Take Care of the Folks that Brought You to the Dance

Surviving a downturn is difficult and there are no silver bullets to increase or maintain your current level of revenues. However, there are ways to alleviate the pain of declining sales.

1. Communicate with your customers large and small on the phone or better yet, face to face. This also means listening and learning about their business as much, or more so than talking to them about yours.

2. In a slow economy, everyone on staff must increase their sales effort relative to their function in the organization.

3. The type of communication should change from “Hey have I got a great product for you to buy!” to “How can I help your business survive this recession?” The shift from sales person to trusted advisor will go a long way to gaining the respect and loyalty of the customer because they are experiencing the same challenges you face to a similar or different degree of difficulty.

4. Repairing a product or extending a service agreement at the same or lower rate versus pushing a pricier new product or upgrade will also earn the long term relationship that will see each entity through the economic slowdown.

5. Sales and support are the muscle of any organization. When you are evaluating cost reduction options, owners should think twice about how deep to cut the supporting administrative line items and sales personnel.

To emphasize this point a recent article in BusinessWeek illustrates the need to maintain Sales and Customer Service staffing:
As the economy plunges deeper into recession, many companies are confronting the same brutal choices Hertz faced when it announced layoffs of some 4,000 people on Jan. 16. While businesses may feel forced to trim costs, cutting too deeply can drive away customers. Hertz representative Richard Broome says the company has reduced "instant return" hours at some smaller airports but is making adjustments to restore that service in locations where it "might have gone too far." Says Broome: "You try to create the right balance."

Across the business world, managers are trying to pull off the same perilous high-wire act. Just as companies are dealing with plummeting sales and sinking employee morale, skittish customers want more attention, better quality, and greater value for their money. Those same customers are also acutely aware that their patronage is of growing importance to companies as others decrease their spending. BMW Vice-President Alan Harris argues that in the current environment, consumers expect "that anyone who is in the market with money to spend is going to get treated like a king."

All in all business owners know they must run twice as fast to maintain existing business and work even harder to find new opportunities in previously unexplored markets, but the way to stay in the game is to maintain your base when the going gets tough.