Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

The Secrets to Successful Social Selling with Jon Ferrara of Nimble

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 331

Share episode

Highlighting an industry trailblazer, I'm honored to host Jon Ferrara, the tech visionary behind Goldmine, once the largest CRM in the world, and Nimble, the pioneer of social CRMs. Buckle up as Jon takes us on a journey exploring how to turn social media into a goldmine of sales leads, stake your claim with influencers, and leverage social media to resonate with your audience.

Strap yourself in for an expedition into the world of relationships - building, scaling, and managing them effectively over time. Jon underscores the lifeblood of purpose in our ventures, and how digital platforms can be harnessed to amplify our humanity and carve out a robust brand. We delve into the promise of technology to bolster business strategies, and the crucial need to be authentic in engagements.

As we round up, Jon gifts us with his wisdom on establishing business habits and workflows, emphasizing the crucial role of customer feedback in product evolution. We explore the intersection of social selling and influencer marketing and the power they wield in scaling businesses. This episode, brimming with invaluable tips and strategies, is your key to unlocking the potential of social selling and digital marketing.

Guest Links

Learn More:

Speaker 1:

How do you reach people who might buy Nimble? Well, amazon is the perfect example. People are looking for recommendations from others on what to buy. As I swam in the social river, I saw people that resonated higher to me and I began to share their content and then listen for the influencer to respond, their community to respond, and then I would begin to engage them. When we spoke that first time, I didn't just jump on the thing and say I want you to start talking about Nimble. What I did is I researched your background and I learned about who you are and what your passions and goals are. Then you asked me about what I'm doing and I began to share what I'm doing and I gifted you Nimble, taught you how to use it, you started to use it and then you started to recommend it to your community, which is exactly what I did with the Novalry seller. Guess what this is? Social selling.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tick-tocking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 3:

Greetings friends. This is Neil Schaefer and welcome to the digital marketing coach podcast. If you are new here, well, you probably didn't notice anything different, but if you are a regular listener, I hope you enjoyed that way of introducing my guest directly in the teaser. You always need to be experimenting with your content, with your digital marketing. Part of my experimentation is slowly creating short form video about these podcast interviews, but I really wanted to try to find something compelling in our conversation to use in the short form video. When I found it which is what that introduction was I thought, well, why not just use that for the teaser for the podcast episode? Right, rather than me introducing the topic? I thought that would be the best way to introduce it. So, as you heard from the teaser, this episode is going to be all about social selling. Now, social selling is something related to how salespeople can leverage social media as part of their toolbox. That is really the way it all started. I'm Farah.

Speaker 3:

My guest for today was the founder and CEO of Goldmine. This was the biggest CRM before Salesforce. For those that remember, I was the user of it back in the day and then, after he sold that company off, took some time off, saw social media growing, the way that salespeople could use social media. And then is the founder and CEO of the first social CRM called Nimble, and I am, as in Mary BLE. Perhaps some of you are already Nimble users. It is quite well known and it really is the best social CRM out there. Now this is not just about sales, right?

Speaker 3:

In that teaser, john talked about the engagement with influencers. This is a very, very popular topic for anyone that wants to expand their audience on social media. You know, gary Vaynerchuk has said a lot about this, this concept of engaging with other profiles, commenting on other profiles in order to gain visibility. In fact, joe Polizzi, who's been a guest on this podcast several times, in a recent episode also talked about one of the unconventional ways of content.

Speaker 3:

Marketing was, instead of trying to compete with all the mass media that are publishing, you know, consistently, over 16 different marketing channels every day was to actually be human and reach out to people on their profiles and obviously comment intelligently and relevantly and from that, really build your audience, build your community. So, with that in mind, I want you to listen in. I think anyone that does any sort of outreach whether it's influencers, whether it's media outreach, whether it is in a sales or business development role. I think you're really going to get a lot out of this. John is one of the most down to earth, friendliest but smartest people you will ever meet on this planet, so it was just such a joy to have him on the podcast and have him share everything with us. So, without further ado, here's my interview with John Ferrara.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 3:

Selling. It is a term that we've been throwing around for more than a decade and it's a term that many people have different ideas about. I hear marketers say well, social selling is just selling your stuff on social media. Now, some of you may not know this, but my background before this social media and all this was B2B sales. So I began my social media journey on LinkedIn because that was the only platform for professionals when I signed up in 2004 and became very active on it in 2007. And I realized that I saw LinkedIn as a tool, not just as a way to connect with my personal connections and keep in touch with them, and from that we've seen the emergence of more and more salespeople leveraging social media as another tool in their toolbox.

Speaker 3:

Now I want to bring up my history, because at this company where I did B2B sales, we actually started to use a tool and I'm going to age myself here called Goldmine. Now Goldmine was a CRM before there was a Salesforce. It was a brilliant tool that allowed me to keep in touch with all of my customers, catalog new ones, really have control over what was going on in my pipeline and in my network and in my market. So at that same company. A few years later, they started to use this online tool called Salesforce. But what's really cool is that the CEO and founder of Goldmine is not only a fellow Los Angelen or Angelino, but he also created a very, very cool tool.

Speaker 3:

As I went into social media, so did he, and he created a new tool, a social CRM called Nimble, that most salespeople know about today. But it's more than just a social CRM tool. It's more than just a CRM tool. But I'm really excited to bring on stage the founder and CEO of both Goldmine and Nimble, john Ferrara, because he's been in this space of relationships and sales and marketing and social media and networking and all the core things that lead to business. He's been doing this for decades, before the internet, before social media and now today. So he's going to get us. He's going to bring decades of experience and expertise into today's conversation to get us all caught up on anything and everything social selling. John, welcome my friend.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. I really appreciate, Neil, the opportunity just to reconnect with you, with your audience, and to have a conversation that I hope will help people grow, because I really believe that's why we're on this planet is to grow, and we do that best by helping other people grow. What do you think?

