Nutshell CRM at a Glance
Nutshell offers automated email campaigns and lead management for marketing and sales teams, notes, call and email recording for customer service teams, and visual pipelines and funnel reports to enhance your sales and marketing strategies.
Best for
B2B small businesses with inside sales teams
Key use
Contact management, sales automation, and related reporting
Price
$16-$49/user/month
Free trial
14 days
Tools for Sales Teams
Nutshell offers lead management tools and reporting for sales teams. With lead management, you can enter your leads into the Nutshell database, take notes on customer interactions, and even record outbound voice calls for later review.
Nutshell’s reporting and pipeline tools can help your sales teams plan their business strategy. You can create a visual pipeline and use reporting to see how close you are to meeting your sales goals. You can also see a basic forecast of future sales based on your current and past performance.
Nutshell also has sales automation tools, including automated email outreach, follow-up scheduling, and data entry. This tool will automatically update information like confidence and closing dates for leads based on preconfigured parameters.
Tools for Marketing Teams
Your company’s marketing team can use Nutshell’s email builder to craft visually attractive emails using a simple, drag-and-drop interface. You can use Nutshell’s range of premade templates or build your own.
You can then create automated email campaigns that use your custom templates and track customer engagement with those campaigns using Nutshell’s Funnel Reports. Funnel reports track customer engagement throughout the sales funnel, from initial contact to successful closing.
Tools for Customer Support Teams
Nutshell can be used by customer support teams to keep notes on customer interactions and to record outbound phone calls. Unfortunately, it does not yet have support for inbound call recording, which would be a nice feature for customer support teams.
Nutshell also stores email conversations, allowing service reps to quickly and easily look up past client interactions.
Nutshell does not have any specialized features for rewards programs or complaint handling. I would’ve liked to see a little more in this area, especially considering how feature-rich the marketing and sales tools are by comparison.
Customization and Integrations
Nutshell integrates with most commonly used business software, including Dropbox, the Google Workspace, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Office365, Quickbooks, Slack, and Zendesk. Some programs integrate directly, while others must be connected via Zapier.
Nutshell’s customization options outside of third-party integrations are limited to what’s necessary for a sole proprietor or small organization. You can add your own branding, define access levels for users, and set working hours for your business units.
While this is not the same depth of customization offered by some competitors like Salesforce or HubSpot, I think it’s perfect for Nutshell’s intended users, as Nutshell is geared towards small businesses and sole proprietors and focuses on simplicity rather than depth of customization.
Reporting and Dashboards
Nutshell can create simple, visually attractive charts on demand. You can pick from preset variables like Sales or Losses and generate a graph showcasing these values at daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly intervals. You can easily download these charts to add to a PowerPoint presentation or report.
Nutshell does offer some slightly more advanced reporting as well. You can create a forecast report that shows your pipeline of projected sales and the quota your team will need to hit to meet your sales goal. It will also let you know whether or not you are on track to hit your sales targets based on current sales.
You can easily add a chart from the reporting menu to your primary dashboard by clicking the prominent plus symbol.
Ease of Implementation and Use
Setting up Nutshell is very easy. I spent five minutes creating an account and choosing a plan, and then Nutshell was ready to go. Setup will take a little longer if you need to add existing customers or leads to the database.
If you already have a customer database on a spreadsheet or in another CRM, follow this guide to import that data into Nutshell. Nutshell can only import data from .csv files, so you will need to convert any existing data into that format.
When you start Nutshell, a series of handy help screens and tooltips will guide you through initial setup, importing your Google Calendar (optional), and creating your first leads. Thanks to Nutshell's excellent customer support, help with anything that the tooltips don't cover is just a few clicks away.
Mobile App
Nutshell’s mobile app is available for Android and iOS devices. The mobile app has a simple interface consisting of four tabs: database, reports, search, and the company feed. You can add a lead in a couple of taps or create reports in-app similar to how you would do it on your desktop.
Overall, the Nutshell mobile app is rather basic. It can do some things that the desktop app can do, but it does not have many mobile-specific features. I would have liked to see more mobile-specific features, such as speech-to-text data entry for salespeople or call recording, which is missing entirely from the mobile app.
Nutshell Customer Support
Nutshell offers plenty of self-service support through its help center and blog, but if you prefer, you can speak to a live representative over the phone at (888) 336-8808 Monday-Friday between 9am and 4pm ET. You can also contact Nutshell support via online chat on its website during the same hours.
How Much Does Nutshell CRM Cost?
Nutshell offers two pricing tiers, Regular and Pro. The Pro Tier is where you’ll find most of Nutshell's advanced features, such as sales automation, phone call recording, and forecasting, while the Regular tier includes full CRM functionality and basic reporting.
You can choose monthly or annual billing, and there is a discount for yearly plans.
Nutshell
Nutshell Pro
Monthly Plan Pricing
$19/user/month
$49/user/month
Annual Plan Pricing
$16/user/month
$42/user/month
Contact and Lead Database
✓
✓
Email and Calendar Sync
✓
✓
Pipelines
1
Unlimited
Reporting
Basic Reporting
✓
Sales Automation
X
✓
Bottom Line
Nutshell offers advanced features like email automation and forecast reporting while remaining extremely easy to set up and use. This makes it particularly well suited for small business users and solopreneurs who otherwise might not have access to these features in a format that’s easy to use. Nutshell has excellent customer service with multiple channels, pipeline management, and lead and contact management.
Nutshell’s biggest weakness is its mobile app, which has few mobile-specific features and cannot record calls. The customization options Nutshell offers might be too limiting for large enterprise users, but they’ll be more than sufficient to meet the needs of a small business.