The CRM industry continues to grow at a staggering rate and is becoming complex day by day. Enterprises want real-time access to consumer data, with mobile and cloud applications leading the way. They now need to be able to link apps and technology with consumer data, creating a more personalized experience. Founder and CEO Jon Ferrara understands this need as he faced a similar situation, which motivated him to establish Nimble in 2009. He believes “CRM should really stand for ‘customer reporting management’ because, in reality, CRMs don’t work for you — you work for them.” Through Nimble, he is transforming the CRM industry by delivering a CRM that is dominating the world of social selling today.
The Notion behind Nimble
Jon founded GoldMine Software Corp in 1989. During the 90’s — when business use of the Internet was just beginning — he grew the first modern CRM into a $100 million dollar enterprise. At that time, he used Influencer Marketing to do it, without an ad budget, access to social media, or smartphones.
Jon’s personal struggle to build relationships in the new age was the inspiration for founding Nimble. He started to use social media in its infancy and immediately saw how it was going to change the way businesses work, play, buy, and sell. Then, he started searching for a CRM that would allow him to effectively manage his contacts within social networks.
“The funny thing is that I never wanted to be a salesperson,” explains Jon. “I studied computer science. After two years of working at Aerospace, I decided I wasn’t an Aerospace guy. After that, I got a job at a tech startup and they put me in sales. I quickly realized I was struggling with growing relationships at scale, collaborating with my team, and achieving my business goals.”
However, Jon quickly realized that there wasn’t one in the market because CRMs weren’t about relationships – they were about reporting. He firmly believed that the best CRM crosses department walls as well as makes sure that everyone in the company is on the same page. As a result, Nimble came into existence and has since evolved into the simple, smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite.
“Now, this was before Outlook or Salesforce existed,” says Jon. “There wasn’t any type of contact management platform or a way for teams to easily collaborate with each other. There wasn’t a tool that integrated email, contacts, calendar, sales, and marketing automation into one unified platform. That’s how I got started on the career path of pioneering CRM, contact management, and relationship tools.”
He further adds, “I really love to build these tools because they not only empower me, but they also empower others. It aligns with my philosophy in life that we’re here to grow other people. I build relationship management tools and teach people how to build relationships at scale. I believe if you teach someone to fish, they will eventually learn that you sell fishing poles. That’s what I do — I sell relationship fishing poles.”
As a people-centric leading company, Nimble empowers people that are connecting with other people. It mainly serves professionals in the fields of real estate, financial advisors, mortgage bankers, headhunting, and more.
Offering A Convenient Integrated CRM
Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Nimble is the industry-leading CRM for Office 365 and G Suite that builds award-winning contact management solutions for teams and individuals. Its primary focus is to simplify CRM; therefore, it offers a CRM system that combines the power of relationship management, unified conversations/communications, social media tools, and team collaboration under one roof.
The company keeps clients and their teams organized, which allows for more effective communications between the companies and their contacts from one centralized SaaS platform regardless of what they are using: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, or email. Most importantly, the CRM system has the ability to follow up with the client’s follow-through; schedule the next meeting, log notes, and add tasks to turn their business relationships into goldmines. Now, Nimble has experienced notable growth, with more than 100,000 registered users and more than 10,000 paid customers across the globe.
Unique Features of Nimble CRM
For businesses, being innovative or outperforming the competitors is crucial for growth and success. Nimble has adopted a new technique that differentiates itself from others. It is the first CRM that “automatically” builds itself and updates records to always keep them up-to-date for clients. Clients can access CRM from anywhere at any time to complete their work. Since most CRMs just cover the relationship management aspect, they don’t really cover sales intelligence, sales enablement, or sales automation.
To address this, Nimble has built-in intelligence, SFA (Sales Force Automation), and templated email tracking. The CRM developed by Nimble is not only for relationship management, lead-flow, and reporting but also to empower those customer-facing business team members.
One of the most unique and powerful aspects of Nimble is that it works for you everywhere you work (within your inbox, on social platforms, your favorite apps, and on any webpage) via the Nimble Prospector browser extension.
Nimble users can manage relationships wherever they engage (including prospecting new contacts, enriching leads with business details including email and phone, logging activities, viewing contact and company details for existing contacts, sending trackable email templates, applying tags, and more) right from Nimble Prospector.
