new deduplication feature to help spot those cases, and to automatically merge them for you.

If Nutshell detects a duplicate, it will add a red flag to the card. Clicking this flag opens up a dialog to hide the warning, or to merge the records.

Merging duplicates

If you choose to merge a duplicate, Nutshell will merge all of the fields, preserving data from both records, even if they have multiple values (like phone numbers). The merged contact will be properly attached to any leads that the old duplicates were. In short: it just works!

More on detecting duplicates

We use the same typo-proof engine that powers our universal search to detect duplicates, so it will suggest that Andy Fowler and Andrew Fowler might be the same person. When you click Not a duplicate, we’ll use that data to improve future matches.

We’d love your feedback on how the new de-duplication feature is working for your business, and stay tuned for some really exciting feature announcements!

Wufoo integration for easy web-to-lead forms

2011-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Last week we released an update to our public HTTP POST API, making it compatible with Wufoo’s webhooks. Wufoo is a simple but clever service for building forms that can be placed on your own site, with zero coding background. Like Nutshell, they value clean user experience, and we're excited to build this and future integrations with their service.

We’ll be releasing additional documentation and screencasts to document the process, but read on for a quick overview on getting started with Wufoo + Nutshell.

Field mapping

We take the data that we receive from Wufoo and attempt to match it to the appropriate fields in Nutshell. For example, if you have a field named Company address in Wufoo, we’ll automatically create a new account with that address. You could have a hidden Wufoo field named “source” with the name of one of your Nutshell sources, and we’ll detect that. We also detect any Wufoo fields that match custom Nutshell fields.

In the future, we’ll allow you to adjust field mappings between Wufoo and Nutshell, but we’re really happy with the intelligent behavior we’ve built so far.

Connecting to Wufoo

First, log in to Nutshell’s setup section, and click the API Keys link. You’ll need to create a new API key with Form submissions privileges. After creating the API key, Nutshell will give you a URL.

Log in to your Wufoo account, and after creating a form with the fields you want to connect, add a new Notification to that form. For the application name, choose Webhook then paste in the URL you received from Nutshell. You also need to check the “Include Field and Form Structures with Entry Data” option, so we know how to process your submissions.

The World's First Mobile CRM Media Logging

2011-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Nutshell iPhone App OverviewToday, we're excited to announce the latest feature in Nutshell CRM: mobile activity logging, with full audio and video support. The most hated part of a CRM is activity logging -- especially from a clunky laptop with bad wifi.

The latest version of our iPhone app allows you to use your device to log activities via keyboard, microphone or camera. After logging an activity, you can replay the clip from any other iPhone or the Nutshell web application.

We’re really excited about what mobile audio/video media logging means to CRM – we want to make life easier for the road warriors, who until now have been stuck with clunky laptops in crowded coffeeshops. Record a 45-second clip as you walk to your car from a meeting, and show your boss how you’re on top of the lead.

Mobile Timeline

We’ve also brought our new timeline view from the web to the phone, allowing you to view an in-depth transcript of every lead, including the notes, activities and emails that make up its history.

The latest version of the iPhone app is available today from the App Store. You can use it with a Nutshell trial account, or you can simply shake the phone to log in to our live demo.

You can also check out the video above for a brief tour of the Nutshell iPhone app.

Announcing small business pricing

2011-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

When we launched Nutshell, we made our goals clear: to combine advanced CRM features like salesforce automation and advanced reporting with simple, elegant user interfaces. We’re working hard to build Nutshell to meet the needs of businesses both large and small.

To make Nutshell even more accessible, we have introduced new small business friendly pricing plans. To be clear, we are opposed to the nickel and diming practice on features found in many CRMs – especially API access – we believe that free and open access to your data is a core part of any CRM. These new small business pricing plans include full access to all of Nutshell’s capabilities.

Starting today, you’ll pay just $49/month for up to 5 users. A plan for up to 15 users is only $99/month. All of Nutshell’s pricing options are detailed on our pricing page, and we continue to offer active-user pricing for businesses with more than 100 users.

