Episode 104: What is Visibility and Why is it So Important in Sales with Jemimah Ashleigh

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Right where you need to be. Welcome back to the Stronger Sales Teams Podcast. The place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Little bit of time in the making for this episode Today we have the wonderful Jemima Ashley with us. For those who don't know, Jemima and I actually have a separate podcast together. Friends in business, go listen to it if you haven't already has a very different approach to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast and we'll talk about it as the day goes through. But Jemima's one of those people that has had a hundred careers by a very early stage in her life. Along that journey has become an award winning entrepreneur, a best selling author, a keynote speaker, and really who's someone who has that drive for impact that you just can't walk past. So Jemima's first career was all around the Australian Federal Police is an easier way to say that. And I mean that's an amazing way to start your career right where you are professionally profiling people. But she then left that law enforcement career, if you like, or staging her career, and started to look at building multiple six figure businesses, releasing books. And then in 2022, I think you were named one of Australia's top 10 entrepreneurs. So well done, Jemima. I don't think I've said well done on that before. Now Jemima, she's the founder of the Vent is Ability Lab, which essentially helps businesses. There's, I think there's a strong theme on small businesses, but it scales up from there. But it really helps business owners scale and grow through those practical type of strategies that spotlight their strengths. And today really we've got Jemima here for everything around visibility, which we'll get into. She's worked across the globe, lots of different places and shared some stages and I still haven't seen the footage for this, but I'm looking forward to it with people like Gary Vee, some of Barack Obama's advisors, founders of Make a Wish Foundations, and. And I've seen some of her press work as well. So. Jemima, welcome to the Strongest Sales Teams podcast. Lovely to have you here.

Thanks, Ben. Thanks for the invite. Was completely out of the blue and shocked that you reached out, so thank you.

Well, you can't be too shocked. We have a podcast that's up to about 30 episodes together in the other one. So it was always going to happen. Of course.

It was like, hey, can you do this? Yeah, I'd love to. Thanks.

Yeah, great.

Yeah, that was a great intro. It's interesting listening to that biobat because it is one of those things that. Yep, I did all of that stuff. That's crazy. And I'm not quite 40, so. Yeah, tired, but good.

Well, I can't wait for the 40th. There'll be some good stories. So your business now is called the Visibility Lab. Before we get started today. And we are going to talk about visibility today, but before we get into that, I'd love to hear about two things. Number one, tell me about what you can tell me about the Australian Federal Police, because I think it's just interesting. And then number two, how did that lead you into the Visibility Lab and what are you doing in that business now?

Yeah, great question, Sven. So I worked for the Australian Federal Police. I was in law enforcement for 13 years in total. So I started at Victoria Police and then went on to be recruited to the afp. I worked in criminal intelligence. Best way to explain that. And worked in intel for most of my career and I absolutely loved it. So we look at intelligence as being. We look at policing as quite reactive normally. So some. So an offense happens and the police run to go and solve that. The thing I looked at from an intelligence perspective is let's stop that happening. Let's use intelligence to catch the bad guys before this even occurs. So that's intelligence led policing in the most basic of terms. So I did that and ended up going to university a couple of times and have three different degrees. But I have a master's in criminal intelligence and absolutely loved it. What I can tell you about it is that it opened so many incredible doors and I got to go to places that look on. Exactly. Travel guides like no one's. It's not Paris. Right. We're not going to amazing places like that. But I got to see some pretty incredible things and got to really, you know, I got to work in human trafficking and I got to work in people smuggling, and I got to work in crime teams and prevention and internal affairs. So really saw the best and the worst of people in many, many ways. I did that for 13 years and I got quite burnt out by the end of it. That was really where that career comes to a bit of an end. How it ends for me really comes in about 2020 during the pandemic. I went back for a little bit in the pandemic to help out. Obviously, the COVID pandemic closed most of the world and they needed some help. So I was back there for that time, went back to help for that, and I ended up really covering. I had always grown up in that environment. But I like Ben. It's so funny because now I run this company that kind of rebels so hard against that. I wasn't allowed to have my photo taken. I had top secret security clearance and then some extra letters which was, you know, the vetting was insanely huge. I couldn't really have a social media profile. I couldn't do a TV interview, couldn't be friends with journalists. Like, that was a life I had. And that got incredibly grating, if I'm honest. Like, it got to the point where every day there was another security issue or another drug test or another. The report having to be written. And it was just not fun anymore. And what broke for me is I met a bunch of comedians and I started to like, really? I'd arguably be pretty funny. And I started to actually kind of flex that muscle a bit outside of work hours and was teaching and like learning about improv and comedy. And that's what broke it for me. I started to see, I don't actually have to have a 9 to 5 where I can't talk to anyone. I could do something creative and fun. And that's where it starts to. I'm like, I actually want to step away from this. And I would have said a couple of years earlier that that's. I would have retired there. That was my life. That's what I was going to do.

