OPW INTERVIEW - Oct 2 - Jon Ferrara is the founder of GoldMine, a business contact management solution and also the founder and CEO of Nimble.com. Nimble is Gmail, Google+, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Foursquare messaging, all in one place. It's a tool that lets people monitor their social networks from one screen, engage customers and build deeper relationships. - Mark Brooks
How would you define social CRM?
I'm
not a big fan of the term CRM. Social CRM is just a stake in the
ground, a moniker to talk about the application of social to business
today. Ultimately, it's really a combination of marketing, support,
collaboration, sales and the core customer needs in contact, calendar,
and communication that will create the tools necessary to be a social
business tomorrow. We need to cut away from the acronyms and just talk
about what can we do to help businesses turn their social communities
into customers for life. That is what we are doing at Nimble.
What are the top couple things that you've learned from Goldmine that you've applied with Nimble?
Sometimes
I feel like the Don Quixote of relationship management. I'm still
teaching today the concepts that we were teaching 20 years ago with
Goldmine. Goldmine was the first tool that integrated contact
management, network scheduling, email, sales and market automation, and
collaboration into a team tool. That's what made it unique.
The old days of yelling at customers about how great you are and how great your products are are over. Customers are having conversations amongst themselves about what they are going to buy without engaging with your sales reps. The only way you can grow your business today is to listen and engage where the customers are.
Business is built on relationships. We used to go into somebody's office to get to know them. That hasn't changed but now we do it electronically. The problem is it's in different places and they?re not connected. That's why we built Nimble.
Customers
are hanging out on Facebook, some are on Linkedin, some are on Twitter.
So ultimately they are more responsive when you bring them all together
in one place and that's what Nimble does?
Right.
You got your email, you got Twitter, and Facebook, and Linkedin, and
let's not mention Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, and Google+, and you
try to manage all that with a tool like HootSuite. ?I love HootSuite. I
cut my teeth on it, but the problem is that listening and engagement
isn't tied to the contacts so you don't have that single view of the
relationship and the engagement for yourself let alone your team
members. When we call a company up we expect them to know who we are,
who we talked to the last time, and what our issues are.?
Rapportive is an essential tool. I love the service. Do you do like Rapportive?
Nimble
actually predates Rapportive in its ability to consolidate your
contacts, map the social profiles, show you what that person is saying
to the world and what you said to them and your team members.
I think what Rapportive did real well is plug that into your inbox. If you're in Gmail, you see the Rapportive widget and it shows you who that person is and their background. We do that in Nimble, not only in the contact record but also in our inbox, and in our inbox it's not just your email. It's Twitter, and Facebook and Linkedin and now Foursquare.
If
you could advise Mark Zuckerberg on one thing to change in Facebook,
what would you advise him? How would you wave a wand and improve what
Facebook is doing?
I
think that the opportunity for Facebook is to be more than just a place
that you go to to find your high school sweetheart. Facebook is more
than just personal, it's business because business is personal, business
is social. So I think Facebook has an opportunity, if they step up, to
be more business focused to a certain extent, to the point where the
business professional who are using it today can use it better. More
importantly is the integration of the interactions. In Facebook,
Linkedin, and Google, if you bring up a contact you see no history of
interactions. This is what Goldmine did so well 20 years ago that Nimble
does so well today.
I
can't help thinking that this ties in very nicely with the kinds of
visions that LinkedIn and Facebook have ultimately. Would you entertain,
the sale or at least integration of Nimble into Facebook or Linkedin?
We
already are integrated and partnering with both of those companies and I
would welcome an opportunity to integrate further within those
platforms with our platform to provide that universal view. I want to
build something that changes the world. I want to empower business
professionals to be more effective. I want to teach them, evangelize,
and give them a fishing pole and help them to fish and grow. So, whoever
can partner with me to do that the most effectively, I'm listening.
What kind of partnerships are you looking for?
There
is a lot more for us to do with the integration and surfacing of
opportunities for engagement within the platform. May West said "Out of
sight is out of mind and out of mind is out of money honey." ?So how do
you stay top of mind with your customers? It's all about engagement and
relationships.
One of the great things about Nimble is if that customer talks about you or your product or services. All these conversations are connected to the record automatically and then you can measure that engagement. Salespeople have to log who they did it with and what they did in order for the reports to be run on their CRM system. Imagine if the CRM system was built on a Nimble backbone that automatically collected who they're touching, what they said, then automatically told them the opportunity for a sale based on the historical engagement of sales that had occurred.
What Nimble is doing for the salesperson is empowering them. When I say salespeople it's really business professionals, because we're all in sales. It's empowering the business professionals to build their brand and grow their network and this is what we all have to do, it's what we always have done. If you're not leveraging social today, you're in trouble.
What do you have in the pipeline for us in the next version that you can hint or tell us about?
We're
excited about rolling out our API, which will give us the ability to
integrate faster into more platforms. My idea of Nimble is to give the
business professionals the 10% to 20% of functionality that they need to
do the core functions of contact, calendar, communication, social
listening engagements, sales and marketing, and collaboration. We don't
want to be all things to all people. Nimble is great for a workgroup
environment or single professionals. If you want to do that on an
enterprise level, traditional CRM has its place. What Nimble can do is
provide the social selling and customer engagement functionality that
social businesses need for the future and traditional CRM systems can do
all that backend stuff that they do so well. So we will be announcing
some partnerships with some of those vendors.
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