Amir Reiter is a master at sales, customer support and anything to do with building business relationships. In this episode he teaches us how to make real money by nurturing your customers, making friends with competitors and enabling your staff to grow beyond you.
If you want to learn how to maximize the human side of business, this episode is a must listen!
Teaser:
My Guest: Amir Reiter
Amir Reiter is the CEO and founder of CloudTask – a managed service provider that helps organizations grow with B2B sales, 24/7 customer support and sales chat, with offices in Miami, Colombia, the Philippines and the UK. CloudTask’s mission is to find prospects, nurture leads and satisfy customers, to allow companies to focus on what they do best.
Pivotal Moments:
Majored in physiological science, with a minor in pre-med chemistry.
At age 23, started Innovative Water importing cheap water coolers from China.
Didn’t manage to kick-off the water cooler business due to inferior quality of the machines, but converted his business network to create a new business, Cost Express, selling office supplies to companies that had been leasing coolers from him.
Couldn’t compete with the huge brands like Amazon and Staples so he sold office supply company.
Realized that he wanted to work with people who can add to his knowledge and teach him valuable things.
Went into a surgical robotics, creating systems for neurological surgery.
Became a clinical sales rep, selling million dollar surgical robots and also doing some on-the-ground work, guiding the doctors in how to use the machinery during surgery.
Left that job and joined NetSuite’s software division, selling NetSuite software to software companies.
Opened his own business CloudTask, which helps businesses grow by providing all sales services and is currently doubling his business in size.
The Advice:
An easy exit strategy is to make friends with your competitors so that when you want to sell your current business, you can offer it to competitors.
An employee is someone who speaks the same language as you and is on the same page. Just filling out a W2 doesn’t give you an employee – it simply allows you to pay your taxes! Having real employees means giving them empowerment, and making them feel like they are a leader. This will make them want to invest in their career with you and stop them from constantly looking out the door for bigger and better opportunities.
A good business needs to give their employees both training and enablement. Training means giving your employees the education so that they know what they need to know. Enablement is the practical side and means giving your employees the opportunity to learn and act on the knowledge and education they acquired in the training process.
Not a natural salesperson? Here is what you need to know to help you make decent sales:
- Network: There are people out there who really care about sales. Find them, network with them and they will give you the best, free advice that you can find.
- Competition: Don’t be afraid to collaborate with your competition and ask them for help. You often can provide value for them in return for the help they provide to you.
- Socialize Ideas: Test out your ideas on a small scale before you invest in them. One way to do this is to invest in a Facebook campaign for your MVP (minimal viable product) to see if people are interested in your idea before you go into the full sales process.
- Technology: Don’t get overwhelmed with technology and think that you need every software and every gadget out there for sales and lead generation. To help limit yourself, set a budget and defined goals for what you want your technology to achieve.
SMARKETING= sales and marketing.
The Struggle:
Amir has a personal relationship with 40-45 of his 100 staff members. Yet, he still struggled with managing his staff and often found himself in a sell/crash cycle where his team made a huge amount of sales – which they couldn’t deliver on. He then needed to make up for the broken promises, fix up the past and go on to make more sales which he again couldn’t deliver on, and the cycle went on. How could Amir manage his team better so that they could deliver on what they promised?
The Breakthrough:
Amir realized that although he is a master at building relationships and making sales, he had never been good at managing people or teams. He therefore went into CloudTask with his partner, the COO who manages operations and systems, leaving him to focus on building the relationships needed to bring in more customers and deal with existing customer needs. This means that both Amir and his partner are working from their place of strength and maximizing the skills that they excel in to build a business that can make great sales and also deliver on what they promise.
Resources and Links:
For part 1 of this episode, where you can learn hear how Amir had already opened and closed two businesses before the age of 35, go to estierand.com/46-1
Did you enjoy this episode? Then subscribe to my podcast on iTunes, so you can get automatic updates whenever another episode goes live (and you will be helping me get to #1 on iTunes, making us all cooler in the process!)
About the author, Estie Rand
I love turning ideas into money, and helping others do the same. I help small business owners with everything from marketing to fiscal management, business plans to staffing, database architecture to work/life balance coaching and I love it all! What do you need help with today?