Yeah. Wow. I love it. I mean, there's so many skills that I think will transfer into what you do now. But let's hold that for a minute. So tell me about the Visibility Lab. Just quickly now, before we get into it.

Yeah. So I started out of. Born out of the Pandemic. I've been living in the US prior to that and teaching a lot of the Visibility Lab principles in person. This company starts because I Just saw the need. And this was. I read in 2018, the World Health Organization releases the statistic that 97% of female led startups fail in the first five years. And gents weren't immune from this. That's about 95% of fail for men. And I just thought how ridiculous it was because the people I were meeting, they were good at what they do, but no one knew who they were. If no one knows who you are, how can you get a client if you're not doing the work in behind that, you're not doing the social media strategy, you're not doing the actual physical networking, you know, doing the big ticket item, the book, the podcast, whatever that looks like for you, you don't do these things. How on earth can someone possibly know you exist and therefore how can your business succeed? So I thought, what if we created something that taught me literally, I took the process that I did to grow my profile and put it on paper and said, this is what we're going to do. And we've had pretty remarkable results following.

Anyone that's multitasking or was half listening for the last minute. If people don't know who you are, it's very hard to be successful. And I think sales teams, we can be the best at meeting customers, taking them on a journey and converting. But if we haven't spent the time building our network and building our profile, I. E. Prospecting and generating leads, then we're going to be reliant on others. So as you got into that business, what skills, let's ask this now, what skills do you think from the AFP translated really well to help you make that business more successful?

100% was processes.

So.

And it's, it's so unsexy because people think visibility and they're like, you're on TV and you get to do podcasts and you get to write books. Yes. But all of that underpinned is process driven. There is strategy and process at every point. What I learned in law enforcement was, you know, you had to identify the offence, you had to prove the offender did it, you had to do the paperwork for it, you had to go to the judge, you had to get the warrant, you had to, you couldn't skip, skip one of those steps. Frustrating as it was, you didn't get to jump to the end. What I learned was patience. And what I learned was you have to do this, then this, then this, then you're allowed to apply for tv. Your website's not up if you don't have a Social media following. If you don't have a social media page, let alone a following, if you don't have a clear product that you're selling, there is no way that you're going to get a sale and there's no way that you're going to be able to build your visibility. I learned processes and how to do them properly and I got very good at seeing business processes for what they were and taking away the sparkle. The like the TV interview we'll call at the end of this, I got to take that away and just go, this is what it really is really interesting.

I mean for me it's one of the five things that are core fundamental of any program that I run is having a great sales process. So very nice to hear. I was probably expecting that you learn how to read people from the moment you meet them and then wow, bang. Here we can profile this person and I can get into their deepest, darkest secrets and needs and wants. But yeah, it's not as sexy. But I think it really supports the work that a lot of people spend around building processes for their teams.

Oh, I can do that too. But it's just not the number one thing, I think that comes later for like the larger sales and knowing the people that you want to work with when you can start cherry picking. But we get the luxury of cherry picking once the systems and the processes are in place.

Great. Well, just as well. We don't have time today for you to talk about how you profiled me when we met. So visibility. Can you tell me.

Still time, Ben, still time.

So you can see I'm moving on very quickly from that question. Visibility. Can you tell me what it means to you and why it's important?

