How to Achieve Your Goals with Passion, a Plan and a Purpose, with Jon Ferrara [Episode 417]

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Joining me once again is Jon Ferrara, Founder and CEO of Nimble. In this episode, we discuss what passion for your career means for sales professionals in ways that can maximize their profits and productivity.

Key Takeaways

• Jon describes a pathway to achieve your passion, plan, and purpose in life — ideally by serving others.
• What is Dunbar’s limit of the relationships humans can maintain? What relationship stage takes the most effort?
• Jon discusses CRM, or, as he calls it, ‘Customer Reporting Management.’ What percentage of businesses use CRM?
• Jon describes how CRMs operate, and why he created GoldMine 30 years ago.
• Nimble unifies Office 365 or Google contacts, email, and calendar, and integrates them with your CRM.
• Nimble is a Microsoft launch partner for a Dynamics app exchange. Nimble can operate as a system on its own, or within whatever social sales and marketing system you use.
• Names put into Nimble are enriched with data, and a history of email, calendar, and social actions. You can build a manual cadence. A package for Q1 ‘17 automates cadences.
• Jon suggests how CRM will evolve. Salespeople want to manage relationships, not tools. Nimble’s CRM idea is to make the rep most effective as they engage with the customer.
• Simpler, smarter unifications of social, mobile, and big data will become the next generation of tools to help you achieve your passion, plan, and purpose.
• When the tools start to work for reps, in email, social, and mobile, then reps will use them to engage their contacts.
• Jon tells of his own experience preparing for a Microsoft 2015 conference using Nimble, and how it helped him win two bundling deals with Microsoft.
• Having automation doesn’t mean you should start spraying emails. Make the content count with added value, relevant to the prospects, even at scale.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul  2:26  

Hello, and welcome to the Sales Enablement Podcast. I am excited to be joined on the show again by Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble, one of the great innovators in sales technology and sales we’ve had over the last umpteen amperes. I won’t give the exact number of years Jon, but welcome to the show. 

 

Jon Ferrara  2:58  

Thank you, Andy, I’m super excited to be here with you today to share our common passion about the power of relationships and their ability to help you achieve your passion plan and purpose in life. And ideally, that’s serving others because I really believe that service is what sales is all about.

 

Andy Paul  3:19  

Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s one of the things that seems to be missing so often in the conversation about, you know, what the purpose of sales is, and it’s to help the customer make a purchase decision. I mean, I don’t think selling is about anything other than that.

 

Jon Ferrara  3:36  

Yeah. And, sometimes it’s maybe not even your product that they’re going to be helping or make selection. Right, right. No, I think the best salespeople are really there for their customer success, even if it means that today, they’re not going to be buying your products or services because I think in the end, if you do your job, right, not only will they pick up the phone and call you in the future, they’ll drag their friends with them. And that’s what we’re trying to do is to build community through conversation to establish ourselves as the trusted advisor to our prospects and customers, and ideally their influencers as well.

 

Andy Paul  4:18  

Well, we were talking before we started recording about this whole issue that there’s some people that are very infatuated with the science of selling, you know, data driven, we’ve got all these metrics, we got all this insight now through data into what our prospects are doing. And then I don’t want to call old school but people that are saying it’s all about the art of selling and clearly there’s a blend, it’s not one or the other, but you can’t get rid of the person out of the equation.

 

Jon Ferrara  4:49  

You can’t and I think that we’re all struggling with engagement. I think that we’re all over connected and over communicated. There’s a Dunbar limit with the number of people that you can manage in your head in regards to the relationships that you’re nurturing. 

 

Andy Paul  5:03  

I tell people about that Dunbar number because I think we might have been talked about that last time. But, people know what that is? 