Speaker 3:

Oh, I couldn't agree more. It's why, you know, I used to just do a podcast and now I do a live stream of the podcast interview. It's like you know what, if I can just reach one more person, if I can reach two more people. You know, I have a in our. My wife is Japanese, so we keep in touch with the Japanese community here locally in Orange County and there's a 49 year old father who actually was in Santa Monica on a weekend at a coffee shop with his family, actually with a coffee cup in hand, and he had a massive stroke and he did not survive that and he had no healthiest guy. You know, you never know when your time is up, so let's leave, you know, and when our time is up, everything in our brain, it goes the way, so let's get it all out there. Let's help as many people as possible. I share the exact same sentiment, my friend, and that's only. This just happened two weeks ago, so it's just a reminder of that that I need to do more of that.

Speaker 1:

Amen.

Speaker 3:

All right. Well, this is not about. This is not a podcast about morning or sort of like a psychological motivational, but we do want to motivate you to look at business differently and I think you know, john, you're a great person to talk about this. So, goldmine, nimble man, getting in your backstory, there's a lot we can talk about. But what is it that drives you to create these world-class bestselling products focused on CRM, or should we just say relationships?

Speaker 1:

I would really like to say relationships right, because if you think about the core, the heart of what a good serum should be, the R in serum stands for relationship, but unfortunately today I think it stands for command and control. And so the reason I got started in building relationship management systems and pioneering contact management in serum, before Outlook or Salesforce existed, was because I personally struggled, and I think the best products come from your own need, because you're passionate about it and you understand the problem. And my problem was I was a sales guy in Dallas, texas, working for a startup out of Boston trying to sell network operating systems to enterprises and they would give me quote lead, but they weren't really leads, they were just a piece of paper with phone numbers of IT people at large corporations. They said go get them, john, and so I pick up the phone and I cold call those people, I make notes on that piece of paper, I do my forecast on the spreadsheet, I communicate with the people in my district office with voicemail and post it notes and pink while you're out slips.

Speaker 1:

And I said, gosh, there's got to be a better way. And I managed my contact with a day timer, which is a paper-based tool to manage contacts and to-dos, and what I really wanted was not just a day timer for me, but a day timer that ran a wire through all the day timers of everybody in my office and at corporate so all of us could be on one page with all the contacts that we're connecting to. Because teams that work together win games, my dad used to teach me, and so I struggled to find a tool that integrated email contact and calendar and sales and market automation. It didn't exist. I quit my job, I built Goldmine and the rest is history.

Speaker 3:

Are you also an engineer in the background coding, or?

Speaker 1:

Well, I'm actually an engineer.

Speaker 1:

I got a computer science degree, but I worked my way through the school at a computer land store, and it's there that I really learned every single software program in the market. So I knew what existed and what didn't exist, and I knew how corporations bought and how resellers sold, and it was that background that gave me the ability to synthesize a solution to the problem that I had. And so I built Goldmine, initially for myself and eventually started to sell it to others. And when we were at our peak I think we had like 100 million people around the world using Goldmine we were outlook before outlook existed. Now I know that sounds crazy, but when I started Goldmine, outlook was a DOS program called Outlook Express, which was an inbox in DOS, so it didn't have email contact, a calendar unified, let alone sales and market automation. And so we were the first team tool that essentially delivered what you expect today of a product like Salesforce, but in reality much more. And I want to point one thing out the heart of Goldmine and there's another program called Act that people loved as well yeah, and part of those two programs was it wasn't designed for management reporting, it was designed for the person engaging with others, building a relationship, and I think that that's what got lost in Serum today.

Speaker 1:

Serum today should stand for customer reporting management, not customer relationship management, because it doesn't have contact management within it. So people today use things like Outlook and Google productivity suite for their contact management and then they go into the Serum to feed it. So management doesn't beat on them. And I like to say, but it's true, the reason they call it Salesforce is that before sales people use it, did you know that there's 225 million global businesses and less than 1% use any Serum? Really, that's really scary it is, and the reason why is because you work for it. It doesn't work for you and you have to go to it to use it.

Speaker 1:

Now, that's why I built Nimble, so it automatically builds itself in the contacts that you already have within your individual or within your company, and we all have siloed contacts. You either have them in Microsoft, google or Apple email productivity suites. You have them in the business productivity apps that you're using in sales, marketing, customer service, accounting, and you have them in social Twitter, facebook, linkedin, et cetera. So you've got all these silos of contacts, and every team member in your company has silos of contacts, and so what Nimble automatically does is unify them into a singular whole, enrich them with people and company data, synchronize every interaction that you and the team have had and then works with you where you live.

Speaker 1:

You don't live in your Serum. You live in your email inbox and in social, so Nimble is like a little nudge on your shoulder that automatically brings up a record, or build a record, if it does exist, and allow you to do the human thing, which is follow up and follow through. And I think that's what kills business people today is they don't log in out, they don't schedule a next task, and that's really what you should be doing. But salespeople are too busy typing stuff in the computer, like googling somebody and then typing in what they know about them, rather than actually listening to the customer and finding ways to add value.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so true. It's funny because the minute I started using Salesforce and I'm not just saying this to flatter you I loved goldmine and in fact we have some of the audience who are a big act fan that you know Similar, very different than sales was, because I felt like when I was in Salesforce it wasn't serving me, it was only serving the people on top of me and every salesperson. It was just a pain. No one, no one wants to go and get it. No one loved to use it, right? So I totally agree with that paradigm shift.

Speaker 3:

So this is before social media and you were quite ahead of the curve and I know there's a whole story of how you launched and scaled goldmine with, you know, influential small business owners in part, and that's that's a topic of another, of another podcast episode. So there's there's a lot to dig through there. But I want to stick to this topic of social selling. So you were looking at like relationships and building business and CRM, and then social media came. Yeah, when social media came, you were also big on LinkedIn, I'm sure, as I was. How did you see how that would change things? And where are we at today?