We’d love to hear your feedback on our new pricing options – thanks for your interest in Nutshell!

Announcing the timeline UI + improved email support

2011-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Since our last release, we’ve been working to solve a problem that we’ve noticed in Nutshell: sometimes you need to go multiple places to view the lifecycle of a lead. We’ve always organized items like email conversations, activities, and notes into different places.

What we’ve learned from user feedback (and our own usage of Nutshell) is that it’s often more useful to see an entire stream of activity. Today we released our new timeline UI, available for leads, accounts and contacts.

Timeline UI

This new interface consolidates all emails, notes and activities related to a lead into a single view. This lets you see exactly how things are progressing, whether you’re corresponding via phone, email, or just internal notes. The timeline view on a lead includes any emails to any contact or account attached to that lead.

Clicking on a timeline entry expands to show the full email content or activity dialog, without leaving the current page.

This new interface is also now a part of our pop-up account and contact interfaces, consolidating several separate tabs into one faster UI.

Quick notes & activities

At the top of the timeline UI is a new, faster way to take a note or log an activity. If you get a phone call, just start typing your notes in this field, then log it when you hang up with one click.

Email forwarding support

As always, when you’re emailing your contacts, you can BCC the message to bcc@nutshell.com to record it in Nutshell. Starting today, you can forward messages you receive from your contacts back to bcc@nutshell.com. We’ll do the work and show the original message in the timeline view, just like it was sent to you. You can now track full, two-way email conversations in Nutshell.

Additionally, you can now track internal corporate emails related to a Nutshell lead – like when you email your VP about a discount for a lead. Just include something like “Lead 1234” in the subject, or the first few lines of the body, and it will appear in the lead’s timeline.

Other updates this release

We’ve made a number of design tweaks to the process builder, making it a bit easier to use. You can also now pre-assign a step in the sales process to a specific team or user, no matter who the lead is assigned to.

Our pop-up contact and account dialogs are taller, making them easier to browse, and we’ve updated dozens of other parts of Nutshell.

Future updates (including the iPhone)

Nutshell has a lot of exciting features in the pipeline, and in the next week we’ll be announcing some huge new features on the Nutshell iPhone app. Stay tuned!

As always, we have an instant live demo showing off all the latest Nutshell features.

Launch the demo now To see Nutshell for yourself

New features and process builder video

2011-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Process management basics Since our last update, we've been hard at work on Nutshell CRM, working on some incremental improvements, as well as some keystone features that are on schedule for the next few weeks. I've been collaborating with Tyler Tate — our user experience lead — on some big updates to the lead timeline and on a new mass-update tool that you'll see soon.

We also created a video that provides more information on our process builder. While it doesn't cover some of the advanced features, it's a great 4-minute overview to see what's possible. Nutshell iPhone developer Andrew Sardone guest-narrates.

Here’s a look at some of the new features we released this week.

Report downloads

We've worked hard to build live, responsive reports that always display the data you choose. Until now, you could only view those reports — with live charts and summaries — in your browser. We've added a new feature to download the current custom report as a CSV file. This file can be opened in Excel, and grouped, summarized, and pivoted to your hearts delight. This report can also contain any custom fields that you've created for your leads.

Upload your own logo & images

You may have noticed that our demo has a custom logo, and many of the contacts & and accounts in the demo have unique icons. You can now upload a photo to any account or contact, and you can upload your logo to make Nutshell feel more like a part of your company. Soon, we’ll be adding these images to the iPhone app.

Optimized list view of contacts

When working with an account that has a large number of contacts, we now display a cleaner list view of those contacts. When the account only has a few contacts, you'll see the blue contact cards you're familiar with.

Other new features

In addition to the above, we’ve made dozens of new tweaks, bugfixes and improvements.

Leads can now be reopened
See a lead’s contact name in various lists, if there is no account name
Filter and sort options are now preserved when you return to a list of leads
Smoother experience when editing addresses, emails, and phone numbers
Better feedback when a step is being completed

We’re working hard to continually make Nutshell better, through a smooth user experience and open access to your data. Please contact us if you have any suggestions. Thanks!

