I’ve briefly mentioned the tool “Dex” on here a few times, as it’s a great tool to help you remember to catch back up with old contacts. It does an excellent job, but it has one major problem — it doesn’t sync with my contacts.
It can pull in my contacts, as well as email and other things, but it can’t do a two-way sync. This means that for every new contact I get, I need to put them in my contact list as well as in Dex. The same for if I need to update a phone number or email address, or really make any kind of change to a contact. It’s not critical that their info is perfect in Dex, but I still would much rather be able to update a record once and know that it’s fixed everywhere.
I’ve looked at other tools similar to Dex (like Relatable), but it had the same problem — no two-way contact sync. I reached out to the folks at Dex and Relatable, and they both said they’d love to add that feature but it’s really complicated and likely wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
Nimble
That’s when I decided to take another look at Nimble. It’s been around for over a decade, and I’ve looked it a few times in the past. I never quite went for it before because it was lacking some features and was a bit buggy, but as they’ve continued to develop it they’ve turned it into a pretty solid tool.
If you’re not familiar with it, here is a quick overview video:
It doesn’t have two-way contact sync built-in, but it works perfectly with SyncPenguin and I’ve been amazed at how smooth the combination of those two has been.
However, while Nimble will work great as a contact manager and a reach-out reminder tool, their core focus is as a CRM and sales pipeline tool. Could it replace that for us as well? Yes, it turns out it can.
Their pipeline sales tool isn’t quite as robust as our previous tool (Copper), but it’s solid and does a nice job.
One tool to rule them all?
This starts heading toward the conflict of using multiple tools that are each great at what they do (here are all of the tools that I use), or using one tool that is good enough and handles everything. I generally steer toward using separate tools, but in this case it’s one tool for all and it seems to be working well. Ultimately, it’s doing three things for me:
- Contact Management. If I add or edit a contact in Nimble, it syncs to my phone, and vice-versa. This means I can spend time in Nimble really keeping things organized and it will reflect on my phone and in my email.
- Contact Reminders. I can tag people with reminder timelines (“make sure I talk to Chris every quarter“) and it’ll keep an eye on my email and calendar and remind me when it’s been too long and I should reach back out.
- CRM / Pipeline. I also can keep agency leads in here and track the sales process like we’ve been doing in Copper.
Pricing
While Nimble isn’t super cheap, it’s quite affordable and will actually save us some money.
Before:
- Copper: $708/year
- Dex: $240/year
- Total: $948/year
After:
- Nimble: $298.80/year
- SyncPenguin: $204/year
- Total: $502.80/year
(SyncPenguin has a cheaper plan at $9/mo, but I think I’ll need the $17 plan.)
Right there I’ve taken our annual cost from $948 –> $503 per year, which is great! However, it’s actually a bit better than that. Right now we have three of us on the Copper plan, so it’s actually costing us $2,124/year. If I put all three of us on Nimble ($896.40/year), the total cost goes from $2,364 –> $1,100.40, saving us over $1,200/year!
My goal with this wasn’t to save money, but that’s certainly an excellent side benefit.
For many people, Dex might remain a solid choice for contacts, and Copper is certainly a great tool for sales pipeline management. For me, at least for the near future, it seems that Nimble is going to be an excellent change for this part of my workflow.
What do you use for these kinds of tasks?
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