Ep20: Check-Out to Check-In: The Hotelier's Transition into Tech Sales, Parenthood, and Beyond with Jennifer Suski of HotelKey

Celeste Berke [00:00:00]:
Hello. Hello. It's Celeste Berke Knisely on the Sales Edge podcast. I'm joined today by Jen. And fun fact, Friday, we both come up through hospitality and hotels, and she works a lot from home in her bed. We decided we're both going to do this podcast from our beds today Casual Friday.

Jen Suski [00:00:21]:
And be comfortable. Maybe we have Some people wear Hawaiian.

Celeste Berke [00:00:24]:
Maybe we have PJ bottoms on. I don't know. We'll see. Jen, tell us

Jen Suski [00:00:29]:
a little bit about yourself. My name's Jen. I am director of business development for Hotel Key, which is a property management system. I come from Hilton Hotels. I have a long career in hospitality. I'm a mom of 2 amazing boys via embryo donation, and I am excited to talk to you.

Celeste Berke [00:00:49]:
Same. And we were chatting off air about everybody tells you as a female, don't get pregnant. From age 12 until age 18, it is basically you do not get pregnant. You do everything you can to not get pregnant. And we were chatting around how difficult it is to actually get pregnant as you let

Jen Suski [00:01:11]:
a boy sneeze in your direction. You'll ruin your life. As You're gonna get knocked up.

Celeste Berke [00:01:16]:
As you age. Yes. And so you are a fierce advocate, Kip, for talking about pregnancy. Getting pregnant is difficult. The amount of money that it costs in this country to go through the process, the emotional toll it takes on the relationship, on your work. So if if somebody wants to talk with you offline or your DMs open to chatting about those struggles,

Jen Suski [00:01:42]:
wide open. Wide open. It is it's a taboo con it's a taboo subject of the whole realm of infertility, and so many women are just alone. And there's not a lot of embryo donation, surrogacy, adoption. There's so much out there that needs to be talked about. And I am an open body.

Celeste Berke [00:02:12]:
The working female balancing that, it sounds like your journey was almost 6 years with this, of balancing that emotional load as well as working full time. Yeah. Probably one of the

Jen Suski [00:02:27]:
biggest reasons I left working on property for hotels is because I knew I was about to undergo hormone treatment, and I didn't know what how my body was gonna react to that. I needed more flexibility to work from home, and that's what I wanted. And to get that, I needed to leave hotels, and that was very hard. But I jumped into the tech space to be able to sell the hotels, and it was honestly the best decision I ever made.

Celeste Berke [00:02:49]:
So the hospitality tech space is freaking booming. And I talk with a lot of people who are in hospitality tech who are sellers who don't understand this interesting world of hotels, what RevPAR is, any of that stuff that is the driver of hotels. What I am seeing is a lack of understanding about why technology and keeping up with the advances in technology is so important for the hospitality industry. Obviously, every industry, but hospitality, they often are laggards. They lag behind slow adopters, last to adopt. What have you witnessed from being in this space and leading a team as it relates to old way versus new way? Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely correct, but it goes both ways.

Celeste Berke [00:03:38]:
So on the tech side, I have done a lot

Jen Suski [00:03:41]:
of education and training about what, like, what's a star report? What is a red book? You know what

Celeste Berke [00:03:47]:
I mean? Like I know. I know.

Jen Suski [00:03:50]:
It's like, what does the front desk have to do during their shift? Because there's this whole thing of, like, I don't understand why can't the front desk just enter a phone number for the text messaging platform. Well, they got a lot going on. They are the face of that hotel, and they don't need 1 more thing to do, and this is why. And then when you're talking to the hotel, yeah, implementing any kind of change in hotel is is very difficult because, you know, they do have so much going on. So it's kind of that if it's not broke, don't fix it. So they kinda have that blind eye to all of this new tech because they're like, it's a nice to have, not Yeah. A must have. Right? So kind of showing them that it's it's what the guests wants when you, like, you have to remind them when they go to check beast.

