Practical Marketing in New  Zealand is a really easy to read, easy to use book, full of checklists and tips on undertaking marketing activities.  You can read all about it on the website, and come along to the book launches to see it, and the investment is only $90 for 800 pages of strategies.

This is an all-New Zealand production, written by a New Zealander, typed by a New Zealander, printed by a New Zealand company, book cover designed by a New Zealander, and bound by a New Zealand company, because it is full of New Zealand successes.

The book is only available on my website, although it will possibly be available at some selected business book stores and retail outlets who choose to be innovative and be part of the opportunity to sell New Zealand business books.

There's going to be book reviews in a host of publications and magazines, on radio stations and on TV.  The marketing strategy for releasing the book is underway, which includes direct marketing, book launches, television advertising, and flyer inserts into selected mailing databases and friends of Geewiz who are including a flyer with their statements, plus promoting it at my conferences, seminars and workshops, and direct marketing to selected retail outlets to encourage them to offer it to their customers.  The main focus is to drive people to the website, so that they can directly interact and get their book personally autographed.

You may have noticed, if you've been watching the ASB Business Show, that television advertising has been started, and a fascinating comment from a good Geewiz friend was that "I saw you one morning Richard, but I didn't see you the second morning. When will you be back?"  That's the difference between regional advertising and national advertising - he'd seen me in a national advertisement, the following day was a regional advertisement, and then it comes back to national.  And yes, there is a pretty strong television campaign featuring around the ASB Business Show and the Breakfast Show to promote the book.

To those of you who have already purchased a copy, I hope you are enjoying the ideas.  For those of you yet to purchase a copy, I look forward to personally autographing your book.

October 19th - Birmingham

This is the date for the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management "Selling Success" conference, which about 2,500 leading sales managers and top sales people from around England and Europe will be at, and speaking at that event will be a contribution from one little New Zealander called Richard Gee.  I'll be alongside Alan Pease from Australia, Ciaran McGuigan from Australia, Lesley Everett from Europe, Gary Outrageous from the USA, Gavin Ingham from England, and John McCarthy from England.  This one-day event will be held at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham.  If any of my Geewiz News readers would like to invest an air flight and 208 pounds, I'd love to see you there.

Election Campaign

Yes, there's an election campaign on, as we've all started to notice by the promotional activities, the marketing activities, and the news shows being full of political information.  What will be even more interesting to remember is that just prior to the election, for approximately 3 weeks, business decisions seem to stop and sometimes for one week after the election, so it's important that you spend time with your sales team encouraging them to really identify the reason why the customer should go ahead, so that they can help get the decision made rather than have it put off by elections.

Some of you may have seen an article that I contributed to Xtra MSN on political marketing, but the gist of the concept was to have a look at the way the political parties market themselves, and see how difficult it really is to get your communication message across while you are trying to promote the skill and experience of the people, promote your policies (which can be quite in-depth and complicated), and also promote that the key to all of the actual number of parliamentarians is the party vote.

Here we have major campaigns focused on the leaders of the parties, but what will determine how many members and indeed the government, will be the party vote.  Have a look at the expenditure that we, as taxpayers, are actually funding through our grants to the political parties plus private contributions and party fundraising, and look at their methods of communication in the form of direct marketing, billboards, television advertisements yet to occur, radio advertisements, and you've only got a short time window to be effective, and at the end of the day, measurement will be on the number of people who turn out on the election day to the ballot box.  The marketing strategists behind all of the political parties need to be admired for their guts, and of course we will all know whether they got it right or wrong very shortly.

Award Evenings

This is the season where a number of organisations and institutes have award evenings to recognise results and success, and I've recently had the opportunity to attend a number of award evenings, including the awards evening that the Sales & Marketing Institute (of which I'm president) put on.

In this instance,  the awards evening was totally focused on the people, focused on what the people had contributed, focused on what the customers said about the people, what the companies said about the people, and it seemed to me to be the real essence of what an awards evening is all about.

