Do you believe in Unicorns?

Entrepreneur Ami Bloomer. Photo: Michelle Mock

Do you believe in Unicorns?

Would you believe that a billion pound company can be built from scratch in less than a year?

That’s the claim from Ami Bloomer, a brash young British entrepreneur who is taking the B2B sales world by storm with her new startup, Clozer.


Apparently, unicorns can still be found in Central Europe, as the seasoned 29-year-old Londoner has selected Vienna, Austria as the starting point for her new global empire.

“I chose Vienna because firstly, it’s a fantastic place to live, and secondly, because there’s a great untapped wealth of talent in this old gateway to Eastern European economies.”

Cultural nous

Clozer was born as the result of her experiences selling HR team building packages in South America.

Faced with a culture where Spanish was de rigeur, and where machismo meant that a petite blonde from Great Britain just wasn’t taken as seriously, Bloomer had an epiphany.

She realized that sales -- especially the important deals -- requires a personal touch. And if companies have leads that reach beyond their usual territory, where language and cultural nous become paramount, then finding a trusted agent to walk into a meeting on your behalf is something for which businesses would pay a premium.

Flexible Billing

Her model is simple -- deals are structured so that 15% of the value is escrowed through the Clozer platform. When the deal is closed, the sales professional immediately gets 10%, while Clozer retains 5%.

Of course, other models are available, including a mixture of commission plus an hourly rate for working the leads and building relationships. Different business sectors may have traditional compensation rates -- from helping startups acquiring seed capital, to feature film funding and presales.

Bloomer recognized that effective sales is all about relationship marketing, and puts a high value on connecting people. One of her first ventures, which is still in business, is called GiveWhatYou’reGoodAt  -- a UK based system for connecting charities with skilled professionals who want to volunteer.

The platform she has built -- with technical teams outsourced over several countries and timezones -- performs matching at the speed of business, connecting sales professionals with new deals as they are entered, and supporting the Clozer in the sales process from initial lead generation to the final close.

Link Analysis

Of course, building a technical platform by itself isn’t enough. There has to be a clear story and process behind the sales activities, with training, support and lead generation as key spokes on the sales wheel. Recruiting the right people with contacts at the customers is critical to the success of the concept.

As the site builds momentum, Bloomer is counting on benefiting from a big-data analysis of the hundreds of thousands of deals she expects to close through the platform, so that companies can learn how, where, when and with whom deals are most likely to close.

The aspects of predictive modeling and link analysis will be supported with a data quality and analysis team, who will help to build an AI-like approach into the platform.

Eventually, the young entrepreneur expects Clozer to be deeply transformative, introducing efficiencies into a traditionally conservative process, and giving companies a flexible, customer-local on-demand sales force, saving on the costs of hiring and travel.

As an indicator of Bloomer’s commitment to corporate social responsibility, she announced that 5% of the profits from Clozer would go into the Clozer Foundation, a non-profit which will support small businesses in developing countries with startup and business loans.

Whether the unicorn she is creating becomes all that she believes, there is no doubting this young woman’s determination and drive, and if she succeeds, it truly can transform the business landscape.