The Power of CRMs and Relationship Building with Nimble - Jon Ferrara - Nimble

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. Sebastian. John, welcome to the show. Or should I say, welcome back to the show. I think it was a different show the last time you were on many, many moons ago.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Well, you know, Sebastian, first off, thank you for inviting me into your community to have a conversation that I hopefully is uh enlightening to them. But I just want to acknowledge and honor you for what you do for helping people tell their stories. Thanks. That you have been storytelling for a long time. And uh and now you're helping other people tell their stories. And I kind of dig that because I think we all struggle to be effective storytellers, especially with all this gear and shit you got to set up and more than that, right? What's your story? What's your purpose? And uh I think we might be able to talk about a few of those things today with each other.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Well, I appreciate those kind words, John. It's always great to reconnect with you. It's been quite some time since we've been connected. I want to say my very, very early days. Uh we met when I was starting my first company, and then uh since you know gone all in with podcasting and found my my calling in life here by just like you said, helping people uh tell their stories through the catalyst that is podcasting. So uh feel very um uh uh privileged and uh and blessed to be in this space. I don't really consider it work. It's not really work.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Yeah, if you and your love, you're not working.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Exactly, exactly. So, but before we dive into to what you've built here at at Nimble, and it's it's been something that Nimble's been around for a minute here. And I was a user uh way back when we first connected, but uh and it's still alive, which tells you a great thing about a software because sometimes it has a life shelf life, sometimes it gets sold off, sometimes not there. But Nimble continues to evolve and grow into like we were talking about before we started the interview, uh the at the core of the meaning of actually having uh a CRM like Nimble, not because you can organize data in leads, of course that happens, but because you can nurture, grow, establish, reconnect um relationships, which are really the core of life. But before we get into all that, let's back up a little bit and help our listeners better understand a little bit about you. I know that you've been in the CRM world for just a couple of minutes, just a couple, only back dated back to the probably I'd say 90s, um, with with the gold mine days. But so let's back up a little bit and give our listeners some context on on your story and how you got all how you got started.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Well, Sebastian, I really got started because I struggled to build relationships at scale. And I think the best products come from your own need because you're passionate about it and you understand the problem. And I was in field sales for a technology enterprise company in 1988, and they gave me, quote, leads, which were sheets of papers with uh phone numbers of IT people at big corporations. They said, go get them. And I my tools were a daytime. Exactly. My tools were a daytime in a phone and a spreadsheet. There was no contact management. Outlook did not exist as the way we know it. Outlook Express existed, which was an inbox. Uh, there was no CRM, there was no tool for an individual to manage contacts effectively, let alone a team. And I was part of a team in a district office that worked with a corporate office to sell multiple people out of enterprise. And I was really struggling to figure out how to do that effectively. And because I had a computer science background, I worked my way through my computer science degree at a computer store. I knew every software program on the market, I knew there wasn't a program that integrated email, conic, and calendar, and sales and market automation. So at uh 28 years old in 1989, I quit my job, started gold mine. We started on $5,000. We never took it on adventure, grew it to $125 million a year in revenue over the next 10 years and sold it for cash. And I retired at 40.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Hashtag goals, even though I'm 43.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Yeah, yeah. And you know what? The the biggest gift that that gave me was the journey with the the constituency around gold mine, where I really felt that I had a role in growing them. That people still stop me today who are part of that constituency. And I say constituency because it's more than prospects and customers or employees, which I don't like to call them out. I like to call them team members, that really make things happen in a company. There's there's resellers, there's writers, there's all kinds of influencers. And but most importantly, what really was the gift to me was being able to be a present dad for 10 years, raising three kids. That the gift that they gave me, my kids, helped me grow my soul in the period of time that I was doing that. Because if you're truly present with people who love you, like your kids, they will reflect your shit back at you. And if you're willing to look at your shit in life and work on it, that's how you grow as a human being. And in the process of all this, that's why I came to the conclusion that I'm on this planet to grow my soul. And the best way to do that is by being present with others and by helping others grow their souls. And that's my purpose in life, which is why I got back into building software. Because as I started to use social media in 2006, seven, eight, nine, I saw it was going to help me build my brand and my network. I started building all these connections. But what do you do with all these connections? How do you manage the interactions that you're doing in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever? I tried Hoot Suite and saw that yes, I can manage the conversations, but the conversations weren't tied to contacts. And what I wanted was a contact manager that was social. In fact, I wanted a CRM that was social and I couldn't find it. And so those same sort of chords hit my head, like when Jagger wrote Angie. And I just said, you know what? I need this, and the market needs it because relationships are critical to your life success, whether we're talking about individuals or businesses. And I looked around at CRM systems and saw they weren't about relationships. They're about command and control and reporting. The reason they call it Salesforce, you have to force salespeople to use it. Nobody in their right mind would use a serum if they weren't beat on to use to use it because they don't work for you. You work for them. You have to go to the serum to use it, and you work for it by Googling people for a meeting and then go log in the data, and then you go engage wherever you can, email and social, and then you got to go back and log the data. Serums suck. And I'm here to make them suck a little less.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

