Can professional B2B be outsourced? Mark Cox says yes, and he sits down with the person to prove it: Tammy Gillis, author of the book Room To Grow. Tammy explains how she developed a unique approach to mend the gap of B2B outsourcing, making it more targeted in addressing the client’s needs in the most efficient ways possible. They discuss why sales are more than just transactions and sales talk, but meeting people wherever they are. Tammy also presents the ideal attributes every great salesperson should have and the best approaches to building a well-rounded sales team.
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Getting Some Room To Grow With Tammy Gillis
Can professional B2B sales be outsourced? Good question. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show over the years. Most of the time, the answer was no, in my view anyway. Finally, we found a model that works. That’s why you can find this episode so interesting because we’re talking with Tammy Gillis. Tammy is the author of Room to Grow: Not Leaving Sales to Chance.
Tammy is also the Founder and CEO of Gillis Consulting and Training. They’re an outsourced sales provider to the hospitality industry and a very large one. What’s unique about their model is the one gap on most outsourced sales models is that the outsourcing firm does not understand the industry and the client as well as the actual host company. Tammy’s model fixes that because they have only got experts working on their sales team. They know more than many of their clients about how to sell professionally at the B2B level for hospitality. That’s the interesting part of this model we’re going to get into.
The other thing that’s interesting is although Room to Grow, Tammy’s book, is focused on the hospitality industry. It addresses most challenges and opportunities in professional B2B sales. One thing that struck me so much was how applicable this is to every industry in B2B sales. Not just hospitality. It’s a very well-written book. It’s concise but powerful.
We talk about everything Tammy and I, from the book to the outsourcing model to the importance of being relentless about understanding how to help your clients and prospects achieve better business outcomes. Our conversation was amazingly interesting to me, folks. I certainly learned a few new things. I hope you will too. If you like this episode, please like and subscribe to the show because that matters to us. It helps us get great guests like Tammy. Here she is, Tammy Gillis.
Tammy, welcome to the show. It’s so great to see you again.
Thank you so much. I’m a big fan of the show. Thank you for having me on.
Thanks for saying that. It’s such a pleasure to speak with you. I got to say I was super excited to chat with you for two reasons. First of all, I’m a huge fan of the book. Those who read frequently know, Tam, the way we do this show is I read almost everything out there. When I read these amazing books, I go after the author to see if I can get them to join the show and coerce them into the show.
One of the amazing things, the book we’re going to be talking about is Room to Grow: Not Leaving Sales to Chance by Tammy Gillis. Fantastic book. It just hit me. You are a perfect example of the reverse of the Mark Twain quote. I wrote you a long letter. If I had more time, I would have written you a short letter. You took the time and wrote the short letter, but it’s so well put together and so concise.
One of the things that’s very interesting, this isn’t a book just about selling in the hospitality industry. Although Tammy, I know that’s what you wrote. It’s a book about selling because the one thing that became so clear to me every time you identified an issue or a challenge or what’s happening in sales and we’ll get into it. You talked about it being applicable in the hospitality industry. We know with all of our clients, it’s applicable everywhere in sales.
It is. Any B2B sales for sure.
Looking Back
Tam, by the way, I’m not the only one who loved this book. “Filled with tons of rock-solid strategies and practical advice.” An amazing testimonial on the cover of the book, Joe Conrath. One of the biggest names in our industry gave a wonderful testimonial. The second thing we’re going to talk about, which is interesting. We talked about that a lot on this show, Tammy, is outsourced sales models. That’s what your business is. It’s outsourced sales within the hospitality industry and a very big flourishing business adding huge value to the clients you work with. We’ll talk about that as well. Maybe to start, what’s the short story on your journey? How did we get here?
First of all, thank you for that lovely introduction. When you’ve been doing it as long as we have, I don’t know if there’s a short version. I will say that I’m one of those accidental salespeople and I talk about it in the book. I didn’t grow up saying, “I want to be a salesperson.” Rarely does anybody even know what that is and what that looks like.
I went to school for hospitality but I still didn’t know what sales meant. I was out at a college, finished a contract position at UFT, and helped them in their events department. My professor said, “The Hilton Toronto Airport is looking for a corporate sales manager. I threw your name in the ring.” I was like, “I don’t even know what that means, but sure.” Talk about faking it until you make it.
