Over at Corporate Presenter, I’ve mentioned that business speaker and writer Geoff Burch will be presenting a series on BBC2 starting at the end of July. The programme is called All Over The Shop. It’s all about business problems businesses face!
The programme will run on Tuesday evenings until the end of September. Details of the programme can be seen at Touch Productions.
Many of you will not have seen Geoff Burch in action. So here he is:
Here’s a link to my “Latest News” page. The latest entry was all about encouraging students to achieve their aspirations. It’s great fun and rewarding to. Get in touch with your local authority, they’d love to hear from you if you can offer your services. It only involves a couple of mornings a year.
Yesterday afternoon, at my PSA London Chapter meeting, I heard one of the best “common- sense” business talks for some time.
Barry Graham outlined how he has successfully built up his training business, Speaker’s Corner. He based his speech around his “10 Lessons”. These included, “don’t throw away good ideas”, “find your niche” and “go international”. His firm handles a wide portfolio of training topics such as conference speaking and progressive training.
On one of his slides was a comment made by an associate of his, Alan Dunachie. Alan is Director of Operations at the Economist magazine. It’s all about telephone selling:
“If you don’t make the calls, you don’t get the business”. Blindingly obvious, but do you set aside time each day to market yourself or your business?
From left to right, Jonathan J.Gabay, Jeremy Jacobs and Geoff Burch.
Jonathan spoke on advertising and branding and explained how marketeers and advertisers get their message across. He pointed out that the sales acronym, AIDA (Attention Interest Desire Action) is now old hat. AIDS is more appropriate! (Attention Interest Desire Substantiate). Or putting it another way, “desire” for a product or service isn’t enough. Sellers have to substantiate the benefit(s) of their product or service.
Geoff Burch had us in stitches during the afternoon session. His anecdotes and stories about selling, customer service and how the “Americans do business” would have touched many nerves in the audience. His main theme - finding and keeping customers. Then build value and trust with those customers.
Steve Farber makes interesting points about leadership on his blog. He says that “real leaders take us to places we’ve never been before”. This concept is very similar to a number of anecdotes that Geoff Burch highlighted in his extremely funny and inspirational speech at the PERA Innovation Centre earlier today. The gist of Geoff’s talk was about getting customers to say yes and to continue to say yes. If you haven’t heard Geoff speak, then get along and see him. He’s brilliant as are his best-selling books. Check them out at his site.
Another aspect of leadership and inspiration is the ability to come up with new ideas of getting your message across. Jonathan Gabay gave the audience a wonderful insight into the current trends of marketing and advertising. His tips for marketing and advertising:
1. Keep your message clear concise and short
2. Ensure that it triggers the emotions*
* Many years ago when I was in direct sales, we were told that 84% of sales made in the business-to-business arena were “emotional” rather than based on logical reasoning.
