Episode 53 - Jon Ferrara
How to organise your conversations. Making conversations about processes count!Jon Ferrara, CEO and Founder of Nimble CRM
Making Conversations about Processes Count!

“Processes help us scale…” –
Jon Ferrara, Making Conversations Count (October 2021)
How are you building your brand?
Hopefully you’re using conversations?
I mean, we all have business conversations but where do you keep track of them?
You’re probably having conversations across email, social and even through Google, using either Google My Business or your website.
There’s only so many our own brains can store before it gets all-a-jumble.
Getting help with this leans towards software assistance and following a process.
Databases aren’t sexy and let’s face it, there are plenty out there to choose from but picking the right one will be the difference for growth.
We usually turn to CRM software.
And normally when salespeople think of CRMs they think ‘sales’.
The majority might automate lead nurturing, but sales is still considered their main priority.
So how do you best nurture the ‘touches’ – the human and conversational aspect of doing business?
As a telemarketing trainer, this podcast’s host Wendy Harris is a busy business owner herself, and so she’s also been facing this challenge.
Recently she’s been made aware of the Nimble CRM which has been started up by her associate Jon Ferrara.
He’s adamant he can help her with her business processes and sales conversations, by using Nimble instead of Salesforce.
And when she’s promised something can help her with her sales conversations, she’s all ears.
Her background includes being a telemarketing trainer, author and speaker on sales processes improvement.
And her mission is making sales people better at engaging prospects through to closing deals faster, over the phone, with less effort.
So that’s why this conversation with Jon Ferrara was a must have.
Hopefully you’ll agree it’s also a must listen.
Especially if your sales team could do with a better handle on sales processes and a way of keeping a record of sales conversations.
Jon’s sales platform is called Nimble, which he developed after his previous CRM GoldMine (which was successful) was bought out.
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Full Episode Transcript
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Making Conversations Count – Episode Fifty-Three
October 21st 2021
Wendy Harris & Jon Ferrara
Timestamps
00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:33: Background to GoldMine
00:02:59: From terminals to computers
00:04:36: How databases have evolved
00:06:41: Building human connections
00:09:14: Introducing Nimble as a Relationships Manager
00:13:40: The Dunbar limit
00:16:30: New Nimble Processes
00:22:59: Human interactions beat AI
00:25:23: Jon’s pivotal moment
00:31:11: Belief in a higher power
00:32:32: Passion, plan and purpose
00:34:07: Managing social media connections
00:36:31: Reach out to groups of connections using Nimble
00:39:39: Building relationship through multiple channels
00:44:05: Staying top of mind with your customers and prospects
00:45:13: Final thoughts
Wendy Harris: Where do you keep all of those conversations? You can’t keep them in your head. You’re having conversations online, over the phone, face to face, and at networking. Because, the key to good conversations is always in following up. So databases, whilst unnecessary, can be really exciting for your business. Join me and Jon Ferrara as we start making conversations about processes count.
What’s new, Wendy Woo? Well, Colin Moby sent me this, “Really enjoyed the Ian Genius episode this week, Wendy. To be fair, he has a great way of looking at sales full stop, and it was great hearing him get into flow, chatting with you”. Well, that’s one thing Ian can do, is get into flow, but he really does know his stuff. Thanks for getting in touch, Colin.
Hey, Jon, how are you?
Jon Ferrara: I’m good, I’m good. So nice to see your beautiful smile.
Wendy Harris: Oh, thank you! I’ve been sitting here getting very excited, because I’ve just realised that when you very, very first started at GoldMine in 1989, that was when I very first started my career, and the office there hadn’t got a clue what a database on a computer was.
Jon Ferrara: If you do what you should do, as a human being, to be present and connect with others, to ask good questions and listen for opportunity to learn about how you might blow wind in their sails, then you will build a network so vast that you can’t manage it anymore.
So, I had that sort of gift of desire to learn about others and to power their dreams, and I started to build this network and I couldn’t manage it on paper. Because I, with the computer entrepreneurial path of getting a computer science degree and working in computers and knew what we sought to put it on the market, I knew there wasn’t a programme that enabled people to manage contacts, communications and their activities, let alone sales and market automation. So, I quite my job and started GoldMine. Actually, it’s going to be a really great topic for our chat about conversations that changed your life.
Wendy Harris: I think it’s incredible, because it’s kind of Silicon Valley in its very infancy, because they’d only just started to teach computer science in the UK in the late 1980s. You were taught how to turn it on and if it booted up right, you might have got to see the flashing blip on the screen, if you were lucky. So, you weren’t ever taught anything on the computer; it was just, this was a computer and isn’t it a great thing to have!
Jon Ferrara: It wasn’t very sexy with the little dos prompt.
Wendy Harris: No.
Jon Ferrara: About as sexy as a terminal! But the difference was, the computer gave you the power, because the terminal, really you could only do what IT let you do. Whereas, with the computer, you could pretty much do anything you want. You could go down to the local shop and get VisiCalc and basically build a spreadsheet to do anything.