I showed up and I got the job. Many years later, I’m still in sales. I can’t imagine any other profession and the reason I’m still here is because there’s a better way to do it versus when I was on-boarded 30-some years ago. I’m dedicated to the profession. I love it. It’s about people. It’s a skilled trade, but it’s not treated like a skilled trade and a professional trade. That’s why I love your show is because you bring on smart people who are dedicated to elevating the profession. I’ve been so fortunate. It was the greatest accident professionally to ever happen to me. I hope to be doing it to the end of my career.
You brought us so many things, Tammy, that are worth unpacking a little bit. Let’s go down a bit of a tangent, the profession. I came on Andy Paul’s show and he was saying he was looking for big ideas in sales. The question was, if we could start it all over, what would you do? He listed a bunch of things not working very well in professional sales. He said, “If you could start it over, what would you do?” I didn’t know the question was coming. It hit me and I went, “I’d make it a profession. You have to get certified and you need ongoing training like an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, a real estate agent, or a project manager. How is this any different?” What are your thoughts on that?
In the hospitality industry, and I don’t think other verticals are any different. Unless it’s big complex B2B stuff. They might treat it differently. Basically, are you a good talker? Are you good with people? Do you know your product or service? You’ll make a great salesperson. Those are all the wrong things to look for because we need to do more listening than talking. It is not about our product or service. It’s what our product or service enables the customers to do.
That’s what gets missed. Adnauseam salespeople are told whether it was many years ago or current state, to know your product, your service, and your competitors as opposed to what you’re buying or what the client is buying is and what you’re selling so go figure that out. It still perplexes me to this day that we think about transactional sales and we think we’re selling a product or service. It’s all about the mindset and how we onboard sellers and how I was onboarded with Hilton many years ago.
With Hilton, they were the best ten years of my professional career but it was about rates, dates and space, and transactional selling. Not much has changed sadly. It should be a profession because it is an art and a science. Especially with the availability of technology and data and all of these tools that should be together strategically with the fundamentals that never go away. It’s this convergence of technology and fundamentals that we rarely see that’s missing from sales.
It’s so interesting. There’s a perfect example. In the book, Tam, you say, “In hospitality, it’s about a personality, being able to talk and knowing your product.” We have SaaS people reading. We have manufacturing businesses and services businesses reading. We see the same problem everywhere in professional sales. You’re a CEO. Their version of it is you get blasted with emails that know nothing about you. They’re pitching a product and all they’re trying to do is push for a demo. In hospitality, we’re going to do a tour. We’re going to walk around and do a site tour. In technology, if they’re pushing for a demo and it’s talk and me. The worst first date ever.
There won’t be a second date. I can tell you that I get a lot of those emails from some of these technology companies. I use them. Respectively, I lock out the name and the company, but I use those in our training with our team to say, “This is how you don’t prospect. This is how you don’t rise above all the noise.” Who’s the connector in the translator between what they’re selling and how it’s going to help me? We need to be translators to translate the value proposition. There is such a tremendous disconnect that it gives salespeople a bad name.
Salespeople need to be good translators of value proposition. There is currently a tremendous disconnect here, and it gives salespeople a bad name.
You’re right. By the way, jokingly, I don’t do it either. I can’t do it, but I’d love to. We get hit three times a week by another sales training company trying to sell us sales training. We’re sales training. Our website’s not fantastic, but it screams we’re sales trainers. Somebody just looked at the website. Sell us anything else. Stop trying to sell us what we sell. That’s a perfect example.
By the way, this is one of the reasons I love the book. The book, although I’m not in the hospitality industry. In every concept, every principle that you share every idea, it’s so universal for professional sales in general. The other thing that’s so important is it’s so clearly laid out. This is one of the things that it’s the magic of this book. There’s so much on professional sales, whether it’s internet platitudes and ideas or there’s hundreds of books that are great on professional sales.
Many of them are very are either strategic or tactical or they’re very tactical on one idea. To help somebody who’s getting into the profession or somebody who’s in the profession that wants to recharge a little bit. Your book has done a nice job of giving a general overview of the things we need to think about that could have a dramatic impact on what we’re doing. There’s no question in my mind. Anybody in professional sales who wants to read Room to Grow, you’re going to pull something from this that you can apply to you in your business, in your industry.
Thank you so much. It was a labor of love. That’s for sure. Common sense, as you know, does not equal common practice. I will often hear, “It was such a great reminder of the fundamentals.” It goes to show that our mindset, if we’re not intentional about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We quickly go back to that. I call it Pitch Slapping. We’re pitch slapping. It’s a habit. It’s a formed habit that we have to exercise and fight against that current to feature dump.
