Nutshell CRM: Boosting B2B Sales, Whole Departments at a Time

For an individual or small group trying to launch a business, one of the main benefits of a CRM is helping a few people achieve more with less time and energy. 

While a budding company or startup might have the time and breadth to learn and implement a new tool from the get-go, a company with an established sales department could look at a new piece of software as extra work—legacy systems usually involve strenuous setup and a tedious process to transfer data. 

Nutshell CRM is here to make it easier for both parties (big or small): This is a simple yet sophisticated CRM for sales departments that comes with comprehensive customer support, free data migration assistance, and super useful integrations (think G Suite and Microsoft Office). 

Nutshell is designed to save your sales team time so they can focus on the more important things like building outstanding customer relationships and closing more deals.

The Nutshell sales pitch

Nutshell CRM makes the daily tasks of a sales department a whole lot easier. Below are some of the key features that help save time so sales reps can focus less on mundane tasks and more on selling. 

Sales team collaboration

Like any good CRM, you can set Nutshell up so that whatever action you do on the platform is visible and accessible to your team. This means adding new contacts, scheduling events like meetings, or updating information on contacts or leads.

A key feature here is teammate tagging. It makes it easy to alert another rep that there is a task you’d like their involvement with. These tags and notes can be embedded in the contact conversation history, though they will be invisible to the contact whose deal you’re working on. 

Sales automation and pipeline management

If contact management is the basic bread and butter of any CRM, then sales automation is the buffet table with all the fixins. This is where sales reps are relieved of easy-but time-consuming tasks so they can focus on deepening their customer relationships and landing deals.

Nutshell can be set up to auto-assign new leads to the right reps, based on criteria like product specialty, territory, potential deal size, and much more. So any new contact will get the speediest response from the person best suited to help them.

Nutshell automatically updates the status of a lead through goal completion. For example, if the task is to reach out to a lead by phone or email, but the goal of this stage is to set a demo or onsite meeting, the scheduling of said meeting will trigger the lead to move forward in the pipeline automatically. 

The platform also integrates with Constant Contact to automatically send out emails to customers based on their pipeline position and what they need to hear to go forward. Zapier integration allows you to connect your Nutshell contacts with a variety of other email marketing programs like Mailchimp. In addition, Nutshell has two-way sync with Gmail and Office 365, further reducing manual data entry tasks.

The pipeline itself comes with several view options, from an interactive drag-and-drop kanban board and sortable/filterable list view, to a map view with prospect and customer locations, and a chart view that plots trends based on timeframes, lead quantities, and lead values.   

Finally, there’s a nifty prioritizing tool called Hot Leads, which helps you “turn up the volume"  on your most valuable opportunities. 

Reporting and performance tracking

As sales teams grow, they produce more and more valuable data. Nutshell captures it all and presents it back as clear reports.

Nutshell’s reporting lets you track sales performance periods against past periods to see if things are getting better or worse. If you have set quotas, reports are a great way to monitor how close your reps are to meeting or crushing them.

You can see how sales are faring by individual salesperson, by specific product, or even comparing where most leads are sourced from, for example, web, email, social media, rep outreach, etc.

The reporting features include more professional tools like a sales forecaster, analysis of deals lost, and conversion-to-dropout ratios for each stage of the funnel.  

Pricing

Nutshell has two pricing plans to keep it simple. Both come with unlimited data and robust customer service including free help migrating over your data. 

Both plans work on the Nutshell native mobile apps for iOS and Android. You also get one-click integrations with other popular business tools like MailChimp, Quickbooks, and Slack (among many others).

The Starter plan is $19 per user/per month, billed annually ($22 monthly); the Pro plan is $35 per user/per month, billed annually ($39 monthly). The major extras of the Pro plan are all the sales automation tools.

Nutshell offers a 14-day free trial for those looking to quickly test the waters. 

Setup 

Between Nutshell’s thorough omnichannel support and their free data migration assistance, you can tell Nutshell is really putting their money where their mouth is regarding the speed of setup and ease of use. 

After all, these are two of the main challenges Nutshell has taken on to win over the most obstinate of legacy, spreadsheet-using sales departments ossified in their old-school ways.

CRM for the soul

As Nutshell acknowledges on their about page, CRMs can be “soul-sucking.” To counter that soul-sucking feeling, every tool, feature, dashboard, and interface on the Nutshell platform has been injected with a hardcore-focused ethos: Design a CRM sales reps can find real value in so that they want to use the platform.

The results? More time for selling, more effort for closing, more revenue won. 

With Nutshell’s focus on sales departments for the B2B world (and without the excessive multi-department feature avalanche), the formula of simplicity = revenue is one you’d have to be a bit nuts not to appreciate.