Yeah, absolutely. So we at the visibility lab, we work on kind of five principles. So the first one is personal brand. It's great that you have a business, but people are going to buy from you first and foremost. Most as an example for your sales teams, they might really like the company but if you haven't built that know like and trust, you are not getting a conversion at that point. You know this, this is a bit 101 of sales. But you have to be strong in this as well as the brand, the business that you're working for. So we really help people build out that personal brand part. The second thing we look at is what we refer to as a sum of five people, your community. If you don't have people that are saying your name in rooms that you're not in, if you don't have people advocating for you. If you don't have people who are saying good things about you, we need to change your circle and you have to be around people smarter than you. That is the number one thing. Summer five. If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. We make sure you get the right circle around you. And sometimes that's me leaning into my network, sometimes that's me calling you and saying, hey, who do you know that can help me with these? That's about having people that will pick up the phone and help you at any given time. The third thing is it's a really lonely thing. I know it sounds like a really weird principle, but if you don't have the right people around you, close shop now. Get better people, right? Get a better community around you. Reach out to us. We can definitely help you with that. Number three is social media is shocking to me how many people don't do social media well, don't understand what attention economy is that where people that we are rewarded. The more that we post that we have that only 6% of any post that you put out will actually be seen at any given time. So we really give processes and strategy on how to cut through all that noise. And the biggest part for that from a visibility perspective is that thought leadership pace. Social media is so cluttered. What are you adding to an already hectic platform? What are you doing to bring attention to your business? Then we get into the sexy stuff. The less strategy stuff, which is the media and pr. We have to get you in front of media and PR that are going to care about what you do. And so where are your ideal client? What podcasts are they listening to, what magazines are they reading? What articles are they getting delivered to their inbox? And we need to get you featured there. And then my favorite one is awards. So awards and speaking engagements, we kind of clump together, but awards and speaking engagements. So awards being a huge way to build your visibility and to also establish that authority piece and then speaking engagements which kind of the gold stand in for conversion as quickly as possible. Those are kind of five key principles that we look at when we're building that visibility for people.

I think you walk the talk there because I've seen you very, very active in the award space and I'm starting to do so myself as well actually. So thank you for your advice there. Instagram, you've got 50 odd thousand followers and you're very active there, so I can certainly see that. And the sum of five. Well, I'm going to put myself as one of those five, so maybe you need to work on that one. We'll certainly.

It's a bold assumption, but. Okay. No, it's fine. It's true. Because that if I called you and I heard this as vice versa at this point, but if you called and said, I need this person and vice versa, that's. We're dropping to help. This is just what people do. When you have a good community around you, Summer five is really important. This is a hard job and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Yes, you're lucky. Yes. You get to work your own hours. Still hard.

Yeah. And I think the summer five, for me, it is perhaps a more holistic approach to saying, surround yourself with good people. I can be facetious and say that we know each other and we help each other out. That's fantastic. But surround yourself with as many good people as you can who can help you in different ways. But I think what's important there is to do that. You've got to be prepared to help others in return. Visibility goes both ways, so fantastic. Okay, so can you tell me what does good visibility look like when you get it right? What does it look like for a business or an individual?

Yeah. Great. So what it looks like is honestly extremely consistent. What it looks like is the dream for me, for a client, is to bring them in and say to them, we're going to brand you with thought leadership. So we're going to get really, really clear about what you're known for, what you're going to speak about, what you're an expert in. It is incredibly frustrating for me watching entrepreneurs come in who are like, I want to be known as the sales guru, but also the tech guru. And I also want to be known as someone who really likes swimming and running all the time and really likes musicals. Can you brand me as that? No, I can't. Because they're divergent from where we need to be. We need to focus on that real thought leadership. So the first thing we're going to do is, when we get it right, is get really consistent about what we speak about, what we post, about the timing. The other thing we're going to look at is really basic, the branding. How are you putting this information out? Are you putting them out on LinkedIn as a blog? Are your emails consistent in the font, in the tone, in the color? This stuff really boring to figure out, but once it's established, it's set and forget and it just brings a level of authority that you don't have. If you're kind of ad hocking everything, the next thing it looks like for us is consistency. For media contacting you, it's you turning up and getting regular interviews in magazines and articles and TV interviews that your ideal client is listening to. Then if I rang you and said, I've got you and interview an entrepreneur or founder magazine, is that a good fit for you?

Yeah, I think it would be.