Happy new year: new features in Nutshell

2011-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been 6 weeks since our exciting launch event in New York. Since then we’ve been talking with many of you, working with users trialling Nutshell, hiring more savvy people to answer our phones and most importantly: continuing to improve Nutshell with new features and a better user experience.

After a year of under-wraps development, it’s great to share new things as soon as we release them. We’ve been releasing updates to Nutshell on a weekly basis, and we’ll be sharing those highlights more often on this blog. Here’s what’s new.

Email BCC Integration

Nutshell has a hearty email storage and cross-referencing system at its core, but many of the email import features weren’t production-ready at launch time, so we tucked them away. Two weeks ago we released the first iteration for our own usage, and it’s currently being used by many of our early adopters.

As of today, any time you send an email to a contact or account, BCC it to bcc@nutshell.com and we’ll attach the message to the appropriate place. When you view a recipient in Nutshell, you’ll see all messages that have been sent to them.

We’ve got a lot of additional plans for this feature, including the ability to track internal emails you send regarding a lead, and to capture messages sent from a lead to you. Email is going to play a huge role in some of Nutshell’s upcoming features — watch this space!

HTTP POST API

We heard from many of our early adopters who were looking for a dead-simple way of adding leads to Nutshell without using our more powerful SOAP and JSON-RPC APIs. Many of these users were hosting forms on platforms where they were unable to run their own code, or were using third-party form managers like Wufoo.

We responded by building a POST API that allows you to create new leads, accounts and contacts with nothing more than a form post. After posting to our servers, we can redirect your leads to another page that you specify. Several of our early adopters are already using this API for simple web-to-lead forms on their own sites.

API Documentation

We’ve been hard at work building easy-to-use documentation on our APIs, including the brand new POST API. As of today, you can browse our full API documentation suite. We’ll be building upon this documentation, and providing actual code samples. Our open API is one of the most important parts of Nutshell, so please let us know how we can improve its documentation.

Other Improvements

Since our launch, we’ve made hundreds of tweaks, fixes and performance improvements to our web and iPhone apps. Some of these include:

Improved email and iPhone push notifications
A brand new time interface for scheduling activities
New interfaces for managing large product catalogs, and products with long names
An indicator of a contact or account’s timezone and local time (based on their address)
Easier integration with Google Calendar
Better sorting and pull-to-refresh on the iPhone leads list

Our network team continues to improve our cloud architecture with additional servers to support our fully replicated and secured databases.

Roadmap

We’ve got huge plans for Nutshell, and some of these are just a few weeks from being released. We’re also hiring more developers to make sure we continue to accelerate our pace. Shortly we’ll be upgrading the lead timeline view, so you can view all relevant notes, emails and activities in one place. We’re making reports faster and more insightful, and adding better custom field support.

Our mobile team is working on some really exciting features that we can’t announce just yet, but they’ll connect activity editing with some of the iPhone’s unique multimedia features…

Thanks for taking an interest in Nutshell. 2011 is going to be huge — we can’t wait to show off more of what we’ve got planned! Happy new year.

Nutshell launches in NYC: A Recap

2010-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

It's been an exciting week for the Nutshell team. We've been in New York City officially launching the company in front of about 500 of our peers at Future of Web Design.

The announcement

On Monday, Andy Fowler (our lead developer) and I went on stage at the end of the conference to make the big announcement. We shared some of the key tenets of our development strategy including cross-platform design, building the API first, and prototyping on paper. Here's the video and slides.

The party

After the conference, most of the attendees headed to the after party that we were sponsoring at a great venue called Touch. Our CEO, Guy Suter, gave a brief welcome announcement and shared why we chose to launch at a web design conference rather than a sales event (video, photos).

Design and development techniques

On Tuesday Andy and I took to the stage for a second time to share a bit more about how Nutshell was created. We started by giving a quick live demonstration of a few of Nutshell's core tasks, from creating a lead, to using the sales process, to viewing a report (you can watch the Nutshell demo for a similar walkthrough).

