Currently in the Healesville, Marysville area filming Kochies Business Builders Bushfire TV Special. There is a lot of businesses up here hurting because people have stopped coming. Day trippers. weekenders get up here now. There are awesome places to see and stay. Get up here and have a beer at the Black Spur Inn http://www.blackspurinn.com.au. Sit out on the balcony and watch the motorcycles go past on what is rated as one of the Top 10 rides in Australia and say hi to Scott for me. Stay at Gary and Vicki’s award winning Woodlands Retreat  http://www.woodlandscottages.com.au . Great fun at Mitch’s Trout farm. You can catch fish in under a minute http://www.buxtontrout.com.au . This area has some great businesses but they need you patronage. More next blog.

Social Media Secrets for Business Owners Breakfast

Today we ran our Social Media Secrets for Business Owners and had a great turn out from Melbourne based business owners and executives who were all using to some degree social media applications all bright and early for a 7.30am breakfast. A point I like to make at these events is that there are answers to your questions in the room and this event was no different. In Q&A we had some great contributions around the room to various questions and comments posed by the audience members. My co presenter Jasmine Batra from Arrow Internet http://www.arrowinternet.com.au and I showed why Social Media is important for business owners and how it is part of a growing trend of people wanting to connect to like minded people and the overall theme of targeted marketing and Web 2.0 applications of interacting with your customers as opposed to mainstream mass media. We covered the new changes to Facebook and the implications for business and ran through a number of case studies who have used blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other applications to get closer to their customers.  To me Social Media should be part of every businesses marketing strategy and especially if you are a business that likes to stay close to your customers and values two interaction. So integrate your social media strategy with your online strategy asap.

We will be running another event soon so stay tuned!

Feedback was great ie ”You guys rock”, “Very Inspiring”, “Great information”, “Now I have a direction”; “hey this stuff works”, “thanks for the real world examples”.

Rob Hartnett & Jasmine Batra

Building Trust Workshop

I spoke at a marketing breakfast for Connect Marketing and challenged the audience to tell me what were the five reasons people don’t buy. I got back some fabulous responses all sort of right. Of course the first one is no money which is actually the last one. The ones I liked the best were

1. You have not emotionally connected with their truest desires (what the?)

2. Your value proposistion has not moved them sufficiently

3. You have not moved them into fear quickly enough ( a sales coach - these people make my life hell!)

So there were many more and show how many books by Kotler, Godin and the like they had all read. Well done and good profits to Amazon but they stuggled with the number one reason. That reason starts with T and its TRUST. We don’t buy because the seller be it a brand or person has not developed enough trust with us so we give other reasons for the most part why we can’t/won’t buy ie no money, no help and the like. Remember all the time in our sales and marketing efforts we must be building trust with our current and future customers. Go Mr T!

Last week I spoke to a group of CPA’s (accountants) and there was a healthy mix of those in public practice who look after small to medium businesses and some CPA’s who were the chief financial officers or senior accountants in companies that ranged from top 500 businesses to mid sized companies. While I am known as a Sales Performance and Marketing Expert these days I am actually an accountant by qualification. However I was amazed at the reality of the situation for marketers as accountants see them. Read the rest of this entry »