Q&A with Janice B Gordon

We caught up with Janice B Gordon from Scale Your Sales ahead of her appearance at Accountex Summit North. She’ll be sharing her sales and marketing expertise in a session all about unleashing the power of personal branding.

Tell us a bit about your background and how you came to set up Scale Your Sales…

I have been a Visiting Fellow of Cranfield School of Management for five years helping large global companies with consultancy and training in Cranfield leading-edge best practice Key Account Management strategies. I am a global social influencer and have always used social media to gain clients and grow businesses, it’s the modern way for all companies, whether a global sales team or an accountancy firm, to build a trusted relationship and increase sales revenues. Scale Your Sales is a framework created to fill a client need to secure, maintain and grow key accounts. Social selling is one of the many tools in the Scale Your Sales framework along with key account management and personal brand personality.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?

When I help a company change their prospects by modernising the way they compete, and they say to me that it was my energy and training that help them exceed their target by $6 million. I want to do it again.

And the most challenging?

When you know that in one year that you could work with a company’s sales, marketing and senior executives and set them up to be growing faster in the future and the board or decision-maker defers the decision to star. Decision-makers are too often reluctant to lead change for fear of losing control until it is too late.

What one tip would you give to accountants looking to grow their sales?

Stop selling!

What is the most common mistake you see businesses making that impacts on their sales?

Selling with no system. Selling is haphazard, hard to predict and measure, reliant on a few people and not a whole company practice.

What do you want visitors to take away from your session at Accountex Summit North 2019?

Why and how their brand personality helps them get found by new clients and keeps existing clients happy. I want to motivate accountants to embrace the new age of growing an accounting practice to serve the needs of the 4th industrial age businesses.

How important is Accountex Summit North to the industry?

We are too London-centric, there are amazing companies in the Midlands, the North East and the North West but they are often overlooked; Accountex Summit North is essential.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?

Do not lose sight of who you are. It is easy with the demands of growing a firm to lose sight of your values, to lose your humour and personality and to get swallowed up by the business challenge. Maintain close relationships with people who will tell you “you need a break!”

Tell us a fun fact about yourself that most people don’t know.

I fought with a Hippo in the Okavango Delta. You will have to read my book Business Evolution Creating Growth in a Rapidly Changing World, to find out what happened.