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.

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 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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CRM happened after management saw all those sales people running around with those contact managers and they wanted to command and control the database and to track what the sales reps were doing. And Siebel was sort of evolved and then Salesforce, and that’s why CRM failed is because people don’t use it. It’s not built for them. It’s built for management and it really doesn’t help them. And today, if you buy a CRM, it’s not enough for the sales person. They have to go out and buy ZoomInfo to enrich the leads with data about people and companies. You have to buy Outreach IO to automate the process of scraping leads from LinkedIn and basically putting ’em on sequences to qualify them. And you have to buy a sales navigator to be able to manage your LinkedIn contacts and it’s overwhelming. And so I think that many people, most people don’t use a CRM. There’s 225 million global businesses. Less than 1% use any CRM because CRM isn’t built for relationships anymore. It’s built for command and control and reporting, and that’s what I’m trying to do is bring CRM back to its roots, back to relationships. 

Okay, so let’s not talk about CRMs now. Let’s talk about building relationships.

Yes. 

You mentioned the five Fs. So how do I use the five Fs to build relations? What are the five Fs and how do we how do I use it to build relationships? 

You bet. So the five Fs are what I call the commonalities, the softer side of life. Family, friend, food, fun, and fellowship. These are all the commonalities that you might share with another human being. You like the same sports teams. You’re both parents. You like the same band, you went to the same school– the commonalities, and you don’t lean on that. You don’t do it too much, and you don’t do it in an icky way. But you learn how to do it just in the same way as you learned how to behave in the playground, in the classroom.

We're taught all these things, through life, but that's just the beginning of it really.
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So that people see you as the trusted person. So when they need your products or services, they not only pick up the phone and call you, but they drag their friends with them.
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You don’t walk into a cocktail party and say, ‘Hey, anybody wanna buy some CRM?’ ’cause people are gonna look at you and say, ‘What the heck?’ You walk in and you look around, you find a group that you might want to connect to, and then you go and stand adjacent to the group and you begin to listen to the conversation and eventually you find your moment that you can add some value and then the person next to you is gonna go. ‘Wow. John, you seem to know a lot about that CRM stuff. What do you do? Tell me more.’ Right? And that’s the same way as you do that out in the digital world where you begin to share your expertise. And an easy way to do that if you’re not a good writer, is just share other people who inspire you. So other thought leaders in around the areas of your product, products and services. And this is the way that I built. The Goldmine brand and the Nimble brand is by identifying thought leaders in and around the areas of our promise of my products and services.

Thought leaders in social sales and marketing begin to share their content, hashtag the category pound sales, pound marketing attribute their name. And not just share the title of whatever they wrote, but to rewrite it and add some value. So it actually looks like I took the time to read it and I’m adding value to it. And if you do that in a series of ways over time. Not only will the people who are looking to be better, smarter, faster at those areas of promise and services begin to follow you and connect with you, but also the audience of that thought leader and the thought leader themselves, so that now when new people walk into the cocktail room and they see you standing next to the other thought leaders and business,

then they're gonna see you as one of the thought leaders because you've built your brand and your network, and we all know that your network and your brand are your net worth.
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Okay. What I find a little bit challenging is the idea of being there for everybody. So you mentioned a different platform, so what do you recommend? How does one prioritize their time? If I can’t be on..

I would basically just stick with LinkedIn..

And then I can’t be in every conversation there. So, how do I prioritize, you know, did they say that a person can have a relationship with up to 150 people? 

Yep

And then you basically, max out, so. 

Yep. 

How do I limit the people on LinkedIn? How do I even select them? How, how do I do that? 

Right. That’s where a good contact platform comes in.

Okay. 

Because the biggest problem with CRM and contact management are just databases.  It’s a Rolodex, but the problem with the Rolodex on the Daytimer is you can’t segment, you can’t build sets. And the analogy I like to use for that is your holiday card, or if you’re gonna throw a party. How would you go and determine who to send the card to? Who to send the invite to? So you’re saying that you could only maintain 150 to 200 people at one time, but the reality is for you to get a hundred to 150 people of the key people you need to achieve your dreams. You need to cast a wider net. That’s what building your identity in the places where people are having conversations about how to become better, smart and faster in around the areas of your products and services. Begin to share your ideas. Because you’ve forgotten more about your products and services than most people will ever know in their lives who are gonna buy it.

