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Our history, in a Nutshell

Founded in 2009

In 2009, four Nutshell founders sat down for lunch at Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor and created the plan for Nutshell. They wanted to design a CRM that overcame three big weaknesses:

  1. CRMs have clunky design that slows teams down and results in low adoption
  2. CRMs don’t work where you work, like your email inbox and mobile phone
  3. CRMs don’t tell your team what’s next at each stage of the sales process

Our solution?

An intuitive CRM that teams actually want to use, with great design at its core. One that won’t require extensive training to learn or rope you in with contracts and endless upgrades.

Nutshell’s founders were software engineers first, and our commitment to refining our CRM continues. We take customer feedback seriously to continue providing the features and user experience our customers need to organize their teams and close more deals.

Our growth is product-led. We’re a lot like our customers that way.

But it’s our solution to problem #3 that’s also driving our customers’ success.

The path to becoming the best Next-Action Selling CRM

One of Nutshell’s three founding pillars is helping sales teams track and optimize their next best action. That’s the engine of a great sales team: determining the ideal process to win business and ensuring the process is repeated.

We’ve learned a lot since our launch, but one thing remains the same: Nutshell has this next-action sales methodology baked in, allowing you to decide what happens next with every lead in your pipeline.

Helping you perfect your sales process

Nutshell gives you complete control over your sales process so you can design your perfect pipeline with stages, goals, and tasks for your sales team to complete to advance leads to the next stage.

Over the years, we’ve built several key features to help you do that:

  • Multiple pipelines: Some companies use multiple sales processes that are radically different—like an initial sales and renewal process—or define wins differently based on how far down the funnel a lead is. Nutshell supports multiple pipelines so you can split up leads however works best for your team.  
  • Stage goals: Leads don’t magically flow through a company’s pipeline stages. With clearly defined goals, sales reps know exactly what they need to do to advance the lead through the pipeline. In Nutshell, you can outline goals for each stage and take the guesswork out of selling.
  • Email automation: When we launched, Nutshell was focused solely on sales teams. We now understand that you can sell more when you get better-qualified leads in the door. With Nutshell Campaigns and email drip sequences, you can use email automation to support leads toward a stage goal.

Perfecting the next-action selling methodology empowers your team with an adaptable, repeatable sales process that streamlines workflows, provides a better customer experience, and increases lead engagement.

What’s next?

So: we started Nutshell to be the best-designed CRM that works where you work and assists you in answering what’s next for every lead.

And that’s the story, in a Nutshell, about why and how we made CRM better with a user interface that didn’t get in your team’s way, making you able to use your CRM wherever you work and by incorporating Next Action Selling right into your CRM.

And we’ll continue working every week to do that better.

Growing with you!

And as we continue to make Nutshell better, we continue to grow too!

Nutshell is now part of an organization with well over 500 subject matter experts on CRM, digital marketing and more!

When you choose Nutshell as your CRM, you get more than a CRM – you get a growth partner!

Nutshell staff are standing in a parking lot

The Early Days

nutshell-crm-launch
lead-board-brainstorming
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original nutshell-lead-page-mock-up
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