So when did so when did and when did Nimble launch?

SPEAKER_00 6:51

I officially about 2011, 12. Um, we were the first company to ever get the public and private APIs from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Angel List, Crunch Base, Foursquare, and integrate all that with the Google email contact and uh calendar APIs into a relationship platform that automatically built contacts for you by unifying them from the disparate places, enriching them with people and company data, synchronizing the history for you and the team, and most importantly, working back where you work, because the whole reason you need a contact platform in today's world is if you do what we tell you to do, which is to build your brand in the places where your constituency has conversations to become better, smarter, faster in and around the areas of promise your product and services, and then give your knowledge away on a daily basis and then listen and engage to build connections and conversations, not to sell people's stuff, but to serve them because service is the new sales. We're here to give more than we get. And if you do what I just said to do, you're gonna have tens of thousands of connections and you can't remember everybody because there's a dunbar limit. You can only remember 100 to 200 people in your head at one time. So you're interacting in Twitter, you see this person that's acting like they know you, and you don't remember them. You don't remember when you engage with them last. You need a little nudge on your shoulder that will basically say to you, yeah, that's Sebastian. You connected with him eight years ago, you're on his show, and and this is what he's about. And that gives you the context and insights to engage effectively in that moment. But more importantly, there's the follow-up and follow-through, which means I want to be able to schedule a follow-up task or message you independently right from where I'm engaging. And so Nimble plugs into your Twitter and your email and your LinkedIn and into your business apps, wherever you are, to give you the context and insights you need to engage in the moment, but most importantly, the follow-up, because business is really about the basics. And most people fail because they don't follow up and follow through. If you don't do what you say you're going to do, you lose trust. And if you lose trust, you're done in today's world.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Yeah, I could not have said it better. That's exactly right. I mean, you you've got ways to be able to manage the people that you come in contact with, but there's no way you can wrap your arms around all the people you're connecting with and all the noise on social media. So tying those two things together uh is is absolutely brilliant. That and that's what Nimble does. So if you're listening to this right now, you're thinking, wait a second, I'm having a lot of conversations online and I have a saw uh I have a CRM that I'm using that I kind of use or I'm forced to use, but man, tying all those together would probably do me some good. Make sure you check out Nimble because uh I've used it way back in the day, and I'm sure that it's far more advanced um than than it was back then, um, because social media has grown. So um, you know, I love the fact that I remember being able to like get an email from Bob Jones and it tells me who Bob Jones is everywhere. Or if it doesn't tell me, I can quit hit a quick button and it's gonna pull all because it's already available anyway. It's already out there. Bob Jones' Twitter account is readily available, LinkedIn's readily available if he's on LinkedIn, if they're on socials anyway. So um who have some of your biggest customers been, like as far as industries are concerned, is it more sales organizations or is this a fit for any business that's doing business with customers that requires a you know a database and a follow-up and in a relationship nurturing uh feature?