I think that giving the power to people, so that they could envision and implement the processes that they need, because maybe processes are slightly different, and there is no one thing that conforms to the way everybody works. But if you give them a piece of clay, they can build a bowl or plate or a bong if they need!
Wendy Harris: Well, it’s true. But then every plate and bowl will all look completely different. They’ll have a similar shape and a similar function, but it will look different.
Jon Ferrara: And that’s why we need manufacturers to synthesise what we need and to build a solution that will fit enough of us, with enough flexibility built within it, that it can be tailored to your processes and needs, so that humanity can get a tool that can scale them like the car.
Wendy Harris: Well, I mean coffee machines do lots now, don’t they?
Jon Ferrara: This is my first cup, look at that!
Wendy Harris: That will get you going; it’s magic! But, yeah, I mean it’s like our mobile phones now are a computer on the go. The majority of people don’t use them for calling; they use them for emailing and tracking software apps and searching the internet and storing so much information. So, just watching databases change, because I remember the individual record cards you would have in a filing system next to your desk, and you’d pull them out and you’d sort them out at the beginning of your day; and at the end of your day, you’d file them back in. So, I remember those days.
Jon Ferrara: But those were the organised people, because most people weren’t that organised. They didn’t use the six-by-nine index card follow-up thing, right.
Wendy Harris: Exactly. And those record cards, I would have a special place on the back of my card in the corner, and I would make a note of if they’d been on holiday, where they’d gone, who they’d gone with, what were they looking forward to most on that holiday, because then I would be bringing that into the conversation when I called them a couple of weeks later. I’d know that they were going to the seaside.
Jon Ferrara: And, what do you think about the people out there that say, “Relationships are meaningless in sales and it’s, you’ve really got to find the gap. It’s the gap selling. It’s all really about process of business. You’ve no need to have any relationship; you’ve just got to dig in and find out where their gap is and fill that gap, and then you can close the sale”?
Wendy Harris: I’m not allowed to swear, so that gives you an indication of where I would like to take the conversation. But, if there are three fundamental elements to sale, it’s time, effort and money. So, if there’s no relationship there, then you’ve got to give it to me now, you’ve got give it to me at the right price —
Jon Ferrara: Then, you’re just working on price and deliverability, and you can always lose that game, right. So, I really believe that the gap-selling concept is powerful, in that you really have to understand where the person is and where they want to be.
Wendy Harris: Timing’s everything.
Jon Ferrara: And fill that gap. But it really helps if they like you and they trust you and they know you. And to like, know and trust, that’s the walls, that’s the little bit of relationship. And, it doesn’t take that much to build a human connection. And I think a human connection separates the salespeople.
Wendy Harris: I couldn’t agree more. If you are approachable, it’s one of the things I teach. If you’re going to reach out to somebody on the phone and it rings and rings off and their voicemail comes on, leave a message, because you’re going to be saying, “It’s nothing really important, I’m not a scary person, I’m not really pushy, it’s nothing for you to worry about, and maybe you’ll pick up next time I call”.
Jon Ferrara: And you might even say, “Hey, so-and-so, I notice that your contract for your servicing of your air-conditioning systems is coming up, and I’m not sure how satisfied you are with your current provider, but here’s a link to our customer stories, about what our customers say. Not only can we match your competitors on price, but we can outdo them on service, and also improve your efficiency and save you money”, right. Because ultimately, I think there’s always a door that can be opened.
Wendy Harris: For me, one of the biggest leverage tools that has supported me really in results, is being able to say to people, “Well, I know you might be happy with them, but it’s always good to have a good plan B”.
Jon Ferrara: There’s nothing wrong with being plan B, baby!
Wendy Harris: Not at all! I’ve had clients that I’m no longer working with that have got in touch with me years later and gone, “Just took a call for you. They asked for Wendy; we knew exactly how to deal with that call and it’s because you’d made that first impression”. And what they were doing maybe takes five or seven years before they’re ready to do anything, or make a change.
Jon Ferrara: Yeah, and what you don’t know is, the people that you don’t sell to, or aren’t buying from you today, may not have bought from you or continued to buy from you for a variety of reasons, which doesn’t mean they don’t value you and wouldn’t recommend you, and they do.
Wendy Harris: Absolutely.
Jon Ferrara: There are people that have outgrown Nimble, because it didn’t fit their new way, or whatever, but they’d still recommend it.
Wendy Harris: I recommend Nimble, I recommend HubSpot, I loved GoldMine, to the point where I put that into several businesses that, when I’d got there, they’d only got Excel spreadsheets. And I’m not knocking Excel spreadsheets, because you can run on Excel spreadsheets, but it gets a little bit cumbersome the more of that conversation you want to hold. So, it’s about the differences as to why you’d want to use it. The reason I loved using Nimble: the social channels, where people are hanging out.