After the brief tour, Andy explained a few of our front-end development strategies, including HTML5, LESS CSS, Jekyll, and Git, which he's nicely summarized in an earlier blog post.

Thank you

We are incredibly excited that Nutshell is now officially launched, and we couldn't think of a better way to celebrate than by buying a few drinks for our peers. Many thanks to Carsonified for inviting us to their conference.

You can also read the press release announcing our launch.

Live from FOWD: Front-end development strategies

2010-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

HTML5

We decided from the very beginning that Nutshell would use the HTML5 doctype, and we borrowed a lot of great techniques from the HTML5 Boilerplate project, with the Modernizer library to help us along. We quickly realized that the HTML5 inner shiv patch was necessary to get older browsers to work with HTML5 elements added to the page by JavaScript. We also found the data attribute (now supported natively in jQuery) to be really useful for passing metadata to JavaScript.

LESS CSS

LESS proved to be an extremely valuable tool for us. While it was originally created in Ruby, we used LessPHP for the web application, and Less.js for our marketing site. Less offers many great extensions to vanilla CSS, including variables, mixins, and operations. This is what the LESS syntax looks like:

Here are some of the especially useful mixins that we put together:

Jekyll and Git

For our marketing site, we decided to use Jekyll rather than a full-blown content management system. It works terrifically for our environment where coders are maintaining the site. We push to our Git repository, which compiles the site in Jekyll and Less.js, then uploads it to our web servers. Take a look at the Less.js - Jekyll plugin we wrote, that compiles our Less for us.

Introducing the future of CRM

2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

For the last 12 months, we’ve been tirelessly building a powerful new sales tool. And today, we’re introducing the world to the future of CRM: Nutshell is officially launching at the Future of Web Design conference in New York City.

While most existing CRMs were built before Wikipedia, Google, and smartphones even existed, Nutshell takes advantage of modern technology and leading design techniques to make managing your sales effort more efficient than ever before. Check out Nutshell.com, view the demo, and download the iPhone app from the App Store to experience Nutshell for yourself.

Not only does Nutshell make it incredibly easy to keep up with your leads and contacts, but it also provides one-of-a-kind tools for managing your company’s sales process. Sales managers can use Nutshell’s visual process builder to create their own sales processes using steps and milestones that can trigger actions, require input, and much more.

If you’re attending the conference – or just happen to be in New York – drop by our launch party this evening for a drink on us!

CRM is broken #2: multi-step wizards

2010-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

If any software application requires you to use a multi-step wizard to accomplish a basic task, it’s a good sign that it’s over complicating things.

The same goes for generating a report. Having to use a wizard means it will take minutes to walk through all of the required steps. And once you finally see the generated report and realize you need to change just one thing — well, have fun going through that wizard all over again.

Shouldn’t you be able to build a report in seconds with just a few clicks? Shouldn’t you be able to see the report update instantly with each new modification?

Don’t let bad software slow down your sales effort.

CRM is broken #1: lead or opportunity?

2010-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Many CRMs have two tiers for tracking potential deals, often divided into “opportunities” and “leads.” The problem is that no one knows which is which. Ask someone from your team to explain the difference and you’ll probably get as many different answers as there are sales reps.

It starts getting complicated when you need to pull up a potential sale from last year with that tomato extract company. Was it an opportunity or a lead? Who knows what Bill from EMEA called it, so you’ll have to search two different areas instead of just one.

And the trouble doesn’t end with searching — reporting and performance tracking also become inaccurate when there are fuzzy definitions.

Wouldn’t it be better if a lead was just a lead? Wouldn’t you rather have one place to look instead of two?

Don’t let bad software slow down your sales effort.

Helvetica Neue Font Weights

2010-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Until recently web browsers have supplied only two options for specifying the weight of a font—normal and bold—allowing for no subtly in between.

But today I noticed that Safari 4+, FireFox 3+, and Chrome on the Mac now all provide support for multiple font weights. At Nutshell we happen to use Helvetica Neue as our primary font, which comes with 5 different font weights: UltraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold.

