305: Build Nimble Relationships with Jon Ferrara
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https://youtu.be/dQWQko3fGZ8
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Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, has devoted his career to helping people grow their businesses by turning contacts into lasting, valuable relationships.
We explore Jon’s journey from creating GoldMine, one of the first successful CRMs, to founding Nimble, a relationship-focused CRM that brings contact management back to its roots. Jon shares his personal “Why” — to grow his soul by helping others grow theirs — and explains why relationships, not technology, are the real key to business success.
He introduces his signature frameworks: the Five F’s of Relationships (Family, Friends, Food, Fun, and Fellowship) for building authentic connections, the Five E’s of Brand-Building (Educate, Enchant, Engage, Embrace, and Empower) for expanding influence, and the Three P’s (Passion, Plan, Purpose) for achieving personal and professional goals. Jon also describes how Kanban-style workflows and selective automation enable entrepreneurs and teams to manage contacts at scale without losing the human touch.
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Build Nimble Relationships with Jon Ferrara
Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is John Ferrara, the CEO of Nimble, a pioneering relationship focused CRM company. John has dedicated his career to helping people grow their businesses by turning contacts into lasting valuable relationships. John, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Steve. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me for this conversation. Hopefully the listeners are going to be able to take away nuggets that will help them achieve their dreams.
Well, definitely you have a really interesting framework and topic, and business that works on that and in that area. So let’s get to it. But before we start talking about your business, I’d like to ask, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it through your work at Nimble and Beyond?
Steve, I think my personal why is that I am on this planet to grow my soul in the brief period of time that I’m here. And I believe that the best way to grow your soul is by helping others grow theirs. The analogy I like to use is I found that I got better at chess the more people I taught how to play chess.
Yeah. I mean, that’s the best way of learning– teaching others.
Yeah. And I think, it’s the best way of growing is growing others.
Okay. Well, I couldn’t agree more. It’s the way to multiply yourself or your knowledge in others. That’s definitely a good way to grow.
Yeah. And my summary is the more people you outgrow, the more you will grow.
I mean, it’s the old what was this business?
Zig Ziglar?
Zig Ziglar. You know, if you have enough people to get what they want, then you’re gonna get what you want.
It really is the basics, like life is about the basics. It’s not that complicated.
That is true. So tell me a little bit about your work in CRM and then you founded Goldmine, one of the first successful CRMs, and then you are now running Nimble. So what was the lessons from building Goldmine and what inspired you to then move on to Nimble and create something, a next generation CRM.
From my perspective as helping to pioneer contact management– call it Outlook and CRM, call it Salesforce, is at the heart of all that are contacts– their relationships, and that’s why CRM stands for ‘customer relationship management’, and it grew out of the contact management market.
You really have to know the past in order to understand the present, and you could actually predict the future if you have a good handle on all of these things.
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And contact management started with The Rolodex. As we became civilized into these larger cities, and more and more people were engaging with each other, we had to manage our contacts. And so the Rolodex was the initial step at managing that, and that evolved into what I call the six by nine index card system, which you put a date on a card on the last call and you make a note, and you file it on the recall date. And then that evolved into the Daytimer, which was a leather based contact tool that had your to-dos and calendars in it.
And that’s where I came into this, I was in sales and they basically told me to go get ’em and I had no tools to do it. And I think the best products come from your own need ’cause you’re past about it and you understand the problem. And my problem was not just that I wanted to be better at selling to my prospects and customers, but more than that, because I recognized that in my sales cycle I was doing enterprise sales to large corporations, but at the same time building relationships with distributors and resellers to try to access customers at their customers at scale. I found that I didn’t work in a vacuum. I worked as part of a larger team, and everybody in that team was touching the customer, and I wanted to run a wire through all of our Daytimers so everybody was on one page, so that no matter who picked up the phone, you knew who you were talking to. ‘What happened? Who did it? What’s gonna happen? Who’s gonna do it?’ That way, you’re all on one page. It’s kind of like when you call American Express, they know who you are, they know what happened and they know what needs to happen. And this didn’t exist in corporate America at that time in 1986, 87, 88.
And I wanted to do more than that. I wanted not just a team contact platform, which is the basis of shared contacts with shared history and pending. But I wanted to be able to automate the sales process in order to do not just pipeline management, managing a sales pipeline, which we used to do in spreadsheets, but to be able to do some automation because we all know what we should do, but we don’t do it, ’cause we’re human. We’re too busy, we forget, right? And it’s the follow up and follow through. It takes 22 touches before somebody’s in a buying cycle, and most people give up to the first to third touch. Why? It’s a lot of work to call people up and send them emails and, and manage all those workflows and processes. So I trademarked automated processes and that was the basis of email marketing. And so my history in conduct management,
CRM Salesforce automation and email marketing is– I was in the infancy of it and I created it to solve my own problems, but it turned out that millions of people had the same problem.
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Okay. So that is fascinating. Now, a lot of people have misgivings about CRMs because they feel like it’s overwhelming or they don’t have a good overview of what the information is in it, and then you have to update, and the automation makes a lot of sense, if you can update it with automation, but ultimately, how does one use a CRM to build relationships? So what, what does it take? Is it just reaching out and sending email automations or it’s something more than that.
It’s way more than that, Steve and I like to reduce that to know technology. Let’s just go to the basics. How I used to teach people before there was technology. Do you see my walls, Steve? If you look closely at my walls, you could see the books I read, the degree, the school I went to, the records I collect, the knickknacks, the photographs, all these things give you a clue into who I am. And I, and relationships are built on what I call the five F’s of life– family, friend, food, fun, and fellowship. These are the commonalities of life that build the deeper connections that stay across time. It takes 60% of your energy to get a car up to speed, to get a rocket into orbit, or to initiate a relationship. It takes very little to keep it going.
And when trouble hits the road– tariffs, price changes, supply chain issues, your prospects and customers will stay with you.
If you've built a relationship, you've done what you said you're going, you've said what you're gonna do and done what you said you're gonna do.
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