IAM648- CEO Helps Entrepreneurs With Sales and Marketing

Reuben comes from a computer science background, he never thought about being a CEO or dealing with sales and marketing, and he now helps entrepreneurs who are great at serving clients but feel stuck with sales and marketing.

Reuben is the founder of Mimiran (pronounced Meh-Meh-ren), the CRM for people who hate “selling”, which he built because traditional CRMs weren't helpful for growing his boutique consulting company. He's also the host and Chief Nerd of the Sales for Nerds podcast.

• CEO Hack: Knowing why I'm getting out of bed in the morning and that there are people who need my help
• CEO Nugget: You are exactly where you need to be
• CEO Defined: Leadership

Website: https://www.mimiran.com/

Podcast: Sales for Nerds (https://www.salesfornerds.io)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reubenswartz/
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/mimiran, https://www.twitter.com/sales4nerds
FB: https://www.facebook.com/mimiran, https://www.facebook.com/groups/salesfornerds/

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello. Hello. Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a special guest on the show today, Reuben Swartz of Mimiran. Reuben, It's awesome to have on the show.

Reuben Swartz 0:39

Great. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Gresh.

Gresham Harkless 0:41

Yeah, super excited to have you on. And what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Reuben, so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Ruben comes from a computer science background. He never thought about being a CEO or dealing with sales and marketing. And now he helps entrepreneurs who are great at serving clients but feel stuck with sales and marketing. Reuben is the founder of Mimiran, the CRM for people who hate selling, which he built because traditional CRMs weren't helpful for growing his boutique consulting company. He's also the co-host. He's also the host and chief nerd of the Sales for Nerds podcast. Reuben, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Reuben Swartz 1:14

We'd love to Thanks.

Gresham Harkless 1:15

Awesome. Let's do it. So they kick everything off. I wanted to start I guess kind of in the beginning and hear a little bit more about your your co story. Where did you get started with the business?

Reuben Swartz 1:23

Well, as you mentioned, I have a computer science background, I came to work in Austin, Texas, as a software engineer at the last thing I ever wanted to do was dress nicely and go talk to customers or do any of that stuff. After a little while, I realized that that's actually where the interesting hard problems were, as much as we'd like to pretend that the software and the computer code are really fancy and take a lot of brainpower. People are really the hard parts of changing things. And so after a while, I realized that's kind of where the fun stuff was. But a lot of the people who were great at the people stuff didn't understand the technology. And I thought maybe if I could put those things together, we could get better results for less work. So I started consulting with these giant Fortune 500 companies when I was in my mid-20s. It was crazy. I, I really, I didn't know what I was doing in terms of helping clients. But I didn't know what I was doing in terms of building a business.

And I struggled tremendously with that. And even though we basically did sales and marketing consulting, we were terrible at actually selling and marketing ourselves, we had to be dragged through the process. And it's a good thing, we got good word of mouth, and we would have been in really big trouble. But my mission since then, once I realized that, hey, I wasn't the only person who struggled with that issue. My mission has really been to help other folks who are going through that who are great at serving their clients and want to do more of that want to have a bigger impact, want to make more money, want to maybe have less stress, but feel like if they're going to do sales and marketing, that's going to somehow turn them into this icky used car salesman Glengarry Glen Ross type person that doesn't want to be and it's not that. So that's what it's all about.

Gresham Harkless 2:54

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I think you're absolutely right, where, you know, a lot of times they'll say sales and sometimes marketing, but definitely sales is the lifeblood of business. And a lot of times, you know, I think Mark Cuban even says that if you take away, if you look at somebody's sales, and then not making sales is really the reason why business has actually failed, not so much all the other things that we can sometimes get lost in.

Reuben Swartz 3:15

That's right.

Gresham Harkless 3:16

Yeah. And so I know you have a podcast. So I wanted to hear a little bit more about what we can find out about the podcast and also more about a match company and exactly what you're doing to serve clients.

