Rebekah Panepinto is a consultant, public speaker & host of her own podcast ‘The Rebekah Panepinto Project’. In this episode, we dive into the importance of a personal brand, advice for generative AI integration, RFPs & much more. Where is artificial intelligence headed & how can it make YOUR job easier? Why are platforms like LinkedIn SO significant to creating trust & relationships in the industry? Watch now!
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Episode Summary
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From Drumming to Digital Transformation
Rebekah’s journey is anything but conventional. In this episode we discuss her career beginnings in the music industry, aspiring to be a rock star in Nashville. However, the harsh realities of the music business led her to pivot to a career in technology sales, after playing a show for 10,000 people earning just $150. This transition allowed her to find a new creative outlet through her podcast, the Rebekah Panepinto Project (which you can access here), where she explores the intersection of tech and personal branding, as well as talking to impactful leaders across all industries.
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The Rise of Generative AI
Generative AI is revolutionising industries by automating tasks and creating new opportunities for efficiency and innovation. Rebekah discusses how AI’s rapid development has impacted her work and the broader tech landscape.
“It feels like AI is coming in fast, but if you look back, there were breadcrumbs all along the way,” she notes. The advancements we’re seeing now are just the beginning.
In the face of AI’s rise, Rebekah encourages staying educated and not feeling threatened by technological advancements. She highlights the importance of using AI tools to enhance productivity and maintain a competitive edge.
“You’re not going to be replaced by AI but by people using AI,” she asserts. “Getting better at prompt writing can save time and energy, making you more productive and competitive.”
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Building Trust and Relationships in Sales
Rebekah emphasizes the importance of building trust and maintaining long-term relationships in sales. She shares her strategies for engaging with new organisations and overcoming challenges in the sales process.
“Personal brand is big. It’s essential to build your own career independent of your company,” she advises. Rebekah tells her about the importance of investing in relationships that don’t have an immediate return. Someone you can’t do business with today might become a key contact in the future!
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To find out more about Rebekah, check out our full episode – available on all your favourite channels. Now including YouTube!
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This article summarises podcast episode 111 “Trust Building in Sales & Generative AI Evolutions” recorded by CX Insider.
Written by Octavian Iotu
[00:00:00.74] Octavian: Welcome back to the CX Insider Podcast. On today’s episode, we’ll be talking to Cloud Data and R strategists, as well as podcast host Rebekah Panepinto. We’ll be talking about the rapid growth of generative AI and its impact in the workplace, the challenges faced when dealing with new organisations and sales, as well as her podcasting journey and the importance of building your personal brand. Enjoy the episode, and if you do, subscribe to our YouTube channel for more content. This podcast has been brought to you by ACF technologies global leaders in customer experience management solutions. Now let’s get into it. Welcome back to the CX Insider Podcast. I’m your host Stephen, and I’m joined by my co-host Greg. And today we’re joined by Rebekah Panepinto. So can you tell us a bit more about yourself, your career and what it is that you do?
[00:00:50.18] Rebekah: Absolutely. Yeah. So excited to be on the podcast today and chat a little bit about the fun journey that I’ve had. So the interesting part of the background is I actually had a first career in music. So growing up I was a drummer and moved to Nashville to be a big rock star. Had a lot of fun with that until I got my heart broken by the reality of the music business. I tell a lot of people. I had one really impactful show when I was 21, where I played for 10,000 people and I got paid $150, and I was like, yeah, this might not be it for me. So I’ve been selling some form of technology ever since, which has worked out really well for me. But I also on the side run my own podcast, which is a really cool creative outlet for me since I don’t drum as much as I used to through my podcast, I’m able to get a lot of creative needs met, stretch myself creatively. So it came out of situations that people similarly experienced during Covid, where you were locked in your apartment, your house, whatever, not many places to go and you still have to do your job. So how are you going to be successful selling from your living room and building new relationships? You had to get creative and there was a boom.
[00:02:01.58] Rebekah: I think of a lot of other podcasts at the same time who had the same idea, but mine was also still very personal, and I had relationships with folks, especially across the whole US, not just in New York, where I was full time in that season. And I wanted to continue to connect with these people, and I wanted to continue to meet new people, and I wanted to hear what they were doing with tech and find opportunities to help them with their digital transformation. A lot of people were being pressed to accelerate digital, especially in that window, and so I wanted to be at the forefront of it and be able to continue to build relationships really organically. It’s been really cool to see how when you interface with somebody in a podcast scenario, you build this trusted advisor relationship and just a different type of relationship than a I’m trying to sell you something. So it’s been really cool to have those kinds of relationships form and grow, which has had me continue to choose to invest in spending my time on the show and building further relationships. And even, you know, I’ve had people on the show that were cold outreach, cold emails, hadn’t met before. And together we built, you know, a beautiful piece of content together.
