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Navigating the Customer Experience

Join host Yanique Grant as she takes you on a journey with global entrepreneurs and subject matter experts that can help you to navigate your customer experience. Learn what customers really want and how businesses can understand the psychology of each customer or business that they engage with. We will be looking at technology, leadership, customer service charters and strategies, training and development, complaint management, service recovery and so much more!
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Now displaying: December, 2016
Dec 27, 2016

Joshua Latimer felt his job as a banker for JP Morgan Chase to start a cleaning business in Michigan which he eventually grew and sold to a California based cleaning conglomerate in 2015. Now he’s living in Costa Rica with his 4 kids and wife where he helps small business owners from all over the world understand the power of business systems and automation and the freedom that they can bring. Joshua is the founder of www.automategrowsell.com, an online training platform for small local service businesses as well as www.sendjim.com, a follow up automation tool for busy professionals.

 

Questions

  • What is your Zodiac sign?
  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • What prompted you to move to Costa Rica?
  • Why is it important in a business, especially if you’re going to deliver a quality customer experience one that’s exceptional, why is it important to have systems and how does those systems help to maximize on your customer experience?
  • Can you explain to us about what you do in automategrowsell.com, in terms of your online training platform?
  • On a global level, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience?
  • How do you stay motivated every day?
  • What are some important considerations for an entrepreneur or an online business owner to be successful?
  • 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?
  • If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business?
  • 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

  • Joshua Latimer stated that he thinks he is a Scorpio but he hasn’t put in a lot of time on that totally being true. He stated that he was born November 18th. Joshua shared he is not sure the traits of a Scorpio, however, a lot of pain and suffering has helped to mold him.
  • Joshua Latimer stated that he has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, he was the first one in his family to be an entrepreneur so when he started his first business he was 18 years old and his parents went on vacation and when they came home, he had used their Credit Card to buy 14 candy machines and their whole garage was full of candy machines. He had no discipline, he had no real focus or wisdom or knowledge in business, he just had the desire for it but he got a lot if push back from friends and family saying, “What are you doing?” “Go get a job” “This is crazy, just be a normal person” and he kind of cave to that pressure for many years like a lot of people have or is still doing, going to work and doing the thing that you’re not passionate about because it’s what you’re suppose to do. He did that for awhile but then his wife got pregnant with their first child, he had his “Come to Jesus” moment where he said, “Alright Josh, deep down you know you’re a square peg in a round hole and you know you want to start a business.” He felt like it was a now or never at that time, so he decided to start a cleaning business and his mother was so mad at him that she didn’t talk to him for a week, she was so freaked out that he was going to start a business rather than having a “safe and secure job.”

Yanique asked if was the same business that he sold to a California cleaning conglomerate in 2015. Joshua stated that yes, it was and that it’s a great business, it’s a repeat service, there’s a high margin and it’s a niche service, it’s a good business but it’s tricky to scale. One of the reasons it is so hard is because you’re inside peoples’ homes to have the right systems and protocols, when you have dozens of employees and you’re doing tens and thousands of dollars in revenue a week or a day sometimes, it’s very tricky to keep that thing tight enough to where it’s operating at a high level going in and out of peoples’ homes, it’s an intimate thing and that where the tricky part is to scale a cleaning business.

  • Joshua shared that he was born and raised in Michigan, never really been anywhere and then decided to move with his wife and kids to Central America. It was a couple year process and he wanted his kids to know that the world is a big place; he wanted his kids to be bilingual and to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them. He wanted them to take intelligent risks and start businesses and do things and live a big life because that’s who he is and he wants to pass that on to them because the world is a big place. People all over the planet are getting up and doing stuff all day and starting companies and getting married and as an American, it is really easy to not even think of that, to not even realize that. Joshua shared we are only a small percentage of the worlds’ population, so he can only help his family to open their eyes and expand their horizons in terms of culture.

Joshua stated that he was so self-centered in a business perspective and in how smart he thought he was perspective, it’s almost embarrassing and he looked around with his colleagues and other Americans, they don’t do it on purpose but they slowly become like that over time, they live in a bubble a little bit and so going down to Costa Rica and engage with people who makes US $2.00 an hour and interact with people who are terrified to start a tiny business and to understand the cultural differences and to see what he can offer there and learn from them as well it has been an amazing thing and because his new business is web based, he has the ability to do that which is amazing and as long has he has Internet, he can work from wherever.

  • Joshua shared that systems are only important if you actually like your business and you don’t want to be a slave to it. If you want to make real money without you doing everything yourself, we have to take a hard look at that system and automation, it sounds fancy but it’s very simple and from the stand point of Customer Service, a lot of small businesses shoot from the hip and the founder or the owner or the person who is holding it all together, they’re the glue, they are smart. Persons who have a small business, they are very sharp, they are very talented and they are holding it together, the problem is you are exhausted, as your business scales, it gets harder and harder to hold it all together and things start dropping, you start dropping the ball, your Customer Experience goes down but you don’t even realize it’s down because you can’t possibly pay attention to 32 different areas in your business at the same time at a high level. So what a system is, it’s you taking a step back and being intentional in predefining the way that you do something in your business. For example, if someone’s really mad at you and they think your company stinks, there should be a process for that, they call, email or Facebook you, these days, probably Facebook so the whole world will see how much they hate you and once that happens, “What’s triggered inside of your business?” Most people today will just randomly see the message and then they’ll say, “Oh no!” and then they’ll do some stuff or they’ll email them back but it’s not standardized, it’s not systemized, it’s not thought through in advance, that’s what a system is. It’s going through all the little pieces in your business and being intentional about how you’re going to do this at a high level and then writing it down and then deploying it to your team and being consistent with it over time. Once you do that in all the parts of your business, the sky is the limit.