Reuben Swartz 3:27

Sure, well, the idea behind the podcast was people would start asking me a lot of the same questions and hey, can I go to take you to coffee and pick your brain for an hour? And I really actually want to be helpful to people as much as I can, whether they're customers or not, if I can be helpful, that's great. But that wasn't really a great use of my time. And I thought, what I should really do is write some of this down in a book. And so I was gonna write essentially a sales printer to the book. And then I thought, well, that's gonna be an awful lot of work, who has time for that? And of course, with all the time I've put into podcast podcasts up to this point, I probably could have written a book, but that's a whole other story. And then me and some buddies, were sitting around having some wine talking about business, and somebody said, Hey, if we were millennials, we would somehow turn this into some lucrative YouTube Live Channel, whatever thing? And I thought, well, you know, I'm not millennial enough to do that. But why can't I bring a bottle of wine and go talk to people I really want to talk to about sales and marketing?

So it's not just me, talking, talking, talking about the stuff I've learned, which I might think is really interesting, but maybe other people don't. But it's a chance for me to get to talk to folks who maybe wouldn't talk to me otherwise, and a chance to bring a lot more collective wisdom into one place, kind of like you're doing without the I AM CEO podcast, right? I wanted to do the same thing but really focused on sales and marketing for people who don't like sales and marketing niches, and so that's how it all got started. I emailed some folks and explained the concept and what do you know, the whole notion of, hey, I'm gonna show up at your office with a bottle of wine and we're gonna record a podcast together. People were really enthusiastic about that. And I was a little bit worried about, you know, is this going to be taken seriously, I didn't want to be too serious. I didn't want to be too unserious. And what I've heard from listeners is, hey, it's a great format. Why just have people have their own glass or something while they're listening to it? And it's just a little bit more of an informal conversation than some of the typical business podcasts.

Gresham Harkless 5:09

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I definitely apologize, I definitely forgot to bring the bottle of wine, but whatever. You try to do what you can, right? But no, I think you're absolutely right, when you get that opportunity to kind of have those conversations and, and really drill down and hear from people because I think we all kind of have zones of genius, as I like to say, and if you're able to really tap into somebody else's, like in an interview, like you've been able to do, and I'm getting opportunity to do, too, I think it's definitely super awesome.

Reuben Swartz 5:34

Yeah.

Gresham Harkless 5:35

And, and I want to hear a little bit more about your company, too. Can you take us through exactly how you serve the clients through that?

Reuben Swartz 5:41

Sure. Basically, after my twins were born, I decided I had to stop traveling and consulting, which you would think you got nine months knowing that babies are coming. So that's plenty of time to make a strategic plan. But I wasn't very good at this strategic planning. I think I was too busy freaking out about being a father, when they were on the way. So have tried to think about how can I take the expertise that I've built up and use it in a way that doesn't require so much traveling. And one of the things that always drove me nuts was scheduling a time to present a proposal, having that meeting get rescheduled? Because the executives are busy. And then I'm calling up like, hey, just wonder if you got my proposal, just wondering, have any questions. And especially when I had people that I was paying, it was very stressful.

Based on that I had to think about do I try to keep them busy with this client that they're working on now. Because the thing isn't going to start for two months anyway? Or do they really intend to start on Monday, they need to be on a plane in a different time zone by Monday. And meanwhile, I don't even know if they've read the proposal. And I realized, hey, if I could put the proposal in the cloud, I could at least know when people were reading it, wouldn't that be helpful? So I tried being a hacker, I tried that out for myself with my next proposal. And it worked great. I got a notification, I called the guy up. He said, Hey, I'm so glad you called I was just reading your proposal, and we discussed making a couple of minor tweaks to it. And he said, you know, send me a new version when you get the chance.

And I was like, well just go back to that section, I've made all the changes already. And at that point, they didn't even do a signature or anything, it was just like a button that said, hey, accept this proposal. But we did five minutes of work in five minutes. And we both got to then go to the actual project, which is what we both cared about. And I thought, Oh, this might be useful to some other people. So I started selling it to some other folks. And they said, Hey, this is great proposals are rockin. They look great, They're fast. They're easy. I feel like I've really got this part of my sales process under control for the first time, what can you help me do to get more leads in the front of the funnel? And I literally thought, what, hey, don't do anything about that. I'll just point you to some WordPress plugins.