Jen Suski [00:04:42]:
Be our guest. Be our guest. It's not happening. Like, let let the technology help you keep your scores up, help, you know, improve your processes, especially with how the change that has been happening since COVID even and the lack of staffing and just the change in the overall attitude of guests checking the hotel.

Celeste Berke [00:05:09]:
What people don't realize about the hospitality industry is that a lot of hotels have this turn and burn. Right? Unless your extended stay or in a resort area, it's a lot of 1 to 2 night stays. There's a lot of wear and tear on the property. Imagine someone coming to your house and every single day you're changing the linen, cleaning the bathroom, like, they're in and out, in and out. Guests got really pissed off during COVID about all the amenities were taken away. What do you mean I need to take off my own bedding? I don't get service. And so the expectation of the price point that you're paying is very high. It was an industry that was decimated, myself included, massive layoffs.

Celeste Berke [00:05:46]:
So trying to get people to come back to an industry where they're often not treated very well by guests is difficult. And also, breaking the stigma around everything is looked at as, like, how how much is this gonna cost? What's this gonna cost per room? What is the bottom line? What is the impact? Because if if I'm not making my GOP or if I don't have this type of flow through, we have an issue versus and you and I chatted about this, turning that conversation into what does this mean for an owner, what does this mean to the bank when we are running more efficiently, We have lower turnover. We have better guest experience, which means guest satisfaction scores are going up. There's a lot of things that hotels are measured on that have, like, a really big impact to refinancing. If an owner is able to acquire more hotels, if they're able to get a loan, like the profitability, all of these things, and we're still at this place where people aren't tying together, but this is how we've always done it versus, alright, this may be a complete change to the way that we're doing business. So that was a rant there. I wanna know from a management standpoint, you come from that side, and you're now managing a team to sell into that space, how are you educating and having conversations with your team for their own growth, educating them on process and people and the buying habits.

Jen Suski [00:07:26]:
Yeah. It's it's interesting. I mean, like, it's again, like you said, it's education. It works on both sides of of it from the hotels and the staff. I do weekly 1 on ones for sure, and we talk about, you know, developments, where you wanna be, how can we help get you there, that type of thing. But then we also talk about, okay, so you're you're selling into these hotels and what they need the education on. So, again, they don't know what the red book is. They don't know what paper maintenance tickets are.

Jen Suski [00:07:56]:
I'm like, do you know that they still they still write. Do you know what carbon copy is? I have people that don't know what carbon copy means. I feel ancient. So anyway, yeah, explaining to them that process of what their hotels are doing and how we can help them. We have a maintenance app in our property management system. So if there's an issue, if the housekeeper sees that the AC, the HVAC unit is broken, they can log it and flag the maintenance person. And guess what, GM? At the end of the year, you can go and say, room 305 seems to have issues, like, every month with this this HVAC unit. Maybe we need to replace that, you know, and keeping up with the building and things like that instead of trying to, like, sort through all of these paper tickets or these audit banker's boxes that are filling up your storage closets.

Celeste Berke [00:08:47]:
Right. It's insane. Bit of data, you're able to make decisions around it. Like, room 305, it's happened this many times. We've dedicated this many man hours to it. It's cost us this much. And we like to say in, you know, gap selling terms, this is the gap. Right? If if it's if our desired state is to have that room occupied 91% of the time, this is how much money we're making per room, but it's costing us this much versus the cost of a new AC units.

Celeste Berke [00:09:16]:
This is the business case for it. But if you do not have that information and I was trying to tell somebody the other day, like, okay. There was this board, and it had 3 pegs. And engineering used you used to put the ticket up there, and you would write what was wrong, and then they would move it to pending. And when it was finished, the copy went here, and then that copy went over here. And they're just like, what? That does that still exist.