Joshua stated that his philosophy is that you run towards problem. One of his company core values that have already been established before they built the system is to have a way to know that Facebook and the customer service support email account and their customer support telephone number were checked really quickly and on going. Step 1 of your system might include using some software or assigning a low level administrative task person to constantly check these messages on a 15 minutes reoccurring basis as part of her workflow maybe she does other work and she is always refreshing that Facebook feed for example because you want to be present and you want to be very responsive in Customer Service. Step 2 would be, if something happens where someone is not happy that would trigger all of this other stuff, so you would give them a predefined script, not robotic, very human, very fun. Taking responsibility by creating a script for them to send back to the Facebook person and it would be in the 15-minute window because the system would be checking it all the time and would probably have the employees take responsibility, tell the customer, “I have the authority to make this right for you, we’re going to be on this, here’s my personal cell phone number, here’s my email address, we’re going to be reaching out to you, we are all over this. Thank you so much for telling us this happened, this is a huge help to us.” Step 3 would be for us to go find this person in real life so whether we review the orders from the time the message was sent, we try to find them and their phone number, whatever it is we will run and sprint towards that problem as a team. Step 4 might be to document the whole situation in our CRM or our support ticket software, whatever we are using so that we have a record of the complaint that was made and anybody that was involved in it. Step 5 might be, during your weekly team meetings, you review the previous week incidents and see if they were resolved satisfactorily or if we can tighten up or if the script needs to be changed or if we are doing our very best. That would be a simple word document that describes everything but the hard part of the system is getting your team to do it that way every single time. The way that you accomplish that is by being relentless in your pursuit of sticking to the system in your own life as a leader so when you constantly going back there an reiterating and reaffirming, it will work but people give up too quick sometimes with it.

Joshua stated that the meat of your leadership ability comes in the way you actually behave and execute in your own role. Everybody is watching you, your family and your kids so you have to be high level because everyone below you will do exactly what you do except a little bit less. If the bar is not high enough in step 1 by the time you are 12 layers deep and have all these staff members, the customers dealing with all the 12 layer employees at the bottom, you’re going to get a very low level experience because the bar wasn’t raise high enough by the leadership in the beginning.

                     

  • Joshua shared that what he does is in his niche of window cleaning and pressure cleaning is that over time people knew who he was in his industry. He would get a lot of requests to do business consulting or fly in somewhere and help them to systemize and automate and really dig in and rip the guts out and look how can we fix this business, where is it broken, how can we scale, how can we grow? He got a lot of requests to do that; he doesn’t have time to do that. His primary business his is software company, so what he did is create Automate, Grow, Sell, it’s for local service companies and it helps you go through basically 6 months of how do I go front to back, top to bottom, through the entire architecture of your company, how do I systemize it, it’s a private community that gets a couple coaching calls with him and there’s over 50 videos shot in Costa Rica with home work and documents and samples. It’s an educational product for service companies to help them stop being a slave to their small business.

 

Joshua stated that he tends to specialize with service companies but the customer life cycle and the way to engage enough to the sale and the way to get maximum profitability specifically to home service businesses like lawn care, landscaping, carpet cleaning, he has some other people in the boot camp but that’s kind of the core of who it is tailored to speak to if you decide to take it.

  • Joshua stated that people in Central America are a lot less stressed out than people in North America and that includes the employees of companies. He almost started a pest control company in Costa Rica a few months ago and he still might invest in something like that. The deal with the way Central America customer service works, everyone is really nice while they provide you with horrible customer service. In general, it’s a strong trend; the people are not entrepreneurial so they don’t look at things the same way. He didn’t realize how entrepreneurial North Americans were until he lived in Central America and so he thinks we have a lot of work to do in North America in terms of getting our service back to the way it was decades ago and really being high level with our enthusiasm and the way we take care of our customers but he feels that we are light years ahead of the businesses down there, they just don’t quite understand power in those type of things, they’re all commodity based businesses, they have a thing or a service, you give them money, they give you the thing or the service and that’s it. There’s very little attention paid to the way that I feel doing business with the company and what happens after I do business with the company. There’s very little attention paid to the perceived value, the branding, the marketing, and the uniform with the company. They just don’t quite get that and for somebody that does, it’s a huge advantage but he doesn’t see very often.
  • Joshua stated that it’s a cultural thing and that Costa Rica is an amazing place and he loves Costa Ricans, he learned a lot from them because the world is not about making more money but from a business perspective, there’s a lot of work to be done there and there’s a reason there’s no middle class, there’s rich Costa Ricans, there’s very poor Costa Ricans, the government takes care of everybody, it’s a socialized country, the Government pays for everything, does everything and so there’s not like people are destitute on the streets but they also have a very limited ceiling on what they can accomplish in their life. For example, if a young poor Costa Rican wants to start a business, the paperwork, the regulation, the process is a nightmare with all the government bureaucracy but on top of that, when they try to start the business, all of their friends and family are going to say, “No, no what are you doing? You’re going to loose your savings, don’t do that, that’s too risky.” Even if it’s the most simple business ever. So, there’s a lot of pulling you back down going on so the mentality there is that they love each other, they’re warm people but they live in fear in terms of entrepreneurism and they don’t know how to make money as a people, they just don’t get it. The very few people that do, exploit it, the government exploits it, there’s a huge corruption in all of Central America including Costa Rica and so the people building the roads are richer than you can ever imagine while everyone else goes to the grocery store and buy 2 eggs at a time because they can’t buy a whole dozen.
  • Joshua Latimer shared how he stays motivated everyday; he stated that he’s motivated because he’s blessed, because he’s thankful, because he’s happy that he wakes up everyday. He stated that he wakes up and it’s a big deal, he wakes up and he has more to accomplish, more people he can serve. He thinks that it is easier to be motivated if your base line personality is rooted in gratitude because there are so many people that he can serve including his staff, there are so many ideas that he wants to execute on and there are so many things he wants to build and he wants his children and family to participate. Motivation to him isn’t something you focus on, motivation is a by-product of correct thinking and correct thinking starts with getting your eyes off yourself every second and looking at everything you’re blessed with and all the people around you that you can serve.

He stated that in his office at the door, there is a white board in his office that says, “Today I’m thankful for” and there is a line and he has a dry erase marker and he writes something new on it everyday. It’s a silly, tiny thing but we have to remind ourselves how blessed, fortunate and lucky we are. It’s very easy to feel sorry for yourself even if you’re doing successful things, even if you’re in America, poor people in America are rich if you compare it to the world but it’s easy to sit around and say, “poor me, I only have this but everybody else have that” or “my job, I hate but it’s impossible because everybody is keeping me down” which is not true, you’re in a perspective the way you view the world, it’s true to you. If you have the correct thinking, you’re going to get more and more motivated over time.