And we'll see. And that's when I realized that in so much of the world, there are so many amazing tools, but they're not really built for this tribe of people. There's a ton of stuff out there that if you're selling an E-commerce product or a digital product, right, you just need to put someone on some kind of mailing list and drip them. There's amazing stuff for that. And there are tools like HubSpot and other things that are great if you've got a big sales team that's just pounding the phones all the time. But for my tribe, small firms where people are actually involved in serving the client, you don't have a ton of leads. But each one could be really valuable. And you really need to get to a conversation with them. I didn't see something that I felt proud about recommending. And then I was like, Well, wait a second, I've got this ability to create content, share it notify people, what if instead of just using that for proposals, we did that with lead magnets as well. We could embed a little widget in your website so that instead of showing a form, there's a little button, someone can click on, they get the content.

And now I know when they're reading it, I have a better chance of calling and actually having a conversation, which is what I want. So like, Okay, this is cool. Now you can get stuff into your CRM, you can do your CRM stuff. And when it's time, you can send a proposal. And people kept asking me, they're like, I hate Salesforce, I hate Zoho, and no disrespect to those companies. They're awesome tools for the right users. Right? My people kept complaining about him. And I knew that I'd complained about it myself. Can you just make a memory and do the CRM stuff in the middle? And I was like, No, the world doesn't need another CRM. That would be silly, blah, blah, blah. And finally, I got so irritated myself trying to do some of those basic things, really around, just keeping in touch with people that I already knew.

So hard, I was like, this should just be easier. And so I said, Okay, forget it. We're going to put the CRM piece in as well. So now you have this sort of end-to-end way of getting new leads in the system, getting conversations with them, turning them into clients, and then staying in touch with them and generating referrals afterward. So that might be a little bit more than you were looking for. But it really was my customers and hey, why can't it do this too? We don't like the way the world so to speak. And the traditional tools work. And I realized that as usual, my customers were right and I was wrong. Because of the way that a lot of these really awesome tools work. It's just built for somebody else.

Gresham Harkless 9:53

Yeah, no, I appreciate you for really breaking that down and talking about kind of, it sounds like the organic nature of, you know everything you've created you've built, whether it be the podcasts or are the business as well, too, because I think so many times that we are trying to kind of put a square peg in a round hole. And I think as you're talking about for your people, you said that a couple of times, it's just understanding who we're trying to target, understanding what exactly they're looking for, and creating something for them not trying to force something that may not necessarily fit their needs as much as they would have hoped. And you've been able to kind of build that grow that speak and continue to get that feedback. Continue to kind of iterate from there.

Reuben Swartz 10:31

Yeah, that's nice, because I'm, I'm user number one. And I went through years of trying to use all those other tools to grow my consulting business, so I get the pain. But it's nice hearing other customers, other users sort of confirming that, yes, this is really a problem or no, you know, what real the real issue is, is this. And so it's really just built for this community of people.

Gresham Harkless 10:51

Yeah.

Reuben Swartz 10:51

And I think that's, that's important for everybody, whether it's whether your CEO or your team, got to understand what your customers are going through on a daily basis, so that you can help them as best you can, not just for the business aspect of it. But I think we all want to just be helpful in general.

Gresham Harkless 11:09

Yeah, absolutely. I think we also want to be heard. And I think a lot of times when we have those frustrations, we want to be able to know that somebody is listening to us, and you've been able to kind of fulfill that gap. So I definitely appreciate that. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce, and it can be for yourself personally or your business. But do you feel like the ability to kind of see it sounds like the forest for the trees and see those two different kinds of groups and be able to kind of create that solution? Do you feel like that's what sets you apart and makes you unique?

Reuben Swartz 11:35

Well, I don't know, it's always tough when you talk about secret sauce and uniqueness on a planet with a billion people. But I think it's funny you ask that because I was saying earlier about starting off and trying to sort of bridge the people in the technology. And I hadn't really thought of that as a secret sauce. But I kind of think that's what it is. I love talking to people, I love helping people. But I can also go back and turn that into code that can then automate some of that later. And it seems like that's a pretty helpful combination.