 

Jon Ferrara  5:11  

So if you think about it, how many times have you forgotten somebody’s name or where they’re from or the shirt company they work for but you remember their face, right? And you remember other things. You can’t remember everything in your head. That’s why we developed the day timer and that’s why we have these things today. And so there’s an English guy that did a study on how many relationships a human being can maintain on average, and the average number is between 100-200. And most people who use our relationship platform Nimble, have thousands 10s of thousands of contacts. So there’s no way that you can manage all those relationships. But ultimately, if you don’t stay top of mind with the people that matter that can help you achieve your passion plan and purpose in life, then you’re going to fail and I love this saying by Mayweather out of sight, out of mind and out of mind is out of money honey. How do you stay top of mind with the people that are gonna help you grow your business and I think that you do that by using tools and techniques. But ultimately I like to tell stories to teach and the most of the fuel that is used in a car to get up to speed. Most of the fuel that using a rocket to achieve orbit is that moment is getting up to speed achieving orbit, but maintaining orbit or maintaining speed requires very little effort or fuel. Right so it’s about a relationship. Our relationship took time for us to see each other and then start the conversation. And that’s the beginning fuel of that take off. But you know, if we periodically touch each other, engage with each other, add value to each other, his journey will stay top of mind. And that’s why we’re back on this conversation today. Sure having this podcast is because we periodically reach out and say, Hey, Andy, what’s going on and do something to stay on top of it.

 

Andy Paul  7:13  

Right. So let’s talk about Nimble a little bit. And how do you help facilitate that so people are not afraid, maybe familiar with the product? Or if they are, they don’t know the details, sort of. But you know, it’s built on a philosophy that you have, which you’ve been talking about.

 

Jon Ferrara  7:27  

Well, let’s start by just talking about this. This thing about we talked about engagement, right, right. And about the science versus the art of relationships, okay. And so if you think about the way most businesses manage their leads, they use a CRM for that. And the CRM system isn’t really for the customer facing business person to be more effective engagement, for reporting, so I like to joke. The reason that CRM stands for Customer Reporting Management, not Customer Relationship Management, I like that further. The reason they call it Salesforce after for salespeople to use it because they work for this CRM, it doesn’t work for them. Most people’s CRM is an inbox or their inbox or a spreadsheet. And the fact that there’s 225 million global businesses and less than 1% use any CRM as a testimony, the fact that CRMs fail at customer engagement and relationship management. 

 

Andy Paul  8:26  

So, fewer than 1% of global businesses use a CRM, any CRM. It’s funny because I was just in another conversation with somebody else and I was telling you about a company I was talking to last week. Company is about 100 years old, and they have 62 salespeople, the top market share leader in the industry. The big deal for 2017 is they’re gonna implement a CRM system for the first time. The guests and the guests are centered early. Can’t believe it? Yeah, they didn’t think there existed a company of that size that wasn’t using CRM and I and I, I think statistics are put out to make a believer that more companies are using there really are.

 

Jon Ferrara  9:10  

I think that many companies buy a CRM because I think you have to. So let’s talk about the systems that we use for managing relationships in the customer lifecycle of a business. So, I’m doing this just to set up why we built Goldmine and why we built Nimble. Okay, so if the whole point of business is to get people to walk through the door, right, and I really my heart breaks when I walk down the retail store, shops, and I see these empty storefronts where somebody’s standing inside the store, and nobody’s there. And then every time you walk by, they look hoping you come into their store, right? And this is how businesses used to work today. We set up a website, then we set up WordPress and we drive eyeballs to that site, ideally through content to inspire and educate, but alright once you get that eyeball, you got to do something with it. So we buy market automation, to nurture it till it’s, lead qualified. What that means is you want to drive them to your website, capture a bit of information, like their email, begin to nurture or phone with them, to drip them, and then drive them to come back and attend a webinar or read an Ebook or give you more information to you can qualify them. And then you put them in the CRM and your sales reps to go get them. So the CRM doesn’t have any information they have the sales rep has to go and Google who that person is and what the business is about, and then go log what they know. Then they go engage on whatever channel they can. And that means email, that means the phone, that means whatever tool you can, and then they go log what they did. So you have to go to the CRM to work for it by logging the data of what you know, and then what you did. And that’s the biggest cause of failure is that you work for it and you go to work for it, but really where you’re living is in your inbox. And now more in social media or in mobile going out meeting the customer. Right. So I believe the heart of most people’s business is the contacts are connecting to the conversations you’re having. And the activities are driving from the conversation, which is email, conduct or calendar. And there’s only two platforms that you could really choose today as a business. It’s Office 365, or Google Apps will work because you need a cloud based email, contact calendar productivity suite for you and your team to share that across your notebook and your iPads and your phones, etc. And so really, your CRM today is an outlook address book or Google Contacts. And that’s the premise where we start is by saying, we can layer on top of that by unifying it together, because if you think about it, and which one do you use?

