In this episode of Software Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig of Software Oasis interviews Jon Ferrara, founder of Nimble and co-founder of Goldmine. They discuss John's journey in the tech industry, the evolution of CRM and contact management, and the importance of integrating sales and marketing tools. John shares insights on building relationships in a digital world and the future of Nimble as a unified solution for businesses.
In this episode of Software Spotlight, host Michael Bernzweig of Software Oasis interviews Jon Ferrara, founder of Nimble and co-founder of Goldmine. They discuss John's journey in the tech industry, the evolution of CRM and contact management, and the importance of integrating sales and marketing tools. John shares insights on building relationships in a digital world and the future of Nimble as a unified solution for businesses.
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Michael Bernzweig (00:02.03)
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I'd like to welcome everyone to this week's edition of the Software Spotlight. I'm Michael Bernzweig, the founder of Software Oasis and host of the Software Spotlight. This week we're joined live by Jon Ferrara. He's the founder of Nimble and the original co-founder of Goldmine. So with that, Jon, welcome to the podcast.
Jon Ferrara (00:26.038)
Michael, it's a real pleasure to be here with you and your community. think that we all grow through conversation and engagement, and hopefully at the end of our conversation, your listeners will find or discover some golden nuggets that will help them achieve their dreams.
Michael Bernzweig (00:43.382)
I love it. love it. Well, first I have to share with you, I am actually an early user of your original solution, Goldmine. And I have to say that that solution was way ahead of its time. But for any listeners that may not be familiar with either yourself or Nimble, I was hoping you could share with us your journey kind of getting to where you are now and a little bit about the solution as well.
Jon Ferrara (01:11.34)
You bet. You bet. Thanks for the opportunity to share. So my journey really begins with relationships. I was struggling as a sales rep in the field for a large technology company. I worked in their district office in Dallas, a company called Banyan Vines. And they basically said, go get them, Jon. And I said, OK. And they gave me sheets of paper with phone numbers of IT people at large corporations. And they said, go sell them.
So I'd cold call those people and put the notes of my calls on the piece of paper I had, put my appointments in something called a day timer, which was a leather base organizer that had your contacts, your to-dos and your calendar. And I did my forecast on spreadsheets, my sales forecast once a month the night before they were due. I communicated with my team, my SE and management, et cetera, with voicemail and pink while you're out slips. And I said, this is so stupid.
Why isn't there a software program that integrates email, contact, and calendar, and sales and market automation so that no matter who picks up the phone, you know who you're talking to, what happened, who did it, and then what's going to happen and who's going to do it? And that's relationship management. That's contact management. But guess what? There was no outlook back then. there was no, in fact, there was very little software that integrated and ran over a network. So.
Michael Bernzweig (02:27.8)
Right.
Jon Ferrara (02:35.008)
When networks first came out that tied together PCs and printers and hard drives, they had to invent file record locking that enabled you to run a network business application across the network where everybody can open it simultaneously and share data all at once. And so we built Goldmine back in those days and what they called the DOS days, Disk Operating System. There was no graphical interface. so Goldmine was Outlook before it existed and Salesforce and
HubSpot marketing or any marketing program you want to pick, we effectively pioneered contact management, CRM, SFA, and email marketing. And the thing I really want to get across here is the heart of Goldmine was contact management, not CRM. CRM is a tool for management to keep the finger on the pulse of the business and the hand around the neck of the salesperson. Contact management.
is software that enables the entire team at a company to be able to manage the relationships that it needs to achieve its goals. The thing that people don't really get about CRM is that it's mainly for salespeople to track prospects and customers, but less than 5 % of your people at your company are in sales. Most of them are in other roles engaging with your constituency. And I say constituency because it's more than prospects and customers that you engage with to achieve your business growth.