Jon Ferrara: So, I think that Nimble is really about the R in relationships. Most of the other CRMs are about the R in Reporting. R stands for Reporting. They’re built for sales managers to manage salespeople, but most people aren’t salespeople working for sales managers; most people are working for themselves, or they’re not necessarily just all-time selling all the time.
If you think about what a business needs to do to grow, at Nimble we connect to editors, analysts, bloggers, influences, third-party developers, investors, advisors and prospects and customers. There’s a lot of processes for all those different people.
Wendy Harris: You’re clearly very practiced at that; do it again!
Jon Ferrara: You want me to do it again? Okay, you want me to do it faster?
Wendy Harris: Backwards; there’s a challenge!
Jon Ferrara: In order to grow your business, you connect to more than prospects and customers, and it’s more than sales and market people that do it. To grow your business, you should be connecting to the constituency around your business which, for Nimble, includes editors, analysts, bloggers, influencers, third-party developers, investors, advisors and prospects and customers, and various types. And so, what you need in order to do that is you need to use a Relationship Manager.
I emphasise a Relationship Manager, as opposed to a CRM, because most CRM aren’t Relationship Managers, they’re reporting managers for managers to manage salespeople. You need a Relationship Manager that’s used across your entire organisation, so that no matter who picks up the phone, they know who they’re talking to, what’s been done, what’s going to be done, and they can then follow up and follow through.
So, I think that a good Relationship Manager will automatically notify the contacts across your entire siloed company, because today your company has a singular contact platform, which is either Microsoft or Google, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, whatever they call it today, and that platform isn’t a good contact manager, because the contacts are separated between email, contact and calendar, and every team member has a separate contact database, so there is no central contact record for the company.
That’s what GoldMine was when we were Outlook before Outlook existed. So, when I built GoldMine in 1989, there was no Outlook. We were the first programme that integrated email, contact and calendar, sales and marketing information for a team before Act did, before there was a term CRM or SFA, and I did it because I believed that everybody in the company touches the constituency around the company, and that you need a common contact platform that everybody works off of.
That’s why I got back in the business to build Nimble, because as I started to use social media and I saw the way it would change we work, play, buy and sell, I saw that you needed a Relationship Manager that not only works across the entire organisation, but integrated the social communications and connections, and most importantly worked where you worked, because that’s the biggest cause of failure of CRM is that you work for it by googling people for a meeting, and then you have to go to it to log those calls, and nobody does it. That’s the big secret of CRM.
The reason they call it a salesforce is that you have to force salespeople to use it, and I think your CRM should work for you by automatically building itself, so that if I open up an email, if the record isn’t in Nimble, it will automatically build it and enrich it with all the data that you would have to have googled them; and then, let you schedule and log the things that you need to do to follow up and follow through, because every interaction with a human being should result in a next step. If you don’t have a next step with somebody, you don’t have a purpose with them and they shouldn’t even be in your system.
Wendy Harris: I love that.
Jon Ferrara: Well, they could, because you’re not current. But everybody that’s really current for you should have a next step; that’s what the index card thing was all about. You basically put the recall date and you filed it, and you basically followed up with that. Business is the basics; follow-up and follow-through are critical. And if you do what we tell you to do to build your brand and grow your network, you’re going to have so many connections, you can’t manage it, because of the Dunbar limit.
An English chap did a study that said we could only manage 100 to 200 people in our head at one time, and go look at the number of LinkedIn connections you have, go look at the number of contacts you have in your Google Contacts, go look at the number of contacts you have in your phone; thousands, tens of thousands. You can’t manage it; you need a system.
Wendy Harris: Two key points there that I cannot tell you how many times I harp on about which is, have a purpose and follow up and follow through. So many people have those conversations in their head, “Oh, well, I’m not sure”, and have the conversation for the client, and they don’t know. How do you know that they’re not going to be ready; how do you know? Ask them. You have no idea where they are in the cycle of things.
I mean, one of the things that I remember from GoldMine was that Outlook time, when Crystal came along, and we could email and we could do letters and it became such a powerful tool. And we take a lot of that for granted now, so that joined-up thinking is all about having the 360, whether it’s a conversation on the phone, an email, whether it’s socials, it really doesn’t matter. Having that one place for everybody to see; that is the magic.
Jon Ferrara: Yeah, and also I think not only having the one place for everybody to see across the organisation; if you think about the typical organisation, they have applications in the different departments, sales, marketing, customer service and accounting, at the very least. If you’re doing things right, you also have PR and influencer marketing and social people that are doing stuff too, and they probably have another application for that. So, you have all these different siloed contact systems, and then you have Microsoft 365 or Google as your contact system. But there is no one record for relationships.
So, Nimble, we’ve got all those contacts, but then we’re back in those places. So, if you open up an email, if you’re surfing in social, if you’re inside of your marketing system or your support system, Nimble will pop up in that system, because we’ll plug in the browser, and it will basically give you the full 1-1 on that person. And especially if you are surfing in social and somebody interacts with you, wouldn’t it be great to remember who they are, what their business is about, the history of their interactions and to follow up and follow through. I mean, it’s pretty basic, right?