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Well, like my dear friend Brian Kramer loves to say, it's not B2C or B2B, it's P2P, A to A's, right? That's right. And so anybody in today's world, your your network and your brand are your net worth. Relationships are critical to your life success, not just individuals, but teams. So any any company, any person that's interacting with multiple people at scale, which who isn't, needs a relationship manager. Today's CRM systems are not relationship managers, even though they say CRM, customer relationship management, they're reporting platforms for salespeople who are engaging leads. The majority of people aren't salespeople. They're business development, they're business people, they're relationship people. And so if you go and look at pipe driver, Salesforce or HubSpot, they're the sales systems. Well, guess what? Nobody wants to be sold. They want to build a relationship, and you should build relationships that are about paying people forward, not about getting stuff from them. So the whole philosophy of Nimble is that is a relationship platform for you and your team, for you to share all the contacts you have with the outcome, not just a deal pipeline, but we have this thing called workflows that enables you to define a Kanban board of a series of stages that you define the types of data you want to collect on people and companies that you're putting them through the process. And you can use that throughout your company, not just in sales, but in marketing support, HR, uh product, et cetera. And so I'll give you an example of a use case. We're hiring for marketing at Nimble. We put an ad in Indeed. We see 100, 200 applicants. How do you filter through them properly? You go and you give them the sniff test and say, does this person feel like they're worth engaging? If they are, you hit the NIMBL plugin in your browser, it automatically takes the lead out of Indeed, builds your record, and from that plugin in your browser, you can put them in a workflow, which is the hiring workflow. Stage one of the hiring workflow is they automatically get an email to invite them to a meeting and they're tagged as an as a prospect for the marketing job you're hiring for. Then if they respond to that appointment and you do the interview and they pass that sort of first interview test, you put them in the next column and it'll automatically send them an email with a request for them to do some work product for you. And you can see how you could take the standard repeatable people and company processes that you have in your business that you don't really manage effectively, other than spreadsheets, maybe if you're good, and you can put them in a relationship platform that your team can share those interactions with the people to put them through repeatable processes to drive the outcomes that you want. And we have templates for accounts receivable, support, um, lead qualifications, et cetera. And so the people that use Nimble the most certainly are salespeople, but also business development, PR, marketers, Brian Kramer, Lee Odin. There's a lot of big influencers out there that use Nimble because they're building their brain and their network, they need to manage them effectively. And today's sort of quote CRM systems, they don't really hack it when it comes to real relationships.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Yeah, absolutely. So um what do you think is gonna change with the onset of web three, which some would argue and some would maybe be thoroughly convinced that it's the next phase of the internet. What is what is what is uh CRM technology and social media look like um when it comes to to web three? Has has any of that been on the on the discussion board or or table for you guys as far as what that looks like? I mean, I know it's all brand new, I don't even know what the hell to do in the metaverse other than put goggles on, and I still don't know what to do other than try not to get a headache and get nauseous. So that's my extent, that's my excitement, but love to hear your thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

