Enterprise SaaS: How Nimble CRM Landed Microsoft

Jon Ferrara built an enterprise SaaS partnership that turned Nimble CRM from a struggling startup into a Microsoft reseller partner. His first company started with $5,000 and sold for $125 million. His second startup has been a much harder ride - pivoting multiple times after LinkedIn cut off API access and Facebook restricted theirs.

Jon's biggest play was not a product feature. It was a multi-year enterprise partnership with Microsoft that made Nimble one of only 8 ISVs selected for their third-party offers program. He built those SaaS partnerships by identifying how Nimble could help individual Microsoft team members succeed - and by using his own CRM to navigate a company with 200,000 employees.

Jon Ferrara is a serial entrepreneur who started Goldmine CRM in 1989 with $5,000 and sold it for $125 million. He launched Nimble in 2009 to build the simple CRM for Office 365 and has grown it to nearly $4 million in revenue with 10,000 paying companies.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🤝 Enterprise SaaS partnerships take years, not months: Jon built relationships across Microsoft's product, marketing, channel, and biz dev teams over several years before being selected as one of 8 ISVs for the third-party offers program.
• 🎯 Position your product as a gateway for enterprise SaaS channel sales: Nimble positioned itself as the simple CRM that makes Office 365 stickier and introduces customers to Dynamics and Power BI - making Microsoft's first-party products more valuable.
• 🔄 Pivot from destination product to embedded widget: After realizing users would always return to Gmail and Office 365, Nimble built a browser widget that brings CRM context everywhere users already work.
• 🤝 Use your own product to navigate enterprise partnerships: Jon imported 3,500 WPC speakers into Nimble, segmented 150 targets, sent personalized emails, got a 50% open rate, and scheduled 25 meetings that led to the Microsoft deal.
• 🧠 Help each person succeed at their own goals: Jon's secret for building SaaS partnerships at Microsoft was never selling Nimble - he asked each team member how he could help them, then connected them to others inside the company.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Jon's background and Goldmine origin story
• Pivot from destination app to browser widget
• The vision for Nimble as a relationship platform
• How Nimble builds itself from email, social, and business apps
• Losing LinkedIn and Facebook API access
• Going all-in with Office 365 integration
• Using Nimble to navigate Microsoft's enterprise SaaS ecosystem
• Landing the Microsoft third-party offers deal
• Building relationships across enterprise SaaS teams
• Becoming a reseller and channel strategy
• Why SaaS companies should build a partner channel
• Nimble's revenue and growth metrics
• Lightning round
• Where to find Jon Ferrara

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/168
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email