How to Transform and Grow Your CSP Practice Using Nimble + Microsoft Office 365

This is the second webinar of a three-part series designed to help CSP and MSP partners build your digital transformation practice and modernize your go-to-market strategy using Nimble CRM + Office 365.

Eamon Moore, CEO and founder of Hikari Data Solutions and former Microsoft Partner of the Year for Small & Midmarket Cloud Solutions for his previous company EMIT Solutions shares the steps he’s taken to transform Hikari and build his digital transformation practice.  

Jon Rivers, President of Marketing Monarchs, and Nimble executives Jon Ferrara and Kevin Turner talk about the impacts of the data-driven buyer on partner channel marketing and why Microsoft partners transform themselves in order to digitally transform their customers.  

The Modern Buyer Journey

How can you ensure you’re top-of-mind with self-directed, data-driven buyers?

A McKinsey Consumer Journey study found that consumers experience a trigger or pain that starts a circular buying decision process with four primary phases: initial consideration; active evaluation; purchase; and postpurchase.

As a Microsoft Channel Partner selling digital transformation, you need to be top-of-mind with your customers, your prospects and their influencers throughout the entire customer journey.  Identify their pain points and figure out how you can help them. Differentiate yourself by giving your knowledge away on a daily basis, and focus on building your brand and growing your network. Develop and nurture those relationships to earn their trust, because people don’t want to buy from a salesperson, they want to buy from a trusted adviser.

Jon Ferrara“Your network is your net worth. Your personal brand along with your professional network will help you achieve your ambitions in life, and hopefully, those ambitions include helping other people grow. Because if you enter into every customer engagement with the intent to help that customer grow, then you can’t help but grow.” – Jon Ferrara

How to Transform Your Practice with Nimble

According to Eamon, the reality is that most businesses have siloed sales and marketing, customer service and accounting applications. Whether you use Office 365 or G Suite, every team member probably has their own contact database, so you probably don’t have a unified record of your customer relationships within the company.

Ask yourself, “How do our customers and contacts interact with us? How do we gain insights? How do we handle deals and opportunities? How do we log support tickets? Think about all of the applications you use to connect with customers, from your email system to your social media vehicles.

Is your team aware of all the interactions you’re having with the customer? There’s nothing worse than telling a customer, “We haven’t reached you in a while,” only to find out a colleague met with them last week. It can be cumbersome to try and manage all of those interactions effectively if you don’t have transparency across the company. Marketing and selling are difficult enough without trying to manage data in multiple locations.

Luckily, Nimble gives you that single source of truth. Nimble is a simple CRM that layers on top of Microsoft Office to automatically unify your email, contacts, and calendar with social sites and other business applications, creating a team relationship manager. All of your systems integrate seamlessly, giving you one place to access your contact data.

grow your csp practice with nimble and office 365

Nimble eliminates the cumbersome approach of adding leads and opportunities into a CRM system that many sales teams struggle with. With Nimble, you can add contacts and view contact information with the click of a button. The simple, smart functionality makes it easy for your salespeople to enter deals, increasing your pipeline and growth opportunities, because the easier it is, the more they deal.

Nimble provides not only CRM functionality but also sales intelligence and sales enablement. The transparent flow of data in Nimble gives you the history of customer interactions, making it easy to prepare for meetings and have more meaningful conversations. Nimble will also prompt you after every meeting to enter important information so you don’t forget key points and action items.

Eamon Moore“Before I go into meetings now, I always check Nimble to see what our customers are talking about. Because if your customer is talking about something, it’s obviously important to them. The fact that you have that knowledge when you walk into a meeting is invaluable. Now I can have an informed discussion with them, which further solidifies the relationship.” – Eamon Moore

Nimble also helps increase the value you can bring to your customers. Nimble’s data enrichment capabilities, combined with key information from your service team, finance, and other customer interactions, give your sales and business development teams a powerful tool to better serve and advise your customers on the best way to move forward for greater business success.

How to Transform Yourself with Nimble

Adopting Nimble as your team relationship manager is the first step you can take to transform yourself and create that single source of truth. Analyze where your data is today and where your precious contacts reside. Make a list of all of the products you’re using and map your data.

Within Nimble, connect your email and social accounts, and begin to import your contacts into Nimble’s central system. Once you import a contact into Nimble, Nimble will automatically map the company information as well.

Now when you need contact information, you won’t have to Google them, you can Nimble them. Nimble gives you information on who they are, where they’re from, where they work, whether they’re influential, and records every action from your email, calendars and social sites for a robust customer profile.

Nimble works with you everywhere you work, giving you background information on people and companies, and more importantly, giving you the ability to follow-up and follow-through with social and business insights and context.

Because Nimble bi-directionally synchronizes with over 160 SaaS business applications, such as ConnectWise, Xero, QuickBooks, Office and Dynamics, your information is accessible in any of your applications, giving you a universal record and complete view of each contact no matter how you work.

How to Use Nimble for Smart Social Prospecting

To find prospects you want to connect with, start by using a tool like Twitter’s TweetDeck. You can search for people, identify the companies they work for, and then add the contact and company information directly into Nimble. You can also categorize people with tags if you want to identify the source, reason, etc.

Then you can use LinkedIn to look for appropriate people within that company that might be prime targets for you to reach out to. All you have to do is hover over the person’s name, and with one click the information is automatically added to Nimble.

Jon Rivers“For me, Nimble’s smart social prospecting has made my life so much easier. Now I can easily obtain contact information so I can move to the next level. Because I’m not spending hours trying to research prospective customers, I can focus on building and nurturing those relationships.” – Jon Rivers

Once you have captured that record in Nimble, you can easily keep track of them. From a prospecting standpoint, you may not be ready to reach out to them, but you want to listen to them, gather insights and identify the right time to connect and engage. Nimble allows you to monitor their activity across social media tools so you can see everything in one place. What are they talking about? How often are they talking? What do they need help with? Then you can enter the conversation when the time is right.

Another venue for growing your practice is the IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners), a global organization that helps Microsoft partners grow, learn, and find opportunities with other partners. There are chapters across the U.S. and they typically meet on a monthly basis. They bring in expert speakers to provide education, and at the same time, it’s a great opportunity to connect with other partners to develop business opportunities and accelerate growth.

How to Grow Your Practice with Nimble

Nimble is a great way to augment your product offerings and allows you to act as a strategic advisor to help other companies expand their businesses. Plus, Nimble is easy to sell to customers and prospects with workgroups of up to 25 users.

Nimble has been endorsed by Microsoft as the simple, smart CRM for Office 365. Nimble fills the gap for companies looking for a CRM system, but not ready for Dynamics, either because they can’t afford it or they don’t have the internal resources to maintain it.

With so many small and medium-sized businesses moving to the cloud, it’s a great time to take advantage of that migration by providing CRM capabilities to these companies, because once they’re in the cloud, it’s easy for them to connect applications to that centralized data and start executing on strategies that, without that infrastructure, they couldn’t do.

Nimble also extends the value of Office 365 and G Suite, allowing you to differentiate your business from others that might also be selling Office 365. Whether you use Nimble as a way to sell to existing customers or when selling Microsoft Office to new customers, Nimble will help you grow your practice.

 Kevin Turner“In addition to providing tremendous benefits on the front end, Nimble opens the door to selling other services and products as you move forward. Nimble is a wonderful conduit to expand your business and transform your customers.” – Kevin Turner

 

Microsoft partners can learn more about transforming their practice and becoming a Nimble reseller here.