Nimble CRM Introduces Prospector For One-Click Contact Information Discovery

Nimble CRM, an innovative integrator of social platform and CRM data into popular office productivity suites, introduced a tool Thursday that puts almost anyone's contact information directly in front of the user.

Nimble Prospector displays in the corner of the screen email addresses and phone numbers of people encountered on LinkedIn, Facebook, inboxes or news articles.

Nimble founder and CEO Jon Ferrara, who helped pioneer CRM technology at GoldMine Software, said the new offering is intended to facilitate the often-difficult process of first connecting to prospective customers, or anyone else a small-business employee is interested in meeting.

[Related: Google's G Suite Gets Collaboration Upgrades]

Cloud-based office productivity suites, especially G Suite and Office 365, are the operating systems of modern businesses, Ferrara said.

Nimble unifies that "operating system around your business," he said, culling conversations and prior activities, mapping identity, importing data and synchronizing the entire history of interactions. "Then you can take that with you back inside your inbox or anywhere you're working," Ferrara said.

With Prospector, users just need to highlight a first and last name, as well as the individual's business domain (which the software suggests) to help Nimble's AI engine make an accurate identification.

Nimble then pulls addresses and phone numbers from business data repositories it subscribes to and accesses through APIs.

Prospector enhances the company's core customer-relationship product that ingests data from productivity tools such as email, calendars and contact lists, and integrates information from social platforms like LinkedIn, as well as sales and marketing platforms like Salesforce, to put comprehensive customer profiles and contact histories in front of users.

The startup, based in Santa Monica, Calif., launched a channel program in July to align with more solution providers in the Microsoft and Google channels. Since then, it's been selected to participate in Microsoft's Accelerator program that helps mature startups scale their businesses globally.

Van Murray, CEO of NeoCloud, a solution provider based in Raleigh, N.C., that's bundling Nimble's software into its Office 365 deployments, said Prospector gives solution providers a truly differentiated capability to offer their clients.

"Having a fully integrated CRM and all the tools, contact management, and now Prospector, in my view, it's an outbound prospector's dream," Murray told CRN.

Nimble's CRM, contact history and now contact discovery solutions benefit by bringing information directly into the user's email environment, where most outbound sales professionals still spend most of their working day, he added.

"The aggregation of contact information from different sources, the idea that you could have in seconds a one-click lookup for a contact, to me that's pretty differentiating. I don’t know of any other tool that does that," Murray told CRN.