How Jon Used Nimble to Connect with Disney
In the fall of 2017, Tiffani Bova (a former Gartner analyst and current Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce) tweeted that “CRM isn’t about managements ‘command/control’ – it’s about empowering front-line resources to serve customers better and that there is a need for improving customer experience.”
Disney’s Global Public Policy Systems Analyst Theo Rand reacted to Tiffani’s tweet by mentioning Jon Ferrara and Nimble. He posted that he was impressed with Nimble but was not sure if sales managers would loosen their grip. This immediately got Jon’s attention. He believed most CRMs fail to empower their customer-facing customers to successfully engage with their prospects and customers and are instead reporting tools for their managers. Keen to learn more about Theo, Jon turned to Nimble‘s Smart Contacts App to “auto-magically” build a record about who Theo is, where he works, and what he does. To Jon’s surprise, Nimble discovered that Theo is the head of CRM and Data at Disney.
Jon next used Nimble Prospector to find Theo’s contact information; after he commented on the Twitter stream, he decided to send Theo an email. Jon explains that he felt that Theo gave him permission to reach out on email by talking about him the way he did. “It was intimate. He knew who I was. He knew what my passion was, what my business was about, and I felt comfortable reaching out to thank him for shouting me out. I also asked to connect with him to learn more about him,” he adds. “This is the way you should reach out to people. You should reach out with a purpose to connect to learn more about the other person and find values to add value to their journey,” continues Jon.
Pioneering Personal CRM
Nimble has pioneered social CRM and social selling before people understood social media’s impact on business. The company progressed beyond focusing on social media when it saw the masses embracing social selling and social media became omnipresent. It is also encouraging people to use CRM to build their own brand and network.
Jon asserts, “Now, what we move towards is pioneering simple, smart CRM for the rest of us; essentially evolving CRM from being complex and difficult to being something that people really love to use. And not just the sales team — the whole company.” In the upcoming future, the CRM industry is going to be transformed drastically. Jon predicts that the future of CRM will be centered on empowering better relationships for a better future.
Focusing On Building A Great Team, Managing Other Responsibilities
Jon believes that great companies are led by great teams. Great teams are led by passionate innovators. He says, “If you think about companies like Ford or Edison, they were all led by innovators with great ideas. The leaders of these companies were able to build teams of smart people that believed in their vision, empowered them to do what they do best, and then got out of their way. Leaders who try to do everything end up achieving nothing.”
Therefore, a great team strives to build a product or company that performs at an optimal level. Likewise, the Nimble team is putting in their best effort to create a novel solution that can help the business grow and thrive. At Nimble, Jon tries to maintain a balance between achieving huge growth and the overall happiness of the team.
Jon comments, “Some people think ‘CEO’ stands for Chief Executive Officer, but I think it stands for Chief Evangelical Officer.” He comes up with great ideas, build great teams, and then he continues to evangelize the brand story. He ensures that his stories get to other people and doesn’t consider himself an executive but just another part of the team. Jon asserts, “I believe that a company’s brand is built on the promises they make and the experiences they deliver; most of those experiences are done through your customer-facing business team members. Empower your team to build their brand in order to build the company brand — ideally, this will also humanize your brand as well.”
Closing Thoughts
Jon has a life lesson quote that he came up with himself. He calls it the “three P’s of life success:” passion, plan, and purpose. Jon believes that if you exercise and identify these three P’s, you will transform yourself through and through. Maybe not exactly how you imagined, but the journey you will have and the places you’ll go to will transform your life for the better.
His other favorite life lesson quote is that “you can get whatever you want by helping people get whatever they want.” Jon believes service is the new sales, which is why he builds the tools people need to build better relationships at scale. “We’re on this planet to grow our souls by helping other people to grow theirs,” explains Jon. “The more people you help grow, the more you will grow in turn.”
Jon is a firm believer that there is a higher purpose for us on this planet. In the brief time that you’re here, Jon thinks you should be as present as you can. By being present with other people, you will get more out of life. He says, “The value of not spending your day ruminating about the past, worrying about the future, holding on too tight to the things you cherish or averting the pain you might feel from dealing with whatever you need to deal with.”
