Sales on Steroids and the World of Entrepreneurship with Jon Ferrara

Today we are joined by Jon Ferrara, the founder and CEO of Nimble, an award-winning social sales, and marketing CRM. Jon also was the creator and co-founder of the award-winning customer management product GoldMine.

In this episode, Alex and Jon discuss Jon's journey, the world of Entrepreneurship, and sales on steroids!

For more information, links, social media profiles, and much more, please visit our website.

Listen now on all major podcasting platforms!

Transcript

Alex Romanovich (00:02):
Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to Global Edge Talk. Today we have Jon Ferrara, and John is a founder and CEO of a very interesting, very well-known CRM company called Nimble. He was a former CEO and founder of also very interesting and very well-known company called GoldMine. He is a leading managing investor at Casentino Partners. We'll talk about investments and entrepreneurship. He is teaching at the University of Southern California and presiding over an entrepreneurship program there. And we'll talk more about his other accomplishments and his early days as well. Jon, welcome to our studio,

Jon Ferrara (00:49):
Alex, it's my pleasure to join you and your audience today. I think we all grow by learning and when you teach, I think, you learn even more. And so I'm looking forward to our conversation and hopefully imparting a little bit of knowledge.

Alex Romanovich (01:06):
Absolutely. Thank you so much for being with us. Now we have a very interesting, very global audience and we want to talk about, first of all, want to talk about you and your early days, and what was the impetus for starting GoldMine? I used goldmine in my early days as a sales professional, as a marketing professional. Very good tool contact manager, but it's not just about the functions and features of the product. What was the impetus? Why were you interested in starting something like this?

Jon Ferrara (01:39):
Well, I was put into sales at a startup called Banyan, and they put me in the district office in Dallas and said, go get them. And they didn't give me any tools. They didn't give me any training. They gave me what they called were leads, but they're essentially a piece of paper from computer intelligence reports, which was the phone number with the ITP of the large corporations. So I'd pick up the phone and I'd cold call those people and I'd make notes on it, the piece of paper, the lead I had, and I put my appointments in my day-timer and I do my forecast once a month in a spreadsheet. And I communicate with my SES and my sales manager and the corporate product people back at Boston by email and telephone. And I said to myself, this is really not a good way to work as a team.

Jon Ferrara (02:26):
Not only was I struggling to manage my relationships and my marketing to my leads, but to communicate and collaborate with my team as we collectively engaged pre and post-sales with those leads. And so, because I had a computer science background, I got a degree in computer science in college, because I worked my way through a computer land store, I knew every single business software on the market at the time. And there was no tool that integrated email contact and calendar in sales and marketing automation for an individual or a team. And there was email and there was a calendar, but it didn't tie back to contacts and it didn't do any sales and market automation. So I quit my job at Banyan, got together with a college friend of mine and we built GoldMine.

Alex Romanovich (03:12):
Excellent. I used it. I think it was a great, great tool for sales individuals as a contact manager. And also as we evolved into a full-blown CRM system. But let's talk about other things in your early days.

Jon Ferrara (03:32):
But while we're here. The story, that will be relevant to you and your audience in regards to how I took this idea. I'm sitting in my apartment in Dallas, Texas. I have an idea for a product, but I'm working for somebody. And I'm getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this job, but I have this yearning to go do this other thing. And so how do I take that yearning and build a product and then bring that product to market without any money. So what I did was I found somebody who can translate my ideas into a product that's my co-founder of GoldMine, Elan Susser. And then when I did, in order to bring it to market identified the trusted advisor of my prospect. So I was selling to small businesses that needed a network business application. You have to understand there were no network business applications back in the day. File and record locking just happened, which means network business software could be written, but there weren't a whole lot of network business software out there.

Jon Ferrara (04:35):
So normally we have the first network business offer, but we had the first contact manager in CRM before Outlook even existed, or Salesforce existed. So how do you sell some people who don't even know what they need? So what I did is I cold-called Novell resellers because when I was at Banyan, I got my butt kicked by the Novell resellers. We were selling direct at the enterprise level, and they were selling indirect through resellers to the workgroup level who had trusted relationships with those local businesses. And so what I did is I cold-called those resellers, the Novell resellers, and I got them to use it and people sell what they know, and they know what they use. They started to recommend it and resell it. And that's how we got to our first a hundred or $200,000 a month is by leveraging the influencer and trusted advisor of our prospects, the Novell resellers.