Gresham Harkless 12:03

Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and want to ask you for what I call a co hack. So that could be like an apple book or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Reuben Swartz 12:13

For me, the biggest thing is knowing why I'm getting out of bed in the morning. And knowing that I have this tribe of people and remembering deeply the pain and suffering that I went through completely unnecessarily in terms of sales and marketing, and realizing, Hey, I've got I've got customers who depend on me now, I've got new people out there who don't even know about me, and hopefully some of them will hear this and then they'll know about me, right people that I want to help. And that's really important.

Gresham Harkless 12:41

Exactly. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So that could be a word of wisdom, or a piece of advice could be around sales or, or marketing. Or it might even be something you might tell a younger business self or maybe even a client as well.

Reuben Swartz 12:54

When I was younger, I was always trying to act like I was older and more experienced. And part of it was you know, when I started this boutique consulting firm, I was telling executives twice my age how to handle billions of dollars in business. And it wasn't that I was lying or making anything up. But it was weird, right? And I felt I felt a challenge to sort of prove my credibility somehow. And it was hard for me to just say, I don't know, insecurity, basically. And I think if I could tell my younger self, something that would be Hey, you're exactly where you need to be. And that doesn't mean that you're stuck there. And you should stop and stop growing. But it's okay to be wherever you're at.

Gresham Harkless 13:32

Absolutely. Well, Reuben truly appreciates that. And I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEOs on this show. So Ruben, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Reuben Swartz 13:43

For me, I think it means leadership. And to me leader is somebody who helps people get somewhere that they can't get to on their own. Or they maybe don't get it there as quickly or as easily or whatever.

Gresham Harkless 13:54

I definitely appreciate your time. Appreciate that perspective. And that definition, obviously, is your leadership as well, too. So last thing I wanted to do is pass the mic so to speak, just see if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and listeners know. And then of course how best they can get a whole view, download that the software and everything you're doing, and get in contact with you.

Reuben Swartz 14:12

Was interesting, because a lot of CEOs do come from a sales background. So they may not need a lot of the stuff that I spend my time working with people on. But folks who don't come from that sales background or don't come from a marketing background, I think one of the things that I would love for you to take away is you don't have to be the used car salesman to be good at sales. You don't have to be Steve Jobs to be good at marketing. But if you're the CEO, even if you have a VP of sales and VP of marketing, you have to do some sales and marketing. And the way I think about it the way that helped me get through the mental barriers I had was to think of sales not as selling but as helping and marketing not as marketing but as teaching. And so for me that let me do things naturally sort of from my engineering mindset in a way that I could just be myself while at the same time actually being effective in those roles.

So whatever you need to do, rather than running and hiding and saying, that's not for me, that's icky. I'm going to outsource it or at some point that might work. But as you're growing your company, you really need to be the CMO and the SVP of sales, even if you've got executives in those roles, you can't entirely outsource it. You're too important for that. But you don't have to be the Glengarry Glen Ross person to succeed there. And I guess, yeah, to get in touch with me, find me at mimiran.com M I M I R A N dot com, or on sales for nerds.io. You can also find the sales produce podcast wherever podcasts are offered, I guess. And on Twitter, Mimiran, and sales, the number for nerds, or on LinkedIn, we'd love to hear from you.

Gresham Harkless 15:45

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much. Again, Reuben, what we'll do is we'll have the links and information in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you as well and directly clink, click through. But thank you too, for the reminder of you know how important sales and marketing is and how it is, it can be for everybody, just so we take some time to change our perspective and the actions that we take with it to make sure that we're able to succeed successfully because I think there are so many people that are really great at what they do, or they created something great, but maybe they just feel like the sales and marketing is so achy. So I definitely appreciate you for creating, not just you know, every day not just the podcast, but all the awesome things that you're doing to kind of help serve that tribe. So thank you so much again, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Outro 16:23

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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