Jen Suski [00:09:44]:
Yes. Yes. It does still exist. They just don't understand. Then when you explain it to GM, they're like, oh, yeah. That makes sense. They have so much going on in a hotel at any given day. It could be underwater or, like, the sprinkler had burst somewhere.

Jen Suski [00:09:59]:
You know what I mean? They need somebody to go out there tell them, hey. There is a better way to do this. Yeah.

Celeste Berke [00:10:04]:
I had someone reach out to me, an internal champion. As we look at elevating a business conversation, we're talking about actual business problems, taking that information and synthesizing it and saying, well, what does this mean to the property overall? What is this preventing us from doing? Is my labor costs skyrocketing? What's happening to my p and l? They don't have that data, and and it's similar when you're talking to a hotel general manager. Some of these hotels, they cannot make a decision. They will never be able to sign off on anything. You're wasting your time educating. Yes. You can have them become a champion, but I think a lot of salespeople don't realize that for their ICP. They aren't the person that you really need to be talking to.

Celeste Berke [00:10:44]:
And and sometimes salespeople, they're, like, afraid to have that higher level conversation because they feel like I'm not a CFO. I'm not in that person's shoes. And you're like, you're the one bringing the value. Right? You're you are an expert in your area. They're an expert in their area. How do you work with your team on crossing that chasm from, hey. This person is just, like, a nice to have conversation. They'll give us a lot of day to day information, but we really need to be having conversation with this person over here.

Jen Suski [00:11:13]:
How do I do that? Honestly, there's no method. I have no method other than to be like, yeah. You just you need to you need to get over the fear. Honestly, just do it. If they really need help, I'm happy to join calls with them. I record every single one of my my sales calls, and I do sales calls just like I asked the team to do sales calls so that we can review them. And they can listen to any one of my calls. Otherwise, I mean, I'll pull up a Zoom or a Google Meet, and I will do the call and have them on it to listen.

Jen Suski [00:11:40]:
You gotta be comfortable. You gotta be confident, and they're not gonna get to that until they're just you just tell them you gotta do it.

Celeste Berke [00:11:47]:
And I love that. I'm seeing a real lack, and I hate to say it's because of time. I think all of us use time as an excuse. Talking like real big companies, like multibillion dollar companies where individual contributors say, I've been here 2 years. I've never had anybody record or review my phone calls because they don't have time. And the thing is a lot of our teams are product forwards. They go in and talk about the product, and we miss the mark on what's happening inside the business. A great example of this is my husband came home 2 days ago and said, oh, this guy walked into the hotel.

Celeste Berke [00:12:24]:
I heard him ask the front desk. Where's your general manager? And he walked over and he interrupted my conversation, And he put a brochure in my face about a cleaning solution and started talking all about it and then started talking about the pricing and that can negotiate the pricing. I said, first of all, did he even ask you if you have the it's an ice maker. An ice maker? What if you outsource your ice? What if you brought it in? What if you didn't even have it?

Jen Suski [00:12:51]:
What if you have no need for ice? Like, for whatever.

Celeste Berke [00:12:54]:
You know what

Jen Suski [00:12:54]:
I mean?

Celeste Berke [00:12:55]:
Or what

Jen Suski [00:12:55]:
if your hotel is fully anti ice?

Celeste Berke [00:12:57]:
But if you're and he said no, this still happens every day. Maybe he's never had an issue with this ice maker. Maybe it's broken every single day. You don't know because you haven't assessed the current situation to find out what's going on. We just went right into pitching our product. And I'm not sure where I was going with this, but, oh, I do know, is that all of us fall into that habit where we get a little product happy and we're excited about it because our product is the best thing, and so we start talking about it. But if we don't have leadership saying, hey. You missed this clue.

Celeste Berke [00:13:25]:
I missed 1 the other day. 2 of us missed it. Someone said, we grew 85% year over year over year, and I was like, oh, that's so awesome. That's so great. You know? Blah blah blah. And then my coaching on the call was, why weren't you triggered by that? Like, woah. Woah. Woah.

