2242 - How Building Relationships Can Transform Your Business Strategy with Nimble's Jon Ferrara

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

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1:05With us right now, John Ferrara. John, you are the CEO and founder of Nimble. You're found on the web at nimble.com. John, it's great to have you. Josh, it's so good to be with you and your community. I'm really excited about our conversation because I really believe that we grow when we help other people grow. And so hopefully through this conversation, there'll be some nuggets that people can take away that will add some value to their journey, even if it's non-business related and more about just personal life and growth. Very true words, my friend. And on that note, just kind of talking about your personal life outside of work, I always love hearing what high achievers do in their personal life, your hobbies, interests, movies, music, entertainment, just whatever they're into.

1:56So I guess my first question is, what are you geeking out on lately? Well, you know, I have a wide array of hobbies that I love, including astronomy, photography, backpacking, camping in my teardrop trailer in the Appalachian Mountains, cooking. And of course, the usual, you know, my family, blah, blah, blah. But you said that family wasn't included in the passion. I think my chief passion is cooking, Josh, because I really believe that relationships are key to our life success. And I'm a relationship guy. I love to connect with others. And the best way to connect with somebody else is to break bread with them.

2:42And I love to cook. So if you come to my place, expect to eat a meal. Yeah. And there's a special joy for me. like I, so cooking for me is a relatively new passion. Maybe about three years ago, I really started getting very serious about it and I'm just obsessed. And I'd say, you know, it's like for me, you know, the crown jewel of being able to, you know, enjoy, you know, that process of grading, you know, creating great food is, is entertaining and having friends over and family and just being able to share your creation with them. And I would, it sounds like you you you have that you know what i'm talking about on that well you know towards that we have it we're remodeling our home here in uh ashville north carolina and um i'm building my own kitchen office so we have a kitchen in the main part of the house but i want my own office that has a kitchen where i do my work stuff like you know look at my walls there's all the books I read and I do my work, my nimble work or my passion work.

3:52But cooking is part of that. So I'm going to have this big great room that has a kitchen wall and I can cook and I could put my my records on my turntable or I could watch my Dodger games and and slice and dice and and it's the gathering room. So basically, it's got this sliding window that opens up into a huge deck overlooking our trees and yard. And you can come and just put food down if you want to do a potluck. And otherwise, I'm cooking. And afterwards, hopefully, we're dancing or sitting around the fire outside. That sounds dreamy. And John, as someone who's as relationship-oriented as you, it makes sense that you are at the helm of a CRM.

4:35Share with us about Nimble, please. Well, the Nimble journey starts with a company called Goldmine. that predates all CRMs, SFA, marketing automation programs. So basically, Goldmine was Outlook and Salesforce before either existed. And that was back in the DOS days. And I built it because I struggled. I have a need. I think the best products come from your own need because you're passionate about it and you understand the problem. They put me into sales and there were no sales tools. The sales tools were daytimers. I don't know if you know what a daytimer is, but it's a paper-based leather organizer.

5:14Oh, yeah. And spreadsheets. That was sales. I had the Franklin Covey thing back in the day. Yeah, yeah. And because I had a computer science degree and I worked my way through school at a computer store, I knew every software program on the market. I knew there wasn't a program that basically ran a wire through all my team's day timers so that no matter who picked up the phone, you know who you're talking to, what happened, what's going to happen, who's going to do it. and that's what you need in a company to stay on one page. I call that contact management and that's the root of CRM because CRM stands for customer relationship management so it should have a relationship manager in it and I started that company on$5 ,000 never took a dime of venture grew it to north of$100 million a year in revenue which was real money in the 90s sold it and retired and raised three babies for 10 years which was the biggest blessing that I could have ever gotten in my life.