Speaker 1:

so I'm going to briefly tell you how I scaled goldmine out of an apartment off with only $5,000 in my pocket to a company with 100 north of a hundred million dollars a year in revenue, and Then take you to how I did it with nimble, and why so. Imagine me an apartment in Kenoga Park with my co-founder and this thing called goldmine that nobody knows that they need. How do you sell it? Well, you want to find the trusted advisor of your prospect, because it's a lot easier to get recommended Then to go and advertise and try to get people to buy your stuff. And so I knew that the novella reseller, the network reseller, sold the network to small businesses and I'm one of the first networkable business programs to run on top of Nobel. And so I cold called all those no value sellers and I got them to use it by giving them goldmine. And then they started to recommend it and resell it, because people say what they know and they know what they use. That's how we got to our first hundred thousand dollars year in revenue. And then we pivoted to working with Microsoft and small business server and that basically blew it up into north of a hundred. So I sold goldmine on.

Speaker 1:

I was 40 years old in 1999. I spent 10 years raising three babies and Neil as a dad. You know how precious that time is and I really thank my higher power for that in those moments. But it also, once my kids got into school, gave me time to swim in the social river. A social media started emerged in 2006, 7 a and 9, and I saw how social media was going to change the way we work, play, buy and sell, and I wanted to use a tool that would enable me to take the contacts I was connecting to in social and to pull them in to a platform that I can manage them in, because it doesn't do any good to make connections with people without some follow-up and follow-through and the ability to segment the Contact and work with them effectively. Because if you do what I'm going to tell you to do right now, which is establish a brand across all the places where your prospects, customers and their influencers are having conversations about how to be better, smarter, faster in and around the areas of promise your product and services, and Give you knowledge way in those places by sharing content about how you might help other people grow, and then listen and engage In for people to respond to you and connect and then reel in them in for conversations when you spend most of the time listening and finding ways to add value.

Speaker 1:

If you do what I'm talking about, you're gonna have tens of thousands of Contacts. How do you manage them? That's why I built nimble, because I couldn't manage the contacts and Hootsuite, which was just streams of conversations but I couldn't tell the conversations to contact. And so when I had that problem, a little note went off in my head, kind of like a song, and I said, huh, I've heard this note before. I think I have a solution to it. And so I took the concept of gold mine, which is a relationship management, core contact management, not CRM where I designed a relationship manager that would enable people to build Relationships by leveraging not just email, calendar and contact but social media as well, and I launched nimble, which essentially pioneered social selling and social Sierra.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, amazing. I mean, like I said, we could unpack that. I love that. You know, we originally were talking about what. What are we gonna talk about that whole concept of leveraging resellers and treating them as influencers?

Speaker 1:

Parallel there is. When I built nimble, they really weren't resellers anymore because people were south buying products in the cloud. And so how do you reach people, business, people who might buy nimble, who are south buying in the cloud? Well, amazon is the perfect example. People are looking for recommendations from others on what to buy, and so as I swam in the social river, I saw people that resonated higher to me in and around. There is a promise of nimble with the social sales and marketing, and I began to share their content, hashtag the category pound sales, pound marketing, pound social, attribute their name at Neil Schaefer and then share their content and then listen for the influencer to respond, their community to respond or anybody around that hashtag to respond, and then I would begin to engage them.

Speaker 1:

And you and I did that exact same thing. And when we spoke that first time, I didn't just jump on the thing and say, hey, I hope you, I want you to do, start talking about nimble. What I did is I researched your background and I learned about who you are and what your passions and goals are. We talked about our areas of commonality the fact that I studied Japanese in college, at CSUN, and I really dig the Japanese culture and the fact that we both live in LA, etc. And then you asked me about what I'm doing and I began to share what I'm doing and I gifted you nimble, taught you how to use it, you started to use it and then you started to recommend it to your community, which is exactly what I did with the no-value seller.

Speaker 1:

So I've just taken this concept of scaling a product by identifying an audience and then identifying their influencer and then basically paying the community forward with Inspiration, education. And I'm not a writer, I'm a computer science major. So I shared the stuff that people like you wrote, because you inspired me and I shared your teaching and Attributed you, which helped build that relationship. And guess what? This is social selling.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and you know it's funny because, yeah, I had the question queued up right to get us started and that was sort of the introduction to it. So really, anybody that is listening or if they're watching the live stream, they can basically replicate what you just did. And it's funny because from before we get to social setting, the influencer marketing People want to tap into influencers without doing any research on them, without following them, without sharing their content, and then they wonder why they get no response to their you know, dms that are not personalized and they send to 2,000 people. So this is a smarter way to do business if you really want to connect and build business. So I think you already gave a lot of this advice, john, of how to use social media platforms to connect with Potential clients and build your brand. But anything else you want to I'm assuming you know first, research who your potential clients are, follow them truly, engage with them, start sharing your own content. I'm sure there's more to it than that, but what would you say is missing in that equation?

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's really boil it down to something simple, because I know that I shared a lot of stuff and I talked quickly. So, if you are a Business person and this isn't just applied to sales people, because everybody's brand and network is their net worth so even if you're a product manager or Any other role in any company, whether you work for yourself or you work for a company, before somebody hires you for your next job, whether they're hiring you to work at their company, they're hiring you to consult to them they're gonna Google you. Google yourself right now. Do you show up on the first page? That's where you really want to start. You want to start by building your identity in all the places that make sense and the make sense places or wherever your constituency Communes and so I say constituency because it's not just about prospects and customers. At Nimble, I connect to editors, analyst, bloggers, influencers, third-party developers, investors, advisors, etc. And so that's a constituency. That's the garden that I'm nurturing to build this self-sustaining garden. So go build an identity.