No CRM does that but Nimble, no CRM will plug into your browser, let you hover on a name and automatically build or bring up that record that’s there, and I think that’s one of the magic parts of us. But one of the things I love is this new thing that we’re building, called Processes. So, 30-something years ago, I trademarked automated processes, which was actions based on triggers; if this, then that, for people in companies.
So, if you put a name in GoldMine and it looked like this, GoldMine would do that. Day one, do this; day seven, do that. If a sale happens, stop this track and do another track. That was marked automation before there was a term marked automation. So, not only did we make contact management and CRM and SFA, but also marked automation. So, I think that processes help us scale.
Wendy Harris: Oh, yeah.
Jon Ferrara: In the military, they have processes for everything and they scale. If I go into a business and I say, “What is it that you do and how do you do it; and what happens if you disappear? Are people going to be able to do your job? Have you documented your processes?” So, every department has processes. So, we have processes for lead qualification, we have processes for selling, we have processes for hiring, we have processes for PR outreach, we have processes for investor relation engagement, we have processes for, oh gosh, there are a bunch of other ones, if you’re going out and doing new business development.
So, there’s a step-by-step thing, and so wouldn’t it be great if you could put people in a process that there were templates for that automatically, when you start Nimble up, you have a template that says, “Okay, I want to do hiring; I’m in the hiring department. Okay, I want to do support, business support process. I want to do lead qualification, I want to do sales, I want to basically reach out to new investors”, and basically, there’s stages with fields in that you can collect the data that have already been thought for you. Then, you can modify that to fit your needs. That’s what we’re building. We’re going to be delivering that.
Wendy Harris: When does that hit us?
Jon Ferrara: It’s already there partially, so if you go into Nimble today, do you have a Nimble account?
Wendy Harris: I think I do, but I’m going to have to dig it out.
Jon Ferrara: Okay, dig it out; if you don’t, I’m happy to facilitate you. So, there’s a thing called a “leads tab”, and we started by building leads tab as a precursor to the deals tab.
So, if you think about leads that come into a business, if you took every single lead that came into your business and put it into your deal pipeline, your deal pipeline would get cluttered with leads, and you don’t want to clutter your deal pipeline, because you want to be able to focus on qualified leads, so that you have a focus thing that says, “These are my qualified leads and these are the people I know that have a high probability of selling”.
But leads is as big a sort of thing, bucket, of new eyeballs that you need to qualify before you put it into your lead pipeline, or your deal pipeline. So, we built the leads pipeline in order to deal with prequalification of leads, so you can put it through a process of, first a lead should pass the sniff test, “Here’s a lead. Okay, let me sniff that. Does it fit the persona of people we typically sell to?” If they don’t, why waste the time and energy to reach out to them. Okay, they pass the sniff test. With Nimble, it’s easy to pass the sniff test; you just Nimble them. Nimble will automatically tell you who the company is, what size it is, what industry it is, who the person is, what their role is, and that’s enough for you to say if they fit us.
Then you need to try to reach out to them, because you need to connect with the lead before you put them in the deal pipeline. So, then you connect with them and you basically ask them your bad questions, whatever it is you use for qualification. There’s a million different ways of qualifying people, but typically it’s, do they have the need, the budget, the ability to buy? If they fit those things, they go in your deal pipeline.
So, we built the lead pipeline for putting people through this process, but then I started thinking, “Well, gosh, it’s not just salespeople that sell; it’s everybody in the company that’s engaging with humanity around the business”. So, the people in HR have to hire people, so if you’re going to hire people, shouldn’t you put them through a process so that you don’t let people fall through the cracks. So, it’s a “new hire” prospect. You put a page up on whatever hiring site you have and you get an email with a resume. Okay, sniff test, you take a look at them. Do they pass the sniff test? Okay, great, they do. Okay, they’re basically into the next bucket.
I reach out to them and have the first phone call. Okay, phone call went good; okay, next bucket. Phone call didn’t go good at all; okay, they’re done. Okay, they go into the next bucket; maybe they have to meet other people within the company. Okay, they pass that conversation. Then, you have to check the qualification or references. So, that’s the process for hiring.
So, if you think about it, every organisation has a process that they should be putting people through, but how do you organise that. So, the deal pipeline is much like any other process. At GoldMine, we flipped our deal pipeline, our opportunity manager — opportunity and deals is the same word — into a project manager. It’s process that you’re putting people through. And so, we’re launching process pipelines.
We launched lead pipelines with the idea of prequalifying leads before they go in the deal pipeline with the notion that it could be used for other things. But we came to the notion that if we called it “lead pipeline”, it minimises that it’s really about processes across your organisation. So, we name it Lead Process Pipeline and we come out with templates that allow you to easily tailor it to your needs.
