Contact management matters, maybe more than you already know. Today’s guest knows it, which is why he goes out of his way to learn and understand even more about the business he’s in on a regular basis. Today, you’ll hear about Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble. Listen in to learn more about his history, what Nimble does and how it can help, and some of the many things that Jon knows about CRM and content management.
Episode Highlights:
- History of CRM and contact management
- How long Jon has been running Nimble
- Nimble’s relationship with Microsoft
- Where sales professionals are today
- Tools and processes for building relationships
- Why you need a process for serving others
- Nimble’s discount code: JON40
- How a Twitter comment shifted into LinkedIn, email, and Jon’s calendar
- Working on staying top of mind to prospects, customers, and influencers
Resources:
Transcript
Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest, I bet Jon doesn’t remember, but I’ve met Jon probably in 1986 or 1987. It was when you first started GoldMine. When you were in that little office and you had a headset on. It was you and I can’t remember your partner at the time but in southern California, not in Santa Monica yet. Not at the beach where you guys at the top, but you were somewhere else. I can’t remember the name of the city.
But with me today everybody is the CEO of Nimble, Jon Ferrara. We have known each other off and on for, it’s going on, 30 years, I think.
Jon: Isn’t that amazing? 30 years.
Marylou: Is that right?
Jon: They say that marriage that gets past eight years is doing okay. You know what, first off, thank you Marylou for that kind introduction. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to come on your stage and have a conversation with you where I hope that it leaves people with some inspiration and maybe some education. I also love that we share such a similar background. You and I are computer science undergrads who worked our way out through system support and then made our way into sales. I think that’s relatively unique for most salespeople.
We have a stronger knowledge, stronger product background for the things that we sell. But also a stronger love of process that helps us to be more successful in sales.
Marylou: Yes, and that by far I think is the love of process, the love of finding ways to leverage technology where it makes sense, especially when you’re doing repetitive tasks. I just remember GoldMine was the best CRM, and you’ve spoiled us for life because we had that experience early on as sales executives. It’s really never been replicated in terms of the ease of use, the navigation, just the intuitiveness of it until now with Nimble. You’ve taken all that knowledge and then some.
Jon: Well, Marylou, I think it would help to give a little history of CRM and contact management because I think if you know history, you better understand the present and can predict the future. Can I share my vision of that?
Marylou: Yes, I would love that.
Jon: Okay. You’re right, Marylou, organization is critical to managing relationships at scale. I remember the story about that agent in Hollywood. They had an assistant next to them. In every meeting, they took notes on every conversation and they basically created a process for follow-up and follow through. It was all paper-based. That really started with the Rolodex. Just being able to manage the cards that you’re getting from people. A Rolodex is just a collection of names. It doesn’t give you any organization.
Then some genius developed something called the 6×9 index card method. Have you ever heard of that?
Marylou: I have.
Jon: The 6×9 index card system took those names and organize a follow-up process where you can create an index card for anybody that’s important to you, then log a note of the conversation, then write down the recall date, and file that in the future in that little index card system for when you’re supposed to follow up. Because I think it’s the basics that win games. Most business people, salespeople don’t follow up and follow through. That’s because we’re human. We could only manage 100 to 200 people, I had at one time, and today we have thousands of connections.
That 6×9 index card system was the way people rolled for a while until computers started, and I think that the early pioneers of sales might have used spreadsheets. Act started out as an add-in to Symphony, which was a Lotus spreadsheet, sort of […]. It was added to the Symphony so an individual salesperson can manage contacts, notes, and tasks for the contacts. But what it didn’t have was the ability to manage a shared group of contacts and to electronically tie email and calendar to contacts, and provide simple pipeline management and nurture automation marketing.
That’s where I came into the world of CRM and automation. There was no CRM. There was no contact management. Outlook didn’t exist. I grew out of a systems engineer into a sales position in a Dallas field office for Banyan Vines, and I had to manage leads, pipeline, and forecast. I looked for a tool to do that. I found TeleMagic, which essentially automated the index card recall date system. I found Snap, which automated the pipeline management, and Act which was plugged into Symphony.