Speaker 1:

Make sure that your picture shows your face, because that's your heart and your soul. Your eyes need to be bright and clear in the photograph, and if you want an example of a great photograph. Just Google John Ferrara, j O N F E R Array You'll see my avatars wherever and go look at that picture. It's a really well-lit picture. Thank you, linkedin. It was at one of the Microsoft conferences that they did that. Literally there's six lights on me to balance the background, the foreground, and get my eyes the sparkle. And then make sure you have a really great bio and make sure that you have links to things that give credibility to yourself and Then begin to give your knowledge away. Every morning that I wake up, I have a little coffee and this is a friend of mine, mr Bacon, it's another podcast. Every morning You're researching stuff about your industry because you're passionate about it. That's why you're in it. Begin to curate that stuff on a regular basis and hashtag the category and attribute the people and then share that across All those different identities in ways that make sense, maybe once a day on LinkedIn, three times a day on Twitter, etc.

Speaker 1:

And then Listen and engage. For when people knock, it's kind of like a a River going by your business and the digital social river and you want to drop lures in there and you fish before. Imagine if you put a fish hook with a worm in the river and you basically didn't pull the hook when there was a nibble. So you know, share content, but you got to listen and engage, not with intent to sell but to serve. I call it the 5 E's of social business educate and chant, engage, embrace and empower your customers.

Speaker 1:

You educate by giving knowledge away. You're in champ by giving away knowledge that is inspiration, educational, because you don't want to talk about yourself for your products. Nobody buys great products. They buy better versions themselves. So you want to sell people a better version of themselves, which means sharing knowledge.

Speaker 1:

If you don't write well, share other people's knowledge and then listen and engage and really what you want to target ideally are those Influencers that already have relationships with those customers. You will never scale yourself by following all your prospects and trying to pound on them, but you can truly scale by identifying the influencers of your prospect and by building pay-up-forward Relationships with them, by not reaching out to them until you've nurtured them at least three to five times, which means you need to go find content that's inspiration, educational, in around the areas of promise, your product and services, and then Curate that content, not by just taking the blog post and Resharing it exactly the same way. You want to put some thought into Changing it up so it makes it look like you actually read the article. And guess what? Chat? Gpt is pretty good for that, so you can then share the article, hashtag it appropriately and then spend time listening, engage in. So I take 30 minutes every morning to curate and share, and then 30 minutes at the end of the day to listen and engage. And then when I actually do find somebody responding to my stuff, I don't immediately pounce on them, I slowly begin to dance with them.

Speaker 1:

And here's an analogy Do you remember the jump rope that that people used to do? You wouldn't just run up to a jump rope that people are doing. You know the two people to the little rope and then you go jump in. You don't just run up and just jump into it. You have to run up and get your, get the stride, get the motion.

Speaker 1:

Or another analogy is the cocktail party. You don't just walk into a business function and say, hey, anybody want to buy some CRM. You walk into that cocktail party and you pause and you look around and you identify individual or groups, ideally that are having conversations that look like you might want to jump into that. Here's the jump rope analogy you walk up to that group and you pause and you listen. Then you get a sense of the conversation, then you begin to add value to that. Then the people who hear you will look over at you and go gosh, john, you seem to know quite a bit about social sales and marketing. What's your story? There's your moment. There's your moment to have the conversation. You learned everything you needed to learn about social selling and social business from your grandma or from grammar school.

Speaker 1:

Let's stop for a second about the word social. Social media first really hit us all hard in 2009, 2010, and 2011. We came up with these words social selling, social CRM, social marketing. You know, I think those words are passe today. They've been passe for years. I'm going to give you a knowledge that helps you understand what I'm saying.

Speaker 1:

When the internet first came out those that remember Hayes, dilip Modems and Prodigy and BBSs and all that well, that was when the internet wasn't really stable. You had to dial up into these things. Then what happened is that DSL Modems came out and the internet became stable. It was always on. It really hit everybody. Everybody knew they had to get a website for business, et cetera, and everybody was getting on it. Back in those days, every company had an E and I in front of it Etoys, icontact. Then, all of a sudden, people stopped saying I'm an internet company right around the time the 99 crash happened. The reason why is because when a technology becomes ubiquitous, it disappears.

Speaker 1:

Think about when you open the pipes on your sink. You don't think about the boiler, the water heater, the recirculator, you just turn it on and you expect to get hot water. That's what happened to the internet. That's what happened to social. You don't need to talk about social selling or social CRM again anymore, but it is just basic relationships. It's basic selling. Don't think of selling as a way to make money off people. Think of selling as a way to help other people grow. If you focus only on how can I help as many people grow as possibly I can, the universe will shower you with gold. I know I did.

Speaker 3:

Amen, man, there's so much goodness to unpack there. You've already responded to the next question that I had lined up with how serving others Really? The secret here is the title of this podcast episode in Livestream does have the term social selling from an actual perspective, because people do still search for it. You know what?

Speaker 1:

I think that if you go outside of the tech coast, things move slowly to the rest of America and the world. You, neil and I, are on the cutting edge of all this stuff. You and I share a lot of these ideas. You and I have already moved on from all that, but people are still sort of digesting it. We still got to include the word social selling and social CRM in the conversation, but we definitely want to get people to understand that it's not about the social, it's just about the relationships and the communication. Social is just one means to do it.

Speaker 1:

Back in the day when I would teach salespeople how to connect and communicate, I'd say when you go in somebody's office, look at the walls, look at the books they read, the degree of the school they went to, the knickknacks they collect and what you want to do is find some commonality and you can tell that the 5 F's of relationships family, friend, food, fun and fellowship. What you want to do is find commonality and share that in order to break the ice and build some intimacy and trust, so that people then will open up to you about their issues, which, as a professional, you can then solve. Let's get back to that sort of purpose of relationships. Neil, I'm not sure if I ever told you when I sold gold money. A year later I got a head tumor. I almost died. Oh, I didn't know that, yeah. So imagine selling a company of hundreds of millions of dollars and having your first baby, second baby and you're facing the grim reaper.

Speaker 3:

You could have been my friend that I was talking about, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so what you were saying was really close to heart. I think that every moment you have, you need to be present with others. But, more importantly, it made me think about what is my purpose on this planet, and I came to the conclusion that I'm here to grow in the brief time that I'm here on this planet, and the best way to grow is by helping other people grow. And so I think that sales has become a four letter word and that people they really a lot of people think how much can I get from everybody I can connect to? And you get that. When you connect with people on LinkedIn, like, you immediately get that email, like you know have you thought about buying this or what.