And so I like to just rattle along that at Nimble, we connect to editors, analysts, bloggers, influencers, third party developers, investors, advisors, and prospects and customers. And that's why we use Nimble as our team relationship manager for the whole company. So that no matter who we're engaging with, we're able to be able to manage and track those conversations across the entire team and be able to put people through processes and workflows to achieve those goals. And so that was Goldman.
Started that company on $5,000, never took a dime of venture, grew it to hundreds of millions of dollars in a year in revenue, which was real money in the 90s. And I sold that and I retired and spent 10 years raising three babies. And Michael, I'm sorry, it's a shame to say that I don't know if you have children, but do you have children?
Michael Bernzweig (04:38.362)
sure
Michael Bernzweig (04:43.332)
fun.
Michael Bernzweig (04:48.632)
I do, I have two teenage daughters, so absolutely.
Jon Ferrara (04:52.096)
Okay, so you know the joys of parenting and the growth that you go through in being a present parent. And I'll tell you what, it's a gift to yourself to actually lean into parenting.
Michael Bernzweig (05:06.926)
Yeah, and it's a journey. mean, you go through times with your kids where they love you, other times where they hate you, but hopefully at the end of the day, they respect you over the years.
Jon Ferrara (05:12.322)
Yeah? Yeah?
Yeah. And I did all that too. And then once I got into school, I had time, I started to use social media. saw the way it was going to change the way we work, play, buy and sell by using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, to be able to rebuild the relationships that I had sort of lost being a parent, re-engage myself into the technology business and world. And I quickly saw that
Social media was great, but you're having all these conversations on separate platforms, and those contacts are all on those separate platforms. And wouldn't it be great if there was a singular contact system that integrated to all those social platforms to create a unified contact record for all your contacts across just not social, but all your email productivity suites, because that's really where we keep our contacts in Google contacts, Google email, whatever. And back then, there was no Microsoft Cloud.
It was on-prem exchange servers. so we pioneered. And so I saw the opportunity and then I looked at CRM and saw that it wasn't about relationships. It was really about command and control because when Siebel and then Salesforce came out, there was already Outlook as the team contact platform. So they never really built contact management into CRM and it was mainly for salespeople. And I really knew because I helped pioneer the industry.
Michael Bernzweig (06:14.135)
Sure.
Jon Ferrara (06:37.794)
that contact management for the whole company is key to those relationships. So I imagine building Nimble to pioneer social selling, social CRM, and relationship management for the whole company. And that's how we got to here.
Michael Bernzweig (06:52.218)
interesting and you know share with you my paths crossing with goldmine were in the early days. My first company was actually a mail order company that I had transitioned, I had acquired and transitioned to the internet back in 1995 and one of the foundational areas that was not in place at the time was
know contact management for sales people so we actually used gold mine on our local network and was a game changer because at that time you know many of the other organizations that we were competing with were still on mainframe computers and you know we're in a very different space and weren't adept at the internet but i could very clearly see that as the journey transitioned it was so important to
Jon Ferrara (07:39.054)
Yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (07:51.738)
tie together all channels of communication. at one point, probably after you sold the company, we actually transitioned to another platform, which was customer.com with a K. Not even sure if they're still around, but I know they were at one point or another acquired by Facebook, and that didn't end well, and I think transitioned back to the original team, and I'm not sure what happened there, but.
they were very early on in the space combining different channels and the solution that you've arrived at now sounds like that on steroids in terms of tying together everything from social to different platforms that e-comm retailers or any other type of distribution or sales organization might be using plus tying in all of the other departments. So that's interesting.
Jon Ferrara (08:50.222)
That was really the heart of where Nimble started. as Microsoft, Microsoft doesn't innovate. They iterate. They wait for somebody else to come in and build some solution. And then they duplicate that solution and build something good enough to take over the market. And they use their muscle, billions of users and hundreds of thousands of hours to do it. So Microsoft built Microsoft 365, which emulated what Google Gmail and Google Workspace does.