But I didn’t find something that really rolled all together, which integrated email, contact, and calendar sales market automation for teams. I quit my job and started GoldMine to do that. But when I built GoldMine, there was no Outlook or Salesforce, no contact management or CRM. We were really the first one that was not workable for teams. I didn’t design it for management reporting. I designed it for myself because I was a salesperson. As a salesperson, I need to build relationships at scale and turn those relationships into revenue.
The earliest CRMs were really designed for salespeople and that’s why they love them. They loved Act and GoldMine. They love them because they’re built for empowering them. What happened was Outlook was created because Microsoft doesn’t innovate, they iterate, and they built their contact manager which was in the CRM. Act and GoldMine shifted more into the CRM bucket and people started living and managing relationships in Outlook. Then Siebel was created because enterprises wanted command and control at scale of those contacts, and they were afraid that salespeople were going to walk out the door with their Acts and GoldMines.
Then they basically built CRM, but not for salespeople. They built it for management. All future CRMs are built for management. CRM stands for customer relationship management. It should stand for customer reporting management because it’s really more for management. That’s why anybody who’s listening to this today should have their own personal CRM. They should have some tool that unifies contacts from all the siloed places they are. Their personal email productivity system, which might be iCloud or Google. Their corporate email productivity system, which might be Microsoft 365 and Google—whatever they call it these days—G Suite.
For whatever applications they might be using because if you don’t have a contact database that’s clean, that you can easily segment and outreach, and have the ability to do basic notes and follow-up tasks, then you’re going to struggle. Even if you’re forced to use a CRM at work because you want to bring your network and your brand with you to work every single day. That’s the beauty of CRM and contact management. That’s what I got back in the business. As I started using social, I saw it was going to be the way we work, buy, and sell.
I started looking for a relationship manager that was social, I couldn’t find it. I saw that contact management in G Suite was broken. Then I saw that CRM really wasn’t about relationships, it was about reporting. I got back in the saddle and built them.
Marylou: Back in the saddle. You’ve been now running Nimble for how long?
Jon: Too long. Almost 10 years. I think that I was early to the game. I kind of pioneered social selling and social CRM by building the first team relationship manager that automatically builds itself from the contacts you have. Back in those pioneering days, I actually got access to the public and private APIs of LinkedIn. Nobody has ever gotten those. I got them and I built Sales Navigator before it existed in what should be, what it isn’t today.
I integrated Facebook and Twitter, effectively built the first social CRM, and pioneered social selling before people really saw that social was a way to get to know, engage, and stay top of mind with your prospects. When everybody shut down their APIs for various reasons, I pivoted and became a simple CRM layer, not just on G Suite, but on Microsoft 365 as well.
Because if you think about it, G Suite is a Novell of its era and Microsoft 365 is the anti-server of its era. In other words, Microsoft 8 Novell after Novell pioneered workgroup networking. Microsoft 8 G Suite after it pioneered cloud email productivity things. That’s the way we scaled GoldMine out of the apartment and partnered with Novell resellers, and we scaled it to $100 million-plus in revenue a year by partnering with Microsoft to help drive their first-party solutions because nobody would buy a single server without GoldMine to drive it. That’s how we really scaled $100 million.
We did the same thing with Microsoft, and did I tell you that Microsoft signed a global reseller agreement with us last year where they selected us as their simple CRM for Office 365? That we’re effectively the simple CRM for Microsoft today?
Marylou: My goodness. I did not know that. That’s exciting news.
Jon: It is.
Marylou: Super. Take us to today. Take us to where we are today as sales executives and the relationship has always been the key importance in generating revenue, in establishing long-term business opportunities. Where are we today and what are we doing wrong? I know we’re still using the command and control reporting engines of the CRM that’s Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, but what about the actual selling conversation? What’s changed?
Jon: I think the biggest thing that we’re doing wrong today is we’re relying on automation to communicate with our prospects. How does your inbox let, Marylou?
Marylou: It’s insane.
Jon: Yeah. In fact, I actually think it’s a product I’m going to develop. I’m going to read the email headers and look for the signature of the automation systems like Outreach and SalesLoft, and it will actually put those messages and spam automatically. What do you think of that? Could I sell that?
Marylou: If a colleague of mine has invented a gated email where you have to pay a penny or more to be a recipient—to be received by the recipient, I mean there’s just a lot of interesting technologies that are being generated to help us manage our inbox.