So you're talking to a person that really was in the infancy of computers. Sure. Um, I bought my first computer in 1978. It was Apple IIe. There was a cursor, it was a green screen, DOS was on PCs a little bit later. So I've watched software and computers evolve through all the ages where I heard, oh my God, this is gonna change everything, right? In the early days, we had bulletin boards that someone would host at their home and we would gather around conversations about common things we love, like backpacking or photography or astronomy or whatever. And then that changed to copy servant prodigy, and then that changed to the internet. And the internet was gonna be the big thing that changes everything. And, you know, it keeps new technology, it keeps coming in, but the basic things won't change. This, what we're doing right now, is really about what life's about. Regardless of the technology that comes about, maybe one day you and I will feel like we're in a room. I will see you in a three-dimensional way, and I might even be able to feel you, smell you, whatever. It's like it's gonna be a little bit more real, but that's not gonna change the whole basic interactions. It's still gonna be a database of people, history, follow-up, the human things are gonna matter more. I believe, and again, I'm gonna call it my dear friend Brian Kramer. The more digital we get, the more human we need to be. So I think that as we get into Web3. Yes, yes, really picking up the fucking phone and calling.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Imagine like some kind of animal note or letter by your hand and putting a stamp on it. That's how you're gonna differentiate yourself, and by having the ability to remember who somebody truly is and something unique about them that you connected with them on. And I'm gonna share one last idea with you. Do you see my bookshelf over there? I do. If you came into my office, Sebastian, and looked at my walls, you'd get to know me. You'd get to know what we shared in common on the five Fs of life: family, friend, food, fun, and fellowship. These are the commonalities that build the bonds that earn the trust and the intimacy that will bond you to somebody that nothing can separate that, even years in time, because you reconnect and you'll share those bonds over those commonalities. And that's what life's about. Forget about the metaverse, forget about Web 3.0, get down to the basics with the people that you really care about and reach out and connect with them, reconnect with them and find out what's going on in their life, find a way to blow wind in their sales, and that's how you will succeed in life.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Love it. And what a better way to uh taper off the conversation. A great conversation at that, really understanding the power of relationships uh by utilizing a catalyst like a CRM that happens to cater to all of your needs pertaining to reaching out, contacting, prospecting, et cetera. But I couldn't agree more uh with those five foundations and that it is in fact uh all about uh relationships. So uh we're almost done with 2022. Uh that's crazy to say. We got a few more months left and uh we're we're 2023, we'll be here. What are you guys excited about uh as we as we round out the rest of 2022 going into 2023?

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Well, one of the things I'm most excited about is our relationship with Microsoft. We've become the simple serum for not just Google and social, but also for Microsoft. Microsoft is really how Goldmine scaled over $100 million a year in revenue by helping our third-party product drive their first party solutions. And I think that all businesses are concerned about um uh security and uh and their data and that Microsoft with Azure, Microsoft 365, and their tools is a platform that a lot of businesses are building on. And we are becoming the simple serum for Microsoft 365. But besides that, really the concept of workflows, the concept of taking the repeatable processes that you have in your business and taking them off the spreadsheets that are that are not connected to the context you they're working with and putting them into a repeatable process that you could train your new team members about so that you can get the outcomes that you really need in your business, in the hiring, in the uh league qualifications, in the uh support things you need to do, really anything that you do with people. And most importantly, I think that I'm most excited about people becoming more aware and present about the things that matter in their lives. If you listen to this today, get involved in your local government, learn about who's representing you and get involved. Because if you're not involved, somebody else will be. And the direction the world you are in may not take the path that's most beneficial for you and the people around you. So please, if you listen to this, yeah, I want you to try Nimble. If you go to Nimble.com and try it, uh use the code John40J-O N 40. You get uh 30% off your first four months, or actually it's 40% off your first three months. But really, I'm not here to sell you something. I'm here to help you achieve your dreams in life. And so what you should be thinking about is not what can I get, but what can I give to other human beings around me. Life isn't about you getting as much shit in this moment in life that you're here because you're not gonna take that shit with you. Yeah, but it's about being present with the people you care about because those ripples of those moments that you're truly present with other people, when you actually gift them something, even if it's just your eyes and your smile, will change potentially that person's life. So please put your fucking phones down and pay attention to the people around you and um and and just enjoy life.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

That's a great, that's a that's a great uh bit of advice and a great way uh to end things because a lot of us definitely need to put our fucking phones down. I love it. John, John, always a pleasure. I'm gonna get out to Southern California uh and enjoy one of those incredible meals that you seem like you whip up every single day.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Um, I would love, I would love to cook for you. You let me know. And and while whatever we're cooking is brazing and getting really beautiful, let's walk down to the beach and watch the sunset.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Ah, that sounds like a game plan uh uh in and of itself. Those uh sunsets and sunrises, they never disappoint and they happen every single day and they're free. Imagine that. John, thanks again. Always great to see you, brother. Thank you, Sebastian. You too. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.