HOW TO GET CLIENTS TO WANT TO TALK WITH YOU IN B2B SALES AND SELLING

In this podcast, I've shown you all kinds of personalities that have been very, very successful at sales. I think what we can take from this is that style is a personal thing, and we all have our own style, and we should work on our style to become better, more acceptable, more engaging, With our marketplace. And one of these characteristics is likability. And likability is kind of the old-school view of how we looked at sales, that, oh, that person's very likable. It's a people person. But I think there's more power to it than that, meaning that it's not enough to rely solely on that. And certainly in the last few years, a lot of people have put down that part of the selling process, that it really should be based solely on value and compelling reasons. But we still need to talk to people, and a lot of the things that we sell are easily viewed as commodities. And here's a secret: Everyone wants to view everything as a commodity. Otherwise, they don't get any power. This is the topic we're going to be talking about today. And you may say to yourself, well, that's not my style. But we all have a quotient of likability. Some of us are less likable than others. And if we were more likable, Wouldn't we be more successful, make more money, have more people want to talk with us instead of just having to talk with us? Because logically, we view sales as a transaction. But when you have to work with somebody over a reasonably long period of time, get to know them, ask them for help, trust them, likability becomes important. And I don't think we should focus solely on it, of course, but I don't think we should ignore it either. Let's get into this interview. And before I do, I want to make sure you understand the 10,000-hour rule. Now, in sales, it might be the 20,000-hour rule. This rule was made popular in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.

Outliers.

Which is a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. You may not agree with everything, but it's very well-written and entertaining. But the premise is that, you know, anyone can become reasonably good at something after 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. Now, people misunderstand, or they don't want to hear the word dedicated. So they don't hear it. You need to hear it because it's not just doing something for 10,000 hours. So that's essentially 5 years at 40 hours a week, which is a reasonable expectation. And most of the time, hiring managers, including me, looked for 5 years of experience for obvious reasons. Now, how do we get those hours? But the dedicated practice, that's the hard part. That's why a lot of people never get 10,000 hours. They get, you know, 2,000 or 3,000 hours repeated over and over again with no dedication to becoming better at it. The dedication part is planning for it, Doing it, reviewing it, understanding where you were good and where you need room for improvement. Now, okay, you can do that on your own if you are, you know, reasonably dedicated and disciplined with it. But today you can do it with brevitypitch.com. Now, it's not just for cold calling, and it's really for any time you're interacting with another human being. Now, we haven't done this in the past because the only interactions were revenue— very expensive way of doing it on the income loss category— but today we can do it with AI. But it feels, sounds, and acts like a human because it's based off of real humans. It's amazing. What you want to do is grab your manager and sign up and get a demo. It's not expensive and it's well worth it. Pays for itself within a week or two because you get yourself talking, the dedicated part of the practice. In your head, it's nice. I get it. I do it all the time. But then you open your mouth and you realize, well, maybe I should have practiced verbally, because it's just a different part of the brain. And the moments, the precious moments that we get with a client, if we're not ready, we're not rehearsed, we're not practiced, You're essentially practicing with your income right then and there. And if it goes well, you get paid. But if it doesn't, you know what happens. Let's get into the interview. I'll sum it up at the end. Here we go. Hey, Audrey, thanks for joining us today.

As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Oh, goodness. Okay. So I actually do not come from a sales background. I have worked in the hospitality and travel industry for the last 20 years, 20+ years. I was corporate travel agent. I worked for an airline, and then I took my time pretending I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom for a little bit, realized that was not actually for me. I love my children, but I also love to work. So I found this little startup company on Craigslist 12, almost 13 years ago that was just getting started and was looking for someone to do customer service for a hotel rewards program. And I was like, I could do that.

Yeah.