Celeste Berke [00:13:40]:
What do you mean you grew 85%? You just told me that your team didn't make quota. How How did you all grow by 85% and meet goal? Well, it turns out the founders sold 50%. That's how they grew 85%. Well, they don't want founders to be involved in the sales process. So if you take the founders out, the sales team actually used to grow 200% in order to make up for that. But because I missed that, I didn't ask that question. So I love that you're taking the time to work with the team because I hear from so many people who say, oh, my manager doesn't coach me on anything.

Jen Suski [00:14:17]:
Well, how do they expect you to meet your goals and get better at them?

Celeste Berke [00:14:22]:
Change behavior.

Jen Suski [00:14:24]:
Yeah. Exactly.

Celeste Berke [00:14:25]:
I'd love to know if any of your team members come from hospitality sales.

Jen Suski [00:14:30]:
They do not. This is probably

Celeste Berke [00:14:31]:
a good thing. You don't have to break the, like

Jen Suski [00:14:35]:
apparently, yeah, it's be like, I'm basically a unicorn. A lot of hotel salespeople don't don't make it in the tech space. I just learned that.

Celeste Berke [00:14:43]:
Because it's very Vantage. And and also it's 99 purse 9% inbound when you're in I don't what am I supposed to ask? I don't know. Don't I just talk about the hotel and the great things with you? Do not do that. Alright. What I always ask this, and thank you for talking to me about your leadership. It's it's awesome to see a female leaders in the SAS space, but also growing and mentoring a team and juggling a family. What is your sales edge? Tell tell the listeners.

Jen Suski [00:15:26]:
My separates me as a salesperson from all the other salespeople? I'm actually a hotel girl. Like I said, it's I'm a unicorn. I've actually been in this space. I started in housekeeping. I still and I tell this story all the time, but I still have the very first room key for the 1st holiday in I ever stayed at when I was 12 years old that I saved my allowance for to stay at because I thought only fancy people stayed in hotels, which is not, as I know now accurate, but I've always loved hotels, always. And I always sincerely want to help them achieve goals, whatever they may be with whatever I'm selling. So my 1st step whenever I moved to a new company is to talk to my friends in the hospitality space, get them to do a demo with me so that I can work that out. Like, is this something that

Celeste Berke [00:16:15]:
you can use? How would

Jen Suski [00:16:16]:
you use this? Like, that type of things. Yeah. Because yeah. I mean, like, ultimately, that's my goal. That's my dream is to help as many hotels as I can. And now that I'm not on property before, I was helping 1, the one I was working at, and now I can help so many more. So, I mean, it's really exciting.

Celeste Berke [00:16:34]:
And that's really interesting because I'm working with a company. Yeah. It's in a sales process, but they're just now taking a step back and having the team go out and talk to customers about the product. And I'm hearing this some from some, like, amazing BDRs and AEs. Like, the 1st step is just going out to talk to people. Talk to people who are that you would be selling into. Talk to existing customers. Like, get their voice as to what was going on because that's gonna help you to understand what the problem information is, what you help solve for, hear it from the customer voice, what was going on within the organization, and then those that came on board, how it helped them.

Jen Suski [00:17:13]:
And you can't get sales. Thought I was nuts. Yeah. They thought I was nuts because the very first thing I had them do was just to go out and call people and not sell to them. And they're just like, okay. I don't know what to say. I don't know

Celeste Berke [00:17:25]:
what to do. Don't sell. Because we have to

Jen Suski [00:17:27]:
Get to know them.

Celeste Berke [00:17:28]:
Breath, and there's so much pressure on

Jen Suski [00:17:31]:
what what

Celeste Berke [00:17:31]:
are you adding to the pipeline? What are the conversations? Are you moving it through the stage?

Jen Suski [00:17:35]:
And you're like,

Celeste Berke [00:17:36]:
I don't even know what what we're doing here. I need to reassess this because it's often shifting. I've been out

Jen Suski [00:17:44]:
of hotels for 5 years, so be really arrogant of me to say that I still knew what, you know, hotels needed. So it's really important for me to keep in communication with these guys to be like, okay. What's going on now? Because I don't know. I'm not there. I'm not don't have boots on the ground anymore.