I think that the biggest thing that prevents people from adopting a solution is it doesn’t fit them and they can’t see themselves in it. Imagine if you grabbed a suit off the rack and it basically didn’t fit you at all, right. But if they had different sizes and different styles of suit that fit different workflows, then they could tailor it just a little bit more, so that it’s not hanging down here, but it’s right here on your shoulder. So, Nimble comes pre-tailored for your industry, for the processes that you do with people, and then you can just slightly modify it, “Oh, no, I want a stage here [or] I don’t want that stage there. Oh, no, I want to collect this other field that I want to collect through that process”.
Ultimately, it’s processes that will scale your business and it’s thinking beyond prospects and customers and sales and marketing people that will help you to do it.
Wendy Harris: And the difference here is that it’s not an automation; it’s still got that human behind it that is driving it on. So, it’s not letting the algorithms or the AI do all of that work for you, it still keeps the human in control. I love it, I love the idea.
Jon Ferrara: I really am done with the automated emails that I get. People think that spraying and praying works; it doesn’t. I think that the more digital we get, the more human we need to be, and we need to stop spraying and praying, and we need to be laser-focussed with human interactions to stand out from the crowd.
Wendy Harris: I’m sure I’ve said exactly the same thing many a time before, Jon.
Jon Ferrara: Yeah, and I actually have a story for that, Wendy. Back in the GoldMine days, we used to do direct mail; remember direct mail?
Wendy Harris: Yes, I still do it.
Jon Ferrara: So, I did a test of two different direct mail pieces. One was a laser-printed, really pretty letter that went out as an outreach; the other one was a trifled, courier-typed letter with mistakes and yellow highlighting in it. Guess which one pulled better?
Wendy Harris: Oh, please do tell me it was the pretty one?
Jon Ferrara: No, it pulled better the one that was slightly irregular. And, why? Because everybody sends pretty [bleep]
Wendy Harris: I suppose, yeah!
Jon Ferrara: It’s the unique ones that stand out, right? I stand out, right. There’s something unique about me that I stand out, and I think that’s why people love me. And I hope that doesn’t sound immodest. I think it’s my desire to connect with other humans. I think I was gifted with a desire to connect with others and learn about them. I love learning.
I used to spend much of my time in the local library, which is half a block from my house, just reading. And any chance I have, I love to chat people up. And, this is what gave me the pivotal moment that caused me to start GoldMine, and there’s a story here. You want to hear it?
Wendy Harris: Yeah, absolutely.
Jon Ferrara: So, what started me on my entrepreneurial journey was my father was an automobile entrepreneur. He was a Lincoln-Mercury sales guy, top in the country, and then he had one of the first Subaru dealerships in California. And, I grew up on his car lots and I said, “I never want to be in sales, never, ever”.
Wendy Harris: You’ve got to find somewhere far away or dark to hide from sales, yeah.
Jon Ferrara: Yeah. So, I grew up watching the NASA missions, the Mercury, the Gemini, the Apollo, and I wanted to be an astronaut, and I wanted to be in technology. And, my uncle helped invent radar and microwave at MIT in the 1940s, and he was an aerospace entrepreneur; he built waveguide systems, which is microwave communications stuff. And, he was President of Itripoli, he also was a dean of engineering at my school. He actually helped create Save The Engineering programme at my school, Cal State Northridge.
So, I emulated my uncle. I bought a computer in 1978. I was the first kid, maybe one of the first people in my city that had a computer. And, I worked my way through college at a Computaland store, gaining my computer science degree. I was making $80,000 a year working part time at a Computaland store, selling the first 300,000 computers in Southern California corporations in 1982, because there were no computers on desktops; they were all terminals. And, computers were 55% margin, so there was a lot of money to be made in computers.
Even with that, I took my first job after I graduated, for $30,000 a year at Hughes Space and Communications, and I did that because I did not want to be in sales. So, I did a year at Hughes Space and Comm, a year at Hughes Missile Systems and after two years in aerospace, I learned some lessons. One of them was, one of my dad’s old friends, this engineer that worked at Hughes, he basically used to tell me stories about, I shoulda coulda woulda. And, by the way, Hughes was the precursor to technology in California. Hughes, all the spinoffs that came from that company are amazing: TRW, Litton, a lot of different companies were spun off from these early aerospace companies like Hughes.
He said, “I used to have these friends. They left and started TRW, they left and started Litton and they asked me to join them. I could have done that, I shoula, I coulda, I woulda”. And so I said, “Do you know what, two years at an aerospace company, it’s just a little too slow”. They got a cheque every week and they didn’t really have to work. It was a nonprofit corporation. Hughes basically made it nonprofit, because he was fighting the government and they made Hughes Medical Association; all the profits went into that. And it just was a pretty cushy place to work.
So, I wanted more, I wanted some drive. So, I got a job at a start-up in Boston, Banyan VINES, network operating system, and they put me in as the first systems engineer on the West Coast, and then they moved me into sales. And I went into sales, because I got tired of the sales guys showing me $200,000 commission cheques on deals and I did all the work. A systems engineer does the pre-and post-sales work necessary to get the sale closed and keep the sale closed.
