Why the Hootsuite and Nimble Integration Will Amplify Social Selling

This morning I am one of the honored few to announce the integration of Nimble app into the Hootsuite platform. If you remember, I interviewed Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, back in August where we announced our business partnership. Jon reached out to me this week with the news because he knew The Bella Buzz was a trusted source of information for our business audience. I was very honored to be one of the first to make this announcement! You can watch the video above and/or read more below.

This integration will change social selling for companies worldwide, but what does it really mean for you and I and our business? What is social selling anyway?

The Strength of Social Selling (3x Really Fast!)

Simply this, people buy from who they like or who their friends like. It’s easier to build these relationships online than ever before. Social selling also means using social profiles to have a better conversation with a potential client. (NOT stalking, simply understanding their needs before you call via reviewing their company information and posts.)

The Benefits

The Nimble app for HootSuite enables users to transform limited social profiles into complete contact records with conversation history and context. It provides sales teams and business professionals with the contact management, sales and social business capabilities they need to turn prospects into customers, and measure the effectiveness of social activities. This means no more jumping around between two browser windows, everything is in one place. (Sound familiar?)

The Nimble app allows entire business teams to view contact information, such as additional social profiles, phone number, email, bio, location and date of last contact in the HootSuite dashboard. With a simple mouse click, users can jump directly from HootSuite to the Nimble contact record and manage deeper contact details, such as viewing a complete conversation history, scheduling follow up tasks and events, logging notes, and forecasting sales. Pretty cool!

“Social media is moving beyond the early adoption by marketing and community managers to the rest of a company’s customer facing business professionals. Sales, Service and Support teams will benefit greatly by utilizing social media to enable customer engagement and social selling,” says Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite. “Through the Nimble app, business teams can now follow up with social media leads, nurture relationships in real time, and close deals easier than ever before.”

“At Nimble, we believe that effective team engagement drives relationships, and relationships drive more sales,” said said Jon Ferrara, CEO, Nimble. “Our new app integration with HootSuite will help spread social media use beyond community managers and marketers to the rest of the company. It provides business professionals with social relationship management tools that create valuable and repeatable social selling opportunities.”

Key benefits of the Nimble integration include :

  • Closed Loop Social Selling: Closed loop social selling is empowering an entire business team to stay on one page with their critical social contacts. This process involves tracking the contact from prospect to customer and the resulting ROI. Combining HootSuite’s extensive social monitoring and publishing capabilities and Nimble’s customer engagement and social selling tools will enable business teams to pinpoint and connect with key prospects and existing customers with increased relevance.
  • View Nimble Contacts in HootSuite: The Nimble integration adds context to your contacts by clearly displaying useful Nimble contact information, such as additional social profiles, background info, location, phone number, email, and most importantly, date of last contact. This information

    is pulled directly from Nimble’s contact record and conveniently displayed in your HootSuite dashboard.

  • Create Contacts in Nimble from HootSuite Conversations: If the contacts you’re engaging with in HootSuite do not already exist as Nimble records, they can be easily imported. Once a contact is added to Nimble, you and your team will be able to match additional social networks, view related connections, log conversations and other important sales data in Nimble.
  • View Contacts in Nimble: Nimble automatically combines all your business contacts, emails, social communications, and calendar activities into one unified social contact manager. Now you can jump directly from the HootSuite dashboard to the Nimble contact record to manage deeper contact details, such as seeing a complete conversation history, scheduling follow up to-do’s, logging notes and forecasting sales.
  • Nimble Automatically Maps Additional Social Profiles to a Contact: After you have imported a contact, Nimble will match additional social profiles and create a multi-dimensional contact record accessible for engagement by you and your team.
  • More here with images.

Special Deal

Please enjoy the interview with Jon above where he makes the announcement and includes our audience in a SPECIAL BELLA DEAL! That’s right! You get 90 days of Nimble FREE by mentioning you heard about it on The Bella Buzz. Click here (affiliate linky link) to experience how awesome this integration will be for your business sales team absolutely free for 90 days. This is the perfect time to take advantage of a 90-day trial while you’re ramping up for 2013. We hope you see the benefit for your business and will share your story here in the comments. Congratulations Jon and the Nimble team on an amazing accomplishment!