And they basically now own the email productivity suite. So if you're a business today and you want to manage email, contact, and calendar, you choose Microsoft or Google. But even then, one or the other, or both, I actually use both, the heart of Google or Microsoft email contact calendar productivity suites does not have a team relationship manager in it. Every single team member
Michael Bernzweig (09:28.214)
Exactly one or the other those are your two options
Jon Ferrara (09:44.91)
in Google or Microsoft has a separate contact database. And so you don't have a unified system or record of relationships in your business today. And so when Microsoft was first launching Microsoft 365, I knew that if I could build integrations with the products, relationships with the people, it would give me access to the programs where essentially we can become part of that ecosystem.
and happy to say that Microsoft is now globally reselling Nimble as their simple serum for Microsoft 365. And as we scale with those customers, we're finding that they're struggling to manage their sales and marketing, sales and email marketing growth. And the problem today is that the cost and complexity of the sales and marketing technology tech stack is just crazy. So
Today, if you go buy Salesforce or Pipe Drive or whatever it is, even HubSpot, they don't come with all the tools you need to use to do proper sales and marketing. So you have to buy some type of tool to do LinkedIn prospecting, something that plugs into LinkedIn that allows you to grab an individual record or a series of records on a search and be able to enrich those records with people and company data, email, phone number, put them into some sort of workflow process and sequence.
to outreach to them to try to get them on the phone. That's called prospecting. And so you need something like Outreach I.O. or SalesLoft or Apollo. Each of those $100 to $150 per user per month. Then you need Zoom Info to be able to enrich those leads with people and company data. Another $100 to $500 per month. Then once you want to be able to capture leads from your website and be able to do the sequences and nurturing or do blasts of product announcements or webinars or
Michael Bernzweig (11:18.489)
Right.
Jon Ferrara (11:33.102)
or newsletters, you need email marketing. So basically, when it's all said and done, you can't just buy a CRM today. You need to buy a CRM, some sort of SFA tool, Salesforce Automation, sales enablement tools, like Outreach or HubSpot sales, $100, $150 per month, the lead enrichment, Zoom info, and then LinkedIn sales navigator, because they don't give you the tools in LinkedIn for you to actually use it for sales. You have to pay extra for that.
And so when you get all done with all that, then you buy an email marketing program. And what you're doing is you're spending probably three to five, $600 per month per rep, plus the email marketing of $10,000 a year. You know, Michael, it's just too costly and complex to have software to manage sales and marketing today. And that's why we launched email marketing in Nimble with a soon to be released AI prospecting tool.
that will do this, imagine this. Let's say you're looking for people to do podcast shows with, and you're looking for SaaS CEOs that are of a certain character. You do that search in LinkedIn, it'll automagically grab that list, enrich it people and company data, put it in a sequence, and have the sequence emails tailored to that person and their business as it relates to you and your business so that you're not reaching out with these
Michael Bernzweig (12:33.636)
And.
Jon Ferrara (13:00.418)
blank generic messages, but actually tailored messages to people automagically. And so this is the kind of things that we're doing to make it easier and simpler and less costly to manage the sales and email marketing growth for your business.
Michael Bernzweig (13:19.31)
Yeah. And, and, know, two points that you covered there, which I think are so important, you know, for a lot of the consulting organizations and top tier B2B SaaS solution providers that are listening to the podcast at the end of the day in the year 2025, the bottom line is integration is, is key and everyone is looking at their bottom line in terms of costs. you know, having one solution that
checks all the boxes is huge because you can tie together a bunch of different solutions but it's never going to be perfect or elegant and you're always going to have you know band-aids and things like that that break and different things like that.
Jon Ferrara (14:02.018)
Yeah, and along those lines, Michael, if you think about the typical setup, let's say a business has a website.
They go and get MailChimp or Constant Contact or something for email marketing. And then they might get a CRM and have salespeople engaging. The problem is, is that the email marketing system is this thing that captures leads and does sequences. And then once it's lead qualified, maybe they reply to a sequence. You throw it over the wall to the CRM and the sales rep gets the lead, but he doesn't know any history. He can't see inside MailChimp. So you're sitting here inside your CRM.