[00:03:05.51] Greg: From your perspective, when you’re approaching a wide audience, how do you approach selling from the perspective of engaging with a new organisation that maybe you don’t understand fully? What’s your sort of approach to getting to know them? And maybe, let’s say, the challenges that they face?
[00:03:22.58] Rebekah: Yeah, there’s a few different scenarios that can take place, and one that is super helpful in really getting to real sales conversations fast is by going through the channel that is Google. So I spend a lot of time serving Google reps on the cloud and the collaboration side as a customer of their own, and asking how I can serve their wider book and what they’re looking to accomplish with their customer base. And they typically can point me to the highest Google adoption companies, people with the most pain and people most open to a partnership scenario where we’re helping them on on the licensing and the services side. So that helps you get really quick into like out of, you know, a thousand accounts. Somebody may have the top five that even want to talk to me and have a sales conversation that I can potentially help. Then once we get into that conversation, there’s a lot of qualifying myself, like, you know, a sales rep at Google is awesome. They are great at taking care of their book, but they have different incentives than me. So what they think could be a slam dunk for what we’re doing at Onyx may just be an okay scenario. So typically when I get in there, then I’m further qualifying that it’s really a good fit between the two of us so that I can execute on a helpful sales process that’s win win for everybody and a helpful sales process that’s win win for everyone is typically not an RFP.
[00:04:44.60] Rebekah: We all know and hate RFPs. I think the vendors hate them as much as the customers do. Quickly the relationship becomes just so transactional. Not a lot of people, I feel, leave that scenario feeling like it was a win win. So more often than not, I’m looking for a. That’s more of a true organic net new greenfield scenario where I can help them understand how we’ve had this history of 30 years with Google, how we’re a really good partner first to Google, to making sure they’re accomplishing their goals. But then we dive into how we can help them accomplish their digital transformation, whether it be around cloud, around collaboration, around what’s coming with AI. And we talk through those different pieces, and I’m able to bring amazing folks from different practice units and different backgrounds who are subject matter experts to help bring positivity and conversations and encouragements to actually form real opportunities to move the needle forward for our clients.
[00:05:39.57] Greg: Aside from RFPs, what are other challenges that sometimes you face when trying to engage a new organisation and maybe get them to open up? Yeah.
[00:05:50.82] Rebekah: No. It’s true. It happens more often than not nowadays because so much research can be done before they even meet you. So they could have seen something on your website, seen something on LinkedIn that made them think you can’t help them. And so then they ignore your emails and don’t want to talk to you. And that’s where the soft skills can really come into play of building a solid relationship with that other rep that’s involved in the account, the Google rep, who you hope has a amazing relationship they’ve been able to build with this customer, considering they’ve been in front of them longer, that can help open doors for myself. But then from the creative element, that’s where my podcast has been super helpful, is asking folks like this that maybe are like, ah, I don’t really need your help right now. Like, well, come on my podcast. Let’s just get to know each other. I want to know your business problems, even if they’re not specifically in an area I can solve for and make you feel comfortable that I’m not just transactional here, looking to take down, you know, the first 100 K deal that I find.
[00:06:49.59] Rebekah: But I really want to understand your business problems, your personnel, the challenges you’re having in this economy. And, you know, since Covid era just drastically changed everything for us. And as you’re willing to come in and build a relationship and, and just have people feel trusted between the interactions via emails and calls in the first, you know, six weeks or so. Then typically once you start a sales process, because a sales process isn’t, I don’t feel really start in a first call. The sales process starts when there’s a mutual understanding that there’s a problem that can be solved here. But if you’ve already done a lot of this build to that point for six weeks or so of good emails, good follow up, good conversations via zoom, meet teams, whatever, then it just goes that much more smooth. Because the reality is, even though so much of AI is coming into play, robotics, you know, people want to walk around with goggles on their face. Now they’re still humans and they want to be treated with respect and know somebody has their back and was actually there to solve their problem, not just make a buck.
[00:07:50.34] Octavian: Diving further into RFPs, what’s Rebekah’s perspective on where organisations are going wrong, and what advice can she give to organisations wishing to make them more successful?