Celeste Berke [00:18:00]:
Sure.

Jen Suski [00:18:01]:
So you gotta stay a part

Celeste Berke [00:18:02]:
of the community. And a big a big shift, obviously, after COVID with the customers. Like, things have completely changed. Priorities have changed. And if you come in talking about your product without truly understanding what is going on within that organization, not just the hotel, you know, site specific, but the ownership group or the management company or the brand at large, you're doing yourself a disservice to where you could put your foot in your mouth or potentially say something that totally isn't in alignment with where they are. So awesome. Thanks for sharing that. I love the commitment to customers and getting people to slow down, learn from the customer voice.

Celeste Berke [00:18:47]:
So there's a lot of sales advice that's thrown out there. I would love to hear from you a myth that you want to bust as far as something, like, we should do more of, do less of this, implement this? What would have sales Oh.

Jen Suski [00:19:10]:
That you have to do a 100 cold calls a day? Listen. I'm not against cold calling. It's a part of the process, but you can meet your goals with 10 cold calls a week the same way somebody can meet it with, like, a1000. It's not about picking up a list and just call call call call call. It's about, quality over quantity and recognizing not everyone likes to talk to you on the phone. Maybe they wanna chat on LinkedIn, like the aim days. And I've gotten so much business just doing that or emailing. Some people like it, some people are never gonna read your email.

Jen Suski [00:19:48]:
Some Some people really do like that phone call.

Celeste Berke [00:19:50]:
And I would say knowing your audience is very important as well. So, you know, I come from I'm a little bit older than you, but I come from the times of you would never text anybody. You would never do that.

Jen Suski [00:20:08]:
Oh, yeah.

Celeste Berke [00:20:08]:
So you have to know how to get ahold of someone. Calling a general manager really interrupts their day if they're not sitting in their office versus trying to find a way that you can connect with them either at the beginning of the day or the end of the day when it's a little bit more convenient just given they're typically running around

Jen Suski [00:20:27]:
No one peak check-in time is.

Celeste Berke [00:20:30]:
There you go. There's a good one. Don't call during peak check-in time. Alright. Well, I've so appreciated chatting with you today. Thank you so much for being open about what it's like to be a mom in that journey to becoming a mother, the silent struggles, and how you're open to sharing with other women about about just unconventional or untalked about ways that we arrive at this place called motherhood. And also your transition from property to tech, what that looks like, and then how to hold your team accountable, but are there as a support system for them as you grow this together so that they can feel comfortable and confident in order to learn. I've appreciated getting to know you.

Jen Suski [00:21:17]:
Yeah. Thank you for having me on here.

About the host:

Celeste, a self-proclaimed “Sales Growth Strategist” is a natural collaborator and partner to executives who easily pinpoint gaps in strategy and creates road maps to implement plans and achieve targets. Passionate about creating cross-functional collaboration, team development, and delivering results across top-performing teams. 

Celeste has over twenty-one (21) years of experience within the non-profit and for-profit arenas; holding both a B.S. and M.S. degree.  In her last corporate role, Celeste held the position of Regional Director of Sales and Marketing for a privately held hospitality management company overseeing 19 properties, a sales team of 50+, and $105M in annual sales. Her accolades include the Director of Sales of the Year award, 2x Manager of the Year, and being named 40 under 40 for the Triad Business Journal. Celeste also holds a certified sales designation from Marriot International and in 2023 was named one of the Top 15 LinkedIn Experts in Denver by Influence + Digest.

In early 2020, Celeste branched out on her own to scale a female-owned consulting and training business. Celeste holds the designation of Certified Gap Selling Training Partner with A Sales Growth Company and the Gap Selling Methodology. Celeste resides in Colorado with her husband and daughter.