Tuulia Haveri ’93

Tuulia Haveri built her career in high-tech global sales; now she's using her experience to help technology companies grow into international brands.

Haveri is CEO for Tolt Traders Inc., which she co-founded in December 2016 to help small and mid-size companies sell in foreign markets. The work spans business development, marketing, sales and customer support.

Many of Tolt’s clients occupy the mobile tech space, with an average company headcount of 20. Based in Finland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Canada and the United States, they are looking to expand in the European market as well as to those in North and Latin America. 

One client in Finland, for example, wanted to grow from its robust presence in Nordic and Central European markets to the Americas. Haveri and her team learned first about its product and current customer base, then identified potential sales channels.

“The most lucrative ones were in the United States,” reports the alumna, a native of Finland who speaks seven languages. They focused the client on two sales channels with the greatest sales opportunities, using a classic marketing and sales approach for one and crafting a digital sales channel for the other.

Although the global economy and tech innovation move rapidly these days, Haveri says patience is important in her line of work. It typically takes a couple of years to establish a foreign company and its products into the new market.

Still, she and her Tolt colleagues need to be agile in responding to changing markets, to help clients — as well as their own company — grow.

Haveri held previous positions at Nokia and Microsoft, including, for the latter, director of technical sales for North America. She credits Bentley with providing a strong base on which to build her varied career.

“The international community that existed at Bentley,” she says, “made me comfortable doing business anywhere in the world.”