Common sense does not equal common practice.
You lead to this so nicely in. By the way, your book is one of the easier more enjoyable books to read. The hardest book I’ve ever read, Tam, it’s a must read, but the most difficult book, you referenced Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. You talked about those habits, the 150 cognitive biases. That’s one of the things that’s so hard for behavioral change. I love the way you say that common sense isn’t common practice because human beings are hardwired to save energy and not think about what we’re doing.
We’re hardwired to keep doing what we’re doing. It’s Kahneman and Tversky. I always forget Tversky. It’s Kahneman and Tversky’s Nobel Prize-winning, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that take a pause. You talk about this in the Strategy Before Tactics, chapter four, saying, “Think about what you’re doing, then think about how to do it.”
We all default to just jumping in and that’s where we left this show, Tam. If nothing else, take a pause every once in a while when you read this and say, “Do a little start, stop, and continue for yourself. What’s working, we’re going to continue doing. What isn’t working, but it’s become a habit for us. Maybe we’ll take a pause and stop.”
What’s something we hear about on this show, if you’re going to invest the 45 minutes in reading, just take 1 or 2 things. Go, “I wasn’t doing that. I should start, stop, continue to try and break those cognitive biases that are so tough.” Tammy, before we get to the outsourced model, the structure of the book is a great chapter, A perfect storm. It’s written in 2021, right in the heart of COVID. Are you selling like it’s 1990-love it? Becoming a modern seller. Chapter 4, Strategy Before Tactics. Please, thank you.
It’s the why you’re doing it and not the what. Number five, the Sales Reality. We’ll talk about a few things there in a minute. Number six, Executing your Sales Plan. Number seven, All the Sales Leaders Out There, business leaders, and entrepreneurs, know what good looks like. You touched on that beginning in terms of hiring. What are we hiring on? What skills and capabilities? You do reference our friend Daniel Pink a couple of times in the book. We love everything from Daniel Pink. Final chapter of the book, chapter eight, Everybody’s in Sales.
It is the why of your business that matters, not the what.
As everybody knows, we reference Daniel Pink on the show all the time. One in nine people in a professional sales job or probably more than of the 8 and 9 who aren’t in a professional sales job, what percentage of their day is spent persuading somebody else to their point of view? Forty percent of their day.
Influencing internally and externally.
Hospitality And Travel
Let’s get into the timing. Tammy, given up all the industries out there, hospitality has to be the industry that got most significantly hit during the pandemic. It has to be.
It was devastating.
What was the timing? It was released in 2021. Were you starting this before COVID or did you get on it and use some of the time during COVID? Tell me about the timing of putting it together and then releasing it.
It’s so crazy. It feels like ten years ago because so much has happened over that four-year period. For people in hospitality and travel, airlines, event management, hotels, but rental cars, and travel agencies.
Ninety percent of the world stopped traveling the week of March 16th, 2020. Was that tattoo to my brain or what? It impacted us not only because we exclusively support the hospitality industry, but we lost 70% of our clients in ten days because they no longer needed us to sell for them because nobody was traveling.
Some clients were shutting their doors. They had a mass exodus. We’re losing millions of dollars a day in canceled bookings and future bookings. When they were going down their list and their P&L, they were saying, “What contracts can I cancel?” We lost 70% of our business in ten days and had to quickly say, “A good percentage, 90% of our business is in the US.”
The US did not shut down the same way Canada did. Thank goodness because that kept the lights on for us. We have clients in Texas and different states that still have travel. We had to quickly say who is traveling. How can we offer a level of service? There were traveling nurses, government organizations, and medical organizations traveling because of the pandemic. We had to let half our team go.
Fortunately, within four months, everybody was brought back with care. It was the most devastating, on one end, we’re letting half our team go knowing the impact it’s going to have on them. While trying to still find business for the hotels that remained in our program. It was an insane time. I thought about as we stabilized back half of 2020, everybody thought that this COVID thing was going to be six months and not two years or three years.
I started because I had time, although I was in the weeds and managing the day-to-day and trying to hang on to the business. I started thinking about how is our industry going to recover? Management companies and hotels let all their salespeople go. Big brands let 70% of their sales organization go. What is that going to look like when travelers start traveling again? Who are they going to reach out to?
There were a lot of things. That’s why the first chapter, the Perfect Storm, was so important because we were getting away with a lot as an industry. Prior to the pandemic because for ten years, we were making a lot of money. There were international conventions. Every Fortune 500 company had travelers, tour groups were coming in, and sports tournaments. Sellers on property didn’t have to look too far to find business.
