Is Nimble AMS Worth It?
I’ve been in the Nimble AMS space since 2014. I worked for them for several years and then began doing freelance consulting through my business Seawalker Tech, which I founded in 2019.
A friend and colleague I worked with at Nimble (back when it was NimbleUser) once gave me a very on-point analogy about Nimble AMS. It went something like this:
Nimble AMS is like a puppy. You can train that puppy to be a very sweet, loyal, loving dog OR you can mistreat it and it can become your worst nightmare.
Yup. That about sums it up.
So the ;tldr answer is: Nimble can be an amazing AMS, but it can also go terribly sideways, depending on how it’s implemented and governed.
It's a "choose your own adventure" that can be an amazing adventure if ALL the following are true:
Your team is serious about owning and maintaining your Nimble instance.
Your organization is willing to invest financially in Nimble beyond the annual fee, for high quality consulting
Your Nimble AMS consulting partner is highly experienced and can help you navigate the gotchas and out-of-the-box limitations of Nimble AMS.
When Nimble tends to shine:
You are fully committed (mentally and financially) to having Nimble/Salesforce as your “source of truth” and you have the appetite to treat this like a real platform implementation (not a plug-and-play AMS install).
You are a good steward of your data, you avoid (or are willing to move away from) unnecessarily convoluted business rules, and you take seriously the boring-but-critical stuff like permissioning, flow design, and release management.
If you have at least one sharp Business Analyst in-house who can talk shop with your internal stakeholders AND talk shop with a Nimble AMS consultant on the technicals, and they are at least partly (and ideally fully) devoted to administering your Nimble AMS org.
When things tend to go south:
Your requirements are not clearly defined and you (or an external consulting firm) builds half-baked solutions off of those flaky requirements.
You don't have an organized project manager on your side who is a clear communicator and can be the key facilitator and owner of internal decisions, business rules, and budget.
Your implementation team left you with scant documentation and didn't have deep experience with Nimble AMS, so they didn't set you up for success with how they launched you on Nimble AMS.
If you’re evaluating Nimble, my advice would be:
Be extremely clear about your requirements. There are some great general consulting shops out there that can help you draft a Request for Proposal (RFP) in the AMS space. Reach out and I'd be happy to point you in their direction, even if they don't ultimately recommend Nimble for you
Don’t under-estimate the effort for integrations to your CMS, LMS, event management system. I have completed dozens of successful integrations but you need an experienced Nimble AMS consultant to "talk shop" with the vendor and build the integration the exact way you need it.
Fun fact: I had to integrate once to a system that ONLY accepted CSV dumps on an FTP. It's a very antiquated approach these days but, yes, anything is possible.
Budget for ongoing governance. Nimble is NOT “set it and forget it.” It gets three major upgrades per year (on top of Salesforce's three major upgrades).
If you're already on Nimble AMS and struggle-bussing, reach out to us today. We focus exclusively on Nimble AMS, and each of our team members has over 10 years of experience with Nimble. Dare I say our expertise is unrivaled?
Our clients can also attest to how insanely deep we document things, and I can't tell you how many times a client (or I) needed to go back to the documentation to refresh ourselves on how something worked or why we made a particular decision 3 years ago.
Seawalker Tech has completed several successful implementations of Nimble AMS, and we also help clients post-implementation on Phase 2 (and beyond) projects.
If you want to hear more, reach out!