You share your ideas teaching people to fish, so you figure out yourself, fishing bulls, share other people’s idea to build relationships with other thought leaders in your space, and then begin to add people to your database. But you can’t maintain the connection with everybody, but

you can maintain the connection with the right people if you put the right information in the database.
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And I think one of the key things to remember is, as I shared earlier, it takes a lot of energy to build a relationship. It takes very little to keep it going because you’ve built that connection. They know who you are, they trust you, they like you. And, you ever seen the guy with the plates on the pencil where basically he gets the plates on the stick and he gets ’em rolling? And then he just goes by every once in a while and it ninjas it. So I can tell you, Steve, that there are friends of mine from high school that I haven’t spoken to in 30 years, and if I met them, it’d be like we never parted because that bond and connection that was there. And the same is true for business friends, acquaintances, colleagues that have worked with over time. And so. You don’t need to be constantly connecting with people in order to maintain relationships. And you don’t need to do that with everyone outside of your key sphere of focus, but

you do need a database in order to manage those contacts effectively.
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So one of the things that you talk about is using Kanban, a Kanban process to manage relationship building. So how does that Kanban process work? 

Let’s boil it down to how most people manage contacts today. They manage ’em in spreadsheets. There’s 225 million global businesses. Less than 1% use any CRM. Most people’s CRM is a spreadsheet. So why do people use spreadsheets? They’re easy to see and manage, right? But the problem is that they’re static. So if you put a series of rows and columns together to manage an outreach to get some press about a new business, you’re opening. Then essentially the last time you contacted them, the last reply that they had, all the nuanced things that you’re tracking, it’s just a dead sheet of paper. Now, you could look at a process with a spreadsheet with some columns in it, or you could take that same spreadsheet and convert it into a Kanban board because each one of a Kanban board for those that don’t know, is a series of stages that you define for a process you wanna put people through initial outreach, connection, follow up, commitment, close, whatever it is for whatever purpose.

And remember that what we’re talking about is not just applicable to sales. Most people are not in sales in a business. Most people are in other roles, PR, bizdev, investor relationships, accounting, HR, whatever. And we all have repeatable processes that we need to manage, and most people are doing it in spreadsheets at best. And so a Kanban board allows you to find what are the stages that you want to put the people and companies through in a repeatable way, and then each card is a contact or a company with the data necessary for you to manage the process. And that card would be the same thing as data in a row, in a spreadsheet. So you could look at Nimble workflows and we call our repeatable process Kanban Boards Workflows. In each workflow you define the stages, you define the data in the rows and columns. And then you can manage those cards and flow them through the workflow, and there can be automations that happen. So I’ll give you an example. We were hiring recently for a new position used Indeed to do it.

We used Nimble Prospector to select the people that passed the ‘sniff test’ I call . It basically means that, ‘yeah, this person could be right’ prospector grabs him out of Indeed on the webpage, that’s Nimble’s Prospector Chrome plugin. Puts ’em into Nimble and puts ’em into a workflow. The first thing that happens in that workflow when they go in the first stage is they get an email asking to schedule a meeting. If they schedule a meeting, they’re moved into the second column, in which case  you have the meeting. If they pass that sort of first meeting, then they put into another workflow and we send them an assignment for them to basically do some work, some work product. And if that passes, then they do an interview. And so basically the workflows allow you to manage repeatable people and company business processes that most people do in spreadsheets. And we enhance it with automations because we’re all human and we don’t do it all. And messaging so that you can automate the process of putting people through those workflows. 

Okay, that makes sense. So someone comes, basically you can use automated processes to watch certain signals and then transition those people automatically into a workflow. And then they get first message and then you start to pursue them and try to get them to meet with you and, and to qualify them and so on.

But I think the key to remember Steve, is in our age of AI and over automation and over messaging, that there needs to be a human aspect involved throughout the whole thing, that it can’t just be automations. There has to be some connection aroused, you’re just going to, it’s not gonna work. And so that’s why Nimble has the workflows and automations, but the humans involved in the work process. But by having the organization of the workflow, the Kanban boards, and the automations, and the automatic messaging.

A normal human being can scale much higher and achieve much better results than by them just doing it by themselves or in a spreadsheet.
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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what is the role of AI very briefly, ’cause we, we are running– coming to the end of the conversation, but what do you see is the role of AI in improving relationship management?