I said, “Well, I could do that sales thing”. I started to do the sales thing and there was no sales process. I had leads, which were pieces of paper from computer intelligence reports, which was phone numbers of IT people in big corporations, and they said, “Go get them”. So, I pick up the phone and I call them, and I’d make notes on the piece of paper that I got. And then, I put the appointments that I had in a day-timer; it was like a leather-based sort of calendar thing I kept in my jacket pocket. And I put my forecast on a spreadsheet once a month the night before it was due.
I communicated with my team with email and pink “while you were out” slips and I said, “There’s got to be a better way”. I looked around the marketplace and I couldn’t find a programme that integrated email, contact and calendar, sales and marketing information. So I said, “I never want to say shoulda coulda woulda”. So, even though I was making $100,000-plus a year, I had a cushy job, I said to myself, “I could always go get a job at a technology company, I know this stuff, but I may not have the opportunity to go start something like this”.
So, I got together with a college friend of mine and we basically built GoldMine. And, we started a company on $5,000 in an apartment in Los Angeles and grew it to $100-plus million a year in revenue, and I sold that when I was 40 and I retired.
Wendy Harris: That’s doing well for you now with Nimble, isn’t it?!
Jon Ferrara: I don’t think I would have been able to do that if I didn’t learn the life lessons before. One of them was watching my father as the entrepreneur that he was in sales and cars; the other was watching my entrepreneurial uncle pioneer technology at an aerospace company. And then, that old guy that didn’t quite do it and said, “I shoulda coulda woulda”, and they will not write on my grave, “He said, ‘shoulda coulda woulda'”!
Wendy Harris: Well, you know when you first said that and my reaction was, “Woah!” I literally, on my Safari tab, got the YouTube of Beverley with Shoulda Coulda Woulda open, because it was something that was triggered in my mind this morning from a poster I’d read, and I’ve got an idea to throw that out there and say, “Come on, don’t be that person that says, ‘I shoulda coulda woulda'”. So, you saying that is kind of spooky. There’s one for you to play later.
Jon Ferrara: I think that the best products come from your own pain, because you’re passionate about it and you understand the problem. So, listen to your pains and try to synthesise solutions and consider whether those solutions will scale.
But beyond that, I really believe in the power of the universe; there’s a higher power. And I’m not talking about Jesus and Mohammed or Buddha, right. I think that each of those people are manifestations of that higher power, where I believe that we’re all connected in the universe, that we’re all part of that higher power, and that some of us are gifted with more of that juice, if you will. And when we come down to this earth, those people that are gifted with that more of the juice have a higher effect on others; you’re just moved by people. Have you ever been moved by somebody?
Wendy Harris: Yeah.
Jon Ferrara: Yeah. And so, Jesus and St Arthur, Buddha, Mohammed, they just had more of that higher power in them, and they were able to spread that. And when they did, people followed them naturally, right?
Wendy Harris: It’s having an ability to conduit that energy, because I believe the same thing. And not wanting to talk politics or religion, because it’s dangerous ground, however for me, people say about introverts and extroverts and they say, “Wendy, you’re an extrovert”; but I’m so introverted at home. So for me, my argument about everything, religion is stories, politics is stories. Energy; it all comes back to the energy that we have and how we use it.
Jon Ferrara: Yes, because when you tell stories, you’re sharing energy, right, and you’re building bonds and connections. So, getting back to product and creation, I believe that anybody can tap into that higher power. So, what you need to do is you — I call it the three Ps: Passion, Plan and Purpose. You need to figure out what your passion is, build a plan to achieve it and make it your purpose on a daily basis. Put in your refrigerator, put it on your bathroom mirror and say, “What am I doing to get there?” each day, and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
If you do that, you’ll get some place. It may not be where you think you were going, but you’re going to get someplace, and it’s going to change your life. And I synthesise that down to, take your dreams and share them with that higher power, with the universe, and be present enough to listen for when they knock and be brave enough to open the door and walk through it. That’s me finding the shoulda coulda woulda and walking through that door.
I wouldn’t have built GoldMine if I wasn’t listening, hearing the universe knock and walking through the door. I wouldn’t have built Nimble if I wasn’t listening, hearing the universe knock and walking through the door. And with Nimble, I didn’t even intend to build another company. I did that; why would I get on the horse and do it again and risk failure?
Wendy Harris: But it’s a different horse, it’s a different landscape, and it’s an everchanging landscape.
Jon Ferrara: It’s a more busy landscape. But the thing is, I started to use social media in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and I immediately saw it was going to change the way we work, play, buy and sell. Because, I had been out of technology for ten years. I basically spent ten years raising three babies, so I had no bread, I had no network, my kids and my family and my community was my network.
So, as I started in social media, I started to reconnect and build connections with new people in and around the areas of my passions and purpose. And as I did that, I needed to manage those connections, because if you get out in the social river and you start to listen and then engage with people who share commonalities with you, you can’t help but build connections. Well, how do I manage these connections now?