  • Joshua shared some considerations for an entrepreneur. He stated that now he has a software company, so he did the local hometown business, started with nothing, eventually grew that to being very successful, almost doing US $200,000 a month in window cleaning and then he started this app and he’s going through that process right now, he has employees all over the world, they have raised money from investors. Some considerations, number 1. You have to count the cost, people love to underestimate what they are capable of achieving in a lifetime but they over estimate what they can achieve in a year. Almost everybody does this and with a small business, for it to work, you cannot quit, you have to stay in the game, it takes time, it does not happen by osmosis instantaneously 24 hours later, so people need to be very real with themselves on the pain that will be involved, the sacrifice that will be involved and the sacrifice required for them to win. The second thing is to get a mentor; you need to be around sharp people, like-minded people, people that are 3 levels above you. If you’re the smartest person out of all of your friends, you need to get some new friends, if you’re the smartest person in the room; you need to get a new room. You have to stay sharp, you have to surround yourself with people that add value to your life and not people that suck the life out of you. If you have negative family and friends and you’re going to start a business, you better seriously considering cutting that off like the Cancer that it is if you’re going to be serious about your business.
  • Joshua stated that the one online tool he uses everyday other than is own app is Trello. They use Trello every day and they have a lot of online tools that they use. Trello is kool and it’s free, it helps you organize tasks, to do’s and projects using little cards and boards and it’s a great app.
  • Joshua stated that the number 1 book that have had the biggest impact is the Bible in terms of business and life and relationship and systems, how to live your life, how do you want to get closer to God, how you want to be a better dad, you want to have a better business. There is another book that he read recently called The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller, he’s the founder of Keller Williams Realty. The book is very simple, it helps you to try and understand the importance of focusing on one high level important thing at a time while you’re moving through your business and trying to achieve success and a lot of us do seven things at the same time and we never really get anywhere but we go home exhausted everyday. The key is to prioritize things and to bite off one singular thing at a time until it’s complete, go to the next one, until that’s complete, you go to the next one, it’s really important, that’s what all the highest achievers in the world do and the book helps to explain that.

Yanique stated that she read in a book when she was in college that said, “It’s not humanly possible for you to do 2 things at the same time at 100%.” She could see the concept that Gary was trying to get across in terms of really being intentional in completing an activity to the best of your ability and by doing so just focusing on that activity for that period of time.

Joshua stated that the first page of the book says, “If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.”  Joshua shared this a Russian Proverb. The truth is that building a successful company is boring and it’s not always sexy and you’re not always on fire with motivation, it’s about setting and accomplishing goals period. One thing, then two things, then three things, then four things, then you get a set back and then you’ve got to be relentless and resilient and not quit and keep going and then you set and accomplish another goal, that’s the way that you do it if you want to really crush it but most of us are too concern with checking Facebook 300 times a day or checking our email 95 times a day. He stated that he heard a statistic that the average person checks their email 95 to 130 times a day. Our ability to focus is really bad, especially with technology now. He stated that it is something he is working on to get tighter into because it’s not about working hard, it’s about being productive and if you want to move quickly to success, you have to be highly productive and that means doing all the boring stuff no one wants to talk about, doing the right things when no one is looking, shutting down the distractions and getting crap done until it’s done one thing at a time.

  • Joshua stated that what he would say is that it is almost a guarantee that they are doing a very poor job as a leader laying out the vision. They have the vision but the people around them aren’t motivated, you having the vision is useless to you. The Bible says, “Without a vision, my people perish.” Your company is going to perish if you don’t have a vision in the same way. If your staff is disinterested, demotivated, not focused, not motivationally engaged, it’s always 100% fault of the leadership. You can have a bad apple once in awhile but if there is a trend, you have to take responsibility and fix the trend so you need to cast your vision more effectively, you need to help your staff understand what’s in it for them, “This is who we are, this is where we are going, this is why we are going there and this is what’s in it for you when we get there” continuously reiterating the same vision is what’s required, you don’t have one meeting a year to tell everybody to get fired up and then wonder why they are disinteresting 90 days later. You have to be driving the train, standing at the front of the crowd, pulling your troops with you, when you have real relationships with them, you understand who they are as humans and you’re coaching them and doing all that stuff, they will go to war for you but these types of issues really always fall on the shoulders of the leader, they just don’t like to admit that, they want the ominous ether of black nothingness to take the blame, they want to say, “Well, there are just no good help out there, there’s no good employees” because that’s an easy way out.
  • Joshua stated that the one thing that he is working on right now is sendjim.com, which is an app that lets you send postcards, emails, gifts and letters from your cellphone. He built this app with his business partner Chris for his own company before he sold it and they are going to use it internally. What it does is automate your follow-up process with your customers, when you are done doing business with a customer, you can push a button on the phone and it will automatically physically mail them a Thank You card and an appointment reminder card 6 months later and ask for referrals, letter or email 3 months later and it does all of that stuff without you touching it. Joshua is excited about it and he said it is growing really quickly. The app is available on App Store and Google Play Store. Great Relationship Marketing Tool. Joshua says your current customers are your biggest asset.
  • Joshua shared listeners can find him at –
    • com | He also has his own Podcast - The Quick Talk Podcast – podcast about systems, how to win and lean into the pain and be successful.

Links

Automate, Grow, Sell

Dec 20, 2016

Calvin Wayman is a bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker and Social Media Entrepreneur. The most inspiring thing about Calvin is what he has done in such a short time. He shows that where there is a will, there is a way. Seeing where he is now, it’s crazy that in just spring 2015 he was still working an employee job, feeling stuck at a job that he was not passionate about; he ultimately decided to give himself a chance. He suddenly quit his day job to pursue his dream of working for himself and went selling door to door; he’s a man on a mission. He owns Cobbes Media, a Social Media Management Agency designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs to stand out beyond 97% of everyone else on Social Media. He has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Social Media Examiner, The Huffington Post and was even named one of the Top 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by www.influensive.com. He recently ran in a 50 mile ultra marathon just to challenge himself and he just barely released his 1st book which debuted on the Amazon top 100 of all books in the success category. His book is called Fish Out of Water: The Guide to Achieving Breakthrough and Permanently Transforming Into the New You.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • What are some recommendations for starting your own business and do you think customer experience is something that they should be thinking about from the initial stage or is it something you take into consideration after you start the business?
  • How do you feel about customer experience as a customer and owning a Social Media Management Agency, how do you approach it online?
  • What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
  • Can you share a little about your book and how can it really help persons listening to this show, what are the main take away, your purpose and intension was for this book?
  • 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