Michael Bernzweig (14:35.46)
Right. So you have everything in one.
Jon Ferrara (14:38.624)
in the silo thing and you got to recreate all that stuff. Imagine one unified system that capture the lead, did the sequences on a reply, automatically put it into a workflow, assign it to a rep and the rep goes and links to the record and they see all the history there. Every single part of that whole journey. And that's what, you know, I think we love when we call American Express and they know who we are. They know what's happened and they get things done. And don't we, don't we, don't all our customers deserve the same thing?
Michael Bernzweig (15:07.338)
And I'll share with you having a single system of record for all of this information is a game changer. One thing that was amazing, you know, we were early on in the e-comm space with my last company, which I sold about three years ago, but for every single rep in the organization, you know, we had every single detail tied into one system and the phone would ring, you know, in the old days, the phone would ring and they would pick up and...
Before they even said hello, they knew exactly why the customer was calling. They saw every contact, every order, every social channel, every email, text, chat, know, everything. So, you know, they already were formulating in their minds what the challenge was that they needed to help that customer with. And I think information is power at the end of the day.
Jon Ferrara (16:01.848)
Do you have that today, Michael?
Michael Bernzweig (16:04.65)
So within Software Oasis, our clients are a little bit different, you know, with the B2B space. So yeah, it's a very...
Jon Ferrara (16:10.254)
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what you're saying does resonate with me in that the channels of communication, the channels of engagement are going to vary and they're going to skip from one channel to another. So imagine every business has a website and they want to drive eyeballs to the website and they want to engage with them. So how do you engage with them? You can give them a form and you can collect their information or you can them a chat window.
that enables them to have a chat with somebody. That chat might be with a bot, or it might be with a live person. But either way, you want to give them the means to begin to engage with you. So if they fill out the form with their email, you put them on a sequence. If they do a chat, you engage with them. And maybe that chat then shifts to text or phone. And so what happens is,
You need to be able to listen and engage on whatever channels most effective for your community you're engaging with. And today that is email. I mean, email is not going away. Text, chat and phone. so Nimble is evolving into a engagement system for growth for your business by first releasing the email marketing. Then we're going to release web chat.
Michael Bernzweig (17:15.544)
No.
Jon Ferrara (17:33.138)
and text and phone, and the phone will be outbound and inbound. And so the inbound will screen pop the record and you'll see all the history. The outbound, you can essentially set up a list of 25 people you want to call and it'll basically sequence and dial them. And then if you get an answering machine, it'll drop a voicemail for that person and move on to the next dialing. And so...
Michael Bernzweig (17:53.656)
Yeah. Voice drops on these things in the year 2025 that just didn't exist in the past. And what I described previously was our competitive advantage in the industry. And it was, you know, a solution that we had developed internally from code from scratch. And probably at the end of the day was probably, would have been a running headstart for you've built to be honest with you. But, one of the reasons that that business was,
Jon Ferrara (18:04.302)
Yeah.
Jon Ferrara (18:18.262)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael Bernzweig (18:23.096)
went from nowhere to the number one, you know.
distributor in the space, so was pretty crazy. But at the end of the day, and one other detail that you didn't mention there, but you are doing is social. Bringing all of these social channels, LinkedIn is a social channel when you look at it, into that one integrated solution and providing that to turnkey to someone that is literally just getting started, or a little further down the pike.
and needs all of that functionality. So the solution that you're providing, is it focused on, you know, obviously it's a B2B solution as far as your customers, but do you have customers that are serving both B2C and B2B clients using your solution?
Jon Ferrara (19:18.594)
You bet. Regardless of B2B or B2C, it's still P2P, people to people. And so it doesn't matter whether it's B2B or B2C, it's P2P or H stage, human to human. And so we have customers of all types because relationships will never go away. going back to the LinkedIn thing, I think...
Michael Bernzweig (19:25.806)
Yeah.
