Bridging Strategy and Ground-Level Customer Feedback
In approaching the 13th edition of the Vacation Rental World Summit, we’re releasing a series of interviews to leaders, key players and highly motivated people in our industry whose companies make a deep impact in our space and will be present at VRWS.
The aim is to get you some insight into these leaders and the company they founded, manage or work for, as well as getting some behind the scenes on their thinking, their motivation and their drive.
Birgit Wirth
- For thirteen years at Pewag you sold snow chains to militaries and international organisations, a highly technical, safety-critical product sold to institutional buyers. What from that world of selling into procurement processes and safety requirements actually carried over into selling smart locks to short-term rental operators?
At first glance, military procurement and vacation rental management seem worlds apart. But at their core, both buyers are obsessed with one thing: risk mitigation and zero-downtime reliability.
When you sell traction chains to defense organizations, you aren’t selling a piece of metal—you are selling operational continuity in extreme conditions where failure is not an option. Short-term rental operators view access control through a remarkably similar lens. A failed check-in or any access issue where guests don’t have a seamless experience entering their apartment directly impacts satisfaction, reviews and creates unnecessary operational friction.
Once property managers see that you understand their operational risk rather than just showing off hardware features, the sales conversation shifts to long-term trust.
- You joined Nuki as Business Development Manager in September 2022 and became B2B Lead within two years. What happened in that stretch that got you there so quickly, compared with the pace of the industrial sectors you came from?
Throughout my career, I’ve always operated in international sales. When I joined Nuki in Business Development, I loved shaping the strategic vision, but I realized how much I missed the direct, day-to-day dialogue with our partners, learning about their real operational pain points on the ground and solving them together.
My drive has always been to build strong, reliable partnerships and deliver solutions that truly move the needle for our clients. In a fast-moving scale-up like Nuki, you can react to customer needs instantly. I bridged the strategic insights from BizDev with direct customer feedback in active sales, helping us deliver immediate value to property managers.
When you focus relentlessly on customer success and building trust, sustainable growth naturally follows – and that shared momentum accelerated my transition into leading the B2B team.
- Nuki’s core pitch is retrofit simplicity, a smart lock installed in minutes with no drilling, rather than a longer list of smart home features. As B2B Lead, what is the hardest thing to convince a property manager of when the sell is fundamentally about ease of installation rather than a flashier feature set?
What our clients love about Nuki is that it’s retrofit—you don’t need to replace doors, negotiate with landlords, or hire expensive technicians. In the short-term rental market, where time and flexibility are everything, being able to equip an entire portfolio in a single afternoon without tools or structural changes is a game-changer.
The main challenge is simply showing property managers that “easy to install” doesn’t mean sacrificing professional reliability. Once they experience how seamless the setup is and how much friction and cost it eliminates, they realize that retrofit simplicity isn’t just a convenience—it’s the fastest, most scalable way to digitize their operations.
You’ll have the opportunity to meet Birgit directly at VRWS in Lyon
Not Yet Registered for VRWS?
