Nutshell review by Inspector Jones

Nutshell is a relatively new cloud-based CRM program that is available from Nutshell Inc. Compared to many of its competitors it has a relatively narrow focus, specializing in sales and lead generation by firms in the technology, real estate, sales and marketing industries. It covers all of the essential requirements for these firms, although it lacks a number of bells and whistles available in some of the more established products. Its pricing, at $15 per user per month does reflect this.

Nutshell is clearly aimed at small to medium businesses. Large businesses should focus their attention on a product more specifically designed for them. It works best for firms who sell products, as its hourly-rate system is not particularly easy or intuitive to use in practice. It has a very easy set-up process.

It has a clear, simple user interface, both in the version used on desktop computers and in its mobile app, that is available for both iOS and Android devices. This app mean that it is easily used by sales reps in the field.

There are four main area that Nutshell focuses on. The first is lead management. Indeed this area is probably its greatest strength. Any current or potential customer is treated as a lead. You can record a wide range of information for any lead, including their contact details (including a mapped location to help your reps locate them), their products, their competitors and their sources. It is very easy both to create a new lead and to modify the records of an existing one, and you can add as much information as you need to. The highly intuitive interface makes this process extremely straight forward.

A second area of strength for Nutshell is the ease at which you can create sales workflows and processes. It comes with a number of pre-configured sales flows, which make a good starting point, but these are easily modified to reflect the actual flows that your business operates. One nice feature here is that you can set prerequisites, i.e. steps that have to be taken, before your staff can move onto later steps in the workflow.

The third area that Nutshell puts emphasis on is capturing emails. Indeed it is quite intelligent in this respect. There is an address, bcc@nutshell.com to which you can forward all of your business emails, and Nutshell will automatically analyse them and attach them to the appropriate client’s account. Sales reps will easily be able to see any information that comes from emails relating to a particular lead.

Fourthly, Nutshell can generate a wide range of reports and has a huge number of analytical capabilities. You can easily filter sales reports by user, team, product or source. In reality, though, there are limits on how you can filter your upcoming activities list, which does limit that document’s use.

The main limitation I found with Nutshell is that it is far better at adding new leads into the system than it is at dealing with the needs of existing customers. There are fewer capabilities in this area than in many of the competing products. It is better at sales management than customer management.

It has excellent integration capabilities, and works nicely with Google Apps, Zendesk, MailChimp and Wufoo out of the box. If you use a service like Zapier you can expand this integration to include over 40 apps.

Overall, Nutshell from Nutshell Inc is a reasonably priced cloud-based CRM-package for small to medium businesses (who sell products, rather than services) and whose main focus is on being able to have their sales reps having easy-access to their client information. It is designed to be extremely easy to use in the field.