So I joined Stash Hotel Rewards, which is the company that I work for, joined them 12 and a half years ago and did a lot of the customer service side. So I kind of built up the, our member support team, over those years in the operations side. And then in COVID, I started kind of helping in the sales team because we had kind of downsized, and as everyone did, right, in the industry. And I just had a weird way of like— our CEO saw something in me that he was like, you could, you could do this. And I was like, I do not do sales. I am not a salesperson. I don't like salespeople. It's like, I can't do this. But he goes, no, it's not about selling, right? It's about personality. It's about being able to talk to people. And I never understood that. And so I said, I humored him. I was like, yeah, sure. Okay, I'll send some emails. I'll prospect a little. I'll do, you know, and here I am 4 years later, head of our entire sales department here at Stash.

The accidental salesperson.

The accident. Honestly, it's so funny because our CEO, Jeff Lowe, will tell you he saw it all along. But I will tell you, there are still days when I'm like, how, how am— how is this my job? How do I do— I don't know. Like, I, I went from kind of behind the scenes to in front of the camera. Um, but it's been a wild ride, but it's been really, really fun. So, um, I'm definitely not the person that said I want to be a salesperson and got a business degree and went right into it. I followed a very different path that got me here.

What, what was your perception of what selling was about before you did it?

I, I think if you're not— well, even if you are in sales, I think you have this perception of like salespeople are— people are kind of slimy, right? Like they're looking for these different— I mean, honestly, like, I, every time I think of salespeople, I'm like, oh, it's like a car salesman, right? You're like—

Different things.

Or, you know, we all get emails where you can tell it's like a bot, right? I am the polar opposite of that. In fact, like, I have never sent a templated email even. I am— I custom everything. I did that in customer service too, because I just feel like salespeople get this rap of like, I gotta hit a quota, I've gotta get this many things out, I've gotta sell this many cars, I've got to whatever it is, that they lose that personal part of it. And so my approach was the opposite, right? Which was, well, I want them to know I'm a real person. So my opinion of them was Like, well, I just want to be the opposite of what— of the experiences that I've had. But then I also, once I got into sales, realized there's a lot of amazing salespeople that really aren't selling. They are, you know, promoting. They are engaging with people and getting them to understand their product or their company or whatever that is. And so I kind of learned from that as I was going along too. But yeah, I don't know. I had a very tainted view of it only because I had never done it. I had done like I had sold like Tupperware one time. I, in my 20s, I did Mary Kay, like those types of companies where definitely I was like, oh, I'm not good at this. I can't do this. You know, it's not the same. Not at all.

Well, I think a lot of people have that perception more on the customer side than the sales side. But true, you know, I've been in this my whole life and those people don't succeed, not in business to business. Right. Well, B2C, you can get away with it because it's a short transaction.

Right.

People come to you, they're looking for something, and the person knows that if you don't sell it right then and now, it's over.

You're gonna lose them.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It is, it is interesting. In the B2B space, it's, you're creating a relationship is how I look at it. Right? So if you look at sales, especially in what we do, right? We are, Stash is a network of independent independent hotels. So we only work with highly rated, fully independent hotels. We are their rewards program. So essentially like the Marriott Bonvoy, but for independent, highly rated independent hotels. And so for us, we are creating a network. We have 310 partner hotels throughout North America that come to us. They join our program for different reasons. Some are looking for, you know, helping shift away from OTAs. Some are looking for, you know, more direct bookings, exposure, marketing. Whatever it might be, but every one of them is kind of looking for a network. And there are other products out there that you can join that do similar things, but they don't really promote themselves as like a family. We truly promote ourselves as, yes, we have over 300 hotels, but you're going to get one of us every time you need somebody. You're going— you're not going to get a, you know, a chatbot or a call center. I stay very close to all of my hotels that I reach out to, that I meet with, that I bring into the program. Yes, I pass them off to our amazing like partner Advocates, our account managers, but I'm always there too. And so it's— we create sort of a family, like an ecosystem where you're not just another customer for us, even if— even as we continue to grow. And I think that makes a huge difference too.

And what parts of the service and support experience helped and what parts hurt?

