A Bright New Future for CRM
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
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.
Tyler Tate
Tyler is the user experience lead at Nutshell. He has been working on the web for a decade and is the creator of the 1KB CSS Grid. Tyler lives in London with his wife Ruth and son Galileo. You can keep up with him on Twitter.
It looks like you guys intend to build in a significant amount of customization in the sales process. How does that work itself out in the larger concepts and system?
For example, you mention “sales” a lot in these blog posts. Will the system be solely focused on a sales-oriented team or will there be flexibility to use it for more specialized needs like nonprofits (that don’t make “sales” per se, but have similar needs)?
Additionally, will that flexibility of customization impact the time needed for an organization to deploy Nutshell? Will they need to spend a lot of time setting the basics up, or will there be “pre-configurations” (or deployments, if you will) that include a core template for particular industries or needs?
Yes, we are planning on having several out-of-the-box processes that cater to specific industries and company types like you predicted. Our goal is to make Nutshell easy to get up an running, but also provide the power to fully facilitate a sales team’s ongoing needs.
At this point we are designing Nutshell for product- and service-oriented medium-size companies, and have not been considering the needs of other organisations such as non-profits. We just want to make a tool that works really well for its intended audience.