Go Nimbly

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

Twilio is a technology software company based in San Francisco. We offer communication solutions as APIs [application program interfaces].

What is your position?

I am the senior manager of sales operations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Go Nimbly?

Originally, we had a resourcing problem and we needed some extra help in the sales operations team to manage the load of some of our internal Salesforce related products. We also had some problems matching our back-end billing systems through Eloqua and Salesforce. We've been having some issues with leads not moving all the way into Salesforce. Go Nimbly also contracted an additional resource to help us with our Eloqua integration. We signed a mostly full-time person to help us with our Eloqua solution. She's been fantastic, and she has not only documented the Eloqua system, but also integrated Eloqua into Salesforce much better than our original implementation. In the release this week, she has just implemented Guide Star, which is a connection API catering to nonprofits.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

Their original scope of the project was pretty vague. We only had two or three people, and then we lost our head of analytics, so I was spread really thin. I had 12 to 14 hours worth of meetings every day, so it was really hard to get any work done since I was in all the meetings. I was able to call Go Nimbly and just say, "We need someone now." We constantly updated the scope of the project, if it was a new project, or an existing one. They did project management within an Excel template to keep track of all the moving parts for us.

How did you come to work with Go Nimbly?

There were two contractor evaluations: one was for Salesforce and one was for Eloqua. On the Salesforce side, we contacted a couple of different external contractors and a lot of them were unable to give us the resources that we needed within that timeframe without a large minimum commitment.

Go Nimbly was able to provide somebody that day or the next day. He even took on some of the projects at first. That was really what we were looking for: somebody agile who didn't do a lot of hand waving and actually got to start the work right away. We needed somebody who was really like an employee for us.

We actually did hire an Eloqua contractor in addition to Go Nimbly, and we kind of ran them in parallel to see who was more experienced, and ended up keeping Go Nimbly. I've also worked with the head of Go Nimbly when he was at another company called Bluewolf, so I was well aware of his attention to detail and his project management skills.

What is the status of this engagement?

The projects are actually still ongoing. The first two phases of the three-stage project are complete. We have three Go Nimbly resources working with us right now.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Documentation notes has been a big one. Go Nimbly was able to document early on what our objective was, and able to prove at the end that the data does match correctly, in a series of reports and dashboards that aligned with what we were looking for. The integration that I was talking about with the back-end system into Salesforce is actually great.

I haven't received any negative feedback so far. The person working on the Salesforce implementation was really personable and always on time. Go Nimbly provided all the workflows. They've followed our policies very well, too. I think that, as a team, we were constantly changing and the guy that worked with us was able to stay with that. He really feels like part of our employee culture here. I think he's done a great job.

On the Eloqua side, marketing was hesitant to hire her at first because they didn't know her. Now, marketing has been asking if she would like to come work for us. She's very personable, she's always on time, she schedules meetings, a lot of documentation, and she always has good feedback, always very positive. The experience with all the Go Nimbly employees has been incredible. We're very happy with them.

What distinguishes Go Nimbly from other providers?

For us, their speed and willingness to move forward with a vague scope was really the unique and deciding factor for working with Go Nimbly. They were able to get our resources on-site very quickly. They're very intelligent and they're already pre-certified in Salesforce and Eloqua. 

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve, or things you might do differently?

I think Go Nimbly does an incredible job. I think that the resource that they gave us for Salesforce could use just a little bit better documentation, and I guess meeting note taking. The other two resources that I've used have been really good at that, but I have had to remind him to take notes during meetings, which is probably the only thing and that's pretty minor.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I've worked with Go Nimbly at two different organizations. First at an education technology company called InsideTrack. Now, they are working with me at my consulting company.

What is your position?

I was the CIO [chief information officer] at InsideTrack, and now I'm doing independent consulting for a number of different companies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Go Nimbly?

At InsideTrack, Go Nimbly helped us with custom Salesforce development for our coaching CRM [customer relationship management] platform. It was a tool that our employees used to manage student communications and interactions. We didn't have the expertise to do this ourselves, so we needed a partner to handle the implementations for us.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

Go Nimbly built a good amount of custom features on top of the Salesforce platform like additional functionality, and heavy UI [user interface] modifications. Salesforce wasn't particularly good at having all of the information in a single place without requiring a lot of vertical scrolling or white space in between. We worked with Nimbly to create design requirements and then develop a solution to fix the specified problems. Go Nimbly also did Salesforce administrative custom development on the back-end.

We're using Go Nimbly with one of my consulting clients, which is an education technology company. Go Nimbly is developing an application that's got integrated geolocation services.

How did you come to work with Go Nimbly?

I knew the two Go Nimbly co-founders because they used to work at a consulting firm that I had used previously, so we opted to work with them again.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The total cost was probably somewhere in the $500,000 range for the InsideTrack projects, and probably closer to the $50,000 range for the more recent app development project at my consulting firm.

What is the status of this engagement?

The most recent project was completed within the last 30 days [June 2015].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Regarding the first project, which was the coaching platform, after implementing the work Go Nimbly did on Salesforce, there was roughly a 20 percent increase in the number of students a coach could work with. That was achieved by having all our information consolidated in a single place, having a better user interface, and implementing logic that didn't exist natively within Salesforce itself.

As far as quality, a lot of feedback we've received from people was that the user interface was much nicer, easier on the eyes, and has much less vertical scrolling. From a business development perspective, it looked like a very polished product, instead of an out-of-the-box preconfigured system.

How did Go Nimbly perform from a project management standpoint?

They were highly responsive, able to deliver on time and within budget. I don't believe we ever experienced a cost overrun of any kind. One of the main benefits working with them was that Go Nimbly knew our business very well, and were very good business partners for the project.

Internally, we used a project management tool, and Go Nimbly did as well. What we ended up agreeing on was using their project management tools, which were cloud-based tools that we could just log into and get visibility.

What distinguishes Go Nimbly from other providers?

I think the biggest thing was their level of curiosity to learn about our business, which became a huge asset. Go Nimbly really tried to understand what our desired outcomes were and how those linked to our specific business objectives. It was something that was fairly unusual in dealings I've had with other vendors or partners that have done development work.

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve, or things you might do differently?

Probably the biggest area of improvement would be around their capacity. We understood what kind of capacity they had. That would be the area where if we wanted something more or substantially done faster, we didn't have the ability to just throw more bodies on a project and pay a premium for that.