Okay. So I laugh a lot because I, I, I mean, I worked for an airline like Frontline in my early 20s, like 18 to 23. I worked frontline customer service gate agent, right?

All those nice people.

Oh my gosh, the stories I could tell you. I had a frozen turkey thrown at me one time. A woman— That was me. Yeah, this woman tried to bring her turkey. She said it was her support animal and she wanted it to have a seat. And when I would not let her, she threw it at me. I, I could tell you, but that's the thing is it's almost like it gave me this thick skin. And then when I came into, you know, for with Stash, everything is obviously like we're remote, right? Our, our, we have some, we have phone lines, but most of it, our customer service is behind a computer. And I was like, gosh, this isn't, this is nothing compared to being in front of a customer that's mad at you. Right? And so what we did with Stash was like, we made it so you always get a response within 24 hours. It is always a real person. It is, you know, if you need something, you're gonna get probably the same person when you call back or write back. And so I always told our team, and what I've always done is no, no cut and paste, like make it personal. And so that helped me because then when I came into the sales side and I realized that it's not about just generating, because the first thing I said was, I don't want to turn into like a sales bot. I don't want to take this list and plug it into a, into a tool and shoot out the same email that just You know, HubSpot puts the tag, the name, name into it, right?

Tag the location.

Yeah. And how many of those do you get where they forget to do it and it says it doesn't match?

It's so capitalized.

Or yeah, it's— and it's so easy to spot. And my biggest thing is like, I do not ever want anyone to think that they got a bot email. And so what it, you know, that basically gave me the tools to say, okay, this can be done without having to do templates and bots and canned responses, right? It needs to be authentic because at the— in customer service, if you're not authentic, people read right through that, right? They know when they're getting canned response.

Yeah.

But it's the same thing in sales. Like, I— we have a company that we work with that manages a bunch of boutique hotels in Utah, in southwestern Utah. And he told— the CEO of that company, I had reached out to him about a year and a half ago. I kind of started seeing their name pop up and I was like, gosh, they have all these really cool properties I'd never heard of. And he told me that, like, and he actually copied our CEO and said, you know, I get a ton of emails every day of sales emails of, of companies reaching out to me. And he goes, I rarely ever respond. But when Audrey's came through, it was— she had, like, she knew who we were. She knew the people on my team. She was very authentic in her email as far as, like, things about our company. She'd done her research. And so I realized she was a real person. And we have had a partnership with them for the last year and a half. They have like 10 properties in our program. So it's that kind of a relationship that you— I mean, I have some hoteliers that text me and we chat. Like, I know their kids' birthdays. Like, so it's just really important to create a relationship before you even try to sell to them.

So it sounds like the support—

I was gonna say that it does it itself, right? It, it just works itself out.

Yeah, that you care.

Yeah.

And that builds trust. You care about what they want to accomplish.

Right. Yep. Absolutely. And I think it helps too, having, you know, coming into them and saying, I've been with this company since it was a tiny little office in downtown Seattle that we were all working crazy hours and trying to figure out next steps. And we've had big ebbs and flows over the last 14 years. And so it helps when they know, like, You know, I've been here 13 of those 14 years. I've seen, you know, so that kind of gets their trust also that like, I'm not just somebody who was hired 6 months ago to come in and try to get your hotel to join our program. I actually know the ins and outs of it and I know it works and I've been here a long time, which makes you realize that, that it's a good place to be.

And how much do you get inbound versus outbound?

We are primarily— and I mean, it's probably— it's definitely less than a third. We do get a lot of inbounds, but the difference is, is that we only work with really highly rated, fully independent. Every once in a while we'll get hotels that come in that are not fully independent. They might be franchised. Also, they might be just not up to our company standards. And so we get a bunch of those, but they don't really pan out. But I would say more than 2/3 of our business is outbound. So there is a lot of researching, prospecting, knowing your territories, knowing every— we call it Hotel Jeopardy, where, you know, if—

Oh, geez.

