In our previous blog post about the Nimble CRM system, we gave you a brief overview of Nimble. Today we will look a little deeper into the use of tags and custom searches.

We introduced the concept of tags added to individuals’ nimble profiles in the last blog post. In Nimble they are entirely customisable, you can add any tag that you like and you can add as many tags as you like. With some careful planning, you can use the tags feature to create some powerful sorting and searchable categories of contacts.

For example, lets say we have previously added the tag “prospect” to some records (you can see an example of a tagged record below) and we want to search for a list of all contacts with this tag:

Down the left-hand side of the contacts “home” page, you will see a column showing an A-Z list of your tags. Locate the tag you are looking for and click on this:

and you will be presented with a list of all the contacts that you have marked with that tag. This can then be manipulated in a number of ways including bulk editing such as adding an additional tag to all those contacts or you can export the results into a CSV file which can be used to create a Twitter list – easiest to do this with Tweepi.

The search and sorting capabilities of Nimble are actually much more powerful than this. At the top of the contacts home screen, in the blue ribbon, there is a search box with an advanced search option.

The advanced search lets you create logical searches based on AND, OR, NOT logic and allows you to put together powerful custom searches. As a simple example, say we wanted a list of all contacts tagged with “prospect” that also have a Twitter and Facebook account recorded in their Nimble profile.

Clicking on advanced search will give the option to search for “people and companies”, “people only” or “companies only” – we will select “people”

The other fields of the advanced search can then be populated. We want to search for the tag “prospect” so we will make this selection in the search fields:

We also want to add two more conditions to our search – the records must have both a Twitter and a Facebook account entered. To add additional search conditions we click the + sign, choose the field that we wish to search for and by clicking on “contains” we are able to change the search behaviour for this field. Here we select “is not empty”

Repeating the procedure to add the search condition for the Facebook field:

Now clicking search will return a list of all the contacts that have been tagged “prospect” and have both a Twitter and Facebook account recorded in their profile. I know what you are thinking…powerful, but a bit of a hassle doing this every time if the search is going to be used regularly. Well, the lovely people at Nimble thought of that too. When your search has been performed once, you get the option to save your search. This option will appear above the search results list:

and you can then name and store the search for you and your team to make use of. Saved searches are shown in a list down the left-hand side of the contacts home screen and simply clicking on the search name will perform that search again.

When you consider that you can set up many saved searches, each highly customised, you can see that you can view a very specific category/demographic of your contacts quickly and easily. You can then keep tabs on the social media activity of these people using techniques covered in the last blog post. The fact that you can also add your own custom data fields into Nimble means that you can create a system that is very tailored to your business and the way in which you use this powerful CRM system.

There is a good explanation video for adding custom data fields to Nimble here.

Next time we are going to look at how Nimble can be linked to some third-party services to create an even more powerful CRM system.

Do you use Nimble CRM? Have you got any tips to share?