 

Andy Paul  11:51  

Google Apps, right?

 

Jon Ferrara  11:52  

Okay. And I’ll bet you never go to the contact record in Google Apps.

 

Andy Paul  11:57  

Well, again, very, very rarely just to look up a group 

 

Jon Ferrara  12:02  

Right? But the thing is you really live in that inbox and occasionally you go to the calendar.

 

Andy Paul  12:07  

Well, actually I do calendar quite a bit, but those two Yes.

 

Jon Ferrara  12:10  

Okay. Interestingly enough, the contact records should have the history of email and calendar interactions that you and the team have had. And the contact record should be a shared contact record for the whole team. But if you were on a team account, you would notice that there isn’t the shared contact database, let alone the history of interactions on email and calendar. And that’s the big problem. This is what Goldmine fixed 30 years ago, so imagine my previous company that I founded, which pioneered CRM and contract management, right predated outlook, there was no outlook back in the day, we first program the integrated email, Contacts and Calendar. So when you look at a contact record, you can see the history of interactions that you and the team have had. And then we did the simple sales or marketing on top of that, and that’s where everybody in the company lived, which was amazing because everybody knows one on one page with a customer right sales, marketing, customer service, accounting, management, etc. Today, you kind of live in your outlook address book or Google Contacts. But mainly you live with whatever application that’s part of your department. So if you’re in sales, you’re in the CRM, if you’re a marketing, you’re in the market automation, if you’re social, you’re in the social dashboard, if your accounting you’re in the accounting program and customer service in the customer service, none of these things talk to each other. And so there’s no unified system of record for relationship management in your business. That is the big problem Nimble fixes, by going into your business and unifying your office 365, Google outsource, contact email and calendar, engaging people in company data, and then letting you use it in whatever application you are in. So if you have a CRM, if you have a support program, if you have social Nimble actually works in all those different places. And so that means that everybody in the company is on one page with a unified contact, email, calendar, social, and then you can use it wherever you’re at, because you shouldn’t have to go to Google apps to look up a contact record or to go to Salesforce to do that.

 

Andy Paul  14:04  

So I guess the question based on what you said is, I mean, does anybody use Nimble on top of an existing CRM system?

 

Jon Ferrara  14:12  

Yes. In fact, we just signed a deal with Microsoft, where Microsoft is just hiring the guy who started the Salesforce app exchange. And he’s building an app exchange and we’re going to be a launch partner for that. So interestingly enough, Nimble can either be your complete social sales and marketing platform for your business, by integrating it with your website in your Google Apps or office 365, or where you could work within whatever existing social sales or marketing systems that you’re using, and and play a role by enriching and enhancing that because the CRM systems fail as well. You have to go to them to use them. Right. And what you do is we’ll actually unify your Salesforce or your CRM dynamics records with your officers 65 Records and then let you use that where you’re engaging with the customer. Which is gonna be your inbox and social.

 

Andy Paul  15:02  

So I mean, there’s been an explosion in the market in the last couple years of these sales development platforms that are basically, you know, used by inside sales teams, outreach and salesloft and so on. But, yeah, it seems like to some degree, what they really do is these are tools that enable companies to invest in Salesforce to actually get the ROI out of Salesforce. 

 

