The Dow is down. Europe and Asia are in turmoil. All around everywhere recession fears are dominating the news. How are you, and your business, going to survive?
While your first - and probably correct - instinct is to tighten your belt, you should make sure that the belt tightening isn't more damaging to your business than the problems in our economy. You can make cost-cuts, just make sure that the cuts you plan aren't going to further slow your sales.
Even with an economic slowdown, you need to make sales, and your customers need your product.
Two ideas to keep in mind: Focus Your Sales Efforts and Stand By Your Brand
Focusing your sales efforts is just good sense. Use tools and techniques that concentrate your marketing and selling on the audience that is most likely to generate new business. Understand how your marketing efforts generate responses and refocus those efforts to convert interested parties into customers.
Standing by your brand is a little bit more difficult. Who you are, as a business, is incredibly important to reinforce. Your customers need to feel comfortable working with you. They need to know that while the economy is uncertain, your business is not. There's an aspect of showbiz here in that you can't allow the concerns you have for the state of the economy to effect the operation of your business. Everything in the eye of the customer is on stage. Everything else needs to stay back stage.
If your business can be one thing your customers can trust, they'll keep coming back. And that's really all you want.
Comments(0)