  • Calvin Wayman stated that the thing that he tells most people right off the bat that is important to know is that he is a regular dude, he’s somebody who just wanted more out of life, wanted freedom and it’s important to know that because when he was getting started on his journey, he would look at people that he admired like Lewis Howes, Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone even Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres - he would look at all these super successful business people and tend put them on a pedestal and say “Yea, these guys are great, it be awesome to be like them.” Knowing that there is no way in the world he could close to them or have whatever they have, so he put them on a pedestal or on a top of a mountain as a Guru that can’t ever be attained and what he learned over the last 1 ½ year since he quit his day job, being able to connect with so many amazing people is that they are just that, they are people and when that clicked for him he said, “Oh my gosh, here is this person in front of me that’s a multimillionaire or a billionaire having a conversation with them, seeing that they are just a regular human being” then it clicked for him that he can go after this and that excited him. It’s been a crazy 1 ½ year with things he has gone after and challenges he has put himself through and he just wanted people to always know where he came from like less than 2 years ago he was still working at his job, just going through the motion of what we all do, wanting to live a decent life, he has a wife and a 3 year old son. He wants people to realize that if someone like him coming from where he comes from can do it and he’s not come close to arriving where he wants to be but if he can do it, you can do it too.

 

  • As an Entrepreneur, Calvin shared that throughout his whole transition and even when he was in his day job, something that was always in his mind, a quote from Zig Ziglar, “Help enough people get what they want and you can have anything that you want.” So wherever you are at in any stage, whether you’re an employee working for somebody’s company or you’re looking for more freedom, it absolutely comes down to customer experience because it’s coming down to making people feel cared about, loved, taken care of, helping them get what they want because the truth is, if you really want to go after more the way to get it is going to be by giving them what they want so you can have what you want. So you’re thinking of it on whichever side of the isle you’re on, employee or entrepreneur.
  • As an Online Entrepreneur, Calvin stated that it’s more important in a lot of ways because customer experience is one of those things that is mandatory, you’ve got to have it and if you don’t have it then it’s horrible, that’s where stuff really get crazy when people don’t feel cared about, they feel betrayed and how he does it online is that part of the training he does on online Social Media often is something that he calls the 4 C’s to Social Media Success and the last C that everything comes down to is Connection, no matter what you do, whether you’re doing it online or in life, the way you’re going to build your business and have it grow and scale is by building those connections. He calls it “Doing the scaling by doing the unscalable.” He thinks that a lot of time what gets in peoples way when it comes to customer service experience or just the whole interacting and giving the customer something that is pleasant is a lot of times it feels like it’s taking time and it is and it feels like it’s taking a lot of investment and sometimes it is but they’re human beings and if you want to take it to the next level, then you have to have that foundation and there are so many great examples of it. A lot of people have iPhones and if he asks this question of “Who still have their iPhone box?” most people will raise their hand, it’s a box but they have it down to the detail of what you feel like when you open that thing, it’s a piece of cardboard but it’s designed so well, it has the phone right there on the top and it makes you feel special and you think you should be keeping the box and most people do, they don’t do anything with it, they just set it in their closet but they feel bad about throwing it away, it feels good so must be something worth keeping. So it touches everything, especially on the online space you have to scale by doing the unscalable, reaching out to your customers when they don’t expect it, even when you’re trying to grow your following and you think of your followers as “customers” - give them a good experience. Calvin stated that everyone that follows him on Facebook, he’ll go back to them and send them a voice memo so that it makes that touch more human because on line, it’s so easy to forget that there is another human being on the other line and so if you really want to stand out and give somebody a great experience, then just do something that makes it human, if they hear your voice instead of just seeing chat, then that’s such an easy way to stand out from everybody else. It’s super important no matter what your business is, certainly off line but also online as well and sometimes even more important because most people just forget about it.                                                                                                                                             
  • Calvin stated that some people just do the work and don’t really touch back and they try to get cell phone numbers of their customers and they’ll text them and they can text from their computer system but that’s something that’s more personal, it feels more real. He mentioned doing the voice memo; sometimes they’ll do a quick video for a specific customer and say their name just to give them the results. Anything that he feels that make it more human, that probably one of the biggest thing you can do because that’s what people want to have but at the same time, it’s not making the mistakes because when the experience is bad, that’s where things really get in the way.
  • He recently had an experience where he was at the other end of it, he got delayed at an airport for 26 hours and it was unnecessary. This is an example of companies that put policies over people and that is one of the biggest mistakes anybody can ever do when it comes to your customer experience, never put policy over people. He stated that a few weeks ago he went to the airport and everything he does is electronic, he’s a millennial so he doesn’t have printed out itineraries, he has them on his cell phone. He got in the line and he handed the Security his phone; he has the airline app on it, he goes to it and say, “Huh, I’m not seeing the barcode, I’m seeing the itinerary but I’m not seeing the barcode to scan” so he looked through the app he wasn’t seeing it either and his flight is in about 50 minutes so he needed to get things moving and after they can’t find it, they got several other security people over to come look at the boarding pass, to find the barcode, they can’t find it. After several minutes of several people looking through it, they then said he will have to go to a kiosk and print it out and he has never done that before. He went to the kiosk to print it out, the airline that he was flying had their portion of the kiosk turned off, so you couldn’t print it out. He went back to security and said, “Hey, the kiosk is off, so we just need to find it, here’s my itinerary showing my flight, showing my seat number and everything but we can’t find the barcode, what should we do?” And after having 5 different people look at his phone app, they couldn’t figure it out, so then they said, “You better go down to the airline’s customer service.” He went down to the airline’s customer service and said, “My barcode is not showing” and he says, “Yea, we have a little bit of issue, let me see if I can get it fixed” and then he says, “Oh, I actually can’t turn it on because you are within the 45 minutes before leaving” he says, “Even if I could, you’re gonna have to get another flight.” He said that his flight’s not for 40 minutes, that’s plenty of time. He said, “I’m sorry I can’t” and he asked him why and told him that he has a meeting tomorrow morning at 9:00 am, he can’t miss that meeting. The customer service representative said, “I can’t turn it on” and he just kept on saying it would make so that he might be late and it was literally 40 minutes before the plane leaves and he asked him, “How long does it takes for you to walk to the gate” and he said it takes him 7 minutes but he doesn’t have to go through security. Calvin asked him to give him 15 minutes, let him try but he kept giving him all the reasons he can’t and said that he didn’t want him to come back and have to reschedule he would rather me reschedule right now. So here’s someone that could have made one little switch and said, “Yeah, we have had issues, let me turn it on, I understand that you’re under the 45 minutes that me try to get people through but let me get you through.” He talked with him for 15 minutes and then even after he had it booked, several other people way later than him was going through security to get on that same flight. He had so much time and what makes it even worse, he had to sit out that airport for 26 hours missing an entire day, missing his important meeting that he had and when he got the flight the next day, he looked at his watch from the time he was at security to the time he got through and it only took him 9 minutes. Now here is someone putting policy over people and what he learnt from him after they booked it, he asked him, “What made you not want to do it?” and he said, “Well, there’s this manager lady that every time it’s under the 45 minutes, she gets mad at the gate when we turn it back on” and so, he was covering himself to not get in trouble with his own manager and it was enough to have him a customer not wanting to use that airline again because it was such a negative experience, he had never been delayed for so long for something and unnecessarily. That’s an example of having an experience gone bad because what it ultimately came down to a company that has a policy, and policies are important because they help a company function and run more smoothly but when you have policies that contradict the human experience and you put policies over people, that’s where you have a problem and there is a really amazing book that talks about this type of thing that puts it in a great way and it’s buy Dale Partridge, the book is called, People Over Profit: Break the System, Live with Purpose, Be More Successful , it’s such a good book and it shows how you need to be thinking about your business whether it’s online, if it’s an airline or if it’s a brick and mortar, businesses are about people fundamentally not just processes or policies. If you take care of your people, you’re going to take care of your business and where everybody gets in trouble. There’s this big thing happening with Wells Fargo over the last few months in hot water in the United States and the biggest issues that they are having is how they have been treating their people or their customers in not good way. The biggest take away is you got to put your people over your policies.