Jon Ferrara (19:49.534)
LinkedIn is a place to build your brand and your network and your brand and your network are your net worth. And so you should be nurturing those relationships that you're building and your brand like it's your own gold mine to turn your contacts into gold. And that's why we called it gold mine is the more you invest in your network and your relationships, the more you get out of it. And
It really goes to the sort of philosophy that I have as far as being a human being. Why am I on this planet? So when I sold Gold Mine, I got a head tumor and almost died a year after that. And going through the process of healing, I did some spiritual work as well, and I discovered, at least for myself, my purpose to be on the planet.
And that is to grow my soul in the brief period of time that I am here. And I think that the best way for you to grow your soul is by helping other people grow theirs. Which gets me to my purpose in life is to grow by helping other people grow, which is why I build relationship management systems, which are my gift to other human beings to help them achieve their dreams, which I pray will include helping other people grow. So that...
Nimble is not just a product, but really a philosophy about life and relationships and the value of them and the purpose of them. And so, you know, I think it's important to get across the reason why you're here and who you're for and what you're helping them do. And so that's why we built the ability to...
make Nimble work with you wherever you're engaging. Because the biggest cause of failure of CRM is lack of use and the second's bad data. Lack of use because you have to go to it to use it. You go to the Salesforce, the CRM app, and bad data because you have to Google people and then type the stuff in. Imagine if you had a CRM that automagically built the contact records from your email productivity suite, from your LinkedIn, from your emails, wherever you're engaging.
Jon Ferrara (21:57.23)
and then worked with you wherever you worked. And then it'd be like a little nudge on your shoulder that says, hey, this is Michael, this is when you last met. And that happens if I open up an email from you or if I'm on your LinkedIn page or if I see you commenting on a LinkedIn comment to somebody else, I can hover over your name and it will automatically, in Chrome or whatever browser you're in, bring up your record. Or if you don't exist, it'll automatically build a record for you.
And then I could put you through some sort of a process. I might not, if I want to engage with you, Michael, I might not immediately reach out and message you and say, hey, Michael, can we connect? I might walk in your footprint through LinkedIn and begin to comment on your journey, your posts, or share some of them. And not just share it by recopying the title, but to read through the article and determine a post.
Michael Bernzweig (22:29.882)
Sure.
Michael Bernzweig (22:43.565)
Sure.
Jon Ferrara (22:50.946)
that really demonstrates that I looked at your stuff and then had a comment that says why I'm posting it, why I like it. And then after touching your journey for a period of time, then I might reach out or you might reach out to me before I ever reach out to you. And that's the dance of relationships, but it's really too hard to do that manually. And so...
Michael Bernzweig (22:57.87)
something that's relevant, I understand.
Jon Ferrara (23:15.758)
I tell people that your brand and your network are your net worth and that you want to become a trusted advisor to your prospects and customers. And so you should give your knowledge away because you've forgotten more about your products and services than you've ever, than your customers will ever know. And if you do that on a daily basis where you're sharing content to inspire and educate other people about how they might become great, not saying how great you are, your products are, but teaching other people how they can be great because people don't buy great products.
They buy better versions of themselves. If you do all that by basically giving your knowledge away, you then become the trusted advisor to those proxies and customers and ideally their influencers, where ideally when they are looking for your products and services, they not only pick up the phone and call you, but they drag their friends with them. And that's the sort of modern dance of social selling, if you will. But if you do everything I just said, you're going to have tens of thousands of connections. And how do you manage them?