They had a lot of incoming inquiries and they were very transactional. They were using different muscles. They got away with being transactional because there was more business than they could manage. When the world stops traveling and there’s no business. You have to go from farming to hunting and going after business from market segments that you’re not experienced in. That was a heavy lift for a lot of people.
I knew all of these bad habits because part of our company also trains people. Even when times were good before COVID, I was getting in front of people saying, “You’re transactional. It’s going to catch up. You’re getting away with it.” For me, writing the book and the timing, there was more of a sense of urgency for me to get this out, to help the industry recover. I spent a year putting it together. In fact, I thought, will it come out in time?
In 2021, we were still in the throes of COVID. 2022 was the year that revenge travel came back and here’s what happened. Travel came back before hotels had their teams in place. The travel came back and hotels weren’t ready for the big league. They weren’t ready for it. They didn’t have the people. People left the industry. Millions left the industry and decided, “This isn’t recession-proof. I can go make more money somewhere else and not be treated the way that I was treated over COVID.”
This, to me, was a recovery toolkit to help hotels get back on their feet. We’re still trying to get back on our feet. That’s the crazy part. We’re getting there, but sales teams are very much still smiling and dialing. I hadn’t planned on it, but it became very crystal clear to me in 2020 that something had to be done and I had the time to dedicate to it. I made the time.
Again, when you talk about that environment, that high-level, broad environment, and economic environment for hospitality. There are a lot of industries today, Tammy, experiencing the exact same thing. In the SaaS industry, for example, you say we’ve been getting away with it. The SaaS industry had venture capital and private equity money flooding their organizations with sales and marketing personnel.
Turn rates skyrocket. No one’s hitting sales productivity. No one’s hitting quote is anywhere close to it. Customers are feeling this impact because we have unskilled and overconfident people reaching out and wasting the time of buyers. Now the buyer is coming back and going, “I rather do most of this online.” A good portion of buyers say, “I prefer never to speak to a salesperson.”
They’re thinking of a root canal that engages with a salesperson.
This is this interesting thing where this question I was asked on another show seemed relevant, which is, “There are a few metrics that keep screaming at us. We’re not getting better.” Are we plugging holes or is there a way of looking at this in a different way so fewer people can become accidental salespeople? We have a different industry if you couldn’t fall into the job because you have a pulse and I need to fill a body on my inside sales team. Would it be different if I had to go through a course for a year or two and have some certifications? Do some ongoing training to maintain that certification.
Good Salesperson
Over time, not overnight, with the buying community starting to see us as truly the consultants, we need to be B2B successful. That’s two different things. It might end up in a different way but let’s keep on with the book because I want to get to the outsourced model again. Let’s take another one. We’ve run through the different chapters here, folks, but knowing what good looks like is still an important thing for everybody.
Whether you’re a salesperson reading, and thank you for doing so. When we talk about what good looks like, that’s what we all have to try and attain as lifelong learners. If we’re going to be in this profession, we can talk about what a great salesperson looks like. Tammy, you identified some great examples, by the way, in the book of what good isn’t and what happens in interviews.
What I loved about the book was you laid out amazing questions for an interview. Folks, grab those questions, whatever industry you’re in, and use them. They’re going to be helpful. Tell me about the attributes of a great salesperson in your mind. I met your sales team and your sales leader. They are great.
Thank you.
What do you look for when you go through building out your team?
For any organization looking to build a sales team, they have to be clear on what is the role profile. In our world, are they managing incoming inquiries? Again, this is very specific to hotels. Are they order takers and managing incoming inquiries? That requires a different mindset and a different skill set. Are they having to grow existing accounts? Are you hiring someone to do business development?
Business development, which is when you’re hunting for business. You need to be strategic. You’re looking at the comp set, where the business is currently sitting, what business you have, and what business you don’t have. How are you going to get to those decision-makers? That’s a very different skill set. For us, because we are a 100% remote team, clients are hiring us to do their sales and to outsource their sales to us.
We are not managing incoming inquiries. They can take care of that. They are not paying us and our skilled people to make a wedding booking. In fact, when they’re talking to us to say, “What can Gillis do?” I’m saying we’re not talking to brides. I’m not booking hockey teams. Let us go after the B2B decision makers that you may not have the experience or time to go after because it requires research, a business conversation, and an understanding of the value proposition. It could take twelve attempts to get on their calendar.