Calvin shared a great example of Morton's Steakhouse, there’s this guy jumping on an airline and he’s going to go on this long airline flight so he sends out a tweet and he tags Morton's in it and he says, “Man, this is going to be a long flight, I would love a Morton's Steak at the end of this.” He was just joking; he sends out the tweet completely joking almost like if it’s starting to snow, we’ll make a tweet that says, “Dear winter, please go away." He gets to the end of his airline flight, he comes off the plane and guess what he sees right there in the airport, a guy in a tuxedo, bow tie and all with a Morton's Steakhouse meal for the gentleman completely for free. Morton's saw that tweet and if you think of all the logistics that had to come in play for that to happen, for somebody at Morton's to see that tweet, to then get it approved in however long and say “Let’s do this stunt”, and to even find the guy’s airline and see when he was going to land and plan everything to get the food cooked right, to be right there in the airport when he landed, it’s crazy, so many resources were put into that but the question is “Do you think that made a connection with this guy? Do you think it gave him a good customer experience?” Absolutely! And that’s the point, it blew his mind so much that he was so excited about, so impressed, realizing what Morton's did, he ended up writing a blog - posting and sharing his story and it ended up being shared thousands and thousands of time and Morton's business blew up because of that and that’s just one little thing, taking care of one customer, doing one little thing and most people might look at that in the beginning or even the idea of it and say “Well, we can’t do that because that’s going to cost us time, money and resources” but it’s something that you can’t scale and do over and over but it’s when you do those human touches that your whole business will grow and Morton's has that story within their culture and so it just has this whole culture of taking care of people and people over processes, people over policies, people over procedure and that’s how any business continues to flourish is when they keep that in mind that it's the people that matter and give them the experience, they are the reason YOU are in business.

     

  • Calvin stated that January is coming up and that’s when he thinks the book is really going to become heavy and super important because in January everybody sets New Year’s resolutions and they get super excited about it and then come February everyone flat lines or people quit. When he started the book, he was analyzing that and was like, “Why is that? What’s happening here?” and what he discovered is there is this thing that is not talked about in business or goal setting or aiming high in any part of your life and it’s this period where after you get excited, after you start taking action on a goal, you hit this point where it’s not very exciting anymore, you feel out of your element, you feel awkward, You feel like a fish out of water and that’s because you’re doing something that is out of your element jus t like a fish is out of its element when it’s out of water. The tragedy is when most people hit that point, like in February when they become fish out of water, because they are out of their element, they end up reverting back to their old fish bowl of mediocrity and so what his book is all about is recognizing that this is going to happen, so in any business that you’re in, if you’re a business owner that wants to completely change the culture of your business or develop a whole completely new customer experience, then you’re going to go through this growth stage where you’re going to feel like a fish out of water because it’s going to be completely new territory from where you’re at right now. That’s what the whole book is about is recognizing that you’re become a fish out of water but here are the principles that you can go through to not just revert back and flat line and become normal but completely break through and create an entirely new standard for your life or your business.

 

Yanique stated that there is a section in the book called, SWIM which is an acronym and it says swim like a shark. Shark and development and moving forward in your life, are they connected and can you share with us a little bit about why you would need to swim like a shark and what are the characteristics of a shark that we would need to be inculcating into our lives.

Calvin shared that shark in his book is a really positive thing; he uses the opposite like a "guppy" which your smaller average version of yourself and a shark is something completely different, something you transform into. He did that because when you breakthrough that fish out of water phase, you don’t just become a bigger fish, you become a completely different fish, something that’s confident, you literally transform. One of the main principles he talks about near the end of the book is swimming like a shark and SWIM is an acronym of four things that he noticed with successful people and when you start behaving like a shark then it pulls you in that direction to become a shark yourself and SWIM stands for Success, Words, Improve and Measure.