Jon: Yeah.
Marylou: I can totally relate to that.
Jon: We know when we’re being pounded on. I think that salespeople in today’s world are relying too much on automation to try to break through the clutter to your prospects, your customers, and ideally their influences as well. Because if I want to access sales executives and sales management, what better way to do it than you become their trusted adviser? Where you’re not trying to sell them something, you’re actually there to help them grow. I think that that mind shift is where we’re going.
We’re short of leaving behind the bag-them-and-tag-them Oracle Enterprise, killing anybody in the way to get the deal. We’re moving towards really where service is the new sales. I think to get there, you need to be much more organized with the contacts that you’re creating, your brand that you’re building, and what you do with it.
Ultimately, what is your intention as a human being? Why are you here? Are you here to make as much money as you can, or are you here to help as many people grow in the brief period of time that you’re on this planet? Because I think the latter is the truth, and that I am on this planet to grow my soul. The best way I can do that is by helping other people grow theirs. The mindset of sales, I believe, is shifting, but we still haven’t shifted there with it totally.
Marylou: Right. My question about that is I think there’s always been that, especially in really excellent salespeople. This notion of the trusted adviser of someone who is a visionary, but also is willing to take your hand and walk you through the glide path from where you are today to where you know you want to go. But also where you don’t even know about yet, what you don’t know where you want to go. I think that that’s something that we are definitely moving towards.
But my question is always, how can we leverage technology to help us do better at that? How do we look at intent data? How do we look at empathetic conversations and leverage some of the footprints that are now out there for us so that we can weave the conversation that benefits our audience members—whoever we’re trying to reach, our targeted person—in a way that makes them feel that we are personalizing our communication, but yet we’re having technology help us do that.
Jon: Yeah. I think there is a way. You just need to have the intent to do it that way. I think that the key thing is that any—and not just salespeople, Marylou, because I really believe that any person in business today should be concerned about their brand and their network, and then nurturing and building that brand and network on a daily basis. But if you do that, if you do go and build an identity in all the places where your prospects, customers, influencers have conversations and then give your knowledge away. To share content that’s inspirational, educational in and around the areas of the promise of your products and services.
If you don’t write, just identify people that inspire you and share their content. Then follow that up by not just putting fishing lures in the river, but by listening, engaging, and connecting with those people, then to reel in the ones that matter in an organized way, and then follow up and follow through. If you do that properly, that system, then you can’t help but win in life. But I think that today if you do what I tell you to do, which is build identity, share content, listen and engage, connect, not with the intent to bag-and-tag, but to find ways to blow in people’s sales, you’re going to have tens of thousands of connections.
Then you need something that automatically enriches those contacts with people and company data so that you can effectively segment them, then identify the ones that matter, and then do the basics to reach out in a human way. Because I think the more digital we get, the more human we need to be to connect effectively. Marylou, did anybody ever teach you in sales when you go to somebody’s office, look at the walls, look at the books they read, the degree, the school they went to, the knick-knacks they collect?
Marylou: Yes. At some point in life, yes.
Jon: I used to teach salespeople that. The reason I did is because by doing your homework, understanding who somebody is, what the business is about, and then connecting with them in a human way to share commonalities in order to develop the intimacy and trust you need to get them to open up to you about the business issues, which as a professional you can then solve. After that, to stay top of mind, not because you deliver the best price or product, but beyond that. That you connect in a human way and they’ll remember you, and that’ll get you through the bumps of price and delivery that may occur from competitors.
I think that’s the natural human cycle that’s always been there. I remember when social-first came out, people thought that LinkedIn was a business thing and Facebook was a personal thing and the two don’t mix, or oil and water. But the reality is that people buy from people they like, know, and trust. Especially in this digital world where we can’t go seek—in this pandemic world where it’s harder to go see all the people that we want to see, you need to build that human connection.
That’s why I recommend that business executives, not just build identities on LinkedIn, but across all the spaces where humans connect. Then to share content across them that’s not just business but personal as well because people connect on what I call the five F’s of life—family, friends, food, fun, and fellowship. These are the softer side of things that build those permanent connections that will get you through the tougher times. I think that we don’t do that effectively because it takes work. I think that there should be—that’s why we build tools like Nimble that make it easier to do that preparation. Because if you’re not preparing, then you’re not showing up for the game.
