Jon Ferrara - Service is the new sales

I think any business person listening today should put their customers at the center of their storytelling and make them the hero

My name is John Ferrara, the CEO of Nimble. is a simple smart serum for individuals and teams that enables you to build the relationships that

you need to scale your business. I think that the biggest problem that most businesses and even

individuals make is they think that customers want to hear how great they are or their products are

And nobody wants to hear how great you are or your products are. They want to learn how they

could be great. People, every business person got into their particular business because they're

passionate about it. So if all you did is you built an identity, wherever your customers

your prospects, and ideally their influencers are having conversations to learn about how to be

better, smarter, faster in and around the areas of your promise of your products and services

you built identities for yourself and your team and your brand, your company. And then you just

gave your knowledge away on a daily basis where you inspired and educated them about how they

could be better, smarter, faster in the areas of promise your products and services, then when they

do need your products and services, you are their trusted advisor because you're not basically

trying to bag and tag them and sell them. You're basically teaching them how they can be better

So what happens is they not only pick up the phone and call you, but they drag their friends

with them. So you might say, John, I don't know how to write blog posts and content and do all

that stuff. Okay. So what you do is you start to hang out in the places where your constituency

hangs out. And I say constituency, because I think a lot of people get caught up on prospects

and customers. It takes more than prospects and customers to grow your business sales. And most

people try to sell too much. And so if you just took time to listen to your customers and their

prospects, influencers, and do your homework before you meet with somebody and basically ask

open-ended questions and let them talk, you're going to discover ways to build the intimacy and

trust you need to start a relationship where that person turns into your evangelist. What I'm saying

is if you want to build a self-sustainable garden around your business, you need to attract a variety

of things by putting things in the garden to attract those things. So it's self-sustaining

A story, my wife is a landscape designer and horticultural therapist, and she took me out in

the garden and showed me this monarch butterfly caterpillar. And I said, why is a monarch butterfly

caterpillar in our yard. She said, I'm plant milk thistle to attract the monarch butterfly

caterpillar so he eats the aphid So I have to spray and blah blah blah So basically she attracts all these different things to the garden so it becomes self any individual listening to this today any business listening to this today is should be thinking about their constituency around themselves and

their business like a sustainable garden how do you move them forward or make sure that they stay

a long time what are some practical things that you and your team do so that's where the basics

comes in. And my dad always said it's teams that win games and it's the basics that helps those

teams win those games. And a lot of it is being able to provide the right customer journey for

them. And I find the best way to do that is I get on the phone and I take service calls

I get out in social and I respond to customers. And by doing that from a leadership perspective

is I learned where the customers are cutting their hands on the edge of the boxes

So I bought this fancy, well, I was going to buy a barbecue. And I looked at this fancy one from Viking

I lift up the hood and I cut myself on the underside of the lid

because somebody doesn't take the time to sand the bottom of underside of the lid

And so if you're actually in the river with your customers, as they're going through the journey with your company

and you can see where they're just, I think that if you listen to your customers

and you iterate with them, that they will show you the way, but it's more than that

It's a lot of it is the basics and processes that you need to implement within your company

And so you might get emails from customers about pre-sales or post-sales

or various different things that are affecting your business. If you don't have a way to document repeatable

people and company business processes, and then teach that to new team members

then you can't provide consistent experience to your customers. And it really is the consistency

that really makes people feel comfortable and happy. I'm going to tell you a story about a

restaurant that I love called Hillstones, also called Houston. They might have 75 restaurants

And they call them by different names because they don't want to be subjected to the printing the calorie count on the menus or the laws that happens when you get really big

But one of the things they do, no matter what they call it, is when you walk into that restaurant, there's a consistent feel in the environment with the way the server treats you