So, I started looking at cloud-based solutions for Contact Management and saw Google Contacts wasn’t good at Contact Management, because email, contact and calendar are three separate programmes. And then I started looking at CRMs and saw they weren’t about relationships, they were about reporting, and they weren’t social. And so I said to myself, “Imagine if there was a CRM that automagically built itself from the social connections you had and then worked back into places where you were engaging”, and that was the impetus of Nimble.
Wendy Harris: Here’s a question off the top of my head, because this is a question I’ve had rolling around in my head. I’ve started to use Sales Nav on LinkedIn and I’m building lists. I’m self-taught, rubbish at it. Somebody said to me the other day, “You can find out what’s your most engaging content”. No you can’t, not easily, not even if you pay for it.
But what it did lead me to was that, there are different people I want to get in touch with for different reasons, which is why I’ve got different lists. So for me, I’ve got people that I want to work with on my training and consultancy, and then there’s people on my podcast that I want to let them know about different things, so two completely different reasons for getting in touch. Is there a way with Nimble that I can use my list to broadcast through Nimble to a set of people?
Jon Ferrara: Sure.
Wendy Harris: That would be a really — I mean, because half of it is the questions that you don’t think to ask, that never get answered, so you never put the process in place for it to make your life better.
Jon Ferrara: Yeah. The thing you have to remember about LinkedIn is that those aren’t your contacts, it’s not your Contact Manager, and you don’t own it. And you don’t really have access to all the contact information. You can’t export it, you can’t really do much with it.
So, if you think about what you just said, there’s different people I’m getting in touch with for different purposes. I might be getting in touch with them to bring them on my show; I might be getting in touch with them to sell my consulting services to them; I might be getting in touch with them just to build my brand and my network with peers of mine that are influential in my same training area purpose; I might be getting in touch with them because I just [bleep] love them, these are people I dig and I want to be around.
That’s what Processes is all about. So, if you think about it, most CRMs are about deal pipelines, but most relationships don’t centre around a deal. So, the structure of an opportunity manager or a deal manager is all about the amount of probability of closure, which has nothing to do with building a relationship for other purposes.
So, the Nimble Processes, which is now called Lead Pipelines, it’s going to be called Process Pipelines, will enable you to take a list of people and to build a set of processes you want to put them through. Because, if you’re thinking about these different sets of people, let’s say you find somebody on LinkedIn and you go, “Okay, I want to connect with this person. Okay, I’m going to put them on a list. Okay, what I want to do, I don’t want to just have them on a static list, I want to have them on a list that I can start moving them across the stages of the process that I want to put them through, their relationship.
“So, first identify them, then the next thing is, I want to outreach them to initiate a conversation, and then I want to have a meeting with them face to face, just like this, where we have this conversation. Okay, I’ve initiated the relationship”, which is 60% of the fuel of the rocket kicking into orbit. 60% of the fuel of a car is getting it to speed. The rest of it is just keeping the speed, which is maintaining the relationship. So, once you’ve gotten the connection, then you want to maintain it, which is why you want to message them periodically with updates, or stuff.
So, there’s a different constituency that you want to then connect to and message, so what you’ve just said is, “I have different groups of people, I want to basically connect with them, and then maintain it, which means I want to message them periodically with different sets of messages”. So, with Nimble, you can basically build these sets for processes and stages for different types of connections. I’m connecting with them for the podcast; I’m connecting with them for the consulting services; I’m connecting because they’re my professional peers.
Then, you can then do group messages to them through Nimble. We have templated, trackable emails that you can do one-to-one, or one-to-many. So, you can basically have a set of people and say, “Okay, I’m going to be speaking at this event and I want to basically invite my network of friends that look like this” or, “I have this special podcast that I did with Jon Ferrara and I want to share it with these certain people”. And then, you can send that one email, it goes to all of them, and it comes from your professional email; it doesn’t come from like a HubSpot marketing animation system. So, it feels like you sent it to them.
Wendy Harris: That’s going to make such a difference, because we seem to have this culture of dealing with this over here, LinkedIn’s over there, then there’s your database, then there’s your email marketing over here.
Jon Ferrara: And, if you do it all right, you’re doing these things in Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. So, I like to say that LinkedIn’s like my business lobby. If you walk in my business lobby, which you can’t even do anymore because of COVID, this is my business lobby, which is much better than my corporate lobby, even though I have pictures of my family. Actually, I used to have pictures of my family in my business office; I took them all home, because I like to have my pictures with me.
But if you walk in my business lobby, it’s going to be my business persona mainly. And, if you want to build a deep relationship with a human being, you need to take that business connection into the personal route, and we’ve been doing this forever. When I started teaching this ten years ago via social, people said, “Well, no, I have to keep my Facebook separate from my LinkedIn”.
Wendy Harris: Good luck with that!
Jon Ferrara: When we built a business relationship, we took people to a pub, we took them to a cricket game, we took them to our home. I go to London and I see, during the work day, business suits standing outside a pub at noon drinking beer.