At another group's awards evening, the whole awards seemed to be about the environment and image that was created, which to me totally lost the plot. It wasn't about the awards, it was more about the MC and entertainers creating an entertaining environment that in my opinion didn't work.  Somehow, it made us judge the success of the awards on the entertainment - isn't it time we took away this drive for big, fancy, expensive visual displays, comedy routines, and MCs that focus on themselves instead of focusing on the award winners?

Another set of awards that I went to recently also focused on the campaigns, rather than the people who actually created the campaigns.  They talked about the monetary successes of the campaigns, which was really whether the companies had a big enough budget to be able to cover enough media choices. 

Again, three different styles of awards, but the one that remains in my memory is the one that focused on the people.  Perhaps we should be thinking about awards nights, and what really makes the difference in business - and that's people doing business with people.

Anyway, enjoy the next awards night you go to, and make sure you share success with a few great people who have achieved.

Personalisation

Hasn't the age of personalisation really arrived?  As I opened up my mail the other day, and received a copy of DLB magazine, which is the magazine put out by the direct marketing association, it had a special flap cover that perfectly blended into the cover design, but embedded into that flap cover design was my name, my street address, my business name (both on the front and the back), and this really is the age of delivering a personalised magazine cover to the subscriber.  How powerful can this be?  How magic is it in eye-appeal?  It will really be the future of personalisation, embedded not only in the cover but also in the content of the publication that we read, whether it be in e-commerce format, or a printed format, the ability to personalise.

New Laws

You may have seen the media editorial I achieved in the New Zealand Herald and on TV3 News, trying to bring some commonsense to the proposed changes to delivery of advertising communication material to households.  The essence of this is that three local city councils have decided that they want to control for paper wastage reasons, the information that is going to letterboxes marked 'No Junk Mail'.

Their method of control is to bring in a bylaw that fines the delivery boy $20,000 if he delivers to one of the letterboxes, and considering he's only paid $10 a week it's basically not commonsense.  In my arguments and submissions against this, I pointed out that local authority newsletters would also fall into the same category, so in the bylaws that they have created they've exempted themselves for local authority newsletters.

So you could say, I lost, but I did give them a good idea!

Another piece of legislation to watch out for is the Anti-SPAM Act, which is proposed to be brought in during the term of the next government, and it seeks to require you to get permission from your customers to send them email newsletters before you send out the email newsletter.  Again, no commonsense.

Watch out for new laws and regulations which are covering the giving of prizes under the Gaming Act, and rewarding customer's loyalty - again we seem to have a lack of commonsense being applied to allowing sales and marketing managers the ability to communicate with their customers.

I will continue to voice my opinions in support or in opposition to new legislation as it relates to sales and marketing control.

The World of the Web

It continues to expand, with international sales being a common occurence, but I wonder if any of you have missed the small little comment from the chairman of FedEx, who like the similar organisation UPS, is enjoying buoyant times at the moment, because all of these small export sales around the world to customers by companies are just going at the normal freight rate, which is highly profitable for people like FedEx and UPS, as the volumes are not great, and the skill of the companies doesn't tend to go for negotiation, unlike the freight forwarders do.

The lesson is, if you are currently sending goods overseas that have been purchased from your website, make sure that you really negotiate hard with the people like FedEx, UPS, Courier Post, or whoever your supplier is, to get delivery and security at an affordable price.

Credit Unions

I recently had the opportunity to address the Credit Unions' Managers Conference in Taupo, and it is fascinating understanding the value that credit unions provide in the local community's finance and savings industry.  I recommend that if you are ever looking for added-value to your staff, or a speaker at a staff meeting, that you talk to your local credit union about the services they offer to members.  They really are in tune with the community needs at affordable rates.