Alex Romanovich (05:27):
Great story. And we'll talk more about some of the other great sales stories, especially, as they pertained to entrepreneurs all over the world. Now, you and I early had talked about sales in general and global sales, global sales forces. And enter 2020 - 2021 we have a very virtual, very global world right now. Especially after the pandemic, during the pandemic, we still have it. Let's talk about relationship building. A lot of these platforms, CRM platforms, early contact managers were built to nurture relationships with certain levels of automation, with a certain level of information, then data science and so forth. How do you build relationships today? When you have no conferences, you have no face-to-face, something we've been taught by IBM sales schools and Oracle sales schools and sort of what, so how do you build? What is your advice to entrepreneurs today who are stuck in their apartments, in their houses under the pandemic rules and so forth, and all they have is this: they have Zoom, they have CRMs, they have all these different systems? How do you gauge the body language? How do you get this eye contact? How do you build that relationship? What is your advice?

Jon Ferrara (06:52):
Well, I think it's a great question. And the thing that we got to think about is before you get the eye contact you got into body language, you got to get to the connection because there are literally billions of conversations going right by your window every day. And it's kind of like that business with the little bell on the door, where you kind of open the door and the bell rings, and the person behind the counter notices that there's somebody there. We all want that door opened, that bell rung. How do you get people to see you in this world? Because ultimately your brand in your network or your network, your personal brand, and your professional network will help you achieve your dreams in life. So how do you build your brand and build your network, and then nurturing grow that network?

Jon Ferrara (07:38):
It's really simple. Everybody listening to this today is passionate about something or some things, and you on a daily basis get in front of your computer and you read about it. You consume more knowledge about it. And all you got to do is start giving that knowledge away on a daily basis. So what you do is you go and figure out where does your constituency have conversations? Where do they gather the converse? For me, it's Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram those types of places. I've set up identities in all those different places. And then when I do on a daily basis is I share knowledge in around my areas of passion, but also in and around the areas of the promise of my products and services. So for me, that social sales and marketing, and this is how I built my brand after being out of the computer business for 10 years, but how I built the Nimble brand without spending a dime on marketing.

Jon Ferrara (08:31):
And so what I did was identified the top thought leaders and influencers and social sales and marketing. I would swim in the river and curate content that resonated with me. And then what I would do is I would share that content hashtag and appropriately attribute in their name. And then I would listen and engage for the people that would then connect and respond to this content and begin to really end those connections and relationships, not to tell them how great I am or how great my products are, because guess what, nobody cares about you or your products. They care about themselves. People don't buy great products, they buy better versions of themselves. And the biggest mistake you could make is when you do get a connection, you get somebody on Zoom that you basically start talking about yourself or your products. Stop talking about yourself, start talking about how you might help others become better, smarter, faster.

Jon Ferrara (09:26):
And the easiest way to do that, in the old days we used to teach people when you go on someone's office, look at the walls, look at the books they read, the degree of the school they went, to the knick-knacks they collect. All these will give you a clue of who that person is, what their business is about. And ideally, most importantly, how you might add value because that should be your purpose on this planet is to help other people grow because if you do that at scale, you can't help but grow, which means you need to research somebody before your meeting. You need to walk into a digital footprint and you need to identify something along what I call the five F's of life. People know, connect on the fact that you share entrepreneurship or marketing as your business background, they connect on the five F's of life, the softer side: family, friend, food, fun and fellowship. So those softer things help you to build intimacy and trust, which gets people to open up to you about their business issues, which as a professional, you can then solve. If you simply do what I just shared, you will have a global brand, a global network, and an army of people who want to help you achieve your passion plan and purpose in life.

Alex Romanovich (10:34):
Excellent. Those are great, great tips. And socially, I guess that we can do so much of listening right now. There are so many great tools. Your platform allows you to listen and to search and so forth. And I think it's a great tip for many folks out there who may be waking up in China, or Europe, or Asia, India, Middle East, South America, whatever, and thinking, Oh my God, what am I going to do? I can not go to a conference, I can not jump on the plane and go someplace and meet some of these folks. So thanks for that tip.

Alex Romanovich (11:11):
Let's talk about other things. You are presiding over some really interesting programs at USC for entrepreneurship. Tell us more about this. Tell us what you've seen out there or what you've seen over the course of the past couple of years. And let's also talk about this so-called Exodus. Everybody, the media is talking about this Exodus from Silicon Valley, the transformation of Silicon Valley. It's no longer physical, it's more virtual now, and folks are leaving, they go to Austin, they go to Miami, they go all over the place. And yet you are still there. You're a successful businessman. You're a successful entrepreneur. Why are you still in Santa Monica? Why are you not leaving Silicon Valley?

Jon Ferrara (11:56):
Well, for one thing, Silicon Valley is up in San Francisco. Silicon Beach is what they kind of call the Santa Monica area.

Alex Romanovich (12:06):
Understood. But you know what I'm saying.