Jon Ferrara  15:23  

Yes. So the issue is, is today’s sales and marketing technologies tech stack is around. So yeah, that lifecycle that we talked about, that you need to the tools you need to buy, you need to buy a market automation system, which I call MailChimp to Marketo it’s going to cost you $300 to $3,000 a month, just for that marketing price, right? A CRM, which is going to cost you $50 to $150 per referral per month, right. Then you need sales intelligence, so you don’t have to Google somebody. So you need information on people in companies. That’s inside the LinkedIn Sales Navigator or ranking route $50 to $150 per rep per month, then you need some tool for outreach. And that is a template, an email tool that enables you to outreach at scale in a one to one way, that’s $50 to $150 per month. So if you add up those four tools, you’re spending $300 to $500 per month per rep for marketing, sales, sales intelligence, sales enablement, email tracking. The interesting thing is Nimble blended all that into one cohesive platform. So you don’t need to buy all those tools. And all argue that when you do buy all those tools, they don’t talk to each other. She can’t outreach in a segmented one to one messaging way. Because the yes wear and tout app doesn’t know who that person is what their business is about in the history of interaction. If you have that then you can build segments and message the one to one way like this. Hey Andy, it’s been a while since I’ve been on your blog, I would love to reconnect and learn more about what’s going on with you and, and what new books you’ve got out, let’s connect in, you know, catch up, right? So ultimately, if you can reach out in that one to one authentic way you break through the clutter, and you increase your open and your click rates. And so 30 years ago, I trademark automated processes, which are actions based on triggers if this and that for people in the company. And so, Goldmine blended sales and market automation with relationship management, Nimble is basically just redoing that into a cloud platform.

 

Andy Paul  17:46  

So in Nimble today, then you have the ability to set up as you really described a sort of a workflow or a cadence, if you will, of contacts you could define. Hey, if this happens, then over the next 10 days, we’re going to do no free emails and we’ll send you reminders or two phone calls.

 

Jon Ferrara  18:03  

So we haven’t built the cadence yet. We have built this, if you put a name in Nimble, it will enrich it with people and company data, including who they are, what their business is about, and the history and actions for you and the team on email, calendar and social, okay. And then we’ll allow you to build segments of people based on parameters of that data we enrich it with or the other other data that we put in there. And then you could send an outreach email to that person based on this segment. Nimba will track it, they open it, they click it, etc. And we’ll give you those signals. You can manually build a follow up email based on the people that didn’t open a reply. We’re adding the ability to automate that after 10 business days. do that in a sequence that’ll be part of a new packaging, pricing and positioning that will roll out this quarter. Got it? 

 

Andy Paul  18:58  

So who sort of is the ideal client profile for Nimble?

 

Jon Ferrara  19:08  

You know, it’s individuals in teams of 2 to 25 and small, medium, large enterprise companies who are working at b2b or b2c fashion trying to reach out and build these relevant and authentic relationships and stay connected with people really, it’s not just about salespeople that need to do that we all need to do that. We all need to be worried about our brand and our network and reach out and nurture and maintain it. But certainly primarily salespeople are a great fit. PR people, bizdev people, Investor Relations, so you can use it across the board in a company.

 

Andy Paul  19:45  

Okay. So and really from a philosophical standpoint, what we’ve been talking about here today and what you’ve served. I understand what you’ve really built in is it’s really about connecting.

 

Jon Ferrara  19:57  

Amen.

 

Andy Paul  19:58  

Okay, perfect. So let’s talk about CRM in general for a little bit. How’s it going to evolve? I mean, this is a topic that I get asked a lot about. We’ve seen all these tools, the tech stacks are exploding, most of which are built on top of Salesforce, quite honestly. Yeah. So yeah, the surveys come out that the average tech stack, I think, is much bigger than what everybody thinks it is. I mean, the average in the industry is anywhere from like seven to 11 apps in the sales tech stack. So how do you see that’s gonna evolve?

 

Jon Ferrara  20:34  

Well, number one is I think a lot of these individual tools are going to go by the wayside because they’re features they’re not platforms. And ultimately, I think that we’re going to get tired of being cut by thousand deaths, having gone by all these different tools and trying to get them to work together. Salespeople aren’t that sophisticated and they don’t want to manage a bunch of tools. They want to manage relationships. So ultimately today, I think the biggest problem with CRMs is that it’s a dead database where you define what data you want your salespeople to type in, and you beat on them to do it. And then in any case, management doesn’t even run the reports unless there’s a problem with the salesperson, they use it as a hammer to beat on them.

 

Andy Paul  21:16  

Yeah, they’re run by run quota attainment reports, and that’s what it is.

