OK, I’m here this weekend at the last ever Crocodile Marketing Inner Sanctum conference at the Watermark Hotel in Surfer’s Paradise.

Getting up at 4am to catch the first flight up to the Gold Coast wasn’t too bad as it turned out…

…but I wouldn’t want to do it everyday!

Morning session kicked off with Pete Godfrey saying a little more about the reasons behind his decision to move on.  More from Pete later on…

Then it was David McMahon talking about making a…

“Million Dollar Marketing Makeover In 42 Days Using Crocodile Shortcuts”.

To be honest, this didn’t really live up to the billing.

Some interesting points about the 5 key areas to get on top of …

(Communication, Sales, Target Market, Product, Mindset)

…but not a lot of actionable detail.

Half the session was taken up with a Hot Seat (or “Croc Seat” in this case!) which was an interesting exercise in market research.

One of David’s clients is looking at marketing a new anti-ageing product and the audience provided feedback.

Couple of useful lessons about research, getting objective feedback and not letting the process be influenced by your own perceptions.

Reminded once again of the importance of understanding the stage of the market, as Gene Schwartz termed it in “Breakthrough Advertising”.  How people view a new product will be influenced by what else they’ve already seen.

The anti-ageing market is well established with many competing products…so not surprisingly one obvious question is “What’s better about this product?”

Second half of the morning featured Ari Galper presenting his “Unlock The Game” approach to sales.

Excellent session, although I’ve seen Ari before.

What’s it all about?

Basically a different approach to sales based on really wanting to serve customers rather than just “making the sale”.

I’ll have to discuss this a little more in a separate post but some of Ari’s key insights are that most of the problems in sales are caused by the salesperson themselves creating what he calls “Sales Pressure”.

When this happens, you get push back and resistance. Interestingly, sales pressure is caused by specific triggers.

And guess what?  Many of these triggers are what conventional sales training teaches people to do (who would have thought enthusiasm could be a bad thing?).

Looking back at the morning session, interesting how often “mindset” came up.

Lunchtime now and I’d better grab a quick bite.

More later, including, hopefully, an interview with the Wizard himself, copywriter Pete Godfrey.