Nutshell CRM: A Quick Look

I recent­ly came across anoth­er cloud-based Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) that I found note­wor­thy: Nut­shell CRM. My first though: ​“Oh great, anoth­er wannabe CRM com­pet­ing in red oceans (a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket).” Yet the more I explored the fea­tures of Nut­shell, the more I could not believe how intu­itive and sim­ple each fea­ture was to use. I can see blue oceans ahead for this program!  The design of the user inter­face (UI) was very impres­sive. Of all the CRM pro­grams I’ve test­ed in recent years, Nut­shell seems to have the best UI. I found myself won­der­ing if the design­ers worked for Apple, since every design fea­ture was top-notch. Most CRMs I’ve test­ed start with some advanced fea­tures but not a great UI. Then as they release updates, the designs grad­u­al­ly improve. Nut­shell, on the oth­er hand, start­ed with a good UI, so I expect each update to be like updat­ing my iPhone, just more fea­tures with a qual­i­ty design. This obser­va­tion makes Nut­shell note­wor­thy to me, because they right from the start they have a qual­i­ty prod­uct with good features. The icing on the cake for me was the native iPhone mobile App that does an instant sync with the desk­top version.  Pros

• Google Apps plu­g­in to add new con­tacts or for­ward emails into Nut­shel­l’s Con­tacts (works great)
• User Inter­face is sim­ple and beautiful
• The native iPhone App is sim­ple yet pow­er­ful (two-way sync)
• Android App soon to be released
• CRM is very customizable
• Can be used as a sim­ple or advanced CRM pro­gram (lots of fea­tures if you want them, or a sim­ple Con­tact Manager)
• Report­ing and Ana­lyt­ics: easy to run reports and view (again…user inter­face is very good)
• Sales Pipeline is very orga­nized: You can cus­tomize all sorts of activ­i­ties such as when to send an email, a thank you note, fol­low up, who and when, what day, and much more
• The ​“deals” (or Oppor­tu­ni­ties) make it easy to add stan­dard­ized pric­ing. So a con­trac­tor could have set ser­vice prices i.e. Kitchen Remod­el­ing $45,000 (then adjust the price)
• Easy to set­up and start using
• Events Sync up nice­ly with your Google or Out­look Cal­en­dar (I only test­ed Google Cal­en­dar and it was instant)
• Import­ing from oth­er CRMs seems to be easy. I tried it from my CRM, High­rise and it took me a cou­ple min­utes. (btw, I still use High­rise and like it…it fits my busi­ness style perfectly)
• Cap­tures leads from your web­site and cre­ates a contact

Cons

• The iPhone App, although is awe­some, still has room for improve­ment. It does not sync with your native iPhone calendar…and I am not sure how well set­ting events on the app work with Google.
• The Task Man­ag­er works well when deal­ing with a Lead (next steps), but not great deal­ing with exist­ing clients or projects. I’ve spo­ken to Nut­shell, and they are work­ing on releas­ing a Task Man­age­ment sec­tion soon. So this ​“con” may change. Task Man­age­ment is one of the num­ber one rea­sons I con­tin­ue to use High­rise.
• To set a task, you basi­cal­ly have to cre­ate an ​“event.” So the process is not easy. This may sound minor, but for me, I use to-do lists and reminders all day long.
• The pro­gram is more geared for sales man­age­ment than for cus­tomer man­age­ment. This too is a major down­side to the cloud-based CRM. The whole pur­pose of a CRM is to man­age the ongo­ing rela­tion­ships you have with your cus­tomers. It is not a one time deal: sell them, do the job and move on. A good CRM should then take you through the next steps: cus­tomer fol­low up, cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, set­up month­ly email blast, thank you notes, etc. Although there are ways with­in Nut­shell to do some of these tasks, it is not as sim­ple as one would expect. If they improve in this one area, I believe Nut­shell will be a major threat to Zoho, Sales­force, Pipeline Deals and others.

Your Thoughts? This was just a quick, ​“nut­shell” review of Nut­shell CRM. Has any­one out there tried Nut­shell? Do you cur­rent­ly use it? A quick word of cau­tion: don’t quick­ly switch CRM pro­grams. Although com­pa­nies online are mak­ing switch­ing eas­i­er, take the time to eval­u­ate what you want your CRM to do. I would also sug­gest talk­ing to your staff about it too. Show them the program(s) you are look­ing at. Ask them to take some time eval­u­at­ing them and give you feed­back. I tend to always want a pro­gram to do some­thing bet­ter and can eas­i­ly get dis­con­tent. I’ve forced myself to stay with High­rise from 37 sig­nals. It keeps get­ting bet­ter and works for my company.