[00:08:00.51] Rebekah: I think if they’re able to separate the dollars and cents from the true offer. Yes, typically, you know, they’re not even able to see the full offer and all the value adds and all the ways that different partners and groups are going to approach a problem, because before they even get to that, they’re just looking at the difference in price, then it always reverts to them making the decision based on that price. So if that part is taken out of it, maybe like the last thing that’s brought and it’s either a go no go based on price. That would be more helpful because then what I see is companies can’t even hear your full offer because they can’t see past that. You’re the second most expensive when it comes to the transactional piece that they need. So if there is an interesting way that there could be a line between those two things and it didn’t, you know, have 70% influence into the the final decision on what the price of, you know, this actual skew was then I think it could be a different outcome. It just becomes so quickly a race to the bottom when you’re putting six people against each other who just want to play the price game, and then you’re rewarding, unfortunately, the wrong things when you then select them based on that criteria.
[00:09:19.01] Greg: I think that’s a really good piece of advice, and I think it’s also important to highlight that if you’re speaking to an organisation about procuring new technology, you know, your objective is not to be the most expensive or to make the organisation pay the most amount of money. Your view as a as someone in that sort of negotiation is to try and get the organisations to shake hands in terms of short, medium and long term. And like you say, price is a factor, certainly an important factor, but it’s not everything. And if organisations can split that apart in terms of really what they need, what they want and what this vendor technology is capable of, and of course, combine it with the right price point so that commercially it makes sense for them as a business. I think that would be good. I agree with you. Sometimes they’re too intertwined where you almost can’t see the difference because price is just always playing out. And it’s such a shame because you see organisations making decisions, quite frankly, that you know, are going to be poor decisions, but you’re only going to know that two years from now when you have to go back out to tender and, you know, things like that.
[00:10:22.28] Octavian: So how do you build trust in the sales industry, and what advice does Rebekah have to maintaining long term relationships within that?
[00:10:29.78] Rebekah: So in today’s world, personal brand is big. Some people don’t want to worry about it. Some people don’t even have a profile picture on their LinkedIn. But it matters. We live in a social media environment, and you’ve got to be thinking of your personal brand independent of your company, because, for example, I’ve worked for a company that now is out of business. So it’s literally a blank, you know, profile image on my LinkedIn. Well, if I had only built my personal brand around that company and, you know, was there till that situation, that would not have helped me. That company was not going to determine the future of my career. And so having a personal brand that’s independent of your company is how you build your own career versus building a career on the back of, you know, 30 years with the same company, because that just doesn’t happen anymore, especially with how volatile the market is today. So personal brand is a big piece of it. But I love your question around maintaining relationships for the long run. And I think of specifically a handful of customers that have been repeat customers for me. And that’s because I wasn’t only sitting there looking at the what’s in it for me, what’s in it for my company.
[00:11:39.11] Rebekah: I was truly in the same way that I approached sales today looking for the win win scenario, and if it wasn’t going to be a fit, I wasn’t going to help the customer and the RFP. I could see that like, yeah, somebody else had done it better than what I could offer based on the constraints of my company and our maybe relationship with the Hyperscaler, etc.. I’d be the first to say like, you know, yeah, it’s maybe it’s not a fit, but, you know, I’m in it for the long haul. I want to see your career grow and like, maybe we’ll do business again in the future. And that’s back to building relationships really naturally through, like the creative community. Podcasting. Networking too, is like, it’s not going to be, you know, I meet you in two weeks later. We’re doing a multi-million dollar deal. That’s just not how life works. But if you’re willing to invest in relationships that don’t have an immediate return and and cede the win win scenario or say, hey, you know, I probably can’t help you right now. You guys, you know, love the Microsoft tech stack, which more power to you.
[00:12:34.13] Rebekah: But maybe in the future things will change and you have a generation coming out of college that needs a ton of Google across your org, and you’ve got to figure out how to coexist. Google and Microsoft. Well, now I’m in a situation I can help you. And those things happen with the way that the environment is today, with jobs and how people are moving about and how fast technology is advancing and a blink of an eye somebody you can’t do business with today, you likely can in a year or two from now. So it’s not worth like not investing in a relationship there and and not trying to find a win win scenario for the current moment, but also be thinking about how it could be a win win in the future. And whenever I’ve had a repeat customer like, it just made me extra happy because I was like, wow, this is cool. Like especially in a certain situation that my company maybe didn’t do right by them on what I sold later. I can do right by them, and I can put a situation in place to help them be successful in the new environment and new way that we’re being able to transact business.
