Jon Ferrera is a SaaS entrepreneur and a CRM pioneer. He’s mostly known for founding one of the first CRMs, GoldMine. After selling his first company and retiring for 10 years, he decided to get back into the business because he saw that contact management was broken, with no CRM’s offering business owners an entire view into the relationships with their customers. He founded Nimble, an easy-to-use CRM that works for you everywhere you work. Jon often speaks about social media’s effects on sales and marketing, and growing businesses by utilizing community building, PR, guerrilla marketing, and influencer marketing.Nimble is the simple, smart CRM for small business teams using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. It combines the strength of CRM, contact management, social media insights, sales intelligence, pipeline management, and marketing automation into a unified relationship management platform that delivers valuable company and contact insights – everywhere you work.Podcast Summary: In this episode you will hear Jon’s take on how CRMs are evolving to provide better relationship management. Generally, CRMs are tools exclusively used to sell, but building relationships goes way beyond that. And in order to build relationships, you need to know about your potential client. This can be hard when the information is spread in social media, youtube, websites, blogs etc. Jon provides a solution to this where you can integrate all that data in one single tool to use it at your convenience. Key takeaways in this episode:People talking about your product is always more powerful and effective than you advertising it.Why focusing on market fit is more important than funding at an early stage.How social media changed the landscape of relationships management.How CRMs will eventually be a tool for the whole relationship management cycle and not only for sales and lead generation.The early daysNimble is the evolution of a journey that Jon started with GoldMine. Back in those days, there was not any CRM, contact management, salesforce automation or anything like that. Leads were on pieces of paper and appointments were set up in a paper-based calendar. Due to his computer background, Jon was fully aware that there was not any software able to integrate these tools and tasks needed by corporations, therefore, bringing GoldMine to life.How to scale a business effectivelyOne of the questions all start ups must answer is: How do I bring my product to market, then to scale? In Jon’s point of view, advertising is not the best way to do it. On the other hand, if you let other people tell your story, you have more opportunities to scale since it is more powerful when other people talk about you. As entrepreneurs, the number one priority should be to identify the influence of the prospect and build relationships with them because they are the ones who have relationships with your prospects at scale. Social media as the difference makerAfter taking a 10 year break to raise 3 children, Jon decided to go back to the game. He noticed this time that social media had changed the entire landscape. It was evident that it was now the perfect platform to build the brand and network at scale as we never had in our lives. Jon immediately started working on building a relationship management tool that would enable the user to automatically go to all his contacts from all the places and unify them, synchronize the history and be able to use them as necessary.An interesting perspective on fundingJon strongly believes that as an early stage founder, it is way more important to focus on product-market fit before scaling. As a founder, it is very easy to believe that the missing part in your success is capital. By bootstrapping and being close to your customer and iterating with them, refining the story, messaging and processes, you are more in control of any response the market is providing you and therefore in a better position to scale up and grow year over year.How is the relationship management space evolving? In an average company, less than 5% of the employees are salespeople. And even though it is still an important part of the company, customer relationships go way beyond sales. Platforms such as Nimble are able to connect editors, bloggers, influencers, third party developers, investors, advisors and prospecting customers. CRMs will adapt to that in the near future. Instead of having CRMs that only focus on lead generation or sales, they will become more complex and will be more oriented to relationship management. Remember your whyIf there is any advice Jon can give to early stage founders, it is to always remember why you started in the first place. Ideally, your startup should be about serving others, helping other people grow and scale. Wealth and money is always a byproduct of you helping others and it is not a good idea to have it as your primary goal since life is more meaningful than that.Connect with ...
