Link Nimble with Zapier to create the ultimate CRM system
As you will know from our previous blog posts, we like Nimble here at Concise Training. It is a powerful CRM system that has a wealth of great features that makes working in teams much more effective (we recently wrote about the powerful Nimble contact search function). However, there are one or two desirable features that are currently missing and here we discuss ways that third party tools can be used to overcome these minor issues.
Automatic task creation
One of the great features of Nimble is the ability to create tasks and assign them to others. These tasks can be linked to individual contacts. For example, you might want to create a task to give Joe Bloggs a call on a certain date about the proposal that you sent him. This is a very useful feature but wouldn’t it be more useful if Nimble could create such a task automatically depending on the type of contact that you have added to it? This is feature that we believe has been requested and that Nimble are currently working on but at the time of writing it is not yet available. This would be useful if, for example, you were adding a new contact record set to a particular lead type or status. Perhaps you want to create a task/reminder to call that person when the lead status is “qualified” but not when it is “unqualified”. This can’t currently be done by Nimble alone but by linking your Nimble account to Zapier you can automate several aspects of using Nimble including this one.
If you have not already got a Zapier account then sign up here.
First you will have to authorise Zapier to work with Nimble. From your dashboard click on the small down arrow next to your profile picture and select “connected accounts”:
Then from the left hand side of the screen choose the drop down for “connect new account”. When you click on this drop down a menu will appear and you will need to select Nimble from the list of available apps. Look for the Nimble logo.
Clicking on the Nimble logo will then take you through a series of easy to follow steps to authorise Zapier and Nimble to work together – you will need your Nimble sign in information.
Once you have connected Nimble you can create your “zap” which is a bit like an “IF THEN” statement. From the top menu click “make a zap” and choose Nimble as both the Trigger and Action apps:
You will be prompted to choose the trigger to use. There is only one trigger available for Nimble and that is the creation of a new contact.
You will get to choose from a selection of actions that should take place when a new contact is added to Nimble. We are going to select “Create Task”:
Clicking “continue” a couple of times will bring you to step number 4 where you can add some filters to your zap.
Your selection here depends on what you want to trigger your task creation. You can select from a long list of fields that are available in a Nimble contact record:
For this example we would choose the field “Lead Status”, condition “Text Exactly Matches” and value “Qualified”. A trigger would then only fire for a new contact that is given the lead status “Qualified” in Nimble.
Clicking continue takes you to step 5 where you can specify the content of the task that Zapier will create for you:
You can pull in data from the Nimble contact record by using the “insert fields” buttons so for example, you might want the subject of your task to say “Call XXXXXX” where XXXXXX is the contact’s name:
You might also want to set a due date that is calculated relative to the date of the contact’s creation. So if you want to make the due date 48 hours after the date the contact was created:
You can customise Nimble to easily change or add fields that can be assigned to contacts so together with Zapier you can create tasks automatically if your specified conditions are met.
Using Zapier and IFTTT with Nimble to automatically add contacts to a Twitter list
IFTTT is a service that works in a similar way to Zapier but it does not link to Nimble directly. It does however allow the addition of people to a Twitter list – something that Zapier is unable to do. By using both in combination, you can automatically add new Nimble contacts that have a Twitter account in their record to the relevant Twitter list depending on your specified conditions.
For this one you first need to create a zap that will email you when a new Nimble contact is created containing a Twitter account. The zap will need to pass certain fields from the Nimble record into the email subject and main body and then an IFTTT recipe can use this email as an input to add the Twitter account to a certain Twitter list.
To set this up takes a few steps and there is not enough room here to explain all of them but if you would like to know more about how to do this, please let us know in the comments and we will look at putting together another blog post on the subject. Also, please let us know if you have used Nimble and Zapier together to automate other tasks.