Jon Ferrara (12:09):
Why would you leave this? The average temperature is 70 degrees. There are no bugs. There's plenty. There's no humidity. And I could walk to the beach in 15 minutes. So why not move to another place? I think every time I traveled to some other place, I fall in love with it because the newness of it is always great. And I've been to Austin. It's a great city, but I love the fact that I can get from my house to skiing or just surfing in literally 30 minutes. And I could do that year-round. And it's a fantastic lifestyle, but let's get more to your point that you started with, which is growing young people in this world, especially through the university and entrepreneurship programs that might be around you.

Jon Ferrara (13:03):
I think that the biggest source of interns that you can find are your local universities. And we at Nimble make a fantastic use of our connections at these universities, not just at USC, but also at UCLA, Loyola Marymount and others, by getting involved in their entrepreneurial programs, by teaching and helping them grow. And by hiring interns into Nimble to help them grow in their cycle. But by doing that, we actually get young, bright minds who could do research for us, which we do projects on personas and roles and use cases, as well as research into new market opportunities. And we do that through these intern programs. And the only way to identify really great interns is by getting into the pool with the students and getting to know them and identifying people. And especially if you get in and present to them, they get passionate about what you do, and when they reach out to you. And so all of this is by giving, paying them forward. You get the opportunity to not all I get people to contribute while they're students but to hire them and recruit them for the ones that really shine, which is exactly what we're doing. My head of our Microsoft relationship, Yajas Chopra, was an intern before we hired him full-time

Alex Romanovich (14:32):
Great. Excellent. Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about another somewhat sensitive and edgy topic. And that's the topic of age. I always ask and I always get asked Alex, but when you talk about entrepreneurs, you're mostly talking about young scale-ups and startups. And here you are, we're talking to an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur who started yet another company recently, Nimble, at the age of 51. So what is your message to those who think that entrepreneurship is only for the youngsters, or the millennials, or Gen Zs, and every time our media portrays, for example, Silicon Valley, the tech crunch conferences and so forth, and they always show these wonderful young entrepreneurs. What is your sort of message to all of that?

Jon Ferrara (15:33):
Well, I don't think that entrepreneurship has an age. I think that any age can be an entrepreneur. And I think we all did that when we were kids with our lemonade stands and whatever else that you could do to get the things that you needed in life. Alex, I grew up in an affluent area, but we weren't as affluent as some of my peers. And I got a toy on my birthday and Christmas, and that was it. But I wanted other things I wanted this GI Joe set, which was the astronaut set. And I bartered for it. I figured out what kids who had more than they needed, wanted, and I got it for them and I got what I wanted. And so I've been an entrepreneur ever since I was born, I think. And by the way, it's my birthday today. Happy Birthday

Alex Romanovich (16:23):
Happy Birthday! Wonderful, excellent.

Jon Ferrara (16:25):
And so I started my first company when I was 28, and I started my second company when I was 51. And in between that time, I took 10 years off to raise three babies. And I think that there is no age to limit yourself to starting a business, whether you're young or whether you're older. The thing is that my dad's telling me the story about these two bulls on the hill, and they're looking down and the young bull said, let's run down there and let's get us some of them, lady bulls, and the old bull said, let's walk down and get them all. And that might be a little inappropriate in today's world, but it tells a story. That age and maturity have a lot of benefits. And I think that anybody listening to this today, so not limit themselves on the ways that people define you, you need to define yourself. And so I might sell Nimble one day in the next couple of years and take another 10 years off. And who knows, maybe I'm going to start another one when I'm 70.

Alex Romanovich (17:39):
Excellent, excellent. We also talked earlier about cultural differences and the selling approach to marketing. You have a company that has installations all over the world, hundreds of thousands of clients that are using the platform from every continent out there, what is your take on, how do you manage all of this? If you're using your platform, or any other CRM platform, or customer relationship platform and you're a manager of a global Salesforce, a global marketing team that has different cultural approaches. How do you manage all of this?

Jon Ferrara (18:24):
Well, there are some interesting statistics about CRM usage. There are 225 million global businesses, less than 1% use any CRM. I think that's a testimony to the fact that CRM's biggest cause of failure is lack of use. The second is bad data. Lack of use because you have to force people to use it. That's why they call it Salesforce. You have to force salespeople to use it. Bad data is because even if you force them to do it, the moment you type data into a CRM, that data begins to decay and in some ways very rapidly. And so you're never going to be able to force your salespeople to use any tool, especially a CRM, which requires salespeople to type stuff in. No salesperson likes to type anything in. That's why they're in sales. They like to talk, hopefully, they like to listen. And so then you have to contribute on top of that, the difference in culture. Look, in Germany, they don't adopt social media in the same way that we do in the United States, Lebanon, in the Netherlands or in England.