Michael Bernzweig (24:13.474)
And what's amazing is from what I'm hearing, it sounds like our SaaS solution here at Software Oasis for consultants and SaaS providers is almost at the opposite end of that customer journey from what you're helping individuals with. With Nimble,
you know, individuals no matter what channel they're reaching your organization on, you know, they need to get to the point that they know, like, and trust your organization, which is part of that whole journey, getting them on your email marketing list and having them follow, you know, follow your content. But at the same point, they also need to need what you're offering. And I think the interesting thing that...
that has been shown over and over again, 97 % of the people that you meet will at one point or another need what you're offering, but at that moment in time they don't. So it's obviously important to keep them in your marketing funnel. But what I meant by being at the opposite end of the customer journey, clients are actually top tier tech consulting organizations and top tier B2B SaaS organizations that are
in the mid-market to enterprise space and they're looking to bring aboard new clients. So what we found over the years is that, you know, it's very important that individuals are able to generate a flywheel of referral partners. And that is really what the software Oasis ecosystem is all about.
I mean, you might think of, know, a lawyer might refer you to another lawyer, you know, that's a referral network. A doctor might refer you to another doctor. So within our ecosystem, we have all kinds of consulting organizations referring clients to one another and all kinds of SaaS organizations referring clients to one another. So it's a really interesting ecosystem. But I'll be honest with you, you know, I'm really excited to take this.
Michael Bernzweig (26:26.028)
next journey on this end with Nimble because I think I really believe in what you're doing and I think you're early on in a very important space just like you were with Goldmine. So it'll be exciting to take that ride for a second time with you.
Jon Ferrara (26:44.438)
Yeah, I really do believe that the more digital we get, the more human we need to be. And with the rise of AI and bots and all that stuff, to stand out from the crowd, you really need to be more human and value the relationships that you're building and nurturing. And so, yeah, I think it's important.
Michael Bernzweig (27:06.49)
Yeah, I mean people buy from people. That is the bottom line. There's no... Yeah, exactly. And I guess at the end of the day, know, what's really interesting and, you know, you can tell by my haircut, you know, we started relatively around the same time and the early days, know, everything needed to be coded from scratch. you know, I think the exciting thing about the year 2025 is for anyone...
Jon Ferrara (27:10.156)
Like, and Trust.
Michael Bernzweig (27:34.702)
getting up and running or starting a business, you know, have all kinds of solutions. If you're in Ecom, you know, you have Shopify. In other spaces, you know, you have other solutions that are all-in-one solutions that really provide a complete ecosystem out of the box. And I think the total addressable market that you're focused on is huge.
And I think the value that you're bringing to the market space is amazing as well. So it's really exciting to see this part of your journey. When did Nimble first launch? I think that was one question that came in from a lot of users and a lot of people in the audience.
Jon Ferrara (28:14.658)
Yeah, Nimble launched in about 2011. And we were actually the only company to ever get LinkedIn's public and private APIs. So we were basically sales navigated before it existed. And yeah, I think our focus today is less social, Twitter, Facebook, and more
Michael Bernzweig (28:29.731)
I love it.
Jon Ferrara (28:42.702)
back to basic business, which is the basic sales and marketing, email marketing. That being said, we lean heavily into the LinkedIn engagement experience because I know that a lot of people listening today use LinkedIn to build their personal brand, their professional brand, their company brand, and to engage with people. And why are you engaging with people on LinkedIn if you don't want to bring them into your own system that you actually own the record?
Michael Bernzweig (28:44.516)
Peter B.
Jon Ferrara (29:11.086)
because LinkedIn, you don't own the record, you're renting it. And pull it into your own system and engage with them through the processes you need to achieve your business goals. And in many cases, that's not dollar denominated. So a lot of the engagement that you're doing on LinkedIn today are not necessarily people you're going to derive a dollar from, but you might derive a relationship that results in some business goal achievement or growth.
And you can think about biz dev, PR, investors, a lot of different things that are not deal related. And so I think that whatever tool that you're using to engage and prospect the LinkedIn should be related back to a system that has the ability to manage the processes you need to grow. Which means if you do a connection in LinkedIn, you should bring that contact into Nimble and put them through whatever processes you want to put them through in order to achieve whatever goal that you're doing.
could be hiring them, it could be getting them to talk about you or get introductions and referrals from them, a lot of different reasons.
