GEEWIZ NEWS – STAY OUT OF POLITICS!

July 2002

Greetings Friend of Geewiz

With the General Election looming over the next few weeks in New Zealand, you will find that there is a great opportunity for time wasting, lack of decision making, and if you’re not careful, your business will become unfocused due to the external marketing influence of the political campaigns, commentary, and media concentration on politics rather than things good for business.

Politics and your brand marketing?
As a general rule, stay away from associating your brands with any political party pre-election promises, as you don’t know how your clients are going to react. Remember, how people vote is a very personal decision which can be influenced by many external and internal democratic processes. If you as a marketer decide to push your brand as supporting one particular political party’s stance on an issue, then you have to remember that your brand will be associated with that stance and also that your clients may agree with you or may not agree, and this can be affected in your sales revenue.

In the run-up to elections it is generally not a good time to launch new products, new services, as many of your business-to-business decision makers are not focused on their business. It is far better to delay and launch after the election.

Sales teams need to be focused at weekly sales meetings on the need for concentrating on business during customer visits – unnecessary chitchat about political events, political commentary, media coverage, while showing that you have an interest in the external world goings-on, does not show the customer that you are focused on their business, their problems, their opportunities.

At your sales meetings, encourage your reps to stay focused on their objectives, their prospecting, their business developments, their customer developments, and only allow discussion and reporting in your sales meetings on business issues.

If you desire, you can examine the political parties’ marketing and one-on-one sales negotiation skills for strengths and weaknesses, and use those as an example within your sales meetings, of short term sales success.

The next few weeks will really show how well the political parties manage to market themselves, and sell themselves at face-to-face meetings.

For your own business interest, it’s a good idea to attend some political meetings to see how potential Members of Parliament and leaders of parties sell themselves to their audience, sell themselves via the media, and market their true beliefs.

Remember these political parties have government funding, and in some cases unlimited financial resources, but they also have to deal with the people resource, and in your sales and marketing reviewing you may care to examine how they treat the concept of "business is about people doing business with people", voting is about people trusting and believing in people.

Seminars
Seminars in Christchurch and Tauranga sold out very quickly, with record attendances in both cities, and a lot of very successful people emailed me with their activity they had put into place within 30 days to receive their double CD set "Opportunities".

I had the opportunity to speak to conferences for Composite Retail Furnishings Group, the Plush conference, the Inner Wheel conference, and in amongst other activity complete new workshop seminars for WINZ, Smiths Mitre 10 Christchurch Group, CECC, as well as welcome on board for marketing consultancy new clients:

• Tboats.com (Thompson Design)
• Star Publishing (NZ Financial and Business Press)
• Atrax Weigh and Control Systems
• Compute Systems
• Chris du Toit (financial planner – successful money management seminars)

Some nice little successes for me and my clients include:

• Enterprise Hamilton’s marketing seminars being fully booked within 24 hours of notification and advertising.
• Doing a seminar in Tauranga on Time Management just after an international Australian based speaker on time management had visited, and being able to pull twice as many people to attend my seminar as had attended the international speaker.
• My client, TrainingPoint.net succeeding in launching his video, "Lessons from Dolphins" and expanding his training business to Wellington.
• And talking of Wellington, my new partnership with EMA Central is off to a good start, with participants commenting that these were the most practical seminars ever.
• The Portland Hotel, launching their new conference centre, and being able to report an increased occupancy from some of the marketing initiatives we have put into place over the past year.
• Computer engineers client, Kinetics, successfully moving to their own new building and launching a new service, 24 hours – 7 days engineering support.
• Pacific Islands freight consolidator, International Freight Management, opening up sales offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
• Shipping agency client, Tranzpac, securing two new shipping agencies to represent, as well as an exciting new development area to look after in Melanesia with Pacific Islands states such as Wallis and Futuna, and many other names that you won’t even have heard of.
• As well as completing the editing of my new book, "New Zealand Sales Management" which is now away at the printers!

New on my website

1. New seminar details, with easier booking processes once you’ve had a look at a seminar or workshop.

2. Recent photos of participants.

3. Interesting articles about special seminars for women, new speakers, and articles for free downloading.

4. You will also find various articles that I have contributed to websites such as Bzone and Xtra, when you are searching the web.

Seminars Coming Up in July / Early August

Have a great day!

Richard Gee.