[00:13:29.84] Greg: From a relationship perspective. I think that’s such that’s such a good point, is that at some. People change roles, they change companies, and they could be in a different situation. If they have that connection with you, for example, then they know they’ve always got someone they can turn to. And I think like most people, people that work, especially in like, let’s call it the sales arena, they’re very open to giving free advice and helping wherever they can. It’s normally quite in their nature, to be honest as well. Like you want to help people, you want to help organisations. It’s normally actually a big driver. I think the relationship part is really key, but also just from a value perspective, you know that that individual is hopefully going to be there if and when you need them, even if it’s just for some advice. You know, I’ve done that myself over the years and I’m sure you have too. And and, you know, you’d happily do that at any opportunity.
[00:14:20.50] Rebekah: I feel like there’s a time to be aggressive and there’s a time to be empathetic. And the key to being successful in certain situations is finding the balance between the two. And we miss it. You know, sometimes I’m too aggressive, sometimes I’m too empathetic. But finding the balance between it and coming back to like thinking about this person’s scenario and that they’re trying to provide for their family and they’re trying to get promoted and, you know, personal objectives in a scenario, the closer you can align to those, the more that it does become that win win environment for everyone.
[00:14:49.09] Octavian: If we move on to the rise of AI, I was curious how you’ve seen generative AI adapt and transform throughout the years.
[00:14:56.74] Rebekah: Yeah, it feels like it’s coming in fast, but if you look back, there were, breadcrumbs all along the way of how Gennai was especially being introduced to different communications. So it’s funny when you see these big events where it’s open AI and Google announcing this new product that’s going to change the way you work. It’s like, ah, I’ve been able to summarise my emails in a different way for a while now, but now there’s a name to it. Now it’s now it is a skill set. So that’s been interesting to me to be like these massive announcements. And it’s about to change the way everybody works. And, you know, we’re not going to need XYZ employees anymore. It’s like, I know we’re excited, but just not yet. But the advancements of it and where it’s going to be in like three years, based on what we are seeing now, is what’s extremely exciting. I have a great presentation. I walk a lot of my customers through as we’re running what we call Gemini Trials, which is a trial of the Gemini product Google uses within the workspace tech stack. We show them how, if they’ve been using Google for the last five years, how Google’s been kind of dropping hints and giving pieces along their advancements in the workspace tech stack that hagenii and they’re already familiar with different ways. I mean, spell check, for example, that’s AI for a database to be able to say, oh, you spelled that wrong and correct you. Hey, that’s there. We’ve been used to that. Now it’s on steroids, which is really cool. Now instead of spell check, you can say, write this paragraph for me and it can make it happen.
[00:16:23.32] Rebekah: So it’s really cool that it’s just reached this point where now it’s being accelerated from an investment perspective and from an attention perspective. But if folks were staying on top of technology as it was being introduced a little bit more subtly, then it’s not going to be as shocking as people think for shuffling up jobs and complicating people’s ability to work. And I think it’s only going to get better and more exciting from here that if you are staying educated and not threatened, it’ll make you that much more productive, that much more competitive. They say, you know you’re not going to be replaced by AI, but people using AI. So personally, I’m trying to get better at prompt writing, get better at like relying on the technology because I forget it’s there sometimes because I’m so used to doing a lot of manual things and, you know, sometimes you feel rewarded in the grind. Like if you spent three hours writing a piece of copy, it’s got to be better than if you spent 20 minutes writing a piece of copy. Not necessarily true. Save time and energy. Use these tools available to you to help accelerate how you spend your time to have positive outcomes and positive content. And it’s only going to make you better for that, and allow you to have more of a balance between what you’re trying to accomplish in that work scenario and what you may be trying to do in other businesses or in other areas of your life.
[00:17:41.62] Greg: Rebekah, I just typed into ChatGPT for tell me about Rebekah Panepinto. Oh no, and it knows you better than you know yourself. It gave an even better introduction to you than you did at the start of the podcast, which is really interesting. So you are famous because I assume you’re not the only Rebekah Pinto in the world. But when I asked it about Rebekah Panepinto, It Came Up With you describes you life as a professional drummer. How you live. I lived in New York. Wow. Interesting.
[00:18:11.89] Octavian: That is crazy to think. Rebekah. What is some advice on how companies can learn to apply and integrate AI into their businesses?