If you tell me a city, yeah, if you tell me a city, I need to know, like, I should know everyone there. If you find a hotel I don't know, then you— I owe you $5. Like, that's what we do. So it's just important to know the market. You got to know what's— what works, what doesn't. You know, what hotels would be good for us, what hotels have told us no thank you. So we do a lot. A lot of it is outbound for sure, which is a— which is really different for some people because we've had sales, you know, sales team members over the years that have primarily done inbound sales selling.

Right.

And it's a hard— I mean, again, I don't— I never did any of it. So to me, outbound sales makes sense. But To some, that's a harder thing to wrap your head around because it takes a lot more work.

And who do you want to talk to at the hotel?

At the hotels, we are primarily looking for decision makers. So oftentimes we'll start—

How unusual.

Right? I mean, sometimes though, it's funny because we kind of have to— we try to— there's a lot of hotels that are owned by either owned or managed by big companies, right? And getting to the big companies is difficult. So you want to start kind of at the hotel level, get hotel buy-in where they can then go to the, to the big guys and say, hey, we think this makes a lot of sense for our, for our property. And sometimes it makes sense for one property in portfolio and not for another, which is fine, right? That's, that's just how it goes. We are looking for a lot of times looking for general managers. But honestly, some of the biggest key decision makers are director of sales and marketing because they are promoting the hotel and we're going to promote your hotel. So it's important to have their buy-in. And then revenue, revenue managers is another big one because they are the ones looking at pricing and OTA share and all of those different things that we come in and can help with. You know, Stash members tend to book higher ADR than even your other direct guests. And so it's important to get the buy-in of those making those revenue decisions.

And how many already have a program or belong to another program?

So you can have a lot of hotels, especially independents, will try to do their own loyalty program. And sometimes it's not usually a points thing. It's usually like a gift. If you book direct, you get free parking or you get extra benefits on property, right? And so we can come in and play perfectly with that because we are just the point side, right? A lot of our hotels will try something and then they'll come to us because we have a larger network of hotels. And so it's, you know, When you're offering points at just your hotel, that people can only use those points at your hotel, it's not quite as— it doesn't grab a traveler's interest as much. So a lot of times we can play with their own type of amenity program. But otherwise, it's usually they're starting from scratch and they're like, we want something, but we don't know what, and it's hard to create it. We've tried. Hand us your network. So oftentimes they have nothing at the time that they come to us, or they've tried other things and it hasn't worked, and then they come.

How do you make money? Is it an upfront payment? Is it a rev share? Or—

We are paid by the points that our hotels award members. So when you— if you're a Stash member and you stay at a Stash partner hotel, you get 5 points per dollar on your room revenue if you book direct. So OTA bookings, you never, you never get points. Um, if you book direct, you get those 5 points per dollar. At the end of the month, we invoice our partner hotels for whatever points They awarded Stash members that month. So that's where we get paid. And it's so funny because oftentimes I'll go through an entire sales presentation and someone will go, I still don't understand how you guys get paid. And I'm like, oh, alright, because it's— because we don't charge. Like, we don't do upfront fees. We don't have integration costs. We integrate with 40, 50 different PMS and CRS systems, and we don't charge integration fees. So people often get lost and they're like, wait a minute. So it's It's the point cost, and there's like a points minimum per month. But that's— it's essentially just the points that they're awarding.

So that makes it a lot easier to get in, huh?