Jon Ferrara (19:32):
So you have to sort of understand the culture of the countries, of the people that you're selling to and the people who are selling for you and to adapt the styles and the methods to the local businesses, all that being said, if you want to get somebody to use something, rather than telling them to do it because you want it, you should teach them how to do it because it's going to benefit them. People don't buy off on great products, they buy better versions of themselves. And I believe that if the CRM actually helps that person achieve their goals in life, whether it's building their brand and their network or hitting their numbers, then they're probably going to use it. And so don't overburden them with too much, give them enough where they could actually digest it and adapt and teach them how it's going to benefit them. And if you do that, they'll get more adoption.

Alex Romanovich (20:34):
Great, great tips and great conversation about this. What is your advice in general to an entrepreneur who is waking up today and wondering how they're going to grow their business, what tools they're going to be using, how are they going to get new customers? There are so many different platforms out there, there's just another platform just sprouted up called Clubhouse. That's audio-only. You probably heard of it. And it's incredible. Everybody's is clinging onto it, and everybody's just talking and talking and listening, and talking and talking and listening, and everybody's claiming, oh, I'm getting more customers, I'm doing this and so forth. You wake up today and there's just so much around you, there are so many tools, there are so many different instruments. And the question then becomes, how do I begin? What do I begin with my ideas, with my product? How do I reach those customers, especially during the pandemic? What is your advice?

Jon Ferrara (21:37):
Well, I've grown two global companies without spending a dime on marketing, and I've done it by mainly influencer marketing and guerrilla PR. And so it's more powerful than other people talk about you, then when you talk about you. So the easiest way for you to grow your company is to identify the influencer of your prospect and build a pay-it-forward relationship with them and turn them into your evangelists, into your parcels, into your army. And so I shared with you earlier, how I did that with GoldMine was the Novell resellers and getting them to adopt it and use it. And then once that started to scale, where they sold to their base of customers, that we want to generate net new leads, I then identified the business publications that my prospects and customers consume in order to be better, smarter, faster in and around the areas of promise my technology.

Jon Ferrara (22:32):
So computer magazines, software magazines, et cetera. And I didn't go to them and say, write about GoldMine. I went to them and said, how can I help you write more stories? And they said, tell us stories about how people using technology to grow. And I started telling those stories, and that's how GoldMine got more awards and more print than all the other products combined. Fast-forward to Nimble. When I started Nimble, there were no resellers per se to go after because it was really cloud-based and people were self-adopted in the fine try by the ecosystem. So what I did is I identified the influencers in around the areas of the promise of my products, so social sales and marketing. And as I shared before I built identities and started to share that content. And then I would listen and engage with the people that adopted it, that bid on the content.

Jon Ferrara (23:16):
And I started building relationships with one conversation at a time, and you will not believe what can happen if you diligently share content on a daily basis, ideally hourly. And you're hashtagging an attribute in the names of the people you share it from. And then you listen and engage. And then you do these one-on-one conversations where you've prepared before the meeting. And you open up the meeting by asking an opening question, and you just listen for 30 minutes and then if you listen, you find ways to add value and we add value. They can help by basically say, Jon, tell me about you and what you're doing, how I can help. And that's exactly how we were able to build the Nimble brand and to grow and scale the business. And so when you start talking about how do you take an idea as a dream, as an entrepreneur and bring it to market, storytelling, storytelling, and the best story to tell is how other people can grow.

Jon Ferrara (24:17):
And so if you can take whatever knowledge you have, give it away on a daily basis. And if you're not a good writer, find people that resonate with you and share their content. And then simply listen, engage, start having these conversations. Not only will you get conversations with prospects and customers, but you'll build a sustainable garden around your business. Now, what do I mean by the sustainable garden? My wife is a landscape designer and she brought me out in the yard the other day and showed me a Monarch butterfly caterpillar. And I said, what is this Monarch butterfly caterpillar doing in a yard? She said I plant milk thistle in order to attract the Monarch butterfly caterpillars, or it would eat the aphids. And this creates a self-sustaining garden. I said to myself, isn't this what I have to do to build Nimble. And it's not just prospects and customers that I need to attract.

Jon Ferrara (25:07):
For me, it's editors, analysts, bloggers, influencers, third-party developers, investors, advisors, and their influencers as well. So how do I attract all these different people? You do it through content and conversation. You get out into the digital social river, in the middle of the river you have these conversations. And I call that the five E's of social business: educate, enchain, engage, embrace, and empower. And so if you just give away knowledge to educate people that is in chanting and you engage them and embrace them with the intent to empower them, help them grow. You can't help but grow, but this is a problem you're going to have. You're going to create so many connections and conversations. You won't be able to manage them because there's a Dunbar limit. You can only manage 100 to 200 people in your head at one time, and you'll need to get and be more nimble.

Alex Romanovich (26:01):
Jon, with that I want to thank you for this amazing conversation. A lot of great tips for our global entrepreneurs, a lot of great stories from your life, from your career, your journey. I want to invite you to be in our program again, in the near future. And thank you so much.

Jon Ferrara (26:21):
Awesome, Alex. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.