Nimble

Quite a powerful tool once you know how to use it, good value for money.

Some of the search features can be a bit confusing but with proper training and use of the material available via Nimble they can be mastered.

We researched ~10 CRM solutions for our small software contracting company (9 people), to help keep track of leads and communications. We have some frustrations with Nimble, but at least as of the last round of reviews it was the best match for our business.

Things we like:

* Price point is reasonable
* Automatic integration with gmail - communications over email with a contact show up with no extra work from us
* Automatic integration with social media
* Shared information with several people on our team
* Reminders to stay in touch with people can be easily created at the same time the contact is created

I have a number of frustrations with ranging from small to moderate. They are:
1) Can only integrate one social media account of each type. Fixing this has been "coming soon" for about eight months. Right now it means I need to decide between my business Twitter account (the official face of the company), and my individual Twitter account (which has 20 times as much traffic). I interact with business contacts via both and can only track one.

2) The Deals tracking tool has several deficiences:
2.1) The Deals view is wider than the page, which requires annoying scrolling with an embedded horizontal scrollbar, and you can't see it all at once. (Deals columns: 1570 pixels. Page width: fixed 1200 pixels, even if your browser is 2000 pixels wide.)
2.2) The "stages" of a deal have an arbitrary maximum limit of 99 days in stage. In my industry, initial contacts often turn into paying work 8-12 months later after companies complete fundraising. Nimble can't handle this.
2.3) There's no way to hide or "put on ice" a deal that is suspended temporarily. You can only close the deal as "won" or "lost". See above, I frequently have leads disappear for a year and then come back to hire us. Unless I want to lose the work I've entered, my only option is to keep all possible leads visible in case they come back eventually.

3) Nimble has its own separate contacts database from my Gmail contacts and no tool built in to synchronize them automatically. I have to use a 3rd-party tool to sync them, and it's fiddly to keep working right. Right now, I think it hasn't worked in a couple of months.

4) The Chrome plug-in to help you enter contact info from Gmail or from a web page is inconsistent. Frequently I select or hover contact name or info, but the plug-in doesn't detect it and I end up having to enter the contact manually anyway.

I like the quick segmentation of contacts. Create a structured search query through the wizard. Once you get the result set just right, then give it a name and it gets saved as a segment...any new contacts that gain the qualifications to match the query are automatically displayed as part of that segment.

Often to do "mass edits" you have to export the records you want to change, edit them in a spreadsheet and then re-import them.