Marylou: Right. To that end, I know you’re a process expert, is this flow that so easily comes off your tongue something that a person who wants to be able to serve their clients in the way you describe? It doesn’t necessarily have that recipe, that rhythm of where do I start? I’m so used to getting a list of names, and I try to organize them by role, what their workflow is, what their day in life is so that I can […] the lens of my product figure out ways to help them, service them, affect them, transform them, delight them, whatever it is that I’m trying to get them to do at some point.
Is there a process that I, as maybe not a seasoned sales executive, could come in using a tool and actually be successful at?
Jon: There is. It is really simple. If you think about it, it all boils down to a process, and you think about that 6×9 index card method that we talked about. If you think about that agent—I forgot the person’s name, but I’m going to have to figure out that because I love telling stories with real names—that had somebody that logged all the stuff and created the follow-up. It’s the basics that win games, Marylou, it really is. Teamwork wins even more games.
I think that knowing that you need a personal CRM for your personal brand and network is a good place to start. If you accept today’s tools—Google Contacts, iCloud Contacts, Microsoft Contacts, LinkedIn Contacts, Twitter Contacts, Facebook Contacts—these siloed places are not the best place to keep an essential database. If you could build an essential database and keep it clean and up to date, and then for everybody you engage with, log a basic note and schedule the next task. Because Marylou, if you don’t have the next step with somebody, then they’re not important to you.
Marylou: That is exactly right.
Jon: Especially people that you think you might be able to serve because if you could serve others, if you could help others to get what they want, you can have anything you want in life, says the great, Zig Ziglar. The funny thing, Marylou is that there’s a lot of “thought leaders” out there and I can name a few names in sales, marketing, and relationships. But really, they’re always regurgitating the greats—Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar, Napoleon Hill, et cetera.
The communication methods may have changed, but the basics have not. Anybody listening to this today, think about where your contacts are, think about what your process is, forget about what tools they give you at work.
You’ve got to basically bring your own tools with you. You got to bring your brand and your network with you in an organized way in order for you to apply it to whatever business things that you’re doing, and I think to start a good database. It really is about contact management. I encourage anybody listening to this today to go do an audit of where are all your important contacts? What is the daily process that you have with your connections and conversations? Where are you putting your identity? What content are you putting out in your identity? Are you listening and engaging on a regular basis?
Here’s my formula. In the morning when I have my coffee I do some reading because I do what I do because I dig what I do. I hope you hear it in my voice. I dig technology, and I dig its application to people’s success. I think what’s more important to your success than the relationships that you build. I read about content about sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, et cetera on a daily basis and then I share that. That helps to build my brand and my network, and then I do that for 30 minutes when I’m on my coffee each day. In the afternoon, I spend 30 minutes going through the signals of the people who are commenting and engaging.
I build records for the ones that matter, and I build the next step and follow up with them. It’s incredible what that simple workflow does for my brand and my network. Marylou, did you know I sold GoldMine when I was 40 years old and I retired for 10 years and spent 10 years raising three babies?
Marylou: I remember that, yes.
Jon: Nobody knew who Jon Ferrara was when I started Nimble.
Marylou: Not when you came back, no. You had to start from scratch.
Jon: From scratch, right. I started to […] social. I remember I typed in hello, world on Twitter my first time in 2006. I eventually started to use them and build a, what do you call it, a rhythm out of it. That rhythm started building all these contacts and then I had a problem. How do you manage these contacts? This is the same thing that started GoldMine. The funny thing is that I wasn’t the only salesperson that had trouble managing relationships and contacts in the GoldMine days—in the DOS days, believe it or not. In the cloud days, I’m not the only person struggling to manage my brand and my network today.
I think that the pandemic just highlighted how important connections are. You know, Marylou, we may have not spoken for a year or so, but you know me. I think that you like me because you connected with a part of my humanity. You don’t connect with me because I’m an entrepreneur, I am a pioneer at CRM or whatever. You connect with me because there’s a human connection. All those sales thought leaders who basically say relationships don’t matter, I get them. They got to poke the eye. I do believe in things like Jim Keenan teaching with gap selling, all that stuff, but relationships do matter.