First of all, for those reading, what role and profile are you looking for? What do you need them to do? What do you not need them to do? Part of the challenge in our industry is if a general manager at a hotel, most of them have a heavy operations background. The seller reports to them. They don’t know what to look for and they think all salespeople are good at all things. They’re not. We’re not good at all things.
I have certain strengths when it comes to selling. Cold calling was never one of my favorite things. I’m great at other things. You have to be clear that you’re not getting a unicorn who’s going to be all things to all people. At Gillis, we need to have people who love the hunt, scrappy, resilient, and good investigators. They are following the clues. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together to say, “Why would this prospect benefit from hearing from me now? What’s going on in their industry?”
Jill Conrath calls it trigger events. What’s going on in their company that might be triggering travel? Is there a shutdown? Are they redesigning a new line for Toyota? There’s a bunch of vendors coming in. Are they hiring? Are they firing? What’s going on to cause travel? Those are trigger events. There has to be some sleuthing that’s going on as opposed to that transactional seller. That’s what we look for. We screen about 500 resumes a month.
Two full-time people in HR and with all due respect, when we first started many years ago, if someone applied and talk about knowing what good looks like. We have a good idea ten years later. If we thought, “If you were an on-property seller, you’re great. You can hide. You can hide being on property or you could hide being in a big organization.”
If your leader doesn’t know what good looks like, not being observed, not being coached, or you don’t have the right KPIs, it is crazy the transformation when people who make it on our team and we call it the 1%. They sometimes have fifteen years of experience and still, we are rewiring their brain to sell the way we need them to sell and to think the way we need them to think. Everyone on our team will say, “They have never been more trained and supported or they’ve never been forced and challenged to think about sales the way we think about sales,” which is a testament to our business model.
If it was easy and if anyone could do it, our hotels wouldn’t need to outsource it. That’s a long answer to your question. There’s so much to unpack there but knowing what good looks like, it depends. Everybody has to take the time to say, “What is the role profile? Are they scrappy? Are they competitive?” Here’s a question when we’re talking to folks. We’ll say, “Are you competitive? No. What part of sales do you love? I love relationships.”
How are you going to do that to people you don’t have relationships with? How are you going to get to that point? Tell me you’re a 12 at a 10 on the competitive scale and you like to win and you don’t like to lose. You’re not given up and not easily discouraged. Now, we’re talking about someone who isn’t going to be afraid of rejection when they make twenty calls and they get a hold of two people out of the 20. That’s a long answer. A lot of times, it’s gut. There’s a bit of science, but there are some gut checks that are usually pretty accurate.
First of all, so much again to unpack there. We’re going to get into it, but I love that Dr. Nick Morgan's book, Can You Hear Me? Apparently, we make impressions in milliseconds. Particularly, in an interview, we’ll make our impression of somebody in like 90 seconds or less. The rest of the hour, we spend finding data. That gut is your emotional decision on somebody and we can’t make decisions without the emotional part of our brain. A lot of it’s emotional.
In fact, unfortunately, there are some studies done with people who have had brain injuries that have damaged the emotional center of their brain, where the logical portion of their brain is still working perfectly. If the emotional center of the brain has been damaged, they need 24/7 care because they can’t make a single decision without that working. They can’t get dressed in the morning. I forgot where I read that.
I found that so interesting when we think of how people make decisions. Circling back here, you talked about a couple of things that were so important there. One was, Tammy, you talked about how we have to have a business conversation and not a sales conversation. That leads to your chapter, which I love, Are You Selling Like It’s 1999 but industry business acumen.
Forget what my product is. What’s going on with the business of the person I’m reaching out to? We did a great exercise with a training client where they were targeting a large organization. We’re going after the CEO there. We spent six minutes. We asked the individual, what are you going to do? They said, “I’m going to reach out.” We said, “What point of interest do you have?” They shared one.
We had about nine people in a room spend six minutes each finding data that they could leverage. We went around the room and said, “Name two things you found that we could leverage to get through the door.” It’s unbelievable what we found in six minutes. Not an hour. Not an hour and a half. It’s not one of my economic papers of trying to get into university cramming. In six minutes, we can find a point of interest that plays on that theory of reciprocity and they understand it’s about them.
You reference Dale Carnegie in the book again. All your references, we love. Dale Carnegie, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to make people interested in you.” A beautiful point that you raise in the book. When we come back to this.
The other thing is, Tam, this is an important one. We have been in markets where you could hide in professional sales. You sold for Salesforce in the early 2000s. You were doing high-end order-taking. If you sold for HubSpot after 2012, you were doing high-end order-taking. God bless. I’m glad everybody had a good time.
