Jocelyn,

Good question. I'm going to have to think about my answer - might well be at least one more blog post.

Nigel

Ada,

Thanks. Yes, it does look like you are in a very similar space to Nimble. Will be most interesting to see how things evolve from here. Good stuff.

Nigel

Tibor,

Always honored to host your content. Thank you.

Nigel

John-Paul,

I have played with Batchbook but not enough to make a valid comparison with Nimble. From memory I would say you are absolutely right they are in the same ballpark. Where they go from here will be the most telling part I should think.

Nigel

Brad,

Great points.

- Salesforce certainly is the big player these days. Salesforce seems rather like the "old style" CRM to me now but of course they just bought Radian6 which is a social media monitoring tool so they could well be moving in this direction (fast). (Zoho that I metnion above looks a lot like Salesforce without the integration capabilities that Salesforce is so strong on)

- I believe Nimble is mostly targeted at the SMB space where the "IT army" does not exist.

Nigel

Thanks Uncle Paul. A great honor coming from a sales blogging star such as yourself.

@evgeniy good observation. The reason is "cold calling" is a poorly defined term. What both this post AND the e-book are about is making cold calling (aka prospecting) way more effective.

Andrew,

Thanks much for the kind words.

Some interesting data came out this week after I wrote this post confirming the need for meeting prep. It was published in the HBR. You may want to check it out: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/are_your_sales_re...

Nigel

Tim,

Thanks for the kind words. It's great for me to know you plan on using this list in your day-to-day work.

Nigel

Maria,

Thanks. I just wanted to point out this post was actually written by Koka Sexton over at Insideview so he deserves the kind words.

Nigel