It would be incredible. If I rang you and said, hey, I've got you an article in Horse and Hound magazine, you'd be like, thanks, Jemima, that's really helpful. But now we've lost an hour of our life. Maybe there's a conversion. Very probable there is a conversion there because you'll have people who are sales and who are buying strategists who are reading these magazines. But it's not where your ideal client is. It's kind of a. It's not exactly shooting fish in a barrel. So that consistency, it's consistency. It's turning up those people. It's social media posting every day. Again, really boring. Has to be done for that visibility piece. And what it looks like often is that they start winning awards, they start being featured in media, media start calling them instead of them having to approach media directly. So that's sort of what it looks like.

Okay, right, yeah, consistency, that's what I'm taking out of that. Set your process. Australian Federal Police, 101. Get the process right and then from there, be really consistent with it. Okay, what about reverse? What's an approach to visibility? Rather than perhaps not being consistent, what else does a poor approach to visibility.

Look like to you? So it's the rebrand every three months in what you do, it's not being consistent. It's not actually having an active choice quite often about what you do, what problem you solve. I say this more often than not in people that try something for like two months, don't make the a hundred thousand dollars and then try to reverse it and go, I'll try this for a little bit. It often looks like a rebrand changing the business name. Really enjoy business coaching. But I've been thinking about it. Now I'm going to be a health coach. Or I saw someone that was like, I'm now a sugar coach. And they had done childhood regression therapy for forever. And they're like, no, I'm going to get people off sugar. And it's that moment where you go, what is happening here? And it often is quite jarring because it's quite different from what they were doing before because there was no patience and no, let's give this six months or 12 months. It also tends to look like really batch. So people will do like 100 posts in one day and then we won't hear again from them for months. And you'll be like, what happened? What happened to them? And you'll go back and the last post is in. There was 100 posts in 2024, but there's no post now. It looks like inconsistency. It looks like chaos. And often it feels for us as very unstable and it feels like it's just so incongruent and inconsistent. And it does. It erodes trust. It feels like trust being eroded in front of you.

Okay, so there's that theme of inconsistency. But what I'm also hearing there is it's not just inconsistency in how you present yourself to the world from a promotional point of view. It's also in the offer you made to admit. I see in service based businesses where it is really easy to pivot and adjust what you focus on, I see a lot of people moving into different services really often. And there's a level of discipline there that you need to say, do you know what the Olympic Games are? Every four years, athletes take four years or three of those four years to prepare for those Olympic Games. We have pre seasons for major sporting organizations. People in their careers are put into senior roles after multiple years, if not decades. Right. It takes time. There's 18 years before we're regarded as an adult. Right. It takes time to get good at things. So sometimes you just need to stick with it. Excellent. Thank you. So please, before we finish up, two more questions. Number one is for those who want to start somewhere with visibility, progress over perfection, where would you recommend they start?

If you're in the beginning, I'll give a couple of different points depending on where your listener is. So the first exercise around people through, if you're sort of new to this process and you're really coming in a bit fresh to sales, the thing I would recommend is that you do an exercise that we like to call the 10 things. So it's just honestly, sit down with a pen and paper and Write down the 10 things that you want to be known for. So that can be. I want to be great. I want to be known great at sales. I want to be the consistent guy. I want to be the person who is speaking about this particular process. I want to be the expert in What I'm selling, I want to be, you know, sit down and really look at that. And that's your guide, that is your map now for your social media. That's if you want to do keynotes. This is what you speak about and that's it. This is what you're going to pitch articles for. This is what you're going to. This is it. Get consistent about it and don't deviate too much from it. It's really important that you pick. And it's a decision. It's honestly a very active decision that I think people who are very good at this naturally do. But there are a lot of people who go, well, I'll just start talking about everything. Social media, no, no, no. We are going to train our audience on who we are, what we stand for, what we sell and what we value. That's that exercise. So that's where I would start the next thing. If you're a little bit further along from that, I look at your social media. You need to be posting every single day on social media platforms. Every one of them. Ideally different posts, but I'll take anything I can get from that perspective. Let me be very, very clear. You are never going to annoy anyone. The first question we get is, I'm going to annoy someone with my social media. No, people are barely going to see it. If you're further down that and you have those established things, I really want you to start looking at business awards. They are the quickest way to building your business profile and platform as quickly as possible. And there are 450 in Australia right now that you can enter. 72 as of the date of our recording here are currently open.