The challenge you have now though, you may be unskilled, overconfident, and tough. It’s like me in the kitchen. I have no idea what I’m doing, but for some reason, I believe I’m a master chef. It’s hard to teach someone like me. I don’t think I need to learn. I’m dropping pans, breaking things, and flipping stuff that’s not supposed to be flipped. I have no idea why I’m like that.
The pizza delivery guy’s on his way just in case.
Outsourcing Sales
He’s on speed dial all the time but these are important things for us as an industry. These are the things in the aggregate that start to lead to the fact that the buyers have this impression of us. This is what we’ve got all of us got to improve the performance and the professionalism of what we do. Tammy, it is a nice pivot into your core business model. I’ll be honest, we’ve talked about outsourcing sales a couple of times on the show.
Until I came to your business and understood your business, I wasn’t a fan of it at all because for the most part, the market’s made up of the major outsourcing of a sales function is outsourcing of SDR work, sales development work but it’s in the tech sector. What happens is the organization builds a farm of individuals doing this, but they’re not your model.
That model is they get a client. It could be anything in technology, then they hire new feet on the street. They try and ramp them up with industry and business acumen but it’s never as fast as if the company did it themselves. There’s frequently a lunchbox let down is what we’ve seen. Now there are always exceptions. You crack the code the opposite way because you found industry hospitality that can never be outside of the top tier largest organizations. They can’t build a scalable core competency for doing this in-house.
Instead of having 1 or 2 people do it off the side of the desk, you went and found industry professionals who go through a rigorous interviewing process because they’re experts. Not only do you deliver the function to the client, but you’re also delivering expertise and knowledge because they have no idea how to do this in some cases properly because they don’t have the size and scale to get there. Was that intentional? Did you spot this intentionally, or was it the passion of what you grew up doing?
Many years ago, I spent time at BlackBerry. I left the industry. I said, “I’m burning out in hospitality. I need a break. I’m going to join a high-tech company. I’m going to slow down.” The joke was on me because this was 2007. I spent seven years at BlackBerry, left and came back, and knew I wanted to get back into hospitality.
The first year and a half, I was training. We still do training. I went back to my roots and reached out to clients I had worked with. I spent a year and a half training for a large brand to franchise model. They would bring me to the regional meetings and their annual conference. I built out three sales certification programs for the front desk, sales folks, and their general managers. I was embedded with that organization, which was amazing.
Every time I went out to train a general manager or an owner, they were a limited-service hotel brand. Limited service, meaning 80 rooms or less, no restaurant for the most part, and no meeting space. It was for that transient guest. Eighty percent of those hotels did not have property sales people going after B2B business. A lot of people say, “What are you selling in a hotel?” For your audience to know, what’s not a build it and you will come model.
There’s Expedia, Trivago, and all of those what we call OTAs third-party sites. That can fill rooms but that B2B business is Sunday to Thursday if you’ve got a construction project in the backyard. If Toyota’s there or a major company is there. There is something at that location that manages travel that you need to negotiate their travel program with.
I went to our client and said, “You keep paying me, which is wonderful to come and train your owners, but they can’t execute when they go back on the property. They don’t have the time and the expertise.” I’ve worked on this model. This was imagined many years ago. It was still to this day, some owners and hotel GMs say, “You have to be in the market. You have to get a desk at a hotel. You can’t sell remotely,” but then COVID happened. We proved to the world that you can sell anywhere.
COVID-19 proved to the world that you can sell anywhere.
I took this model to Best Western. That was my big client at the time. They have 2,400 hotels in North America, over 4,000. I said, “If they’re not making money, you’re not making money. You can only use programs, but they’re not activating it.” They gave us eight of their underperforming hotels as a pilot and six months later, we had 8X or 10x, the ROI, and improved the model. That’s how it started.
We were building the plane while we were flying it if that makes sense. We’re like, “We better get a CRM. We better bring on a director of ops to start building out all these SOPs.” It didn’t start out strategic. I was in the weeds every day managing the business until we got to a point where you got to bring in the directors of sales, the BI people, and the sales ops people on the team. Now here we are many years later with what I feel is a best-in-class sales model because we’ve got incredible leaders whom you’ve met who oversee the execution of our sales folks.