 

Jon Ferrara  21:20  

But ultimately, what we want to be able to do is to enable that customer facing business team member to be most effective at that moment that they’re engaging with that other person, wherever they’re engaging. So I believe that rather than you having to go to your sermon work for it, that it will work for you by building itself from the data that’s already in your business and then work with you wherever you’re working, whether it is in your inbox or whether it’s in social, whether it’s on phone, and it’ll use intelligence to mine all that data to help surface the right person at the right time in the right channel and help you to be more human in that engagement so I don’t think that will be less human, I think will be more human. Because we won’t have to manage all this stuff right and be able to actually focus on listening to that person because we already have the key aspects that we need to be effective. And we can then listen to the moment to learn how we might be able to add the value necessary to earn that person’s intimacy and trust and ultimately earn a mutually beneficial measurable business outcome from that engagement.

 

Andy Paul  22:31  

Our official intelligence, machine learning plays a role and said, being able to mine all the data that’s out there and synthesize into something that makes sense. I’m alert saying, hey, it’s been three weeks since you’ve talked to Jon, maybe shouldn’t be. You should be calling Jon or, or whatever that is, in terms of helping you prioritize what it is you could do that has the most impact at that time.

 

Jon Ferrara  22:55  

I think that there’s going to be a collapse in the number of tools and platforms that are out there into simpler, smarter unifications of social, mobile and big data that helps us to be more effective. So rather than right now, the whole industry is designed to sell to management. And it’s not really designed to benefit the customer facing business team members. And if you think about it, and they’re suspicious of it, quite frankly, right, yeah. So Marc Benioff, Benioff built Salesforce by punching Tom Siebel in the nose and saying you’re complex, expensive and you’re not designed for salespeople. So Google Wayback Machine 1999, Salesforce, you’ll see that Salesforce was as simple as a tool. Right? And so now, Salesforce has become Siebel. And now, I think that opens the door for a simpler, smarter, better, more, nimble solution to become possibly that next generation of tools that powers the next 20 million business people around the world to achieve their passion plan and purpose in life.

 

Andy Paul  24:03  

Well, I think that’s really the sort of the key I guess for what you see as you described earlier is not just these other tools, we’re also seeing a proliferation of CRM systems themselves and to me what that’s saying is that yeah, despite the fact that Salesforce is out there and well established and has a huge market share is that people aren’t getting what they want out of it. But they’re not new competitors entering the marketplace.

 

Jon Ferrara  24:25  

And you know, a dangerous teens statistic besides that there’s 225 million global businesses and less than 1% use any CRM is the fact that none zero have the CRM influencers, editors, bloggers, and analysts that I know and I know them all, Andy. Use any CRM.

 

Andy Paul  24:48  

They don’t. Seriously, Industry analysts don’t use CRM.

 

Jon Ferrara  24:51  

Nobody uses a CRM unless they’re beaten to do it.

 

Andy Paul  25:01  

All right. So let me ask you this question. It’s a little bit of a different tack, but is a CRM meeting the promises that it makes?

 

Jon Ferrara  25:13  

Yes. And no, I think that management is extremely happy with CRMs. Because it’s plumbing for the reporting necessary for them to do their job. And I think that plumbing is required, right. But ultimately, I think that if you talk to the customer facing business team members, they’ll tell you that if they weren’t beyond to use it, they wouldn’t use it because I think that that there’s two jobs of a CRM, it should run the reporting, but it should also empower the person so that the reporting is accurate. And if the person is basically feeding the CRM the night before the reports are run, then there’s a problem.

 

Andy Paul  25:54  

All right, but I was really looking for a different perspective. This is, it seems to me like we have a sales productivity crisis. In that I see that the tech stacks that are coming. And this is based on reports, we see industry reports like CSO insights and Forrester and others. It doesn’t show that the situation is improving on the ground relative to more reps hitting quota or individual productivity increasing, you know, close rates, increasing the measures that maybe we don’t have the best measures, admittedly, but based on measures that are available, you know, it doesn’t seem like we’re heading in the right direction. I don’t necessarily pin the blame on the tech stack. But on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be making it better. So what’s gonna come out that’s going to change this, you know, how do we address this fundamental imbalance I say in the marketplace?