In managing, relationships and contacts are critical to your life’s success, so go for that audit. If you find that it’s lacking in a unified platform that you’re using, I encourage you to go find one. You could try nimble.com, and if you dig it, I’m going to give you 40% off for your first three months. Use the code JON40 when you become a subscriber. Connect with me and tell me how I can make it better because I’m here to power your success.
Marylou: It’s really a great tool. I love the signals part that you mentioned. At the end of the day, a lot of what we do in business development is to organize our workflow in locks of time and single-tasking. You naturally do that as an engineer, and I do too as a process engineer because of the fact that that’s how we were taught and that feels comfortable to me. It feels good to do it that way. I love the idea that you can start simply. As you heard him say in the morning, we call it Pomodoro, take one Pomodoro 25 minutes on, single-tasking activity, 5-minute break and do your reading and sharing.
At the end of the day, look to see the signals, which we get a lot of signals now on the internet through a variety of different tools and platforms. Then you can see who’s engaged with your content, and those are the people with whom you would love to continue that conversation.
Jon: Can I share a brief story about a cycle that happened with me that I think illustrates this?
Marylou: Yes, please.
Jon: Okay. As I shared earlier, I share content that’s inspirational and educational in and around the areas of promise of my products and services. Hopefully, you can grasp those words, I know they were a lot. But that means I share content that’s inspirational and educational around social, sales, and marketing, not just those hashtags but there’s an example. Then what I do is I listen and engage to see who’s buying on that. There was a girl, Tiffani Bova. You know Tiffany, right?
Marylou: Yes.
Jon: Tiffani Bova was the CRM analyst at Gartner and Salesforce who’s been hiring every analyst in the world. They hired her and she’s the spokesperson for them now. She said CRM isn’t about command and control, it’s about empowering customer-facing business team members. Somebody replied back to that on Twitter and said, […], it is about command and control. […] the sales manager is going to loosen the grip. Isn’t this what Jon Ferrara has been teaching, preaching, and building with GoldMine and Nimble?
Nimble basically listens to my signals and then reaches that contact with people and company data, sees if it matches people that matter to me, and surfaces those signals in the application. It said, Jon, go check this one out. Nimble automagically built a record for the guy and his name was Rand. Well, who the heck is Rand? That’s just his name. But Nimble turned that into his full name, title, company, email, and phone number. Thank you, Nimble.
Marylou: Very nice.
Jon: I saw that he was the head of data and in CRM at Disney, Walt Disney. Of course, that would be somebody that would be interesting for me to connect with. I was more able to effectively respond to that Twitter comment, and in the background, right in the Twitter UI because Nimble lives in any app or any place you’re at, so Nimble was sitting there on my right-hand side called the Nimble prospector. It enabled me to send him an email that was templated and trackable. I was able to say, thank you, Rand. That was really kind in the comment and I would love to connect and get to know you more. Here’s my calendar link.
He then reached out to me on LinkedIn and we built a connection out of a further conversation where I found out that he not only lives in my town but his daughter goes to my school. I figured let’s just meet up for breakfast because the more digital we get, the more human we need to be, and I invited him for breakfast.
That simple Twitter comment shifted from a soft place in Twitter to a firmer place in LinkedIn messaging where Nimble was actually still there, then into my email inbox where Nimble was still there, and to my Calendar for that appointment where Nimble lives there. That is the natural cycle of connections and conversations today. They start in a soft place and move to firmer places. If you do it right, they turn into a mutual, beneficial, manageable outcome, but more importantly, you should shift them into your software connections for the people you dig.
In other words, in the old days, we took people to a restaurant, to a ball game, or to our home to connect deeper. Today, we can take them into places like Facebook and Instagram where you can connect on the areas of commonality in a deeper way.
A lot of people dig my barbecuing, backpacking, my family focus, photography or whatever it is. That’s the natural cycle of business connection, conversation, and networking. It’s just that today’s CRM’s aren’t designed to do any of that. They’re designed for you to go to it and type in who you’re connected with, what you know, and what you should do next. Nobody does it because you have to go to the CRM to do it. You work for the CRM and have to go to it to use it. You should have a CRM that works for you by building itself and then works with you wherever you’re engaging. We call this the nimble way.