Success is defining success the right way and he has noticed has he talks to millionaires and billionaire, they think of success completely differently than a guppy does. For example, a guppy thinks that success is arriving at a destination or getting the result but what he noticed is that successful people are masters of the mundane, they are used to doing the same thing over and over and that is success. Said in a different way, they view success as something completely in their control, so they are focused inward on saying, “What can I do?” they take personal responsibility for it and it’s by doing those things and taking personal responsibility that makes the result happen as a buy product but they are not waiting for the result to come before they say, “I am successful” like you might as a guppy, “I’m not going to be successful until that day, until I achieve this.” You can wake up, be successful today, you can have your goal in the distance and say, “If that’s my goal, what action can I take today to get me closer.” That’s the main thing with the S in SWIM in that chapter, is recognizing what sharks think about success and realizing that it’s in your control and staying focus within your control.

Words is showing that people that are successful and they live by success principles are the people we admire whether they are a famous movie star, whether they are Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degeneres, a millionaire, a billionaire or somebody with a big company, they speak differently than most people, they have a different language, the words they use and the topics they talk about is what Words is all about. A piece from the Words section and it’s something he learned from one of his mentors Michael Bernoff, he is known like the other Tony Robbins, he’s great with transforming people into a new version of themselves. One day he was getting coaching from him and he asked him a question and he said, “Sure” and he completely stopped the conversation and said, “What did you say?” and he said, “What?” and he asked again, “What did you say?” and he said sure. And he said, “Calvin, do you know what sure means?” He said sure means screw you and it shocked him, he said, “What you need to realize Calvin, is that sure and maybe and I don’t know and perhaps, those are all fluffy, uncertain words and if you want to be successful, what you’ll notice is successful people use words that are definite like yes, no, absolutely and they are certain in the things they say, they are absolute.” It was an amazing coaching lesson for him and he said, “Calvin, what you say matters, the words you use matter.” He looks at the word “sure” as a curse word for him because he went through the same process and he saw how he changed his language when he was on his way to becoming a millionaire. That was a major lesson for him, so that’s what Words is all about.

I stand for Improve, this is important if you’re looking to grow your business to always have a better customer experience. You will notice with Apple or any good company that has been around for awhile is that they don’t ever arrive, they’re always improving, and they’re always looking for the latest ways to develop the customer experience. A great example of somebody that finally got their act together was Nintendo. For years they were stuck to the console and in the day that was the thing to give the best customer experience but then these things came around called the cell phones and people were on mobile and it took them forever but finally this year they came out with PokemonGo. PokemonGo was a way of improving from where they were and it created such an amazing customer experience and it exploded and it had the biggest growth of any app in history when they made that switch. That’s what I is all about. It is always continuing to improving where you are because successful businesses, successful people never arrive.

The final thing that helps with everything is M. M stands for Measure and measuring the right things. He went to a mentor and was complaining because something wasn’t happening the way he thought it should or he wasn’t growing as much as he thought he should and he said, “Well, how are you measuring it?” and he replied, “I’m not measuring it.” And his mentor said, “That’s the problem, you don’t know if you’re winning, if you don’t keep score and you get more of what you measure.” Measure is super important it’s what he notices with so many successful people, it’s what sharks do, and they measure the key indicators of what they want to move. So keep score but measure the right things, measure the things you want to get more of. Examples of what you should measure and what you shouldn’t measure, according to his mentor, what most people do if they want to get in better shape or increase their finances and so they measure how heavy they are, if you think you’re going to get more of what you measure, you’re in resistance, you don’t want to measure how heavy you are because don’t want more pounds. People want to get out of debt and yet they are measuring their debt, so they are in resistance. So what do you measure? You measure what he explains as a lead measure, something that if you do more of it, it will change the result. So if you want to lose weight, instead of how much you weigh, you could do a couple of things, you could measure how much weight you lost, so you get more of it or even better, measure the thing 100% in your control like how many days you worked out or how many sets you did or how much you maxed out, how many perfect days you had with eating well. Do the things that if you do them that they are 100% in your control then it can predictively change the result. If you want to get out of debt, measure your income, measure ways to make money and that’s what going to get you closer to getting the actual result that you want. M is for measure, you don’t know if you’re winning if you don’t keep score and to take it one step further, measure the things that getting more of is going to help you win. This is what the sharks do, this what makes them successful and the cool thing is anyone can adopt it. That is how you SWIM LIKE A SHARK. calvinwayman.com/book

  • Calvin Wayman shared how he stays motivated everyday; he stated that he is motivated by the I in SWIM. HE believes in Tony Robbins when he says, “Progress Equals Happiness.” That’s what drives him, he wants freedom, he likes impacting peoples’ lives but more importantly, he likes to see where he is at and taking it to the next level and that makes him feel good. When he went from being completely in debt to becoming debt free that felt good, improving in that way. When he went from being an employee to having his own company, that felt good. When he was 30-40 pounds overweight and he lost the weight, it felt good. When he went from running a half marathon to an ultra that felt good. Just getting up every day and saying, “What can I do to improve myself?” just to stretch yourself a little bit because we are all where we are at and to get where it is that you want to go is not as crazy of a drastic change as we might think, it’s like 1% improvement a day but over time, in a hundred day, you are twice as good.
  • Calvin stated that the one online tool he uses everyday is Calendly. In an online world where you’re talking to people from all over the world and their different time zones, sometimes it’s hard to meet but when he got Calendly, that just fixed everything so people can go set time with you and it takes out all the guess work. People come to him all the time and say, “We should connect.” And then he can put it in their court instead of going back and forth and being stressed out, he can say, “Here’s my personal link feel free to pick a time and I’ll be there.”
  • Calvin stated that the one thing that he is working on right now is his first live event. It is something that he has never done before, stepping into new waters and that’s what he is nervous about but excited about it at the same time.

            Calvin Wayman Facbook

            Calvin Wayman Snapchat

            Calvin Wayman Twitter

 

  • Calvin stated that he has a quote but it is not tied to the customer experience but it’s tied to a business owner, an entrepreneur or somebody that’s leveling up. Sometimes when we are moving or we have a desire to move into a direction, we feel stuck and we feel like we are facing adversity and we don’t know how to get through it and something that has helped him is another thing that he learned from one of his mentors is “Done is better than perfect.” It means just move in any way that you can because often times as business owners or entrepreneurs we are our own worst critic and we want it to look perfect but progress doesn’t happen without movement. Movement requires action and when we are hitting adversity the biggest thing it does to us is the fear freezes us so to break that apart, just give yourself permission that it’s better to look sloppy and do something than nothing. So done is better than perfect and just take that next step.

