Episode 032 : Be Your Industry Influencer with Jane Anderson

Jane Anderson is a Personal Branding and Presentation Skills expert. She is a communication expert with over 12 years in personal branding and LinkedIn in profile development. Jane works with experts in their field to grow their businesses and increase their leads, her clients include Virgin Australia, Cisco, Leggo, IKEA, Rio Tinto and Origin Energy. Jane has been featured in Business Insider, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Courier Mail and Marie Claire and is the host of the number 1 ranked iTunes Podcast, The Jane Anderson Brand You Show. Jane is a nominee for Telstar Business Awards for 2016 and a mentor on Thought Leaders Business School, helping clever people be commercially smart. Jane has been endorsed by LinkedIn as one of the top influences in Australia and New Zealand; she is also the author of 3 books including Connect: How to Leverage Your LinkedIn Profile for Business Growth and Lead Generation in Less Than 7 Minutes per Day.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • How do you feel about customer service/ customer experience on a global level?
  • From your book, what are some of the top things that will help business owners to grow their business, to leverage and understand their business and how customer service can help their business and get more leads and more customers and will they see results?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
  • What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
  • Where can our listeners find your information online?
  • What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Jane Anderson state that when she was growing up something that she has always been interesting in was the world of business but while she was in high school, her very first job was in retail and she worked for a company called Mavis Shoes in Australia and Mavis Shoes is a family type shoes store and they have branches all over Australia. She started working for the Mavis Shoes brand when was she was 14 years old but the keeping was that the Mavis family owned the Mavis brand and it was a big iconic family in Australia and they sold the company and moved on. She started in retail and remembered how the experience was with customers and how she was allowed to have a customer by herself for the first month. They had to have somebody with them the whole time, the standards of training was high but it lead her down the path of really starting to become interesting in personally branding businesses so the Mavis name is still known in Australia, they are 3rd and 4th generation retailers and she has since gone on to work with other industries like State Government, Roads and Transport but she kept coming back to retail, she spent about 15 years in retail, she was a manager. She did a marketing degree but have always loved customers, she loves being able to make them happy but she worked with the Mavis family for 12 years and one of the things she found while working with them is that what drew people to the business was because everybody had a story about the family, everybody knew something about them or they knew the daughters and what she notice was that the family had a strong reputation in the community and they were very well respected and her job was to make sure that their values of customer service that she adapted those and did things in the same way as if they were in the store, she went on to be a area manager for them. She then went on to work for a super retail group, Supercheap Auto in Australia, it is the fastest growing retail companies, they have just over 10,000 staff and she was the Learning and Development Officer for them. She always knew she would go out on her own, it’s something she has always been committed to is customer service. She grew up in a place called Lismore in Australia, which is laid back, she moved to the city when she finished University because she just wanted the jobs there and she has gone on to doing other things.
  • Jane Anderson stated that on a global level from what she see and talking clients is that she thinks there’s not one way to do things anymore, there are so many channels the way you access customers and particular now, what’s the digital platform that matches the face to face customer experience. She stated that she was talking to someone the other day and they said, “the only reason why I on Twitter is make a customer service complaint because if I can’t the answers, they’ll soon answer me if I’m on Twitter”, so the customer service experience she thinks is a lot more transparent than it use to be in the past. If somebody has a bad experience, it’s not that hard for us to go and find out, people make comments on Facebook pages and Twitter, so the digital foot print as part of your customer experience in your business is something she thinks people don’t always think is much. She stated that the other thing is about evolving and changing, so if you look at the retail industry, something that they have noticed in Australia and it’s been in the media, is that retail businesses are being extraordinary slow to adapt online shopping as part of their experience, so a lot of Australian shoppers have shopped overseas online because the can get it cheaper and so Australian retailers suffer because they are not offering the customer experience that people want, so people will shop overseas. Those 2 things, the impact of digital social media, businesses evolving and changing fast enough because it’s the ones that edge all, who can move quickly if they look at thing like Instagram or what people are able to sell and create the customer experience and integrate that, it’s just not walking pass the shop front anymore.

Jane stated that the challenge is that the customer is driving the direction of the experience, not the businesses and it depends on the kind of business you are in but she thinks that 1 of the challenge is being able to know when to listen to customers and when not to, she always thinks of that Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Sometimes it’s that balance, it’s not necessarily playing with the popularity contest. They’ll say, I need you to look at what’s trending and stop marketing around what customers or what people are talking about and what’s trending but the problem with that is that you’re just diluting your business because you’re focusing on what people are talking about what they want but sometimes it’s about being comfortable that what you’re talking about is actually about what people need and you have to be comfortable that you might not be popular, you might not be everybody’s favorite but if you’re following what everybody is interested in, you become commoditize, so you have to be very careful that you can still stand out even if customers are wanting it and everyone’s following what customers want. Sometime you have to actually go in the opposite direction.

