Neither Network Manager (used by nmcli) nor old style networking with ifupdown is supported out of the box by Raspbian. For network connections it uses dhcpcd by default. You should look at /etc/dhcpcd.conf for default settings and have a look at man dhcpcd for using it.
I do not understand why you can use the command nmcli on the RasPi. On a default installation just from an image this command is not available. Do you not using a default installation?
To use it you have to install Network Manager and deinstall dhcpcd. Follow the link @oh.dae.su has suggested in his comment. But I'm not sure if this really completely fit into the hole environment of Raspbian.
For a general overview which three network management systems are available on Raspbian you can look at How to correctly restart wpa_supplicant debug with networkd-systemd?. Network Manager isn't part of it. If you install it, it is the forth networking system. It doesn't make it simpler.