Speaker 1:

Can I sell you that Right? Have you ever considered? Ooh, right. And so it's really about what is your purpose of doing all the things that you do and what do you want out of it. And so I think that your purpose should be that higher purpose, and if you're not necessarily focused on money and I think that we're not here to make money, we're here to make memories out of moments that you can really transform how people see you and that people know who is a bad guy and a good guy, because they can feel it.

Speaker 1:

We're built with these sensors.

Speaker 1:

You don't even understand, and so, as a human, you should not be connecting with others to try to get something, but connect with them to try to give them something.

Speaker 1:

And, as a salesperson, what you're trying to do is you're trying to find as many people as possible that you can serve with your products and services. And you know what? If your products and services aren't a good fit, tell the people, because that person is going to recommend you because you're a good person and you're honest, and so that kind of gets back to what I feel is the heart of social selling is really about what is your purpose of what you do and how do you go about doing it. And so, when we start talking about building relationships at scale, you're going to have to be able to manage them effectively, and that's really why I built this thing, because even if you do use a serum at work that your company gives you, you should have a personal serum. I think that everybody in this planet should manage their contacts effectively and, ultimately, if you do that effectively, you can maintain relationships over time. Neil, it's probably been years since we spoke right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it has. But we've known each other for over a decade, I think, at this point.

Speaker 1:

But the thing is is that you and I speak and there's an immediate connection, right, and that's because we've paid that relationship forward to build that bond that will stay connected. And so, if you think about a relationship, most of the energy goes into getting it up to speed like a car to get to 60 or a rocket to get into orbit, and so to keep it into orbit or keep it at 60 takes very little. And you know that guy who does the plates on the pencils. You ever see him? Yeah, okay, every once in a while he's got to go over there and nudge the plate. Just keep it going right. And so that's what you should be doing with your relationships. So you build all these connections by building your brand and sharing the content, listening and engaging and initiating relationships with key people that make sense for you, and then occasionally go out there and nudge them. And so I'm sure, neil, that you occasionally see me sharing your content, right, indeed, thank you for that, by the way.

Speaker 1:

I do it because I dig it right, I dig you, but you know I'm just no junior a little bit, and so I teach these practices of social selling and using a social serum. There I go, using that word again. The thing is is that you really need to build a process around what we're talking about, and that's kind of what I teach. And speaking of teaching, I like to say if you teach people to fish, the figure out to sell fishing poles, and so, rather than telling people how great Nimble is, I teach them how they could be great, which is, I teach them how to build their brand and share content, listen, engage, have a purpose for engaging and then bring those connections in, manage them effectively, and this is really a basic process. Yes, dr Volgamin, you got it right.

Speaker 3:

Create relationship momentum for those on the podcast. Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of value here. And then I look at the younger generations. You look at your kids. You know, when we got started with this 10 years ago, we had to beg people to engage more on social media. Now it's natural, it is the TV of new generations and they are very cognizant of who they follow, who they follow back, what content they engage with when they get engagement. So I think that one of the reasons why social selling goes away over time is it just becomes a natural part of everyone's life. So of course, in their job, they're going to find ways to utilize as well and therefore it's just it becomes organic.

Speaker 3:

But what might not be organic, john, is when you are trying to get started with this. So for and John you probably agree with me it's often the older generations, and I always tell people like in their fifties when I work with them you're going to get this really quick and you're going to be better than someone who just knows social media but doesn't know relationship building and networking and has business acumen right. So how do we integrate everything you've been talking about? Is it just a matter of making sure that we get connected to people in our industry or contacts who are sharing their content. You know someone in marketing is creating content that we can all share. How do we sort of integrate everything you've been talking about into our, you know, whether it's a very small business, a startup or an enterprise? How do we integrate all this into that process that you talked about and making an integral part of our strategy going forward?

Speaker 1:

Well, you know, neil, it's interesting that you mention our kids because, you know, as my kids graduate from school and they go out looking for a job, they're really not doing as good a job as I'd like them to do of building their identity in the key places because, like I shared, they're gonna Google you before they hire you. And so one of my sons is looking for a job in product management, but he doesn't really share content about product management on his LinkedIn or his Twitter. And I tell him, I Say, colin, you've got to build your brand with a great picture, a good bio that talks about your areas of passion. You've got to share content about that. Ideally, create some content around that and Then identify the thought leaders in your industry and begin to share their content, follow them and begin to connect with them, try to have a conversation with them, turn them into mentors, and then when somebody goes and looks you up on your profile, they'll see that you align with what your Stated passions are. And so I really think it starts with that foundational thing of establishing your, your base, your foundation identity in all the places that you want to be, and Then what you want to do is let's say you want to be a, a kid, a job in product management, if you identify the key people in those spaces and you begin to share their content, not by Regurgitating the, the URL and the word in the headline of the title of the blog so that that influencer and product management wrote, but by regurgitating so it shows people, especially the writer, that you actually saw it and that they respond and say, hey, colin, thanks for sharing that.

Speaker 1:

You don't just like, like it or say you bet you then go reread that content and you identify why you originally sent, shared it and what, what's the one or two things that resonated for you. And then you mention that and you say, yeah, neil, I really dug that post on influencer marketing, especially the one where you say you shouldn't just connect and sell when you connect with an influencer or do a cold reach out, that you really got to personalize things because they just get blasted with stuff. And so it really is nuanced in how you set your brand up, how you curate content, how you share it, how you listen and engage. And it's not hard but it is purposeful. And it comes back to what I shared before, neil, is why are you doing it like, what's your purpose to be here, and so I think that there is a formula to it. But I think that there is some heart and soul to it too, and I think that Anybody who's trying to do anything on this planet today Should be identifying, connecting with some sort of higher power. And I'm not talking about Jesus or God.