Right. It's very simple. We also don't have like— we don't do crazy contracts. We used to have 3-year agreements. COVID taught us a lot about the industry. I think that's just overall with, with anything. But, you know, people don't want long contracts. None of us do as a consumer or as a business. Nobody wants be locked into a 20-year Comcast agreement, right? Or whatever your cell phone agreement. So we, we got rid of those. So we ask our partners to give us a year because it's hospitality, it ebbs and flows. But then we just have a rolling agreement after that. We'd never— again, we never want people to feel locked in, which is another thing in sales that I've noticed is there is a lot of apprehension to that. And it didn't used to be as much, but in the last 18 months or so, You see a lot of hotels going, we're a little, you know, tell— first of all, tell us what your terms are like upfront. They want to know, like, tell me I'm not locked into 10 years because large programs, like if you go and you brand to a Marriott or Hilton, those are like 20, 30-year agreements. We're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we won't do that to you. We always want to make sure it's working. That's the other thing. I don't want to sell you a product and then have it not work. And that's, you know, the other reason we got rid of upfront fees is who wants to pay something before they know if it's going to work for them? So we, yeah, again, we learned a lot in COVID, which was just, that's not really the way we want to do it. We don't want to nickel and dime, and we want people to trust that it's going to work and that we stand behind that.

And can those individual hotels make that commitment without getting approval from home office?

Sometimes. So we actually work with a lot of owner-operator hotels, which is like standalone independents that are owned by the person who's running them or by the family that's, you know, those are our bread and butter, the people who can make the decisions at the hotel level. I would say 65% of our network is like that. Of our other hotels that are branded or not branded, sorry, but managed by a larger company, it depends. So some of them can make their own decisions at the property level. And that is definitely what we are after because they are the ones that understand what the hotel needs oftentimes. Sometimes it has to go to the, to the corporate level. But often we have a lot of hotels that are part of corporate management companies that have joined.

And where does the sale stall? Because I'm sure the first call goes pretty well.

Yeah, it does. So I will say the hardest part is getting— sometimes is getting them to talk to you, right? That's, and making sure they know you're a real person. And I'm sorry, you know, and I— everybody jokes at, you know, in our company because my emails are so dorky. Like, I don't— honestly, I mean, half the time, like, our CEO the other day was like, Telling everybody, he goes, "I was copying on an email from Audrey, and she was talking about the weather with this this hotelier in San Francisco. And we had just had this massive rain up here. Like my backyard was flooding. It's Seattle, so that's not weird that it rained, but it poured for like three days. And San Francisco, California just had all that rain. So we're going back and forth about our rowboats down the road because our lawns are flooding. And he's like, "I don't know how she does this, but somehow it's not annoying. Like somehow it's like engaging to them. And these people, this big hotelier, they're going." back and forth about their rowboats down the street in the rain, you know, and then they ended up joining the program. And so where I think it stalls the most is getting their attention, making sure they know I'm real. And then when we do our presentations, we sometimes we cram a lot of information in. We're, we're getting better at that. But I also think if you don't send really concise follow-up, meaning here's the slide deck we talked about, but here is broken down like Here is what you get. Here is what we offer. Here is what our network is. If you don't bullet that out, I have a template that I even use. It's like the only thing I do a template with is making sure that I at least hit those points when I follow up. Because if you don't have all that information, when you listen to me talk for an hour and I talk fast, as you can tell, and I'm passionate about it too. So I'm always, you know, there's a lot going on in that hour. You're not going to absorb it all. So if I present to you and then just send you a quick thanks so much, here's the deck. Let me know if you have questions. It gets lost. So you have to give those points of like, what are your questions? Let me try to hit them. And I also like to write notes as I'm talking. When they— people get stuck on certain parts, I make myself notes to like put that in my follow-up, like really dive into that part so that they aren't lost on like, well, I'll get back to this because I didn't really understand it. That's what I don't want.

And But how do you create urgency? Because either they don't have it or it's new, it's change.

Right. That's something we struggle with. Not struggle, but because it's such a fine line. Because I don't— like I tell my team, I'm like, we don't want to be the people that are like, well, if you sign by the end of this month, we'll do this for free. You know, I can't stand that type of selling. But there— that is how you create urgency, right? It's like online.

Yeah.

