Jackie Friedman Talks Mentorship, Skills for Success, Growing With Intention and More

Jackie Friedman, president of host travel agency Nexion Travel Group, is an esteemed industry leader and a champion of travel advisors, even winning a TravelAge West Excellence in Leadership Award in 2022. Friedman has been part of Nexion since 2004, when she joined as vice president of U.S. operations. In 2007, she took the role of president. 

Under Friedman’s steady leadership, Nexion has grown its ranks to 6,100 advisors, all of which she is happy to shepherd. Once a travel advisor herself, Friedman considers Nexion advisors as family; matching them with the tools they need to grow their business is her top priority.

With the help of her colleagues at Nexion, Travel Leaders Network (Nexion’s consortium) and Internova Travel Group (Nexion’s parent company), Friedman led the annual CoNexion conference in New Orleans this week, welcoming advisors and suppliers to the summit with pride and enthusiasm. A record-breaking 525 advisors were in attendance, and a celebratory energy was in the air. We sat down with her during the event to talk shop, from her own experience with mentorship over the years to the must-have skills she sees in successful advisors.

You were once a frontline travel advisor at a brick-and-mortar agency in Toronto, back when pamphlets were a primary advertising tool. Things may look different now, but is it important that you’ve “been there,” and that you’ve done that work?

There's no doubt that what the advisor of today does is way more complex than what I did, because they wear so many hats: the business owner hat, the marketing hat, the administrator hat and the travel advisor hat. But understanding what they go through is critical, I think. It gives them confidence that I, as a leader, get them, and that I empathize and understand the challenges they face. 

But it also helps me — to think about what more we can do to help them be more successful. At Nexion, we don't have a single employee who sells travel. Every employee that works for our team is there to support our advisors and help them sell their travel.

What traits do you see in advisors today that you think helps them find business success?

First of all, they need to like working with people. They need to be great listeners, and they need to really understand what consultative selling is all about. A plan to acquire and retain customers is critical. They need to be good researchers and have attention to detail. They need really good organizational skills and the ability to prioritize.

Then, they need to be creative in going out there and finding new customers, because that's probably the No. 1 challenge that most advisors have, particularly when they're new.

I tell them they have to know — and the order of this could go either way — who they want to sell to and what they want to sell to them. If you have no access to luxury clients, but you want to sell luxury travel, you're going to struggle; those two things need to align. And they will need various online and offline ways to grow their customer base. So really, they have to approach it as an overall entrepreneur, as a business owner.

That’s not a short list, by any stretch. But many of those qualities are ideal for other professions, too. When Nexion advisors come from other fields, how prepared are they for the travel industry?

There are some transferable skills that people bring from other jobs, yes. We have a number of advisors who either are or were teachers. We have nurses, or people who were in healthcare. Some are still nurses, but they may work three 12-hour shifts, so they have the other four days to run their travel business. One of the things I find really rewarding is when those people collaborate with the population that has been in the travel industry for years. They bring different sets of skills to the table.

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Most people cannot start off doing this work full-time, and part of that is just the time frame in which we get paid. Say you come in, open your travel business and make a booking that day. Great, but you're not getting paid today. That's why more advisors are moving to fee-based [work], so at least they have some compensation.

Some people will look down their noses at hobbyists, but I think everyone is a hobbyist, in the true sense of the word — they have a passion for travel, they have a passion for people and that’s fine. A lot more advisors start part-time than don't, and for some of them this is a retirement career.  But I will say that they can't underestimate what it takes to start a business and ramp it up.

Did you ever have a mentor, and do you see Nexion advisors seeking mentors? Is mentorship important, in your experience?

I think it is critical, and I think most people are going to have not just a mentor, but mentors. Call them your personal advisory board, call them whatever you want, but identify people who you aspire to learn something from. Someone might be great at marketing, someone else might be great at planning or helping build a group business.

Early on in my career, I was introduced to an organization that still exists today called Menttium. It started out as being a mentorship program that matched women mentors with women mentees. They did quite a detailed assessment and they paired you with someone who was a good fit for you, but they were in a different industry, so they gave you a different perspective. 

I was a mentee, and I worked with the vice president of human resources for a large company. During the pandemic, when I had a little bit more time, Menttium reached out to me, and I was a mentor for a mid-level manager for a credit card company.

Any good mentorship is mentee-driven; the mentor can't drive the agenda, the mentee has to drive the agenda, and they need to know what it is they want to accomplish.

Some of the things I learned from that experience is that any good mentorship is mentee-driven; the mentor can't drive the agenda, the mentee has to drive the agenda, and they need to know what it is they want to accomplish. They have to have a goal or goals, and those goals should be very realistic. You have to be very clear about what you're looking for, and you have to be committed. The mentor also can't be the one who schedules the meetings. Again, it has to be mentee-driven.

I’ll share a related story. In a lot of these chat rooms and Facebook groups, you might see an advisor say, “I have clients looking for an all-inclusive property, what would you recommend?” And that kind of annoys other advisors.

It's a perfect example of how, if someone wants to learn something from others, they have to be a little bit more prepared. If that advisor instead said, “I have clients in their mid-30s; they're active, they are foodies and they love being on the water, so a beach is important. I’m looking at this property, this property and this property. What do you guys think?” Most people would be more than happy to help and mentor that advisor because they're prepared and did the qualifying work. But you have to do the work.

At CoNexion, there are lots of opportunities for both suppliers and advisors to be recognized for their hard work. Can you talk about the importance of giving — and getting — recognition?

When I worked at Sabre, we did a series of assessments, and the one thing that was true of anyone in sales is that they are motivated by recognition. It could be financial recognition, it could be a pat on the back, it could be an email. Some like recognition that’s more private. And when you are part of a large network, you don't want people to feel like a number. We want them to be goal-driven, we want them to strive to be as successful as possible and we want to recognize them when they do that.

There are some people who will always achieve sales awards, but others contribute in different ways. That's why we came up with other awards, for people who help other advisors, or who do a great job with their social media, for example. I might feature advisors in a newsletter. We just want to find different ways to make that person feel special, and to motivate and inspire others. 

We have 6,100 advisors; I don’t know all of them, but that’s within their control. Some really engage over the years — there will be people today who come up to me and say, “I want to be on that stage next year. I want to win that award.” And they will, and I love it. 

You mentioned that statistic: 6,100 Nexion advisors are in the ranks now. Will that number continue to grow, and is there such a thing as becoming too large?

We're not playing a numbers game. There are agencies out there that let people sign up without even talking to them or vetting them, but I see that as just spinning on a treadmill and not going anywhere. We do want to grow, but we want to grow intentionally. 

We want to make sure that people have the right intent. I don't think there's a number that's too big, as long as they’re all engaged. They have to be willing to put in the work. I always tell them: “Start small, learn a few things, sell those and then you can expand from there.”