Accessing these various weights in is now as simple as setting font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; and font-weight to between 100 and 600, as demonstrated below:

View this demo in your browser

It’s worth noting that the browser only exposes the font weights that are available in the font itself. For instance, changing the font from “Helvetica Neue” to plain old “Helvetica” would reduce the available font weights back to just normal and bold.

These additional font-weights are not supported in Opera or Internet Explorer, and we have not yet tested Safari, FireFox, or Chrome on Windows.

What are you waiting for? Start taking advantage of all those extra weights!

Paper & Ink: Sketching Nutshell

2010-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

What does building a brand new CRM for medium-sized businesses look like?

Way before pushing our first pixel, we listened to people recount their frustrations with CRMs on the market today. We had long discussions about how we wanted to both empower sales people to do their job more efficiently, and enable the business to control and codify the sales process. We spent long sessions in front of the whiteboard, and days sketching out and talking through these ideas.

Now in the final stages of development (eying a launch later this year), we thought it as good a time as any to show you a few of those early sketches.

Viewing a Lead

An early focus of our sketching, the first screen we coded, and the recipient of ongoing TLC, we're really proud of the lead screen. Not only does it tell you the accounts, contacts, products, and competitors associated with your lead (and let you add new ones really, really easily), but it even guides you step-by-step through the sales process. It tells you about the activities you have coming up, lets you quickly add notes and files, and even provides a complete audit trail.

Managing the Sales Process

If you're like most organisations, each of your company's leads probably have certain steps to go through before the deal is won. Ever wished your CRM could help facilitate that process? Nutshell boasts a very powerful process builder that gives the sales director the power to create comprehensive processes, complete with input requirements, prerequisites, and delays. We'll admit: it's a hard interface to pull off (none of our competitors have), but we're confident that we got it right.

Accounts, Contacts, Activities

Ever had trouble navigating a website? We certainly have. Sprawling links and confusing interfaces abound on the web. When designing Nutshell, we took extra care to make it straightforward to use, and that includes an innovative technique for keeping things like accounts, contacts, and activities contextual to what you're working on. We don't want to give away too many secrets, but we're sure that you're going to love it when you see it.

Reports

Not only does Nutshell help the salesman do his job better, but it also provides the sales director a birds-eye view of the team's performance. Last quarter's total sales? Easy. Pipeline for this quarter? No problem. Won leads from the past 12 months worth over $50,000 for widget X? Sure, why not. You even get charts and graphs and the ability to export your data. We think you'll like it.

iPhone

Oh yeah, did we mention we're building an iPhone app as well? Unlike our competitors, Nutshell has actually been designed from day one to be cross-platform. From our API to our user interface conventions to our cloud infrastructure, mobile is part of who we are. And when you log a sales call between the car and the office, we know you'll appreciate having a CRM that goes everywhere you do.

Stay Tuned

You can bet that if we get this excited sharing a few pieces of paper with you, we can't wait to show you the real thing. We're heads-down in final development now, but keep an eye out for the new CRM on the block later this year. In fact, give us your email address over at Nutshell.com and we'll send you an invite to our upcoming beta when it's ready!

Fidelity in Design: Nutshell on UX Booth

2010-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

People swear by their design process. Rachel Glaves insists on sketching by hand; Dan Brown urges extensive wireframing; while Ryan Singer goes straight to HTML. Heated debates arise at conferences as advocates staunchly defend their favorite techniques.

With all of these different methods to choose from, should you be sketching, wireframing, mocking-up, or prototyping? The answer, simply put, is yes you should.

Design methods are not mutually exclusive. Rather, each method exists on a continuum of fidelity, ranging from low fidelity sketches to high fidelity HTML prototypes. Each method is well-suited for a particular phase of the design process, with one level of fidelity often leading into the next.

Nutshell user experience lead Tyler Tate outlines how we utilize sketches, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes in designing the Nutshell CRM. Read the whole post on UX Booth.