We’ve got the sales operations people like Nikki and her team who are making sure we’ve got the reporting, processes, tools, and accountability. HR to make sure that we’re constantly filling our funnel with good candidates. It’s been an incredible year of continuing to get better and prove this business model. It started out, “I hope this can work,” to us having over 220 hotels in our program and having a strong, great, I’m trying to sound modest, some brand recognition in the industry that I’m proud of.
Everything’s about the result you provide for a client, 8X to 10X a result for a client. That’s the only way a business is going to succeed. We have to provide results. First of all, no need to sound modest. I’ve met you at a leadership team. They’re dynamite. It’s just fantastic, but this is where this outsourced small because this comes up a lot. There’s nothing but entrepreneurs out there.
Most entrepreneurs don’t grow up in sales. They’re going to swap if their application developers, they create code, want to productize it and sell it or they’re an engineer, come up with a product, have a manufacturing firm, and want to sell it. No one grows up as an entrepreneur in sales. They go through years of what the hospitality industry goes through, where they’re churning through salespeople. They don’t understand why, but they’re the avatars you reference in chapter two, if you build it, they will come.
That applies to a hotel. It also applies to most CEOs of technology companies because they love their product. They’re flabbergasted that not everybody buys their product because they know the nine reasons it’s better than the next one. The best product never wins or rarely wins. It’s the best sales organization wins.
This model where you’ve cracked the code by saying, “We found this niche where they can rarely do they get scale. They need the help so we can outsource it but we understand their customer.” We already grew up knowing their product but we know their customer. That’s what these outsource SDR farms never get to. They start to learn the product a little bit but they’re new into business.
They don’t understand the corporate client. They don’t have that business acumen. They can’t be viewed as a consultant reaching out. They never get to that level of trusted advisor. It’s too hard. It’s a lot of churn and it never had seemed to worry about this. it’s the first time I’ve seen it, but obviously you folks are killing it and power to you.
Thank you for that. I would say we are exclusive to hospitality. This is all we know. We’ve been approached throughout the year by other companies saying, “Will you do outsource sales?” There’s enough business and hospitality. That’s my passion. If I’ve never sold for another industry, I don’t want to go and get distracted from a pure financial point of view.
We live and breathe hospitality and I can relate to it as the CEO. I know what good looks like. I don’t know what good looks like for other industries. The people that we attract are best in class. Part of the scale that you talk about is one of the value propositions. It’s at 8X to 10X. We’re a team of 55 people. The infrastructure is also what our clients are buying into. It’s not that one seller who’s giving fractional sale support.
They’re getting my time. They’re getting our senior director’s time, getting access to tools, and analytics, an entire system that would be so cost prohibitive. This model allows them to run their business, take care of their employees, and take care of their clients while we keep their sales funnel flowing with new accounts coming in.
We take that responsibility very seriously. I couldn’t fake it by selling for another industry. There’s no other industry that would light me up as much or motivate me as much. That’s why we have this real niche business model because we know who we are. We know why we do it and who we do it for, which is critical.
By the way, the other thing that firm gets is they’re getting to the collaboration of 54 other people on the team. I’ve been in the room with your leaders. They’re highly collaborative. We believe in the power of teamwork and collaboration. If managed and facilitated well, the power of the experience, the insight, the market knowledge, the understanding of the trends in the industry, bringing that to each and every client. Shocking. Frankly, that’s why people pay McKinsey or Monitor or Boston Consulting Group. Whatever strategic advisory firm is. They’re paying for that market knowledge and insight.
It’s true.
You bring it to bear with insight in terms of what’s going on with 250 hotels. That’s a lot of knowledge.
It’s a lot of knowledge in terms of here’s who’s traveling, what they’re saying, and the future trends that we share. Also, all of those accounts, all of those prospects when a client, let’s say in Peterborough, Ontario is we’re onboarding a hotel there. They have ABC accounts in their backyard. Chances are, unless they’re one-off accounts that only reside in that market. We are working with that account across our portfolio.
We know the decision makers. We’re shortening the sales cycle and we’re doing all the stuff that they don’t want to do. One thing I’m so proud of, we are going through our quarterly business reviews. Our directors of sales and our leaders who you’ve met, they have individual pods. That’s how we’re structured. They have up to ten area sales managers and 60 hotels they manage. For our clients that have multiple hotels, we have QBRs.
I am blown away. We have prep calls for the QBRs. I attend as many QBRs as possible. The value and insights that our directors of sales are bringing to the QBRs, the level of care and accountability that our team brings to say, “We’re protecting your investment.” It is something that doesn’t exist. I beam with pride because this is over and above their day-to-day job. Our DOSs are putting in a ton of time, but I see the retention. Our client retention continues to increase because they trust us with their investment. They see the results and they see the care and the communication.