The servers work as a team. So somebody might seat you. Somebody else might come and ask you for your drink order

somebody might come and take the or ask you for your order and somebody might come by and deliver

the order and if somebody's walking by and you need something they respond to you how many

restaurants have you gone to where you have your server and your server is never there and you're

going hey you ask somebody do you know who my server is you know what i mean and so not only

is the service beautifully consistent but the food is as well and that's what your customers

want is a consistency of high quality experience that they go through with your company And the only way to provide that is for leadership to get in the trenches with the team and to

experience how the customers are feeling pre and post sales. And then make sure that your team members are documenting the repeatable people and company

processes that are required to do the various things you do in your business

We hire people at Nimble. So what's the repeatable process with hiring

You have to write a job description, then you got to post it on Indeed or ZipRecruiter, then you get the emails on ZipRecruiter and whatever, and you have to do something with

that response. Most people basically just respond back to the email and they don't have a process if

they put it through. Here's our process. We will first do a sniff test, which means we'll look at their LinkedIn profile

we'll look at their resume and say does this person look like they match close enough for us

to invest the time to speak with them if they do fine schedule a meeting in that meeting we'll do a

basic interview process and if they pass that we'll give them an assignment that shows us their work

product and that shows us a lot of things then based off that work product we'll have a follow-up

interview with other team members within that team group if they pass that they might talk to

leadership or we'll go straight to references but all of these is a flow through a series of stages

where there's certain data that we're collecting in that flow and most people do this with

spreadsheets or project managers or trello or something like that and you know what we did at

nimbo we actually built this into the product so we have a thing called workflows that allows you

to build a board that allows you to put cards with people and company data with custom fields that are

or related to it and define the stages that you're putting them through so that the repeatable people

and company business processes that you need to do to scale your company, which is a lot more than

sales and marketing because it's more than sales and marketing people that touch your customers

and you need to document those repeatable business processes that occur and teach those to the rest

to the team and also do them yourselves. So an example, if I'm going to reach out to somebody

on LinkedIn to initiate a relationship, how many times do you, have you sent a message and you've

built the connection and then do nothing with it? Or you basically build the connection and say

oh, follow up on that LinkedIn invite. That's your next step. Typically, there's a series of

things that you might do with a person. And probably before you ever reach out, there's

some things you should be doing. So if I'm going to reach out to somebody on LinkedIn, what I'll do

is I'll walk in their digital footprint and I'll pay them forward for a while, add value to their

conversation. And in many cases, they reach out to me. But if they don't and I do want to connect

with them, I'll reach out to them. And then I will follow up to initiate a face-to-face conversation

and then take the relationship from there. And that's a series of stages that you should have

a process for so there there are a number of common things that occur in sales marketing customer service accounting product investor relations biz dev And we documented these and put them into templates that you could select in our workflows and start to do the

business basics that you need to scale your business. Is there a way that you can identify

those customers or that you have identified those customers for yourself in the past

those connoisseurs of your product or service, your connoisseur of technology or connoisseurs

of food that you would notice. Yes. There are certain people that would definitely value a product or service more based on their

area of expertise, things they care about, cyclists, whatever. A cyclist might be living in a small house, eating pasta all day long, but they have a

$30,000 bike. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the interesting things that we've done at Nimble is we've plugged the LinkedIn

pixel on our website. And what that enables us to do is to look at the traffic that's coming, that we're driving

to our site. And we can see that what the demographics are, the traffic

So if you install the LinkedIn pixel on your website, it gives you the demographics for

you to develop the personas about the people that are hitting your website. And they got that

technology from one of my investors, Russell Glass, who started a company called Bizzo. And Bizzo

basically is able to do that with anonymous traffic, but it could also do it with emails as

well. And so the way we use that is we look at the people that we're driving to our website

then we can yze the people that convert to trial. Then we can yze the people that convert

to paid and yze people that stay the longest and then derive personas of the people and the

companies that of the total masses we're driving those that then convert to trial those that can

convert to paid those buy the most and say the longest so that we know our top personas and their

company types so that we then can utilize that knowledge to to go drive more of those people

and so i think it's really important for you to understand not just who your prospects are but who

are your best customers and figure out a way to go not only find more of them but to invest your

engagement dollars because it costs money to engage with prospects and also customers because

you should be engaged with those customers to get them buy more and also to give you more referrals

And you can't engage with everybody. So why not engage with your best personas

And so if you're looking for a relationship management platform that will help you to scale your business

come check out Nimble. And if you check us out and you dig it

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