[00:18:21.10] Rebekah: So the integrate piece is easier than you think, because the companies that you know and love and are already using are doing that part for you. What you need to be focused on is adoption. Well, you need to focus on is your people. And thankfully, a lot of these groups have programs for trials and are able to help with the change management and walk you through that. Heck, I’ll spend 30 days or so with the customer for free, helping them with use cases and prompts, and understand how to get different business personas to adopt this generative AI product in their work. It’s less and less about needing to be like integrating it, because, hey, in a lot of situations with zoom, Google Slack, you can just click like, yep, gen AI features, boom, but they’re not going to do you any good if your people aren’t using them. So it’s making sure your employees and the people that you work with are aware and take the time to again, not be threatened and go get educated and learn how to leverage these different prompts and different things they can do to make their job better. Building in that change, management, that awareness, that excitement is way more on the soft skills side than the hard skill side because you’ve got, thankfully, these large companies making the investments to be, hey, here’s your AI assistant with Google Sidekick.
[00:19:38.00] Rebekah: Zoom has their own, Microsoft has Copilot, so eventually it will be a situation where everybody is licensed. I could see it even just becoming a part of the skew. You don’t pay extra for the generative AI features, you just do now because it’s new. But if your people aren’t using it, it’s kind of like sometimes when you’re paying double for SAS, like you’re paying for slack, even though most people use the chat in Google and that situation there is waste and there’s a dual payment just because you haven’t gotten your users to adopt one technology over the other. And so as you get involved further in helping people with their business processes and helping them be able to use AI to advance their jobs, it’s getting them to actually just sit and think about case studies and get familiar and used to it, build that muscle, build that skill set, and they’ve got to be interested and passionate to go that route, to then have it actually be a productive outcome for both parties.
[00:20:31.74] Octavian: Generative AI is moving at incredible speeds right now, evolving every day that goes by. But what is the trajectory of AI? Where is it heading in the next few years?
[00:20:42.27] Rebekah: I think of it in three years that it’s going to be cool. It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to help us all do what we do just a little bit more productive. Then I think about it in like ten years from now, and it can scare you for a second. Ten years from now, I think it could be good enough to go to meetings for you and take notes and tell you what you need to do, and you get to focus on the other 10% tasks of your skill set, and not all the rest that spend so much of our time doing administrative activities that are just a lot of cases exhausting and I think will eventually become unnecessary. So I’m excited about, yeah, the ten year version of it, hey, it’s going to be able to like go to meetings for us. And folks in the OpenAI community are already assuming in the next 10 to 15 years, there’s going to be the first billion dollar, one person company, because you just won’t need 5000 people to make $1 billion anymore. So that’s going to be a really cool time to be able to scale and even like I think about it now, if I could just have a $2 million company, just me, like that’d be pretty life changing. I don’t think we’re far from it, but you have to be the person that’s focused on those skills, figuring out how to leverage and put together all these pieces to actually be productive and not let fear slow you down from the fact that, like it is coming, it is advancing.
[00:21:58.20] Rebekah: And, if you really figure it out in these initial years, you’re going to be miles ahead at the three year version and the ten year version for sure. Now is a good time to then be getting into the weeds of it, understanding and just learning to let it help you on tiny little tasks that save you time. Like right now, if I can save 30 minutes a day with an AI, that is a win. I could see three years from now, two hours a day. I could see ten years from now I work an hour a day. You never know where it’s going to come, but it’s only going to make productivity that much easier and allow you to get better and better at that 10% of activities and skill set that you really are good at, which if you do things right, not any, not that all of us have this figured out, I definitely don’t, but you can find that that 10% is your most fulfilling pieces of your work and your purpose, and then you get to spend more and more time doing that piece of it all that really gets you out of bed and excited every day, versus all the other things that have to get you down to, you know, finally, the moment of that fulfillment and that purpose.
[00:23:04.23] Octavian: Thank you to everyone for listening. I’ve been Octavian and I hope you’ve enjoyed the discussion. Let us know what you think of this episode by carrying our conversation on LinkedIn at CX Insider Podcast. This episode is brought to you by ACF technologies global leaders in customer experience management solutions. Let’s get into some quick fire questions. What is your favorite thing to do in your spare time?
[00:23:26.94] Rebekah: Run Spartan races. The nice thing with the Spartan community is it’s about health and fitness and how the sport makes you better. This past year I raced Montreal, Greece, and next, next year I’ll race in Abu Dhabi. So open these cool experiences to like, see the world and meet interesting people and spend time with the world Championship winners so that you can be like, excited and be like, yeah, I want to do better than top seven next time. But I still got to rub shoulders and be a part of that whole scenario and race right alongside them, which is really cool.