Speaker 1:

Even though I was raised a Catholic, I'm more of a universalist. I really believe that if you trust in the universe, that magic can happen, and so I say prayers regularly, I meditate and I try to connect with that higher power. And, neil, I'm gonna tell you that I really believe that my success in life is not due to me, but to the people around me and to my higher power, who, I Said, I send my prayers out and then I listen. So here's an analogy. So you should figure out what your three P's are in life. What is your passion, plan and purpose? So Figure out what your passion is, build a plan to achieve it and make your purpose on a daily basis and I Regularly will.

Speaker 1:

When I'm really seeking something, I'll send that prayer mentally to the universe, but what you need to do is you need to then be present in the universe and Try to hear when the universe knocks.

Speaker 1:

And then, when the universe knocks, you've got to be brave enough to open the door and walk through it, and that's where real magic happens in life.

Speaker 1:

And so I may sound a little philosophical about some of my passions, but I really believe that At the heart of everything I do is relationships and there's a higher power, vibration when you build a true connection with another human being, and that we all feed on that. And that's the reason why we feed these things, these, these phones, with content because we're all desperate. We're all desperate to be heard, wanted, seen and loved, and if you can understand that about other human beings, and you could truly be present with them and give them your Presence, your eyeballs Even if it's like when you're at the register at the grocery store, that you're not on your effin phone, that you're actually putting it down and connecting with that person who's serving you in the moment, and give them a gift of your, of your eyes, of your smile, or just a little word of something. And I think that if you do these kind of things in your motions in life, that the world will unfold for you and and you could literally build a goldmine. I know I did.

Speaker 3:

Pun intended. Yeah, great advice. Yeah, you know, it's funny, we were talking before him. My daughter is gonna be entering university and she wants to go into marketing, but she's gonna be majoring in psychology at a liberal arts college and what you talked about there, like you know, mass those hierarchy, needs and and what Dr Chaudini talks about an influence. A lot of it is the psychology, but it's not just understanding the needs, but it's how do you serve those needs to people with every engagement.

Speaker 3:

And I think that you know there have been a lot of success stories of startup founders who had great product and they reached out to influencers to serve them. Like, I'm not trying to sell this to you, but I think if you did this, this is how it could improve. I've created, just, you know, a two minute video to show you and I'll be more than happy to do this for free for you, just to get your feedback right. Yeah, it's that concept of, yes, you're trying to sell a product, but first you're serving and you're gonna get feedback. You might make a customer, you might make someone that refers you to another customer, but you're at least exposing yourself, you're doing your best to get the word out there in a very, very authentic way. That's aligned with everything you just talked about and anybody can do it. And why does everyone do it right?

Speaker 1:

You know, sometimes I think it doesn't come naturally to everybody, right? So we're all built differently. I shared with you earlier that I have three kids and they're all. They're all born and gifted differently, and we're all born and gifted with different gifts and and some of those things you need to work out. I was never a good writer, but math came to me like a song, like I could literally get straight A's through Calc, one, two and three differential equations and linear algebra, but writing a pair, an essay, oh my freaking God, it was hard. And so the things that are hard you need to work at or, ideally, hire people around you that are good at those things.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, amen. So you know we've gone through it and I know to some I'm used to giving like this, extremely tactical AXMO advice. I think that you've given that, john, yes.

Speaker 1:

It has to be unpacked so that, because we covered a lot of stuff and if I were to sort of like unpack it Into something short, is that what you're looking for?

Speaker 3:

No, no, no. I just I'm gonna go to them, to our final question, like a wrap-up question. But I think, if you dig through everything you talked about, it's less about a tactical formula and it's more about you know the philosophy, the purpose, the passion, relooking at our digital presence, beginning there what is our intent, and then really leveraging social media serving that intent, all with this background of service. That is the formula right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it starts with the humanity of everything, right, Because that's what's gonna make you stand out and be different. The more digital get, the more human we need to be, as our dear friend Brian Kramer likes to say. And it's not B2B or B2C, it's P2P, because people buy from people like no one trusts. And so I think it really starts with that humanity and purpose, and if you could, if you could solidify that, I think that will shine through everything that you do. And, of course, there's formulas to what we're talking about, which is Identifying where your constituency communes, building identities in those places.

Speaker 1:

That's proper and effective, with good avatars and bios Populated with good content. So when people go and Google you, they see that you're actually aligned with what you say you're passionate about, with what you actually share and then Sharing that, but, most importantly, listening and engaging with authenticity and and Genuineness, with a purpose not to sell but to serve. And If you do all that, you're literally going to that's right. Amplify your humanity, christopher. If you do all that, you're gonna stand out from the crowd, and that's really what you want to do today. Is you want to stand out from the crowd? Because everybody's trying to stand out, but they're not necessarily doing it in that human way or with the right purpose, then you're gonna literally have tens of thousands of connections. Okay, what do you do? Well, if you have tens of thousands of connections and I literally probably have 30,000 connections in my, in my Google- I don't doubt that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you know how are you going to find the needle in the haystack and then be able to Identify which people matter, who you should connect to and who you should be nurturing to stay connected to those people.

Speaker 1:

It gets to be hard, and that's why you need your own personal CRM, and I think what we just talked about should be taught in a high school senior class, certainly in a freshman class at a college, and that the students should be practicing this all the way through College. That will then prepare themselves to be launched to the world. And if you didn't do all that, you know what you could always start today, kind of like investing, right. You know, if you do it early, that shit's gonna grow, but you know there's never it's never too late to start. You know, I love seeing Neil, some of these older people out there in the world and I'm kind of older, right, I'm 62 years old, I'm a, I'm a bit of an old fart, but I love seeing them, you know, starting new things and and you know taking things on, you know, and, and so it's never too late to really start this whole thing, and the sooner you start, the better.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, amen. And you know, early on I just wanted to talk about when you started goldmine. You know DOS programming there there was no, there was no upwork, there was no fiver, there was no LinkedIn. It is. You know, entrepreneurs have it so easy today. I mean, obviously it's never easy, but it's so easier if you have an idea to productize it. It's just so much easier today than was back then. So I want people you know, older people may understand that younger people probably have no conception of that, but it just serves as a good reminder. But you know, we talked about so much. You've given so much sage advice. I'm just wondering is there anything we might have missed any strategies that we talked about here? Something tells me that your response to this question of strategies for leveraging social selling techniques to drive business growth is really to do More of this develop more relationships, deepen those relationships and try to scale that. But I'm curious Is there any other advice that we might have missed out while we have you on the on the call today?