  • Jane stated that when she first started her business, she is a sole entrepreneur and have a team of 1 staff member full-time and rest of her team are contractors but one of the things when she first started and she left corporate business life was that she had some money saved and she thought she was going to go out and start her business and the first year she lost about $30,000.00 in google advertisments and search engines optimization and it wasn’t that anything was wrong with those products, they are fantastic but she spent it on the wrong person and she was a little naïve and this person said that they were an expert but she might have well just given the money away. When that happened she had a choice, she had either go back to job or she had to find a way to make it work with zero budget, so it forced her to start to learn about LinkedIn a little more, it’s free and she can go and start reaching out to people and contacting them and that was in 2009. At the time she was also writing profiles for her clients, so they were getting jobs, and branding people and what happened was that she used LinkedIn to help grow her business and that was how, she learnt from someone in the United States of America about how the algorithms work. She is also productivity. The book was written for people who are time poor, who just really need it to work for them when they need it to, when they are trying to grow their business and what are the activities they need to work on that will get the growth. There are thought leaders, experts in their fields she has worked with and she generally says, “you can get your turn over up to the $300,000.00 mark just purely through LinkedIn before you start your website.” She stated that LinkedIn is extraordinary powerful and what it did for her at a time when she had no money and she had to try and work out how to grow her business, it puts you in the drivers’ seat as to hoping that you will get an enquiry on your website.

Jane stated that a client who is a sole entrepreneur, her name is Rachael Burke who lives in Australia and is a Sales Expert and she came to her and said, “I’m not really good at lead generation but I’m really good at selling, so I just need more customers.” So what she did with her was to show her the formula and how to get it to work and she increased her sales by over 66% in 3 months, so that’s in the hundred of thousands of dollars. She does LinkedIn for lead generation for large organizations as well as small ones and sole entrepreneurs. Jane stated that in Australia, they have a business which is a big superannuation and superannuation in Australia is like money you put away for your retirement and they built all the LinkedIn profiles for the staff and for the financial planners for the business and what she got them to do was, they have a change of legistration in Australia so it was a great time to educate the market on some of the changes because nobody was educating the market, she was out looking. She said to them that they need to run webinar, they need to got out and educate some of these clients and they got 500 new leads from that webinar. That was purely through leveraging the profiles and that was about 50 staff that got their profiles built. The opportunities that are in there but the thing is with LinkedIn is that, she find most people will come to her and say, “I’ve got a LinkedIn account but I have never achieve any results from it.” and then she’ll ask them what their profile say, there are often be no content in it at all or she’ll ask them how often they have reached out to people? What have you said to them? What have you invited them to? What’s your content plan? And they don’t have any of that, so LinkedIn doesn’t make clients magically appear, you have to go out and find them but you’ve got to have really good collateral and they make a decision about you in 3 seconds. You have to make sure that all your collateral and profile is so nice and polished and sharp and that it matches how amazing you are in person because we only have 3 seconds for them to go “wow, this person knows what they are doing, this person is amazing, I have to talk to you.” To have a profile that really works, like making sure it turns up in search results as well as having that impact when they see you. For just a simple 3 seconds, that’s how long they look at it before they move on and have a look at somebody else, so they have to make sure that they make their job really easy.