Retailers' Association

Over the last two months I've had the opportunity to address Retailers' Association seminars in New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Wellington, Auckland, Tauranga, Taupo, Napier, Hamilton, Blenheim, Christchurch and Timaru - a fantastic 12-city tour of positive people who want to make their retail stores more exciting.  It has been great to hear some of the success stories of retailers who have enacted some of the ideas that I presented at the seminars real fast, and have already got the benefits.  So welcome to Geewiz News, and look out for the retailers who are trying to excite, entice, and enthuse you to come back to their stores - perhaps they've been to a Geewiz seminar!

First Interviews for New Staff

As everybody is finding at the moment, it's really hard to get good quality people.  I'd just like to focus you on the stages of that first interview, and perhaps remind some of those readers of Geewiz News of the basics of a good first interview.

The stages are:

1. Welcome and introduction to you and your organisation, and the emphasis should be on selling your company to the applicant, and giving them a copy of any company details, job descriptions, and at the same time you are looking to see how well the applicant listens to you, do they write anything down, and what is their attitude to the information that you're passing on.  This gives a good example of how they are going to react in front of a customer.
2. Second stage is to get the applicant to talk about themselves, over and above what is already in the CV, identifying their strengths and weaknesses.  What you are looking for here is, can the applicant sell themselves to you in the next 30 seconds?  If they are not able to sell themselves, which they should know most about, they'll never be able to sell your products or your services without extensive training.
3. The third stage is, ask some probing questions.  These all start with what, why, where, how, which, and when, to get them answering and for you to try to understand what their thinking process is.  It doesn't matter whether the answers are right or wrong, what you want to understand is, what is their attitude like, what is their thinking process like, what is the quality of their answers, and how do they handle a little bit of typical customer pressure.
4. The fourth stage is to make a decision, either to have them back in for a second interview, or to wish them well in their career choice, and perhaps get them to think about your organisation.

If you structure your selection interviews like this, the applicant will get a good idea of who your company is, and secondly you will be able to decide whether you think that person has the potential, the ability, and the attitude, and you'll get commitment when they phone back to you to say yes, they'd like to go ahead.

Obviously, for more details on interviews, check out the free downloads on my website, or buy my book on New Zealand Sales Management on the website.

Exhibitions - How do you make them work?

I see a number of exhibitions focusing around small business, franchising, and business lifestyles, all designed to put potential suppliers of services and products in front of clients and customers.

But an interesting thing is, when I wander around some of these exhibitions I see a big lack of website addresses - after the customer has come to have a look around, where can they get more information?  I also notice that the skill of the people on the exhibition stand doesn't seem to be focused. 

Clearly identify with the team on your exhibition stand - are they there to collect leads?  Are they there to make sales? Or are they there to just make everybody feel good as they wander past the stand? 

The major reason for most business exhibitions is to collect leads.  You can do this by good stand design, by having competitions, by having staff trained that the purpose of the communication is to get the customer's contact details.

Exhibitions are a very expensive investment, but if they develop the right quality leads, they can certainly produce worthwhile results.  If you see an exhibition that is interesting to your industry segment, it's well worthwhile investing the time to see who is out there promoting. 

Remember, a business exhibition is different from a lifestyle exhibition.  Lifestyle exhibitions are there to sell you things, and to entertain you for a couple of hours, versus the business exhibition which is essentially there to get your name and contact details so you can be followed up.

Think carefully about how you can invest your time in the next exhibition.  There's a very good video you can hire from trainingpoint.net "How not to exhibit yourself", which is ideal for training your staff.

Cellphone Virus

One of the things that we seem to overlook in this wonderful technology age is the emailing to cellphones, and the use of a portable PDA, and how powerful the potential to destroy and frustrate you if you get a virus on your cellphone.

You need to be setting up your email virus control to its highest level to minimise the potential of a virus coming down to your PDA.  I would certainlly recommend that you talk to your IT supplier or your cellphone PDA supplier for the best recommendations, and don't get caught out.