Marylou: That is a beautiful thing and it’s definitely the way that—I know for me personally, I prefer to transact that way. I like to build long-term relationships with clients and prospects and share my information as well as teach. I think a lot of us are natural teachers and enjoy educating.
This is the way of the future and it really came out pretty heavily, I think, and was very much in our face with COVID. Because we had to adapt to a way to continue building relationships, but doing it on a remote basis, which for a lot of people is really difficult. I think having those social connections and having the ability to watch and also to be a part of the conversation online, some of the teams didn’t skip a beat.
They just transacted instead of using the telephone, which went away in the United States if you had only brick and mortar telephone numbers to make connections. It went to the social world, and it was favorably received. I’m really happy that your software does that naturally. He says magically. It’s magically and naturally.
Jon: I call it automagically. By the way, do you use Teams at all?
Marylou: Yes.
Jon: We’re launching a Teams integration in-app experience where before a meeting goes on, you can prepare during a meeting, you can log and schedule, and after meeting, you can follow up and follow through. We’re one of the early in-app experiences with Teams.
I think that what you’re saying about COVID just emphasizes the power of connection because you may have not seen people for a while now, in fact, we haven’t, but they’re going to remember you if you’ve invested in that personal relationship and you’ve nurtured it. I love to tell stories that help people to remember what I’m saying. Did you know that a car uses most of the fuel to get to 60 but to stay at 60, it uses very little?
Marylou: No, I didn’t know that.
Jon: Did you know a rocket ship burns most of its fuel to get up into orbit, to stay in orbit it takes very little?
Marylou: That I would anticipate, yes.
Jon: Did you know that relationships take most of the energy in initiating the relationship but maintaining the relationship takes less?
Marylou: Less time and effort.
Jon: A physical example that’s visual is that person, the circus performer with the plates on the pencil. You’ve seen that before, right?
Marylou: Yes.
Jon: It takes a lot of work to get the plates spinning.
Marylou: Right.
Jon: But to keep the plates spinning, it takes a nudge to stop, a little touch, right?
Marylou: Yup.
Jon: That’s what relationships are like. That’s the power of social. If you could just go do with a little touch and they’ll remember you. I’ll leave you with this little saying about a woman I admire. She was a famous actress, but also unbeknownst to many, an entrepreneur. Her name was Mae West. Do you remember Mae West?
Marylou: Yes, I do.
Jon: She had a lot of great sayings, I won’t say some that are off-color. Light them up and see me some time. She had a saying that I love and a guy named Jim Cecil taught me this. I don’t know if you know Jim Cecil, but he was the father of Nurture Marketing. She used to say, out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is out of money honey. And that’s what you should work on doing is staying top of mind as the trusted advisor to your prospects, customers, and ideally their influencers as well so that when they need you, they not only pick up the phone and call you, but they drag their friends with them.
Marylou: Yes. Jon, it’s been such a pleasure speaking with you again. Thank you so much for sharing all this wisdom with us. It makes perfect sense that we follow your lead here and learn more about what you’re doing, what Nimble does, how this tool can help us become better at our craft that we all love.
At the end of the day, you’re right, we’re building relationships with people. Some short term, some long-term, but the name of the game here is that with that consistency of the touch, we’ll be able to meet the goals that we’re setting for ourselves, but also, more importantly, our clients are achieving the transformation that they are looking for because we’re helping them get there.
Jon: Amen. One last piece of advice as an entrepreneur who has built two global software companies and sold them for hundreds of millions of dollars, you’re not on this planet to make money. I think you’re on this planet to make memories out of moments. Do your best to be present with the people around you.
When you’re at the supermarket, put your phone down. Actually, look the checkout person in the eye and give them something even if it’s as simple as your smile and your presence because people deserve that. When you invest in that thing, your presence with the people around you, your heart softens and your soul grows.
Marylou: We will end with that. Thank you much, Jon. A pleasure to have you on the show. We’ll put all your connections in the show notes so everybody can find you and follow you. I very much appreciate you taking the time to share with us today.
Jon: Thank you, Marylou. It’s a real pleasure. I appreciate your friendship.