When you're online shopping and a thing pops up that says check out now and save 10%, you're like, well, I better check it out now because I want to save 10%, 10 whole percent. So we go back and forth a lot on what can we offer to certain properties that, you know, that we know would be perfect, that we know are interested, but it's going to take a little bit more to get them fully on board or it's going to take a little more time. We do a lot of incentives on, you know, if you, if you join with us by this certain time, we give you free points upfront so that you can go win a group or a meeting with those points. Sometimes there are incentives along the way in the onboarding process so that— and it's actually funny, but where we sometimes get stalled the most is the hotel has already come on board and then they're in the onboarding process. Our onboarding is really simple, but hotels are busy. Like sometimes they're running the hotel, right? So do they have time to always do it? So we do actually a lot more incentives in the onboarding process than we do closing the sale. There are times we throw things in. But again, I'm always wary of being the one that's like, hi, it's me again. If you sign this month, I will do, you know, because that just feels like I really need your business versus I want your business.

And your main competitor is like what, hotels.com, the online aggregators?

No. So we, while we have a booking engine on our site, Which we actually— our booking engine is integrated into all of our partners' systems. And so we don't charge them anything on those. So we're not an OTA because we don't charge anything. Our biggest competitors, honestly, is like Marriott Bonvoy and Hilton Honors Preferred, which is another independent luxury resort collection. Those kinds of programs are where we see our competition.

And is it a revenue generator for them because they get repeat business?

Yeah. So we have 1.2 million members throughout, primarily in North America, primarily in the US. They are— so Cornell actually did a study on our member database. They looked at all of our member information for 15— for over a 15-month period. They were able to determine that when a guest enrolled in Stash, they stayed and spent almost 50% more.

Wow.

So that's huge because Again, when you are a standalone hotel without a loyalty program, yes, people love your hotel because it's independent, it's unique, but they're not getting anything for their money. And oftentimes independents are a little bit pricier sometimes depending on the market. And so if you're not offering them anything, you might lose them, right? They're, they're not totally loyal to your hotel. So when you're not only the best hotel on the block, but you also give points, Guests are more— they're going to come back. And that's what the Cornell study proved. Also, our members tend to skew a little bit older, a little bit higher income earning, and they're less price sensitive. Independent hotel lovers are usually not concerned as much about the cost as they are about the experience. So, you know, we have 1.2 guests who love independent hotels. So when a hotel joins us, I'm, I'm like, hey, I will— we will shout you out to our network of people who are looking exactly for your property. And so that right there will generate revenue.

And I gotta believe you could use that revenue reason as a way to create urgency.

True. You know what, one way we create urgency, and I actually just talked to a hotel the other day about this, is a lot of our hotels have— well, all hotels have shoulders. Most have a busy and a, and a slow season, right? But we have a lot that are seasonal. So they're gearing up right now for summer. And if you're in a destination like near a national park or in a summer travel destination, we talked to a hotel the other day in Ocean City, Maryland. I'm like, Okay, well, your busy time, your 4 months of busy is coming. So if it, if it takes us 30 to 45 days to onboard, if we start now, you're onboard, you're in our marketing emails by mid-April, and then you are exposed to all of our members in that area right as they're starting to book their summer trips from Memorial to Labor Day. So sometimes hotels come to us in like June and we're like, well, we can get you onboard as fast as you want, but your busy season right now—

Is tomorrow.

Is tomorrow, right? And so So that's another reason why we asked for a year, because I'm like, listen, we'll get you on board. But when your traffic dies down in August or September, yes, we can help with filling midweek and shoulder season and things like that, because a lot of our members will do drive market to redeem their points in that time. But you just missed our prime time. So give us a year, and next summer you're gonna see how all those guests now know about you. They've been hearing about you for the last 9 months, and they come back. But this is the sweet spot. Right now, March, February, March is oftentimes when we talk to hotels in leisure destinations and we're like, okay, this is it. This is the time. Don't stall. So that, that actually is a really good one that I didn't even think about, that, that, that's what we do sometimes is looking at the seasonality.

Well, on your prospecting as well, because—

Oh, yeah.

You can't prospect them in July and August because they're booked. There's no way.