It is easy these days to have emails coming directly to your cellphone, but a strategy I've found that works exceptionally well is that I have two email addresses, one is my normal email address where all normal email communication comes to, and one is my cellphone email address ( cell@geewiz.co.nz), which is for anybody who wishes to get an email with an urgent basis to me.  That way, I'm only dealing with urgent emails on my cellphone, and then of course I can go to my laptop, put in my datacard and be instantly available.

My brother also showed me a wonderful little bluetooth keypad that he has for his cellphone, which for longer emails is a fabulous technology tool.

Protect yourself - the more we put into our PDAs and the interlinking with our computers, the more we have to concern ourselves with another area where we can get viruses.

Franchise or Not?

I work successfully with a number of franchises, helping them create sales and marketing strategies to promote their franchises to potential customers. You have to remember in New Zealand we have the highest number of franchises available per head of population of anywhere in the world, some 200 franchises are actively promoted in New Zealand, with over 10,000 franchisees in a wide cross-section of businesses.  Sometimes, the selling of a franchise is more about making money for the franchisor than what it is about building a business that is going to be successful for a franchisee. 

A few points you might like to consider, if you're either buying a franchise or setting up a franchise, or running an existing franchise and you want to make it more successful:

1. People - you have to have people with the right attitude, who actually want to be successful in business not just buying a job.  Sell them a franchise based on their attitude of 80%, and 20% technical skill.
2. Your product or your service that you are offering through the franchise has to be something with a point of difference - whether that is in the application, the service, the package - it needs to have a point of difference to be successful.  Remember, even the new product launch success rate is about 1 out of 10.  That's not going to change just because you've put it into a franchise framework.  It needs to have a point of difference.
3. The franchise has to be able to be profitable, it has to be able to produce revenue through the efforts of the franchisee with a top up from the franchisor.  The revenue needs to be produced by the people who are going to carry out the work, and of course it needs to have franchise fees that are relevant to the level of work that is being produced, and profitability.
4. Marketing - there needs to be a marketing plan in place that has a menu of items that a franchisee can pick up and run with themselves, incurring the costs and measuring the results, as well as brand marketing or image marketing that the franchisor undertakes.  Most of all, there needs to be a plan that can be measured, and is focused on generating leads or generating brand publicity.
5. Support - the most important ingredient in any franchise is the people, and you need to have a look at the support package as to how it is going to help people achieve their tasks, how it's going to help people achieve results, and how it's going to regularly communicate the next vision and the next challenge.  Of course, there needs to be some technical support, but it should never be focused on the technical or the commodity support at the expense of investing in the people. 
6. Conflict - most conflicts between franchisees and franchisors are just like relationships between people, it's because "you said", "he said".  It boils down to the only way that a franchise agreement is ever going to be workable is that the people make it work!  Whenever I get asked to assist in a dispute between franchisor and franchisee, my first focus is always, "Let's get around a table and talk about what we're trying to achieve." and get everybody focused on delivering the forward vision, instead of tearing apart the processes and the systems.   A franchising system is about recognising that somebody else has had an idea, and you are buying the right to use that idea to make money for yourself, so don't get into the terrible stage of criticising the franchisor as to what they've delivered, and whether you think it was value or not.  You've already made the buying decision, you bought the franchise, now see how you can make it work yourself with help from the franchisor or outside advisers.

Coming Seminars

Welcome to all the new friends of Geewiz, from the recent series of retail seminars, conferences that I've addressed, and people coming to attend the book launches.  It's great to have you amongst the network.   My coming seminars over the next few months are detailed below, and I invite you to check out further details on the website, www.geewiz.co.nz, and make your bookings either online on the website or with the partner involved.  Remember, I'm also available to do an extensive range of in-company seminars and workshops, or talk at your conference.

Kind regards,
Richard P. Gee

www.geewiz.co.nz
www.professionalspeakersnz.com

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