You bet. Good question. So number one. Most people are doing some type of prospecting. What is prospecting? That means that you might go to LinkedIn and you are looking for certain type of people, and you’re gonna do that when you’re having, you’re wearing certain hats. It, most entrepreneurs wear many hats. So you might wear a sales hat, you might wear a biz dev hat. If you’re trying to do a business relationship with another company, you might, you wear a PR hat. If you’re trying to get somebody to talk about you, you might wear influencer marketing hat. If you’re trying to get an influencer to talk about you. You might wear an investor relations hat, if you’re trying to get somebody to invest in you. You might wear a HR hat if you’re trying to hire somebody or accounts receivable. So all of these are different hats. And so if I’m using Nimble Prospector in my Chrome browser, our AI will enable you to, based off your role, so the role I might be reaching out for PR purposes, and my intent could be in a PR role just to be able to pay it forward a relationship and I’m not asking them for anything, or I’m actually wanting them to write about a product release I’m doing. So what hat am I wearing and what is my intent? So my hat I’m wearing is PR. My intent is to get them to write about me. Nimble will know– Nimble Prospector over the LinkedIn record will know if this person is a fit for you.

And if they are a fit, it can automatically grab that record, put ’em in a workflow, and tailor a message or a series of messages to that person to achieve the goal all without you having to do a thing. Because Nimble uses AI to determine who that person is and what their business is about, who you are, what your business is about, what product or services or intent you have, and what’s the best pathway to achieve that. Is it a LinkedIn invite? Is it a LinkedIn message? Is it a single email? Is it a series of emails? Or is it a series of things that include beyond just an email? So you could basically have, the AI will basically say, well, you don’t want to just send them an email first. What you want to do is you want to begin to walk into the digital footprint, add value to the conversation by commenting on their stuff and sharing their stuff a few times. And then you could reach out for a LinkedIn invite or a message, and maybe about that time they’re gonna reach out to you. And so AI just enables you to scale more, because most people don’t do the homework. They don’t look at, look somebody up, determine who they are, what the business is about, what their problems might be, how they might be able to solve them, and

they craft a methodology in order to start a conversation that gets them in the game to achieve their goals. And so AI basically would enable you to do that better, smarter, faster.
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That makes sense. So it helps basically accelerate the front end of the prospecting  process and allow you to talk to people who are already being, to some degree, qualified and express interest. Of sense. So fascinating stuff, John. So if someone would like to learn more about contact management and how to use potentially Nimble, to manage their contact or maybe generate the prospects that they can siphon out of LinkedIn and warm up with their AI process and start messaging and tee them up for a conversation, where can they find out more about that and connect to you?

Well, if you want to know more about nimble.com, it’s free. You could sign up for two weeks without a credit card. Try it out at nimble.com, and if you do decide it will fit your needs and wanna subscribe, use the code Jon 40, J-O-N 4-0, and you get 40% off your first three months. If you wanna connect with me and let me know how I might be of more service to you, you can Google me and determine which platform or channel fits you best. Or make it easy, email me [email protected]. But I challenge you today to Google yourself. Do you show up on the first page? Are you happy with what you see? If not, if you follow my five Es of building your brand and growing your network, educate, enchant, engage, embrace, and empower. And  I can define that at another time where I could slip it to you on the side, but the whole idea is just giving you knowledge away with the intent to help other people grow and then engage with them not to see what you can get most out of them, but really what you can, how you can help them grow. These are the ways you can get a hold of me, and I look forward to hearing from your audience. 

That’s awesome. I loved the five E’s particularly. I mean, we had the five Fs, which is the finding, the commonalities, the five Es, which is to actually engage people and get them, get closer to them through communication.

And I have one more for you, the three Ps if you wanna achieve your goals in life. I read a book called Think and Grow Rich and Napoleon Hill. Many people I know who retired early, like I did read that book and attribute their success to it. And here’s the nuggets I got out of it. Figure out what your passion is. Build a plan to achieve it. Make it your purpose on the daily basis, most people don’t have a passion, and if they do, they’re, they’re not focused on getting there. And so what I say is figure out what your passion is, build a plan to achieve it, and put that plan on your mirror or your refrigerator. And every day you get up and say, ‘What am I doing today to get there?’ You may not get there, but you’re gonna get someplace and it’s gonna change your life. 

Yeah. That was an old story in Napoleon Hill when Andrew Carnegie taught him to talk to the mirror every day and tell himself that he’s gonna be a bigger person than Andrew Carnegie. And he eventually achieved it because he touched more people. Awesome. Well, John, thank you for coming on the show, and if you enjoy this episode, stay tuned because we come every week with another entrepreneur sharing their framework. Thank you, John for coming and thanks for listening. 

Thank you, Steve.