 

Jon Ferrara  26:48  

The conversations are having activities that they’re driving, and then mind that information to help them to connect to the right person at the right time. I think that people really start loving their tools and actually getting benefits from them. And I think we’re really close to that. I do. Let’s just take a look at these tools for a second. So Microsoft asked me to come speak at their world partner conference WPC 16 in Toronto on social sign. Before going to that conference, I wanted to prepare to outreach to people that might be there to invite them to my session to start conversations with influencers to drive some results because if you’re going to go all the way to You better prepare before you go. Right? So what I did is I used Nimble to import a Twitter list of last year WPC 15 influencers. There’s about 4000 of them. Right I put that and once I imported that list into nimble. I was able to segment out of that 3200 that were meaningful to me. I then tailored a message that was unique to this audience and sent it a 50% open rate. And I drove 25 meetings, one of which resulted in Microsoft signing a deal to bundle Nimble with Office 365 and start reselling it through their bars. Another resulted in Nimble being bundled inside of Outlook Mobile and being preloaded on 40 million handsets. Now, I would have never got that done if I didn’t prepare, connect and most importantly follow up and follow through, and there’s no secret to that. You just need to do the basics, I believe it’s the basics that wins games.

 

Andy Paul  30:03  

I do too. And that’s part of the thing that concerns me as I talk to people, and let’s see, evolving sort of this ethos that, yeah, everything’s about the data and the metrics. And if we complement that with a little bit of training on some skills that all salespeople need, completely ignoring what you talked about, which is the basics, right? How do I connect? How do I engage? How do I build the intimacy and trust and relationships with people that can result in them saying, Yeah, this is why I want to do business with you.

 

Jon Ferrara  30:34  

Yeah, you know, Andy, in the old days, we get to know people by going their office and looking at their walls looking at the book say the degree of the school, they went to the knickknacks they collect all that helped us to understand that person’s, what I call the five Fs of life, family, friends food fun and frolicking aligned with our three P’s passion, plan and purpose. Now we know these things, you can then earn that intimacy and trust to build the relationship to get them to open up to you about their businesses issues, which is a professional you can then solve. And I’m not talking about anything new Zig Ziglar, Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey, Brian Tracy, they all teach the same things. It says in today’s over connected over communicated world, I think it’s getting harder to do. And we all need a little help to do it. And that’s why I got back in the business after being retired from selling Gold Mine is because I believe that the job isn’t done. I believe that there are millions of people out there just like me who are overwhelmed and they just need how to get their jobs done. And so I dig building tools that power other people and help them achieve their goals.

 

Andy Paul  31:44  

That’s fantastic. So I guess the question I’d have is, aren’t we sort of, are we sort of using some of these tools to really exacerbate the problem that you’re talking about, though, is that that you know, I I signed up for a lot of lists intentionally so I can get emails to see what people are doing. I mean by and large, they’re boring if not bad. The emails I get back. And so we’re sort of flooding the inboxes of potential prospects.

 

Jon Ferrara  32:17  

Yeah. And the thing is just because you have automation doesn’t mean that you should necessarily just be spraying everybody with it. And so I get emails all the time that I absolutely know, our template. And what I do is I go in and I look at the source, I view the original. And I look at the tools people use, and I’m actually thinking about building a tool just to do that, just for the fun of it as part of Nimble Press will say, Oh, yeah, this guy’s engaging you with engage IO or you know, whatever tools the flavor of the day, but the thing is, that you can just send these non personalized emails that have a sequence follow up and think that people are going to respond to you. You gotta really do things. is a little bit different. And I think that the way that you do it differently is to understand who somebody is and what their business is about, and figure out how you might add value and put that in the message that you’re out reaching, so that it is personalized. And the problem with most of these tools, they don’t have any idea who Andy Paul is or what your background is, so they don’t reach out and tell you something, why they’re reaching out how they might add value, and to make it feel like he’s on a machine doing it. And when you feel a machine, you just turn off.

 

Andy Paul  33:34  

I empathize with all these SDRs BD ARS that are under a tremendous amount of pressure to achieve certain metrics in their daily activities. And yeah, personalizing it on a scale is virtually impossible. So what then becomes the answer, I mean, you’re you’ve seen this evolve over decades in terms of pioneering this business. 