They're booked and they're too busy. Like, they— we actually, our team, so we travel Most of the year, our team will sort of travel around to different markets. We don't really travel in the summer because going to a hotel in San Diego in July, no GM or director of sales is gonna wanna sit down for an hour with you, right? They are running around, they are busy, their team is full staff, right? So it's going to them in January and saying, hi, do you have time now? Yes. Okay, great. So yeah, that's a big thing on prospecting is also knowing another reason why our whole thing is you've got to know your markets, right? So we all have our, you know, our markets are divided up to where kind of where we live so that we are able to get there easily if we need to. But also we know the seasonality, we know the trends of that market. And if you don't, you need to learn it so that you know when you should be approaching these hotels. Because if you go, if you're banging on the doors in summer season and they're not talking to you and you're like, I don't know why they're not talking to me. Well, now you will next year when you've been here a while.

And what surprised you about sales that you really love?

I love it. I don't even know how it's— there's something about like hunting hotels. It sounds so cheesy, but like there are times I just open a Google Map on my browser and I pick a state in my territory and I do hotels, and I just start clicking. And most of them are not ones we can work with. A lot of them are brands. But it's like every once in a while you find one you've never heard of, and it's like Christmas morning. You're like, oh my gosh. Or, you know, I find I have these different websites and blogs I follow. I have Google alerts set for boutique hotels, and you get these, these ones that you, you know, just have never heard of. And it's honestly so exciting because then you get to go down the rabbit hole of who owns it, who manages it, who And it's just this fun— it's just this high that I love. It's something that completely surprised me because if you would have asked me 4 years ago, I would have laughed in your face if this is what I was doing. That surprised me. Also, just the fact— I mean, my kids have always told me I could talk to a wall, right? Like, I am that mom. I am that mom that in the line—

It feels like you're talking to a wall when you talk to them, right?

Yeah, probably. Yeah, it does. I have teenage girls. Come on. But I'm the one who can make friends in the line at, you know, the restaurant or at Disneyland or in an airport or on an airplane. Like, I make friends. My husband laughed because we went on a trip a couple weeks ago, and there was this baby behind us cried the whole time, and I felt so bad for the mom. She was— you could tell, first-time mom, first-time airplane ride. It was just absolutely terrible. So I bought her a drink and said, I know this is weird. Can I take your baby from you for a minute? Took her baby and walked with it, and she was like sweating. And I was like, have a drink, take a break. I can't run away with your baby. We're on an airplane. I was like, and I'll just— and I walked up and down. My husband was like, I mean, this is adorable, but also this is totally you. Like, you would become friends with anybody. And so part of the whole sales thing is just I didn't realize the relationship side of it. I didn't realize how I would be creating these longstanding Relationships and friendships with, you know, people in an industry that I have worked in a long time but haven't excelled in or had any sort of status in. So that part has been really fun.

And has this always been your personality? Is it something that you developed or?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm loud and obnoxious and I talk a lot. Yeah. Well, yeah.

What people would think is a sales personality, very friendly, outgoing, gregarious.

Yeah. And it was funny because I was behind the scenes doing it for a long time. But I also think that just my, my life changes. You know, I turned 40 this year, and I feel like who I was at 20 and 30, also raising little kids, like, I could have never stepped out of my comfort zone and done this type of job 10 years ago, 20 years ago. A lot of what I did built me up to this point as far as talking to people and solving problems and coming up with solutions. And, but it didn't— I never saw it taking the path that it has. But it's, it's just, I could— I now I can't imagine doing anything else.

Hey, I really appreciate your time today. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

We— so connect with me on LinkedIn. It's Audrey Yates with Stash Hotel Rewards. And we have a LinkedIn page as well. Otherwise, our website is just stashrewards.com. You can check us out.