Speaker 1:

You know, I think that what we're talking about is kind of like working out Right. I walk four miles every day and usually I walk to lunch and then back and I take moments to have quiet times in the morning to be present with the universe, and I take naps.

Speaker 1:

10, 15 minutes a day help to refresh my heart and soul, I love naps amen, and I daily curate, share, listen and engage, and it's just habits, it's just building habits, right. And so I think that the key thing I'd like to share for integrating what we're talking about into your life is just make it a habit. You know, most people start their day with some type of hot beverage Neil, you might drink tea, copy, I like a cup of Joe. And while you're doing that, you're passionate about what you do, so you're researching it. Just start curating it. When you see something that you dig and then sharing it.

Speaker 1:

And you know, neil, I don't know if you've seen nimble workflows, but I built nimble workflows because I used to manage my influencer outreach with spreadsheets, because CRMs are built for deals and selling and most relationships I built, I built, aren't about selling. They're about finding areas of mutual commonality and building mutual benefit. And so how can I effectively nurture people, pay them forward and listen and engage and connect and drive an outcome? It's a process, right, and so it's kind of like a Kanban board with a series of stages, and so if I identify somebody that I dig that resonates with me in around the areas of my passion and product and services, I will use the nimble plugin in the browser, whether I'm in Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever I happen to be, and I will instantaneously automatically build a record for them.

Speaker 1:

Because that's what nimble does it automatically builds a record, establishes their profiles, builds their avatar or bio and I'll put them into a workflow. And the workflow starts with Nurture One. So you know, week one I'm gonna nurture some of their content and then I'll listen to see if they engage and if they don't, they go into Nurture Two and I do the same thing. So three weeks of nurturing and then I might outreach to them if they haven't engaged already. But I've already paid that relationship forward. So you could build processes around this whole thing that I'm talking about. But if you are thinking about doing that, check out Nimble workflows, because we already have templates that are already built or doing exactly what I just talked about.

Speaker 3:

Brilliant.

Speaker 1:

And then you have this database of influencers that you built, and then they will drive connections with their communities, which you then put into your database as well, and this basically becomes a self-fulfilling pipeline that you can manage, not for the purpose of selling, but really for the purpose of growing, and so that's why we built workflows into Nimble, and you should definitely check them out, because I friggin' dig them.

Speaker 3:

Yeah and John, the weird resemblance of, or commonality between, social selling and influencer marketing. Because an influencer marketing for my listeners that have read my book and very familiar with it we would call that influencer relationship management. And you're not just gonna bombard people with DMs, you're actually gonna try to build relationships with them and there is a funnel right. There are different stages. You wanna go through and guess what. You don't need to reach out to all 1000, maybe you do 10 a day, but you're gonna get some that respond back and therefore you begin to prioritize those and build relationships there. And that's really exciting that you've added that to Nimble. Because, getting back to that original question was strategies for driving business growth. You scale when you truly have and I'm a big professor at Edwards-Deming you scale when you truly have a process. I try to create SOPs for everything to do when you have that process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so workflows are all about building repeatable people and company business processes, and so let's say that, now that I've sort of established this methodology of identifying influencers, paying them forward by nurturing their content, listening, engaging to build their relationships, I don't scale. Nimble is in the John Show. Nimble is about a team, and so I then need to bring in new people like McKayla and teach her how to do that. And then she brings in three more people and teaches them how to do it. But if you don't have documented repeatable processes, like workflows, that you can then teach people to do it humans, they just eff up, right. They don't do what you teach them to do, and even yourself you don't do it. You forget about what you already knew how to do, and so you want to absolutely document and build repeatable processes in your business, especially around the most important resource you have, which are the people and companies around your business. That will help it grow and reach your dreams.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's been the secret. I mean, any entrepreneur startup, you know? Oh, neil, how'd you do those great graphics? Oh well, that's my guy in Venezuela. Your audio, well, that's my guy in Serbia. Oh, so, when you have process and you begin to work with people that are not only as expert but maybe they're more passionate about that than you, are right and you're at a strategic level, but there's other people that love doing the things that you may not love to do, right and that's I don't know if it was it from good to great. You know talking about all those people. Like you know, marriott tries to find people that just love tidying up rooms and that's their gig, and they try to find the most passionate people, right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, like at Goldmine, I hired the CFO from Clipper, which was a debase compiler and I'm aging myself, but anyways, he loved numbers and operations and you know, he transformed us from shrink vacuuming boxes into visually at our company to manufacturing boxes by the thousands and having them pre-built and palletized. And rather than us shipping those boxes out of our warehouse in Pacific Palisades, we shipped them from the manufacturing place to the distributors that we had around the world, and that's what we call scale. And so, absolutely, neil and you know, bringing that back to relationships and social selling you need to document and build repeatable processes and so when you do a connection on LinkedIn, you shouldn't just like do an invite and connect. You should do an invite and connect and put them in a workflow that this is my workflow for new connections and then put them through a process where you have an outcome and a goal in mind. Ideally it's not a dollar goal, but you definitely want to follow up and follow through on those connections in a relevant, authentic way to drive that process. But most people just connect on LinkedIn and then they forget about the person. It's like. You know it's like bump of the night, you know it's like why are you connecting, and so if you're out there establishing a brand, sharing content, to give away your knowledge, listening and engaging, you got to take every single connection that matters not every single connection, because you're going to get overwhelmed, but everyone that matters, and you know the people that matter in your life. You have an inherent sense of that. What you want to do is put those parameters into a process and then take the key ones and put them through the flow. So my key ones are the influencers of my prospects, and it's the influencers of prospects around the areas of promise of the products and services, which is social sales and marketing.