6:08After they all got into school, I started to use social media in 2010 or so. And I saw I was going to change the way we work, play, buy and sell. I was looking for a relationship manager that would enable me to take the connections that I'm making in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and put them into an organizer because I didn't want disparate contacts and conversations and all these different platforms. I wanted a centralized contact manager because that's my roots. I want to be able to manage and nurture that relationship database. And I looked around and saw that there didn't exist a social serum or social contact manager.

6:44And then I started looking at a contact management like Google in the cloud or Salesforce. And I saw they really weren't good team contact platforms, let alone relationship managers. Salesforce is built for management. It's not built for the customer facing business team member who's engaging. And so I started Nimble. Well, so where does Nimble fit today in the, you know, it could be perceived to be a very noisy, crowded space today. You bet. So almost every single CRM is built for salespeople. And it's built to track and control the salesperson to a certain extent. They're not built for engagement and they're not built for the whole company.

7:27Most companies, and your audience is in the, say, 10 to 50 employees or so, most companies only have 5 % of those people in sales. And so in most companies, you've got maybe 5 or 10 salespeople. But the rest of the company, the other 40 or so, don't have a relationship manager. They have either Microsoft or Google Email Productivity Suite, which is basically Google contacts or Microsoft Outlook contacts. And every single contact database is separate for every team member in your company. So you don't have a centralized record of relationships in your company today. This is why, besides the salespeople using the CRM for qualifying and closing managing deals, everybody else works in spreadsheets for their purposes.

8:17Oh, that's unacceptable. What purposes does a company have to engage externally beyond sales? Well, at Nimble, we connect to editors, analysts, bloggers, influencers, third-party developers, investors, advisors, and prospects and customers. That means biz dev, PR, HR. All these people are managing relationships and processes. And so what makes Nimble different, it's the CRM for the whole company, not just salespeople. It has outcomes other than deals because not all relationships are dollar denominated. In fact, most are not. But they are process-related. If you don't have documented processes in your company, and ideally systems that automate them, then you're not going to scale.

8:57And the processes could be hiring. It could be outreaching for PR. It could be biz dev. It could be podcast outreach. Any kind of management of connections and conversations. And so Nimble is a CRM for the whole company, not just salespeople. It has outcomes other than deals. Of course, we have deals, but we have workflows. And then most importantly, we have email marketing integrated to the CRM. So you don't have to go by MailChimp or some other email program. So in one system, you have the sales and marketing tools that you need to grow. And I'm going to get specific here because I think it's really important that the people listening to this know about the exploding sales and marketing tech stack that's eating their tech budgets and annoying their salespeople.

9:45So when you buy a CRM today, it's just a deal management system with reports. It doesn't have the tools that your sales reps need to outreach and qualify and close deals, let alone get the business intelligence about those leads. So when you buy a CRM like Salesforce, you've got to go buy Zoom info to enrich the leads with business and contact details because you don't want your sales reps Googling them. Then you've got to buy something like Outreach.io or SalesSoft, which is templated outreach software that allows you to take a lead and put them on a sequence that you could basically have trackable templated emails that can drive a conversation.

10:26And then you need something that goes into LinkedIn to do prospecting. So you've got LinkedIn Sales Navigator,$150 a month. Outreach,$150 a month. Zoom Info,$500 a month. And it's just too much. With Nimble, you get all that for$29. So you get the contact manager, the CRM, the email marketing system, the SFA outreach stuff, and the lead enrichment stuff all in one simple package for your whole company. Well, that's very cool, especially if you can include the Zoom info, which that's actually quite unique. I don't see that in CRM platforms. So people don't live in their CRMs. They live wherever they can engage with their constituency.

11:15And I say constituency because salespeople don't just deal with prospects and customers if they're smart. If you're smart out there and you want to attract prospects and customers, you should be identifying the influencer of that prospect and customer and building relationships at scale with them. And Josh, you know this because that's why you do this podcast, giving your knowledge a way to attract more people to you as a trusted advisor. And so the biggest cause of failure of serum is lack of use. The second is bad data. Lack of use because you go to the serum to use it. Bad data because you have to Google the people and then type the stuff in.