Links

Dec 13, 2016

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?
  • Yanique indicated that se read Jane’s website that Jane believes people should really be optimizing on their personal brand because people buy you.
  • 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 Andersons 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 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 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.

 

Links

Dec 6, 2016

Daniel “ Dan” de Witte is a Business Coach, Digital Strategist and Entrepreneur dedicated to sharing his knowledge with small businesses who want to leverage the online market. As a business coach, Dan specializes in tailor business strategies, business development and automation. Working closely with businesses to identify their needs, Dan thinks outside the conventional box to develop easy to implement effective solutions. As the founder of the Outer Space Network, Dan has used his knowledge and experience in rapid growth and brand development to create an original mentoring and support platform. Although bright eyed and bushy tailed, Dan isn’t a stranger when it comes to starting and growing successful businesses, starting his professional career as an internationally published photographer. Daniel knows designs and presentation, his creative flare and instinct for presentation gives him a competitive edge in brand development.

 

Questions

  • Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
  • Could you explain to our listeners who are thinking of transitioning from brick and mortar to the online space, how it is that they can manage their customer experiences and do you think it’s different in managing that experience face to face versus online? What are some key indicators that need to be considered?
  • In your new product Active Relay, could you share with us what are some ways you try to humanize that experience even though it’s automated?
  • On a global level, how do you feel about customer service/ customer experience?
  • What are some every day solutions that you would recommend to a small business owner to help them improve their customer experience?
  • If you have a customer who wants to migrate from their existing email marketing plan with Aweber, Constant Contact etc, - would Active Campaign facilitate that migration?
  • Please give us an example of how Zapier works and what does it really mean for a small business?
  • How do you stay motivated everyday?
  • What are some books that you have read that contributed to your success along your journey?
  • What’s the one thing that’s going on in your life that you are really excited about that you are working on develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find you online?
  • What is quote or saying that helps you stay on track and re-focus during times of adversity?

 

Highlights

  • Dan de Witte stated that he officially launched a brand new tech product called Active Relay. He has moved from his coaching base platform into another SAS (Software as a Service). He stated that he would be where he’s at if the internet didn’t exist and that the crakes of what he does and stated that that’s inspiring, for instance, we’re doing this podcast over Skype when I’m in Jamaica and he’s in Australia and there’s nothing more inspiring and powerful than that. He loves adventure spots and love getting out has much as he can from the computer, although of lately he hasn’t had enough time away from the computer because of the launch of the new product but that’s definitely one of the aspects he enjoys in life because that’s the ultimate goal, creating these digital businesses or businesses that are enabled by the Internet is to give us more time, more freedom so that we can do the things that we love and enjoy doing but also spend time with family and friends that are valuable in our life.
  • As an online Entrepreneur, Dan shared that branching into the online space can be overwhelming to start because there’s all the flashy whiz tool and everyone trying to tap the next best thing that you should jump on and use and he’s a big believer of simplicity, so starting with one platform and working your way up from there. To tie that in with the customer experience is humanizing that whole aspect. We can get caught up in creating automations and automated business processes that we end up automating ourselves or working ourselves out of the business which is a blessing and a curse at the same time, it’s a blessing because it gives us more time to and more freedom but a curse on the same token, we lose the one to one connectivity as you would if you were a traditional brick and mortar base business where you can actually build that relationship by a simple hand shake, exchange of a business card. When you go online, it becomes a lot of smoke and mirrors and one of the challenges a lot of businesses faces is making sure that they are messaging what they do in the offline space, the brick and mortar space is the same as what it would be in the online space and as humanizing as possible because at the end of the day, all we want to do is be a part of a community and what you are building in your brick and mortar businesses regardless if it’s Joe’s Tire Shop down the road, he’s got a community of people that come back to him time and time again because they built the relationship and what we want to do is to try and replicate that relationship in the online space.
  • Dan shared some background information on his new product Active Relay, it is a payment platform that is designed around a CRM called Active Campaign, so they are the payment platform element of an email marketing CRM. They are selling digital products and digital services and even physical base products online, it’s quite a challenge for you the user to sell something without having to do a lot of configurations, multiple third party tools and at the end of the day it stacks up and become expensive for you the user or the seller of whatever you sell. The whole goal of Active Relay was to simplify and enable people to sell online smarter, better, faster. The second element to that is bridging the customer experience and making that 10 times faster. In the online payment space, which is where Dan is heavily focusing his energy is in that ecommerce space and around how can he bridge the relationship that they have offline and taking that online to becoming what they call a lead in the online space as well or an email prospect is taking that person from being just an email prospect to actually giving you their credit card over the Internet because that’s the next step, getting that credit card information from them. He stated that he is not going to go up to someone random in the street and go, “Will you marry me?” because 9 times out of 10 they are going to say no. There are the people that first move or advantage are the opportunist but 9 times out of 10, if someone walked up to you and asked you to marry them, you more than likely would say no. It’s the exact same in the online space, so what they have done in Active Relay is, they are enabling people to sell things online faster and smarter and simpler but they are also shortening the checkout experience depending on the experiences of people who listen to the podcast, when you purchase things online, you generally have to go find the product, add the product to the cart, confirm that’s the product you want in the cart then go to checkout and go through 2 or 3 steps in the checkout before you get your product. What Active Relay is design to do is put all of that onto the one page, so you clink on the link to buy the product, the product is on the order form, the information you need to fill out is on the order form, you it buy, you then get funneled into the Active campaign CRM and away you go. That’s how they have shortened that experience and taking that journey from being a bit of a barrier. What people have been finding online is that multiple steps or doing more than one thing at once, it becomes a real blocker in the space and everyone’s lazy and if it seems too hard, then we are going to cut away from it. He stated that you can take people on a wild journey and that’s the most exciting thing for him in the online space. You get to control the whole journey, you can do that in the offline space as well but you have a lot more control in the online space because they don’t get to ask you anything back, you get to tell them what they are doing on the next step, you give them the options, “Do you want to do this? Yes or No” you’re not doing “Do you want to do this? Yes or No or Maybe” that “maybe” is a lot of hesitation. So they want to make it as simple as possible for people to purchase your product online or even just be in your community online.
  • Dan shared that he just got back from around the world trip and using the brick and mortar, the United States customer experience is phenomenal compared to Australia. He stated that Australia’s customer service is rubbish. He remembers walking into a classic American diner in New York, there was a lunch line waiting to get in and they put their names down on the list and waited to be seated and the head waiter /seater remembered their names and 45 minutes later after they had left and he was like “thanks Daniel and Lauren, I hope you enjoy the rest of your travels and safe travels back to Australia.” In the amount of time that he sat them down, sat 30 or 40 other people in the diner and he still remembers his name. They left the diner saying “that’s really cool”. That whole experience was amazing, just simply by remembering their name and you can do little things like that in the online space where you can send an automated sequence of emails and have someone’s first name in it because it feels more personal, the connection is more genuine and then you go to a café in Australia and it’s like “Good morning, what would you like?” that’s it, there’s no effort to build some form of relationship and then they deliver you the stuff and there’s no “enjoy”.  He stated that there are restaurants in Australia that are fantastic but the general consensus of the diners in Australia, the customer experience isn’t there from a personality stand point.