Automated iPhone Builds

2010-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

At Nutshell, we’re a small team juggling a lot of different tasks. Automating key processes really helps us move quickly and stay focused. As Andy mentioned, we’re leveraging Hudson as our continuous integration server to handle builds and deployment, including for our iPhone app.

Why automate iPhone builds?

Hudson can poll our central Git repository’s master branch for changes. With each commit it runs through the iPhone app’s test suite and builds, packages and deploys an internal iPhone app to our shared Dropbox folder. At that point, every team member can install the app onto their phone and bask in its glory (or bugs, depending on how early it is in the development cycle).

Hudson setup

You can do a lot with Hudson, but for now, with respect to our iPhone app, its sole job is to run a straightforward build script when changes are pushed to the Git repo. Since the Xcode tools and iPhone SDK are required to build the app, we have a Hudson node running on a Mac Mini to handle the job.

Build script

Our build script is the meat of the Hudson job. It lives within our app’s source tree, under ./Scripts/ContinuousIntegration/build.sh. The ContinuousIntegration directory represents an aggregate target we created within our Xcode project, which simply runs the same script.

Taking influence from this Stack Overflow answer, we’ve created a build script to:

Unlock the Keychain that holds our iPhone Developer Certificate.
Build and run the Xcode target which holds our test suite, entitled LogicTests. If this suite doesn’t pass, then the script exits with a nonzero, failing status.
Build our application target, Nutshell
Package an iPhone app archive that’s installable on our internal devices.
Copy the archive to our Dropbox share so we can all access it.

With all of this, sharing a runnable app with any Nutshell team member is as easy as git push origin master.

In a future post, I’ll outline what’s needed to have your continuous integration server build an App Store submission, determine and set release numbers, as well as how unit and integration testing fits into an iPhone app’s development cycle.

A Bright New Future for CRM

2010-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

We've been putting together a small slide deck explaining what's wrong with customer relationship management (CRM) as we know it, and how Nutshell is getting it right. Fortunately for us, there's a whole lot of room for improvement.

CRM is Broken

Sales software is in a pretty dire state. The current CRM market offers dated, difficult-to-use products that don't work as well as they should. Specifically:

Poor Usability
CRMs have added one complicated feature after another, but continually fail at making software usable.
Double Entry
People must schedule events in Outlook, then re-enter the same activities in the CRM.
Painful Reporting
It takes a computer scientist to generate a meaningful report with most CRMs.
Unstructured Data
CRMs don’t provide enough structure to accommodate common data such as products and competitors.
Difficult Setup
CRMs often take a full-time professional weeks of installation, followed by ongoing maintenance.
Shared Usernames
CRMs encourage sales teams to share accounts, hurting accountability and personalization.

We think we can do better.

Technological Progress

The last decade saw the rise of the smartphone, social networking, and rich web applications. That’s where we come in. Unlike other CRMs on the market, we take full advantage of modern tools and technologies to make CRM both more useful and more usable.

Access Anywhere

On your phone while you take the elevator, on your iPad during your cab ride, or on your laptop at the cafe. Nutshell is hosted in the cloud and provided as software as a service, so it’s accessible everywhere. And with our native iPhone app, Nutshell is as mobile as you are. (You can even use it at the office.)

Managing the Sales Process

Every good sales team has a process. Nutshell facilitates that sales process by putting you in control. Define milestones and steps — complete with actions, delays, prerequisites and forms — to build, manage, and monitor the perfect sales process for your organization.

Powerful Reporting

From historic sales reporting, to sales forecasting, to advanced custom reports, always know exactly where your business stands with Nutshell.

Cloud Infrastructure

Each of our data centers in America and Europe are a high-availability cluster. Put together, they offer transatlantic redundancy and 99.999% uptime.

Be In Control of Your Data

With our full-featured API, you can integrate Nutshell with existing business systems and third party tools.

A Good Digital Citizen

There’s no need to reinvent your organization’s email, calendaring, and security models. Nutshell tightly integrates with your organization’s current technology.