If you're a hotelier, there's a whole hoteliers page Now, support, I've always had mixed feelings about being a great area for developing salespeople because once you have the service mindset, it's hard to have the negotiation skills, the asking hard questions. But some people have made that leap. And I think it's helpful because they have that empathy of the person who's trying to do it. They've seen the fringe cases. See, like sales enablement and marketing, they teach us the kind of ideal case, the easy case, the inbound case, uh, the people who get it case, the repeat revenue Situations. And those are all nice, and if you have them, congratulations, they're a lot easier than the fringe cases. But if you're doing cold outbound, it's mostly fringe cases, which means you're kind of bridging, uh, where the client is to where they could be if they use the product. But they're really— is there any interest, pain, active pain to really build off of?

Hard to tell.

So I think you get a lot out of this interview. Now, if you want to become more likable, here's what I did. Um, I always would greet people with a big smile, and what I found was that was— it's kind of like the defroster in your car. As soon as you turn it on, the windshield kind of clarifies and you can see through it. Because a smile, it's innate, essentially, meaning when someone sees someone else smile, it's contagious. They need to smile. And when you do smile, you're kind of igniting your physiology to be in a happy mood. And then I studied likable people, comedians, late-night show hosts. And I would see like, why are they likable? How do I integrate that? And it's kind of a playful personality characteristic. It's not comedian so much. It's not always trying to make people laugh, but it's trying to make light of serious situations, to be a little less serious about them, but without making it cavalier. It's important to be likable. A lot of people say it isn't. Well, you know, if you are likable, you know how powerful it is. If you're not likable, you've got to make up for it in a lot of different ways.

And you can.

There's all kinds of mixes of personalities out there. But at the end of the day, you want people To want to talk with you. Otherwise, you have to create a situation of them— situation where they have to talk with you. You want to do both if you can, but one's a whole lot harder than the other. Now, how's your pipeline looking? Do you have enough meetings? Are you getting into the accounts that you want to? I've got this course that's insanely effective called Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting. So to get into those hard-to-get-into accounts, start the conversation with those executives. And it's not spam, sending your pitch. It's not about a better pitch because you could spend the rest of your life coming up with a better pitch and it's not going to be as effective as this. Because for a pitch to work, somebody has to be open to reading it, understanding it, And applying it to them. That's, that's a lot to get done in an email, and that's why it's not that effective, especially when they get 50 of them an hour. Pretty much is what executives are getting today. But nobody's really talking about what I'm talking about now, are they? Why? Because it's counterintuitive, because it requires experience. Because it's not based off of logic. It's based off of innate emotions. Theirs, not ours. Ours are pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. Who's interested? It's not working. I got to do more, more, more, more, more. The days of making up for a lack of skill in sales with volume are over. We got the volume thing down. Okay, we had email automation. Now we've got AI on top of it, and now we've got mechanical things to find out people's cell phone numbers so we can text them and really destroy the relationship before it's even started. What we've tried to do for the last ever is replace talent with technology, and it works for a tiny window until everyone starts doing it. And the problem is everyone's been doing it for 15 years. And I've kind of predicted peak email about 7 years ago. I was probably a little too optimistic. And you see today, because now spam folders Anything that's coming from the spam cannons is naturally going into the spam folders. And so you think you're emailing somebody, you're emailing their spam folder. How do you get away from that? We gotta connect with people. That's why we hired salespeople, not sales AI. Anyone can send spam. You know how well it's working. If it's working, stick with it. If it's not, give this a shot because connecting with another human being is why we're in sales. And that's how the magic happens. It takes a little bit of talent, a little bit, but the talent is learnable. If you really want to become great at sales, invest a little bit of your time, a year maybe, and get good at it. Dig deep into it. It's not a tip or trick. It's a talent. And you have to develop it. Go to b2brevenue.com. Invest in yourself and recapture some of that lost income. Just think about how much you lost last quarter. $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, $100,000 in lost income simply because It wasn't there. You can blame the pipeline marketing, but you go to the next company, they're going to be the same thing. It's still going to be you. And the only way for you to make more money is become a better you. Go to b2brevenue.com, sign up today. We'll see you next time.