Speaker 1:

But now I've expanded that. So now I'm going into the verticals that the product serves. So if you think about the horizontal of Nimble, it's people in sales and marketing roles or business debt roles at companies. Okay, well, that's pretty horizontal. But think about the vertical who, what industries use that? It's commercial and residential real estate, it's mortgage brokers, it's financial advisors, it's consultants, and so you can start seeing the verticals there. And so now, now I'm I nurturing the thought leaders in social sales and marketing, but I'm also nurturing the thought leaders in the verticals, and then I'm modifying Nimble so it has templates for those vertical industries. So, rather than you having to go buy a vertical real estate CRM, nimble went and analyzed how people use CRMs in real estate and built templates for contacts and workflows and deals. That makes sense and use the words of that vertical, and so if you are in a vertical or you're targeting verticals, you could build processes around all those things with workflows as well.

Speaker 3:

Very cool. So I'm really glad that we covered the philosophical background before this, because a lot of this I totally agree. I call it muscle memory, like that's how you scale becomes and you build the process Like the like Legrond. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like Kobe. I talked to my daughter's calculus teacher. My daughter's struggling and he explains the process. I'm like, oh, you need to put in the reps, like Kobe to do better. He goes exactly, you gotta put in the reps. So yeah, but it's also the mindset so I want to share.

Speaker 3:

A few days ago, I got an email contact for my website and it's someone that complained that I'm not a big guy, but in order to read your content, there was a light box that I couldn't, you know, x out and I will never like read your content or follow your website again. And when you start putting yourself out there, you know you start connecting with people. You might get something like this, but it's also I'm here to serve, right, and the person wanted to enjoy my content and he couldn't. So what did I do? Well, it's like well, is there a problem here? I went into my WordPress plugin and, lo and behold, that X button that should have been there disappeared. Maybe it was a version upgrade, who knows right. So I'm like that's wrong, it's bad for SEO. People come to the website, they see the pop up, they leave. I don't want that to happen.

Speaker 3:

So I put the biggest X that I could in and then I emailed the gentleman back and I said thank you for the feedback. Actually, I took a look and you're absolutely right. It's bad, for I want you to be able to enjoy my content. There should have been an X. I just want to let you know. You know, I know that it was a major convenience to you, but I've now added it back in and he emailed me back say Neil, you know I have a fan for life and I'm going to buy your book and that's so. It's also that mindset. If you're truly serving people, it's never negative feedback. There's always a positive. There's always a way to help, and often that feedback helps us and our businesses grow, and I just wanted to send that out there as a reminder, just something that happened to me really recently.

Speaker 1:

Amen to that. I spent many an hour in the customer support queue on the phone at Goldmine because by listening to your customers and hearing where they're cutting their fingers on the boxes of your journey, you can really learn how to make the journey of the customer better. And that's so important for leadership at a company and I still do that today. But you know a lot of our stuff's digital so I could just do that in our customer service application. And I learned so much when I listen to our prospects, our customers, and find out where they're cutting their finger and you know, some of the best product ideas come from them, so 100%.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and it gets back to what we started with. When you start this whole process, it starts with listening and sometimes when we go through there but we forget to take a step back, and now that we have clients, it is always remembering to listen. And Well, the game is two of these for a reason. Yeah, exactly Right. Two years. One now, john, this has been awesome. Obviously, everyone listening should go to nimblecom and, as in Neil, I am as in Mary BLE and get started, try it out, try to build a process around building relationships. Apply that to your passion, your purpose and your business and I think you'll come back and you'll want to thank John. So, john, outside of nimblecom, do you have any you know landing pages or social media profiles that we should send people to? Let me give that a second thought.

Speaker 1:

But if you do sign up for nimble and thank you for that plug, neil and you dig what you see, use the code John40, j-o-n-40 to get 40% off your first three months. Oh well, thank you. So, as far as websites that you can make with me on, google me, as I shared before, john, j-o-n, ferrara, f-e-r, arran and connect with me on whatever platform feels good for you, but be sure to Google yourself. If you don't show up on the first page, here's an easy fix Build a WordPress site on yourself, but you better follow the rules of WordPress, which you have to cite everything, et cetera. But if you do that properly, it'll show up on the first page when people Google you and you can control how people see you.

Speaker 1:

And by sharing content and getting out there in the river and building your brand new network, more of your content's gonna show up there. If you can't find a place to connect with me, here's an easy way. My email is joen at nimblecom. There you go. You know how to get a hold of me. Let me know how I can serve you and help you grow.

Speaker 3:

Awesome, John, this has been. I knew it was gonna be amazing, but, yeah, this is awesome. You know whatever you need to know about this term, social selling is included and, John, thank you so much for being my guest. I look forward to future conversations and To the Moscow, Thank you, and to meeting, cause we've actually never we have no, have we did we meet once in person at like a social- yeah, we have world, I'm sure.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, maybe like once, but it hasn't actually, and it's been a while so All right, Neil, you know what?

Speaker 1:

Let's plan a lunch soon.

Speaker 3:

Awesome, john. Thanks again, and you know, I think we both looking forward to serving all of you in the future.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, Neil, and thank you Neil's community. This has been really, really amazing and thanks for making it so easy for me, Neil.

Speaker 3:

Well, thank you, my friend, Wasn't that awesome. I want to remind you that this interview and all of my podcast interviews are being live streamed on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook. Easiest way to catch it's on YouTube. If you go to my YouTube channel, youtubecom slash Neil Schaefer, and if you go to the lives tab, you'll actually be able to see my live stream interview schedule coming up and you'll be able to see this interview in video, including all the outtakes and all the comments that we had from people in the audience, et cetera, et cetera. So I urge you to check that out. Youtubecom slash Neil Schaefer. Well, that's it for another episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastneilschaefercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschaefercom to tap in to the 400 plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your Digital Marketing Coach.

Speaker 1:

Love yous.