Michael Bernzweig (30:16.686)
You know, what's interesting is that I've found over the years that, you know, for individuals that are online, and we've been blessed, to be honest with you, Software Oasis goes back to 1998. So we launched early and the business took right off at a very early stage. you know, all of our traffic is organic and all B2B, which is interesting, but.
One of the things that we've, or at least I found over the years is at the end of the day, you know, asking someone to do something that's unnatural, you know, to engage with your organization, it's like you're throwing a roadblock up. So, you know, I go to a website, you know, you see all of these websites with just tons of ads and pop-ups and all kinds of things. And it's, not a great experience, you know, admittedly. But.
at the end of the day for any organization getting a consumer or a business onto their email list is the beginning of any relationship. this might even be an idea for you or it might be something that you already have up and running. We publish tons of relevant content that's...
of interest to our ICP. So, you know, at the end of the day, we have all kinds of deep research studies and all of that that we publish quite often. And one area that I think would be helpful to a lot of organizations is being, you know, our solution is built on WordPress, which I think half of the world is based on WordPress. But I think a lot of organizations having the ability to
capture individuals at the moment that they arrive at the website and are engaged enough in some content to bring them, know, to basically content gate at some level to bring that individual onto an email list at the beginning of that journey. And I think that I'm not sure if that's a feature built into Nimble, but that might be an idea for you.
Jon Ferrara (32:22.702)
So we do have the ability to build web forums in Nimble and embed those forums into your website in order for you to give somebody the opportunity to give you their email. But the thing that you mentioned briefly that I heard is it'd be great to be able to capture their journey on your site.
before they ever give you the email so that you have some knowledge about like the person.
Michael Bernzweig (32:55.49)
Yeah, and I think maybe at the point where somebody clicks on Read More to read more of an article or a piece of content, at that point, it gives them the opportunity to join your email marketing list.
Jon Ferrara (33:09.11)
Right, but eventually you still have to pop something up and ask them for the right, right? And so.
Michael Bernzweig (33:12.726)
Absolutely, absolutely. So maybe having something that triggers that within the content.
Jon Ferrara (33:17.472)
Yeah. Yeah. I think what I'm hearing is something that's smart enough to sense when somebody's biting the bait on the hook and they bite enough that you basically pull the line automatically. And so if you come to my website and go to the features pages and then you go to the pricing pages and then you go to the about pages,
Michael Bernzweig (33:32.972)
Exactly,
Jon Ferrara (33:43.118)
And I know that you're really seriously looking at that point. I might have a pop-up that says, hey, Michael, it seems like you're really interested in researching the subject and learning more about Nimble. Please give me your contact info, and we'll give you this. A lot of times, people do that, and they say,
we'll give you 20 % off or 10 % off or whatever on your first purchase. then, that, yeah, so they ask you for the email and then they say, well, we want to confirm your email with a text. So give us your phone number. And then you now have permission to email them and text them, but you giving them something in exchange, which is a discount code or whatever it is you're giving them for exchange. And you know, Michael, I do this all the time. If I'm going to a website and I'm interested in the stuff,
Michael Bernzweig (34:12.632)
Sure.
or whatever the value is that you're providing.
Michael Bernzweig (34:23.438)
Right.
Michael Bernzweig (34:32.73)
whatever the value is.
Jon Ferrara (34:39.19)
I do want that discount code because I do anticipate purchasing. Now, I think that a lot of people listening to this might sell a product or service that they'd like this functionality in their website. And I happen to say we're building it. we're built. Yeah, because the thing is, is that Nimble has the ability right now to capture an email with a web form and put them on a drip sequence that will automatically drip those series of emails and then listen to see if they reply.