Wendy Harris: Yeah, and the acid test is, “Do you want another one?” or, “I’ve got to go now”!
Jon Ferrara: So, in order to build that personal connection, which you should do in all business relationships that are meaningful, I’m not saying you try to force a personal connection with everyone, just some people you don’t want to be that connected with, right. Some people, they’re just not friend material, but most of them are if you’re doing it right.
So, I like to take these soft connections that I could build anywhere, so it could happen through Twitter, it could happen through a conversation at an event, whatever. The typical thing that happens is, I connect with them on LinkedIn, because that’s like I exchanged a business card, then there’s some sort of calendar event, where I actually do a face to face, and then I will start following them on Twitter and I’ll comment on their stuff if they’re doing anything, I’ll follow them on Instagram and I’ll comment on their stuff; and, if that feels good, I’ll connect with them on Facebook.
So, that’s the natural cycle, but the problem is, if I have that connection randomly, which could happen at Twitter or LinkedIn or email, how do you then take that into these other places? That’s why Nimble plugs into your browser, so if I have the email, if I have the LinkedIn connection started, if I have the natural thing happening in Twitter, I could then bring it to email, to calendar and all these other places; because when you engage, if you do this at scale, you’re going to have thousands of connections, you won’t remember everybody.
So, if somebody comments on your Twitter or your Instagram or your Facebook in the future, it would be nice to go, “Oh, yeah, that’s Wendy and yeah, we met here and that’s the last time we connected”, so that you have context and insight in order to engage effectively. You need context, the history of interactions, insights, who are they, what’s their business about, what’s pending and what’s going to happen, in order to effectively engage; but most importantly, follow up, because the engagement opens the door to a follow-up, which creates more opportunity.
Wendy Harris: Certainly one of the things that I insist on now is not just about starting that relationship, but making sure that whoever that is handed over to is going to deal with it, because what’s the point? It makes me look bad, and if what you’ve just explained there is 60% effort to get it to that point of having a conversation, why would you waste all that energy?
Jon Ferrara: Yeah, and it doesn’t take much to keep the plates spinning. Have you ever seen the people in the circus or on the streets of the mall where they have the plates spinning, the people that can get all the plates on their fingers and on the pencils spinning, you ever see that?
Wendy Harris: Yeah.
Jon Ferrara: Okay, so it takes a lot of work to get that plate up on the pencil and get it going, but it just takes a little nudge every once in a while. So, what you need to do is you periodically just need to nudge somebody to let them know that you’re still around and you still care about them, and that’s what I use the Nimble stay in touch reminders for, is I basically set a reminder saying, “Hey, if I haven’t connected with this person in a while, connect with them”, because it doesn’t take much if you’ve done the foundational relationship stuff, for you to let somebody know that you still care about them and are interested in learning more about them.
If you have that connection and you’re top of mind with them, then when they have somebody, if they need you, or they have somebody that needs your products and services, they will gladly pick up the phone and call you, or drag their friends with them. And, there is an actress named Mae West.
Wendy Harris: Oh, yes.
Jon Ferrara: Mae West actually was an entrepreneur, a really good entrepreneur. And one of the things that she said that’s just one of my mantras is, “Out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is out of money, honey”. So, how do you stay top of mind with not just your prospects and customers, but their influencers as well, because that’s the most important one? The influencers of your prospects and customers will help you scale. So, how do you stay top of mind with them? You show your humanity, you open up your heart and your sole, you build a personal connection, you blow wind in their sails, you pay them forward. And if you do that, then they will gladly shower you with referrals.
Wendy Harris: I mean, a rising tide lifts all boats, right, so be the rising tide. It’s been wonderful to hear your journey, it’s been wonderful to hear more about how Nimble can help and some of those ideas are going to affect listeners. Now, I always ask a guest, if people want to carry on the conversation, where’s the best place for them to find you hanging out?
Jon Ferrara: Well, actually, here’s my last tip to you. Google yourself; do you show up on the first page? How much do you show up on the first page? If you don’t show up on the first page, or not to the level that you would like, build a Wikipedia page for yourself. It’s easy, it’s free, you just need to cite citations so that it’s credible. And put a nice avatar there, and you’ll show up on the first page in a nice little box, and you can control what they see.
But Google me and connect with me on whatever channel that is most comfortable for you. My name is Jon Ferrara, and I’ll just make it easy for you, here’s my email: jon@nimble.com. You want to connect with me? There it is. Let me know how I can blow wind in your sails.
Wendy Harris: Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jon, it’s been a real pleasure.
Jon Ferrara: You bet, Wendy, it was my pleasure.
Wendy Harris: Will you be looking at your database now, or your spreadsheet, or that pad that’s got a long list, and thinking you need to do things differently? If you are, do get in touch. It’s one of our specialties. You can speak to me or to Jon; we are both happy to carry the conversation on. Don’t forget to check out the website for all the additional information you may be looking for, on www.makingconversationscount.com.
Join me next week, where I will be bringing Social Republic founder, Rob Illidge.
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