Yanique stated that something as simple as remembering the customer’s name is very important. It’s powerful because regardless of where we are from in the world or what language you speak or what culture we are from, we all have something that is unique to us and that’s what people call us by and so you give someone your name, it’s important to use it and use it properly because it differentiates the experience and it sets that whole experience a part. Looking at what Daniel remembers from his trip, the food could have been good but he didn’t mention that the food was great, he mentioned that the fact that waiter was serving 30 or 40 other tables and he remembered you and your guest names and that’s what stood out in his mind. It is always the little things that separate the really good companies from the ones that doing the bare minimum.

  • Daniel shared some everyday solutions for small businesses online to improve their customer experience – being authentic on Facebook and authentically telling the story of you, if you are one that always wear make-up everywhere and you’re all about the make-up and the aesthetics, then you need to genuinely portray that online in Facebook videos and pictures but if you are a person who loves building the relationship around who you are and authentically portraying that, you win as well. It’s like picking your digital persona to resonate what you are in real life because people can smell fake from a mile away. When you look at portraying your image online, you want to make sure that it is as authentic as you are in real life. The way to do that is to test it with your audience, ask your audience, “What do you think of our new website or what do you think of our new eBook or guide that we just release in the market space?” the ones that care will tell you and the ones who don’t care aren’t customers you’re going to have long term.
  • He shared that in regards to tools that you must have – Active Campaign which is an email marketing CRM because you want to keep in contact with your people regardless if you own a brick and mortar business or not because at the end of the day we are all playing on out mobile phones, we’re all checking Facebook, so if you can be connected with them by simply sending them a email that is just touching base saying, “Hey, how is your day going?” that speaks wonders to building the relationship and you can do all of that with active campaign and it’s a really simply platform to start out, to get you online you looking at USD $9.00 a month. The other tool that he really loves is called Zapier which is a connectivity tool that connects anything that you can think of to anything you can think of in regards to online tools, it’s the junction box for PowerPoints so you can plug in to anything and it’s a great tool for increasing productivity and fast tracking a lot of internal stuff, for example, if a client does something, you want to be notified or if they email in some content, you want to upload it to something else, if someone schedules an appointment in your calendar and you want them to go into your email CRM to send them an email saying, “Thank you for booking in a time”, there’s so many things you can do with Zapier. WordPress, there are so many free platform out there to get you up and running like getting your website online but if you really want to increase your speed. He stated that why he recommend WordPress is that you can upload themes, you can connect it to any platform and what WordPress is, it’s essentially a CMS and that stands for Content Management System, so you would have a WordPress installation on your website and that would manage your whole system so that things like your homepage, your thank you page, your blogs and all of that gets managed in the WordPress element of your system. If you couple these 3 together and if they are done in the right way, you’re not only saving yourself time but also money in the process on developing your products and infrastructure but also, you’re improving your customer experience because all 3 applications are designed to make life easier and make life more efficient.
  • Active Campaign would assist in on boarding – customers would have to do the migration themselves but it’s a very simple process.
  • Dan stated he has a Zapier connection that connects an opt in form on his website and it connects to his CRM Active Campaign. He has a pop up on his website and this pop up doesn’t actually connect natively into Active Campaign – so he uses Zapier connection to send the data over. Dan also stated that he uses Slack, which is Facebook Chat for your staff. If a client certain number of actions over a particular time frame for example clicks on 3 emails, reads 4 blogs over the space of two weeks and has not purchased a product from me before. Dan de Witte says he wants Zapier to send a notification to his Slack Team to say, “Hey, can you personally follow up with John Smith because he has done x, y, and z in the last 2 weeks and not purchased a product.” This action shows we have someone on board that is paying attention what is happening and is reaching out to help them have a better experience.

 

  • Dan de Witte states that he’s burning the midnight oil as he’s up by 4:30 am most mornings and not in bed until 11:00 pm most nights just because of the launch of Active Relay. Dan states what motivates him is giving other people the opportunity to be more and do more in the online space. Giving others the flexibility, more time to do things that you really enjoy doing! Dan stated your staff in your business, if you are a Brick and Mortar, are your biggest brand ambassadors – if you are not inspiring and leading them then you are shooting yourself in the foot.
  • Dan de Witte stated that he’s not much of book reader as he learns through doing, however, he would recommend Start with Why by Simon Sinek, Dan says anyone who wants to learn who why what you do will sell – this is the best book to read. The Art of the Start by Guy Kiyosaki. Dan further stated he reads a lot online and he learns a lot online.

Yanique shared how learning for her online has been such a remarkable and great experience that she has learned so much from You Tube videos, reading articles, connecting with people in Facebook Groups and so she agreed with Dan that doing is definitely one of the best ways to learn quick.

  • Dan de Witte says short answer would be Active Relay. Dan says he is thoroughly enjoying the journey he has been on with Active Relay over the last 6-8 months. He says he’s learning everyday about his users are selling online and how they would want to sell. Dan shared he’s newly married and he is thoroughly enjoying that personally that he’s doing now!
  • Dan de Witte says listeners can find him on:

www.goactiverelay.com

www.activecampaign.com

Dan de Witte Facebook

Dan de Witte Twitter

  • Dan de Witte shared one quote or saying that really connects with him all the time is “Logic will get you from A to B but creativity will take you anywhere.” Dan says we are all creative in some aspect.

 

Links

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