11:48Imagine a serum that automagically built the database itself by unifying your contacts from all the disparate places, Microsoft or Google, email productivity suites, LinkedIn, your accounting system, wherever you've got contacts. And then enrich them with people and company data so you didn't have to Google them, you nimble them. and then lived where you worked. We live in our inbox. We live in LinkedIn. We live on webpages looking at companies and the about bio pages. Imagine if you had Nimble on your shoulder plugged into your browser that automatically brought up a record when you're engaging with somebody in email, LinkedIn, or wherever, or built a record automatically and then enriched it with the people and company data you need, email, phone number, and allowed you to put them in a workflow or sequence process automatically wherever you are engaging then you'd use it.

12:37And that's why out of 225 million global businesses, less than 1 % use any serum because they're not built for people, they're built for management. Yeah. And John, I really, I'd love to hear your take on this. And I feel like if there's a TED talk you were to give, I think you would just be quite eloquent. And I mean, I feel it in your heart about the value of relationships and the value of connection and why we're here, why we do what we do. And I'm wondering maybe if you could just take a couple minutes that we're kind of wrapping up here, but maybe just kind of a closing thoughts primarily around the impact and the power and the value of relationships.

13:22You bet. You know, in today's crazy world where tariff prices pop up and down on products left and right on and off every day i think you're going to understand the value of relationships when if you have a connection with a person where you built it over time having that connection on the softer side the family food fund and fellowship things that built the intimacy and trust and you've delivered for that person over time if you're struggling with a price increase or inventory lack, they're going to stick with you because of those relationships. And I'll tell you a story. So imagine we started Goldmine with no investors, never took a dime of venture, no bank loans, nothing.

14:11So when we sold it, we sold it for cash. So there I was with more money than I could ever imagine in my life, brand new babies being born and I get a head tumor. And it's a pretty serious one. Stage three, almost died. And in the journey of getting healed, I did Western medicine. I did some Eastern medicine. I did some philosophical soul work. And I came to the conclusion that I'm on this planet to grow my soul in the brief period of time that I'm here. And I discovered that the best way for me to grow my soul is to help other people grow their soul, rinse and repeat. And so I really doubled down on my desire to connect with others and help them grow.

14:59And the best way for me to do that at scale is to build relationship managers that help them build the relationships that help them achieve their dreams, which I hope includes serving others to help them grow, because I believe service is the new sales. And the more people you outgrow, the more you will grow. And so relationships are at the heart of my being. When I'm in the register at the market and I'm checking out, I put my phone down and I look that person in the eye and I create a connection and I give them something, even if it's just my presence or my smile or my attention. And so I think that's the way I run my life.

15:41But it's for a purpose. My purpose is to connect with somebody for a brief period of time to learn enough about them to blow wind in their sails. And if more salespeople stop talking about themselves and their products and the services and start talking about how they can help other people grow at scale, then they would basically have more business than they could ever manage because people don't buy great products. They buy better versions of themselves. So start teaching others how you can help them to be great. you will then stand out as a trusted advisor and people will not only pick up the phone and call you and drag, but they will drag their friends with them.

16:18Yeah. Well, John, getting back to Nimble, I want to make sure to our friend who's listening to this episode, particularly specifically because they wanted to learn about you and Nimble. I want to invite them to kind of take the next steps. What are those next steps? Well, it's easy. You just go to nimble.com, N-I-M-B-L-E and sign up. It's free for two weeks and you get full access to the program. And at the end of the two weeks, if you feel it is adding value to you and you want to become a subscriber, use the code John40, J-O-N-40, and you'll get 40 % off your first three months. J-O-N-4-0 was that code.

16:59Yep, yep. John Ferreira, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great conversation. thank you for the joy and light that you bring to the world. I appreciate it. It's been a great conversation. Thank you, Josh. It's been amazing. I appreciate this opportunity.

17:20Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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