Michael Bernzweig (34:54.138)
Okay, so it is on the roadmap because that yeah
Jon Ferrara (35:08.918)
And if they reply, that means they're engaging back. That's the time to pull that person out and not send them any more sequenced emails. That means a human needs to reach out to read what the reply is and then send them a response. And Nimble has all that built in today. So if you capture a lead and you put it in a drip sequence and they do reply, Nimble can take that contact out of the sequence and put it in a workflow.
which is a process that the sales rep would then engage with their own email, not the marketing email, but their own personal email. But I anticipate that we're going to release a plugin to your website that will do just what we talked about, that will be smart enough to pop up at the right time, that will ask them for their contact info and offer them something. And that will be something our users will be able to plug in the website and do that. And then once they capture the email and text,
Michael Bernzweig (35:51.394)
That's the key right there.
Jon Ferrara (36:02.062)
we'll be able to not only put them on a sequence of emails, but text as well. Because sometimes we don't see all the emails and the text we do. And then if they do reply to the text or the email, then the system will be smart enough to hand that person to a human. Or you could actually do it where if they do respond to text, you can immediately give it to a human to begin to engage in that moment all through the Nimble UI.
Michael Bernzweig (36:28.03)
And I want to be respectful of your time. So I'm to wrap up with one question that came in from a lot of listeners in the audience. And I want to make sure I had it or else they're going to have my head. So obviously a lot of organizations at the end of the day are somewhere, right? And transitioning to Nimble is a transition. you stand, obviously the solution provides tons of functionality with more coming.
But for organizations that might be someplace else, what does that journey look like and what is the integration path for other related solutions that they may be using? Is there an ecosystem of integrations?
Jon Ferrara (37:06.232)
You bet. You bet. So first off, great question. Everybody has something already, right? They got a website, they might have QuickBooks, they might have MailChimp, you know, they got something, right? And so they're doing something with something already. And my advice to anybody is you don't have to immediately shift every single system that Nimble does that you already have another system for into Nimble right away.
What you do is you just, if I was doing it, I would look at what value does Nimble provide that we're not doing today that we could benefit from. Like for instance, let's say you already have email marketing, you're capturing leads and you're basically doing drip, but you don't have any prospecting tools for LinkedIn or you don't have a team relationship manager or you're using the email marketing side, but you don't have any of the SFA stuff that the sales rep can send templated email trackable emails or whatever.
So you could, you could wholesalely go into Nimble and just put everything in there, or you could do bits at a time. And we integrate with all the standard things. So Zapier and everything else. And Nimble has import profiles for all the different, sales or marketing platforms out there. And if you are considering trying Nimble out, it's free, go to nimble.com and you can sign up for two weeks for free. And if you do decide you want to use it,
Use the code John40, J-O-N-4-0, and you get 40 % off your first three months.
Michael Bernzweig (38:38.712)
Wow, that's really fair. So we'll leave a link in the show notes for anybody that would like to reach out. On top of that, for anyone that's joining for the first time, Software Spotlight has been around for some time. Very proud to announce that we've just hit 31,000 listeners every month as of last month. So we have quite an engaged audience. In addition to Software Spotlight, there are two sister podcasts.
Jon Ferrara (38:43.278)
awesome.
Michael Bernzweig (39:05.282)
career spotlight and consulting spotlight. be sure to join on your favorite podcast player. And for anybody that wants to keep up with everything that's going on over here at software Oasis, you can go to software Oasis.com backslash subscribe and join our email marketing list. And one, one other detail we have one spot on the podcast for an ad spot that is coming up in June. Other than that, the podcast has been.
sold out for quite some time. if there's anybody listening that is looking to get in front of a B2B audience, definitely connect with us. And once again, from Nimble, I really appreciate your time. We've had Jon Ferrara, and thank you for joining us today.
Jon Ferrara (39:52.674)
Michael, it's a real pleasure to connect with you and your community today. Hopefully they got some nuggets that they could take away and act upon today. And the main thing I'd say to anyone listening to this is that you should all have your own personal CRM. No matter what you're using at work, your network is your net worth. And you should go get something like Nimble for you
Michael Bernzweig (40:23.746)
I love it. Well, thank you so much for your time today.
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