 

Jon Ferrara  34:00  

I just want you to answer. I just talked about how I took a 4000 person Twitter list, right? Say 15 influencers, taylor down to 200. Hmm, he got a 50% open rate. So it’s not impossible. But what you need is a tool that enables you to enrich people and company data at scale. And then to segment and outreach with a tailored message that’s personalized to that unique subset group. Right, and to get signals on the opens and clicks and that’s essentially what we’re building with Nimble.

 

Andy Paul  35:25  

All right, excellent. Like it. So, John, we’re getting to the last leg of the show. I’ve just got a few standard questions I asked all my guests and and actually you were on episode, or direct people back my shirts are right when you’re Episode 68 are you actually heard these questions originally? So we’re going to give you a few more different questions. Just for questions. So the first one is this is one that gets a lot of debate is, in your mind, is it easier to teach a technical non salesperson how to sell or how to teach a salesperson how to sell a technical product?

 

Jon Ferrara  35:59  

That’s a really easy question. And my answer is I would much prefer to hire a liberal arts major or a hire somebody from Best Buy or Apple or Victoria’s Secret, who isn’t a salesperson and teach them the technology and the business skills that I need them to learn in order to be effective at selling nimble or back in the day goldmine. So, what I found is that it’s easier to teach somebody technology and business stuff than to really make them as a human being and that what I prefer to have somebody is their focus is coming from a service perspective than a C perspective. And so I’m always hiring non technical people and teaching them based on their culture, their background and their fit within our culture, and then teaching them the technology in the city. All skills, but ultimately, really less emphasis on sales and more emphasis on success.

 

Andy Paul  37:06  

All right. All right. So I need a third option in that question. I’ll put that in. So what’s the one great book I’m gonna say? It’s not a business book, not a sales book that you think every salesperson should read?

 

Jon Ferrara  37:46  

You know, books on self realization, because ultimately, for you to be successful in whatever you do, ideally doing what you’re passionate about, right? And if you can figure out what what you’re passionate about, you build a plan to achieve it and make your purpose on a daily basis, you, you’ll be rich for the rest of your life. And so Siddhartha is about a journey, a journey of a wealthy man who gives up his wealth and he goes on a journey to South realization, to find his passion, plan and purpose in life. And so, ultimately, if you do choose sales as your thing, it’s great to have a reason why you do in sales and ideally, you’re selling in order to serve and help other people grow and if your purpose in every engagement is to learn, listen, to learn, to find ways to add value to help that person and grow, you will be the most successful salesperson in the world. 

 

Andy Paul  38:57  

Great answer. So if you could change one thing about your business self, what would it be? 

 

Jon Ferrara  39:11  

You know, Andy, I’m a really passionate person and I love to step up my soapbox and I sometimes tend to just go off for a while, right? I just am I, I love to. Some people call me the preacher, you know, and I think that maybe I could just back off on that a little bit. And, but it’s who I am, you know, it’s who I am. And I think people love me for my passion. And I, you know, I guess I just have to accept that in myself. 

 

Andy Paul  39:51  

Are you criticized for being too passionate about what you do?

 

Jon Ferrara  39:54  

Yeah, I just, I think I could learn to listen more now. We’ve got these, we got one of these. And, and I love this feature on go-to meetings where it’s In fact, there’s like a beta of it, where it shows you how much time you talked and how much time they talked. 

 

Andy Paul  41:33  

All right. Last question for you. So do you have a favorite quotation or words of wisdom you live by?

 

Jon Ferrara  41:48  

I think the more people you have, the more you will grow.

 

Andy Paul  43:48  

Excellent. Jon, thank you very much.

 

Jon Ferrara  43:51  

Andy. It’s a pleasure.

 

Andy Paul  43:53  

Great and friends, thank you for spending time with us today. Remember to make it a part of your day every day to deliberate deliberately learning something new to help you accelerate your success and an easy way to do this, make sure you join these conversations with top business experts like my guest today, Jon Ferrara,, who shared his expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks again for joining me. Until next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling everyone. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, and want to make sure you don’t miss any upcoming episodes, please subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.com for more information about today’s guests, visit my website at AndyPaul.com