[00:23:54.51] Octavian: Are you a morning person or a night owl?
[00:23:57.57] Rebekah: Morning. I love 5 a.m. it’s crazy, but I love 5 a.m. it’s quiet, you know, the email slows and I can take care of me for the first, you know, 2 or 3 hours of the day with my health and fitness mentally, physically and make sure I’m really ready to tackle what the day brings me.
[00:24:15.30] Octavian: That’s really interesting. So you you wake up.
[00:24:17.37] Octavian: At 5 a.m., what time do you go to bed then?
[00:24:20.25] Rebekah: Early. So typically I’m always staying on the Eastern Time zone, so I typically try to be in bed by 9:00 eastern so I can be up by five eastern. And then on with the day. Makes me pretty lame on the weekends, but it’s great for race schedule because you usually got to be on the course by 7 a.m., but it’s where I found my balance, my circadian rhythm. And, I just feel like I’m starting from behind if I’m not up earlier, if I, if I sleep in, you know, 7 or 8, I feel like I am way behind on the day already.
[00:24:53.13] Octavian: Like the day is already gone.
[00:24:55.17] Rebekah: Like I already have, you know, 100 emails and where how am I going to catch up?
[00:25:00.42] Greg: Rebekah, what would you have done if you ended up in a career as a professional drummer? You’d be playing late nights.
[00:25:06.36] Rebekah: Oh, I was lame back then too. I always is like, show was over at 11. I was like, bye, guys, I’m out. I gotta work tomorrow. I wasn’t ever, you know, burning the midnight oil in that scenario. And I think my band appreciated it.
[00:25:21.75] Greg: If you could play in a band just like, you know, go and perform one show in any band, who would it be?
[00:25:28.47] Rebekah: I would play for Keith Urban in a heartbeat. Beat, and most of his band has been with him ten plus years. So that tells you something.
[00:25:35.53] Octavian: Wow. Very, very loyal.
[00:25:37.15] Greg: Who’s your dream guest on your podcast? Would it be Keith or would it be someone else?
[00:25:43.03] Rebekah: I think it’d be Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO. I think I’d want to have somebody or like an Elon Musk, somebody that that has three more years of knowledge of knowing what’s coming than I do.
[00:25:58.36] Greg: As someone who coaches drumming, how have you seen that skill set applied in your corporate career?
[00:26:06.31] Rebekah: More than you would think. Surprisingly, I’m so thankful for what I learned initially playing drums and then like, being the only girl in the band. I learned a lot of things that were, not noticeable back then of How to Hold My Own in a man’s world and how I can do anything a guy can do as good, if not better. And drumming, especially being on stage in front of thousands of people, just brings an element of confidence that you need to then also own a sales call or lead a room or, you know, encourage folks on your team. You have to have that confidence and that leadership that comes from being the leader of a band. And so I heavily rely on what I learned through music, and I try as much as I can to pass down playing drums early on in people’s lives so that they also can gain confidence from it. And especially for a woman, understand, like they can do whatever a guy can do so that we see more women coming into tech. We see more women coming into leadership, because if they’re learning these things early, early on building their confidence, it doesn’t have to be behind a drum set, building their confidence by being, you know, a dancer or a singer or, you know, whatever it is, that they can assume a leadership role when they’re 12, that’s going to make huge changes in what their life and their career looks like in their 30s, because those skills were learned at a young age, and they’re very transferable to them being typically the only woman in the sales call and being somebody who needs to lead a situation that may be a little scary. You step up and own it, because that muscle has already been trained from an early, early age, and now it just gets stronger every year.
[00:27:40.78] Greg: Do you have any advice for women starting out in technology today?
[00:27:46.27] Rebekah: Yeah, find a mentor. And it doesn’t have to be a female mentor. Just find somebody who feels like. Understands what’s going on in your life and can encourage you and help you see it from a third person’s view, from a view outside of the direct interaction. For me, a lot changed in my leadership ability and my career when I hired an executive coach, and that was actually a situation where I was, you know, having my company pay this individual. But people don’t have to be paid to want to invest and care about you and mentor you. You can find those folks by just asking people to coffee and just finding people who are in your corner and invested in seeing you be successful, and just feeling like you have one person that has your back, can really change how you address a situation and how you step back and process even how to interface with an individual or a situation.