The lesson learned for me and for everybody reading is what are we all doing to take care of our clients with this level of unnatural focus and intensity because all of our businesses exist only because of our clients. If we’re not as focused and relentless to bring that much value to our clients every day in every conversation, somebody else will.
Someone else will. That’s my healthy paranoia. I say, it’s healthy paranoia. I don’t know if my husband would agree.
That’s right.
I have healthy paranoia about, don’t change for the sake of it but we need to be constantly elevating and making sure that we’re bringing the best to the business every single day.
Closing Words
I love the quote ar the beginning of your chapters, by the way. You quote Mark Cuban, “The one thing in life you can control is effort.”
I love Mark Cuban.
I love that quote. When we started to think of everything we talked about, having forbidden the pandemic and all these different things. First of all, you so much have that entrepreneur’s mindset where something happens, it doesn’t matter what happened. You’re about the future. There’s always this opportunity. Every crisis is an opportunity and even in the heart of it, you were going, “We’re going to come out of this and these people are going to be understaffed and this is an opportunity.”
Tam, when we think of what we’re doing every day as professional salespeople, there’s a massive opportunity. The opportunity is to stand out. We can stand out if we go that extra effort to understand, even take from now, business acumen. What are we watching? What are we reading? Which shows do we listen to elevate?
Room to Grow is the book to read. What are we reading and learning so that we have more insight and knowledge that we can bring to our clients and prospects so that they can run better businesses? Good things will happen for us if we can do that. That might be a key thing, Tam, to leave in the show notes. The one thing in life you can control is effort. We’re coming to the top of the hour, so thank you so much for joining.
This was so much fun. We could talk for hours, as we always do. I have about twenty books I have to read, thanks to you and your show because you bring on great guests and so many good recommendations. Thank you for all your work in elevating this profession. I learned from you every day.
Great guests like the one we have now. Thank you so much, Tammy. By the way, Tammy, how do people learn more about Killis and you?
I’m on LinkedIn and that is the one social that I dedicate time to simply because our product is an Instagram and Snapchat. All that good stuff. I’m an active contributor there and GillisSales.com if you want to learn more about what we do. I love to write. I love to write articles and do shows and use LinkedIn to develop best practices to share because we still have a long way to go. We still have a long way to go as a profession and as an industry. One show at a time, we can start to change the mindset of people and hopefully, turn around the reputation that the profession has, unfortunately.
Room To Grow: We still have a long way to go as a profession and as an industry. One podcast at a time, we can change the mindset of people and hopefully turn around the reputation of the profession.
Beautifully said, Tammy. Thank you again for joining. Thank you so much for joining the show. We do this podcast to increase the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. Our belief is that if we can do that, we’ll improve the lives of professional salespeople. That’s our mission with the show. This show is super fun, but it needs to be of value to you and you’re the folks who can let us know if it is.
Please send your comments about this episode and all of them to me. I’m MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That’s my personal email that I check. We love constructive criticism. Let us know what we can do to make this more valuable for you. We will respond to each and every suggestion we get. Thanks for making them. If you liked this episode and love this conversation as much as I did, like and subscribe to the show. Please tell your friends because that’s how we get great guests like Tammy Gillis. Until next time, thanks everybody for joining. We’ll see you next time on the show.
Important Links
About Tammy Gillis
Tammy is a recognized leader in the hospitality industry in sales and sales leadership and the founder and CEO of Gillis Sales. She disrupted the traditional hotel sales model in 2014 and launched a Dynamic Sales Solution providing remote sales support for hotels.
Tammy launched her sales career 30 years ago and has led high performing teams with Hilton Hotels, Blackberry and her current team of 45 sales professionals who provide sales support to over 200 hotels across North America.
She has trained thousands of sales professionals, hotel owners, general managers, and front-line associates, earning her a Training Excellence Award from the Institute for Performance & Learning and recognized as One of the Top 100 Most Inspirational People in Global Hospitality & Travel.
She has a passion for improving not only the skill set but also the mindset of sales professionals to succeed in this digital age of selling to modern buyers. Believing that sales is the life blood for all organizations, her mission is to make sales accessible and achievable for all hotel owners.
Tammy’s engaging and genuine approach helps her clients break ineffective sales behaviors to become trusted advisors with a client centric approach to selling that drives results and differentiates them from the competition.