Yeah. Wow.

Okay, so that's a lot of business awards.

Great, great. So early stage, Write down the 10 things you're known for. Second stage, get some consistency in posting every single day. And third stage, start attending awards. The second piece there, did I hear you say earlier about 6% of all posts are seen? So you're very unlikely to be bothering people if you're posting every day.

I post twice a day and that sounds like a lot, but there's a strategy behind that. So one is an evergreen post. That's just. What's Jemima doing today? I'm having a coffee. No one cares about that, Ben. I'm not expecting that they'll get 0 out of 10. What they do care about is when in the afternoon. Because our attention is rewarded and social media is great at this. You posted earlier, you're posting again. Thanks so much for your attention. We'll boost this a little bit for you, naturally, in the algorithm. So when I send out my sales post saying, hey, I've got this event coming up on this day, will you please buy a ticket? 6% isn't going to see it. Something like 14% will, though. So it's playing. Know the arena you're playing in a little bit, understand how it works rather than just trying a bit of a scattergun approach and being very, very, very consistent. Social media is. Then we could do whole, wow, we should do a podcast on social media. That would be crazy.

Who would have thought anyone would be so brazen? Okay, so before we go, you are a sales leader. Please put yourself in a position where you're a sales leader. You're wanting to turn on the growth tap and really rev those growth engines this year. What's the first thing that you would do?

If my team is converting, if it's going well, if we have all the pieces and the social media is naturally going out, the first thing I'm doing honestly is social media. I'm getting everyone's LinkedIn super consistent. And if that's not, that's where I would start. If that's all going well. I'm looking at business awards. I keep talking about this because it is so invaluable. Free pr, free media. Often they have cash prizes. The connections that you get from that, they'll brand you, they'll position you, and they will run you through about 100 of their social media campaigns.

Okay, I just want to jump back onto the. Just for a moment. I want to summarize a piece you said there around social media. If the rest of your business is going well, get your team on social media. But you said a word there. Make sure everyone's using it consistently doing the same thing. I have not met a sales leader. Yeah, I have not met a sales leader yet who has their team consistently working through social media. It just doesn't seem to rise to the top in your priorities. But I love that as a piece of advice.

It's so jarring. And I'm just saying this from a perspective because we teach people to do this every day. That you've got one company, we're working with one at the moment that is education and cpr. So they go in and do childcare training. And all of their frontline staff there was 10 or 15 trainers. All of them had different backgrounds and they had different photos and different styles. The first thing we did was made a universal one. And said put it all up. Immediately. We saw a return in their sales because they're looking up Mary Beth and they're typing in Mary's information. And Mary's is the same as the CEO. The CEO is the same as the coo, the same as the cfo. Everyone's consistent because they're part of a team.

Great.

And again, immediately there's this elevation. Who are we going to go with? The person who's got kittens and unicorns and some pastel colors or the person with a professional business branding. That took us 30 seconds in Canva to make and it took them a minute to update. Huge investment.

A lot of these lifts, they might be small, but when they're, you know, they're incremental. Right. One on the top of the other is significant. Excellent. So thank you. Jemima Ashley from the Visibility Lab. We're very pleased to have had you here today. Can you please let people know where they can find you? I know you have a great awards portal that's out there.

Yeah. Biggest place to find me is jemimashley.com we also have the awards portal. I bang on about awards because I'm so passionate about them. And that's@theawardsportal.com in a shocking turn of events. And I've also got this other podcast as well that I'd recommend. It's Girlfriends in business available. Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, it's all places that you that all good podcasts are.

Excellent. Thank you. Well, yes, Friends In Business is the podcast we do together. There's going to be a lot of content happening around that. This year we have our first off site for business owners, business leaders. It's going to be happening on the Sunshine coast later in the year. So, in fact, this is the first place I think it has been publicly talked about, so there is some really great things happening there. Please, you just need to jump across and have a look at that or you can contact either of us if you want to know more. Very much a different theme to just what we talk about in the sales podcast here at Stronger Sales teams. Excellent. Well, thank you very much. For those who are listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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