Who We Are

Nutshell’s board boasts years of business, technology, and sales experience. Operating out of Ann Arbor and London, the Nutshell team includes specialists in business management, design, software development, and network infrastructure.

What's in Store

We are busy building Nutshell and look forward to showing you more in the near future. If you're ready to turn your department into a sales dream team, then watch this space.

In a Nutshell

2010-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Welcome to the Nutshell development blog. Here, our team will be telling the story of how we’re building Nutshell. We’ll share specifics like our experimentation with UI design patterns, the best practices of integrating with Microsoft Exchange, or the lessons we learn in collaboration. We’ll also begin to give a few peeks into the applications we’re building. Sure, maybe we’ll generate some buzz along the way, but more importantly, we want to show you how carefully we’re crafting Nutshell. We think that if you can see all the thought that goes into every decision we make, you’ll get as excited as we are.

What is Nutshell?

It’s a tool for businesses to manage their customers and sales. The industry would call it a CRM, and we’ll accept that label – we’re chomping at the bit to compete against some of the biggest CRMs out there. But as we begin to show off some bits and pieces of Nutshell, you’ll see that it does more than that. In particular, we’re excited about the process management tools that are at Nutshell’s core: enforceable todo lists that keep every employee on the same page.

Nutshell is a web application and a mobile application. We’re designing an iPhone interface in tandem with the web, allowing each interface to inspire the other, while taking advantage of their niches. And from day 1, Nutshell also provides SOAP and JSON-RPC APIs to fit into existing systems.

Who is Nutshell?

We’re a team of developers, designers and network engineers, many of whom have already collaborated on some very successful projects. Tyler Tate, our user experience lead, is guiding the team through every user interface from sketches on a whiteboard to finely-tuned pixel-accurate code. I’m working with our developers to bring those interfaces to life, and to handle every other bump along the way: translation, 3rd-party integration, and API development. Our network team has experience managing terabytes of data across multiple continents, and is building the cloud architecture to host Nutshell swiftly and securely.

Coming Up

Watch this space for updates on a variety of topics: job opportunities at Nutshell, technology previews, and anything else that’s currently on our minds.

The Nutshell Blog

Announcing territories to organize your accounts

Territories

New filtering interface

Filter by location

Account & contact ownership

Updated design for popups

New tagging features

Creating tags

Add tags to accounts, contacts and leads

Using tags to organize your data

Bulk adding & removing tags

Announcing the Nutshell Android App

New sales analytics in Nutshell

CSV import, Mailchimp, and changelog

CSV import

MailChimp integration

Public changelog

Unified integrations panel

Announcing Google Apps integration

Detecting and resolving duplicates

Merging duplicates

More on detecting duplicates

Wufoo integration for easy web-to-lead forms

Field mapping

Connecting to Wufoo

The World's First Mobile CRM Media Logging

Mobile Timeline

Announcing small business pricing

Announcing the timeline UI + improved email support

Timeline UI

Quick notes & activities

Email forwarding support

Other updates this release

Future updates (including the iPhone)

New features and process builder video

Report downloads

Upload your own logo & images

Optimized list view of contacts

Other new features

Happy new year: new features in Nutshell

Email BCC Integration

HTTP POST API

API Documentation

Other Improvements

Roadmap

Nutshell launches in NYC: A Recap

The announcement

The party

Design and development techniques

Thank you

Live from FOWD: Front-end development strategies

HTML5

LESS CSS

Jekyll and Git

Introducing the future of CRM

CRM is broken #2: multi-step wizards

CRM is broken #1: lead or opportunity?

Helvetica Neue Font Weights

Further reading

Paper & Ink: Sketching Nutshell

Viewing a Lead

Managing the Sales Process

Accounts, Contacts, Activities

Reports

iPhone

Stay Tuned

Fidelity in Design: Nutshell on UX Booth

Automated iPhone Builds

Why automate iPhone builds?

Hudson setup

Build script

A Bright New Future for CRM

CRM is Broken

Technological Progress

Access Anywhere

Managing the Sales Process

Powerful Reporting

Cloud Infrastructure

Be In Control of Your Data