New training workshops Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne

A brief message to announce my new Presenting With Confidence presentation skills workshop.

First workshop date is in Brisbane on April 8, followed by Sydney May 22.

Also now available are additional dates for Selling With Confidence sales training.

Registration is now open for:

Brisbane (one-day workshop) April 29
Sydney (2-day program) May 12-13
Melbourne (2-day program) May 7-8

Any questions please let me know.

Which advertising works best? Recent data shows...

I'm a great believer in making sure you are using the best marketing tool to suit your objective. And I often say that marketing is like playing chess. In chess you have a variety of pieces, each with their own moves and abilities.

In marketing you have a range of marketing tactics, and each comes with its own inherent set of limitations and advantages.

The challenge is to use the best marketing tool for the job. The choice of which tool/tactics to use, and how frequently to use it, should be based on what your customer needs to move them forward in their purchase decision.

This article from eMarketer talks about the impact of various marketing tactics on consumer purchase decisions in the USA.

It shows that the first places people look for information is advertising inserts and the internet. Each source received 26% of responses. The internet was nearly double the number from 2004 (15%). Interesting newspaper advertising dropped by 33% since 2004 to now sit at 12%.

The message here is that you need to stay up to date with the most suitable marketing tactics for your requirements. The market is changing too fast these days to keep using what you had in place 5 years ago without reviewing it.

When good branding still isn't enough.

Having a strong brand name will not ensure your business is a success all the time. There is no arguing that having strong brand recognition is a great start. But there are often other factors that come from many different sources that can have a big impact on your success.

Take Australia for example. Australia as a brand, that is.

Over the last 10 years there has been a huge amount of work put in by Tourism Australia (previously Australian Tourism Commission) to create and promote the brand 'Australia'. Take a few minutes to read this informative review at BrandChannel.

The promotion of Australia as a value-packed alternative for world travelers has been successful. However there are now forces at work that are discouraging visitors from coming.

As the market forces change, so too must the marketing (and branding) strategies.

In an item titled "Creepy Crawlies Sting Tourism" in the Sydney Morning Herald it is quoted that:

Tourism Queensland's (TQ) annual conference this week heard a high Aussie dollar and expensive fuel surcharges and airport taxes were bumping up the cost of a trip Down Under, with concerns many would look elsewhere rather than dig deeper into their pockets.

... and that...

Japanese travellers have already begun snubbing Australia for cheaper Asian destinations and are set to do so well into the future.

The formerly booming market is forecast to drop by one per cent each year to reach 561,000 tourists in 2016, from a high of 820,000 in previous years.

Additionally, the article states that Britons may have seen "too much" of Australians. And that they feel as though they know everything about the country already. So why should they travel half-way around the world?

How does this apply to your business?

Even if you have a strong brand presence in your target markets, how do you ensure it is always relevant? How do you make sure your customers always have a strong reason to call you?

And how are you monitoring external influences that may act to limit your opportunities in the market?

Your marketing strategy should be dynamic. It should evolve based on market conditions. Even large successful businesses need to evolve - as does the marketing strategy for a country like Australia.

Next trust-based sales training in Sydney Feb 18-19.

A quick message to let you know the next dates for my Selling With Confidence course is in Sydney over Feb 18-19 (Mon/Tue). Get the details and register here.

I've been running this soft-selling training program for 4 years now and theres plenty of testimonials about how delegates have found the innovative approach and structured methodology very helpful in getting better results.

The course is for service providers, managers, professionals, technical staff, and sales people who sell services, technology or complex products.

You will leave the course with a new structure for how to handle your own sales encounters.

Interested? Check the details here online and listen to my brief introduction (click the play button on the page).

The value of building a brand for B2B companies

I was discussing some issues with my business partner in Solutions Found, including the impact of branding for a B2B company. Most people think of 'brands' as mainly being important for consumer products. But the idea of brand is also critical for B2B companies.

In the B2B space a lot of the business is driven by personal contacts, and personal relationships. And it might be tempting to think that the overall brand of the company is not so important. But it is.

For B2B companies, the brand should be used to create a sense of unity, and reassurance, for the customer. In fact many companies offer a variety of products or services under the one main company name (or brand). These individual products can be come a confusing mess of opportunity for customers, unless they are given clear distinctions between each product and who is selling it.

A great explanation of this is given by John Quelch at Harvard Business.

By having a unifying brand image, it is also easier to control communications from different parts of the organization. This is something we covered at a recent seminar on centralizing email marketing for franchise groups.

The 'brand' must be championed by the CEO and other senior leaders within the company. And the task of maintaining the brand usually falls into the marketing department.

Although in reality, the marketing department only directly controls a portion of the communications within a B2B company. Other departments such as sales and technical support have significant direct contact with customers (verbal and written) and they also need to be brought on stream - guided - with how to manage and implement the 'brand message'.