Jane Anderson stated that people need to shift their attention now onto the other person, so you’re looking for what’s the common ground or what the purpose because the other person is asking themselves “why are you offering to connect with me?” so you’ve got to be able to answer the “why”, so if you’re reaching out and for example, she was reaching out medical financial planner, if he just looked at her profile and say, “why is she offering to connect with me, I don’t understand.” She explained to him that she does a lot of work with doctors, she helps them with lead generation but she helps them who are going into specialist training programs and she said to him, “I would love to catch up with you, I think there’s an opportunity for me to perhaps add some value to your clients, if not, that’s totally fine but here are some links, you are welcome to check out what I do and I would love to catch up with you for coffee one day and see what I can do to help you as well.” And so he met with her, so it all started from there and you’ve got to focus, look at their profile, what is it that they do and you have to address, “I notice this on your profile or I notice that you do this type of work, I notice that you’re in the same industry, I do this type of work or I help people like you in this space, so I thought I’d connect.” Jane stated that what happens is that just because you are ready to sell, doesn’t mean that the customer is ready to buy. So when you reach out to people, people have got to get to know you so they are going, “hold on, I haven’t even met you” and it’s a little like dating. She recalled she went on a date with a guy once and he turned up with a bag pack and she said to him, “have you just coming from the gym?” and he said, “No, you never know, things might go alright” and she thought he was joking and he opened his bag and there was a tooth brush, he had a change of clothes, his undies. She stated that LinkedIn is a little like that, is that sometimes we turn up with a bag pack, we’re ready to move in together, start this relationship and go in whole but the customer is saying, “hold on, can we just have coffee first, who are you?” So we sort of scare people and that’s when you hear people say they just get harass by sales people. You have to connect, be liked, friendly but then you’ve got to let people get to know you through your content, Mark Port who wrote the book, Book Yourself Solid said, “you have got to earn the right to sell.” And the problem is that most people don’t earn the right and then they scare people away. You can then ask for the value, you can ask for what you want based on the value you delivered. So in other words, if you have given enough, you have done enough content, if you kept visible enough, if you build enough trust, now you’re ready to go and ask for what you want. One of the things she does with clients is that she will look at how much value they have given to their audience because what they do is done nothing, they have given no value and they will say to her, “I want to be able to grow my business on LinkedIn but it’s not working.” But are not giving their audience any value, so you can’t go and ask for what you want because you haven’t earn it yet. You can do that in less then 7 minutes a day.

  • Jane shared her concept of people buying you, her experience working with this family from she was 14 years old, people’s connections were so intertwined. Jane shared back then the only way people really knew who you were was if you were on TV or something or if you are in the newspaper. Now, Social Media has heavily leveled the playing field so if you leverage your name and identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that you bring to your customer. Jane says thought leaders will at times come to her and say there is so much content out there already about for example productivity and Jane believes there is only one of you and so people deserve to hear your unique views on the subject – your experiences, your voice, you lens, your interpretation and your insights. Your Social Media profile, particularly something like Linked In offers great opportunities for a small business owner or soloproneur that is leveraging their own brand – you own your own profile, you can add agility, personality and so much more which is a threat to larger companies.
  • Jane Anderson shared how she stays motivated every single day – Jane thinks it is important to be really clear about your purpose and what you want. Jane shared she thinks that motivation really hits you when you have a choice at 2:00 am in the morning and you have the choice of going to bed or finishing that last bit of work because you really want to do it and get it done. Jane says she believes that it is in those moments that your motivation will either work for you or against you and it is in those moments that purpose is really important. Jane says some other factors that really keeps her motivated is that she is very particular about the people that she works with – she chooses to work with thought leaders and experts in their fields as they inspire her. She further stated that if they bring the best to her and inspire her then she can bring the best to others and inspire them. Jane also shared that it is important to find a group that you can belong to that are similar to you such as an industry association etc. and then Jane said there is also the basics such as eating well, get enough sleep as these activities help to make you more productive and efficient.
  • Jane shared the one website, online tool or app that she absolutely cannot live without in her business is LinkedIn as a Social Media platform but the one app she cannot live without is actually an app that she created. Jane spent some time as a Productivity Consultant working with some real large corporations, she did a lot of work helping CEO’s and EA’s how to work really well together and what she found working with the two set of persons was the speed of communication between going to meetings and being on the run. Jane said she was looking an Concur, which is an IT company that looks at the on-the-go economy and how there is this shift to doing things on the go. Jane said the app she has created is called “Memo-Mailer” and it can be accessed at memomailer.com and it is available on iTunes. Jane stated the way that it works is holding down the button in the app – say what you have to say and then the app will email the memo to your Inbox. Jane said sometimes ideas come along at really inconvenient times and this tool really captures those things. Jane stated that she built the app with her colleague Dermot Crowley, who is an expert in Productivity and he has written the book Smart Work, which was recently released and hit Best Seller in Australia. Jane said that’s the app she definitely cannot live without.
  • Jane shared the one thing that is going on in her life right now that she is really excited about is a piece of work that she is working on to further develop her Linked In engagements with clients which will be called the Lead Generation Indicator. The tool is specifically designed for people who are experts in their field and will help clients identify 12 activities that will grow your business even if it is from scratch with absolutely no clients. A complete package for business owners.
  • Jane shared a quote that she has on her wall and sees all the time during times of adversity – “If you are going through hell, keep going.” Winston Churchill ***Jane says she feels that this is a quote that she believes is in the trenches with her when she needs to hear something real and authentic.

 

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