An Entrepreneur’s guide to thriving in the credit crunch
There’s an awful lot of news around about the credit crunch at the moment. We must all be experts by now on sub-prime mortgages, interbank lending and the like.
We’re told that business is suffering and many businesses won’t survive the credit crunch. I don’t expect my own business to survive the credit crunch – I expect it to thrive during the credit crunch. Our July revenue was 80% more than the same month last year, so we’re not doing too bad so far!
So here’s the approach to the credit crunch that I’m applying to my business:-
1. Stop watching the television and listening to the radio – everything you watch or listen to is more doom and gloom about the credit crunch. We’re being brain washed into desperation. Listen to this stuff and it paralyses you. You need to understand what’s going on in the world but you don’t need to be brain-washed with bad news – you’ll soon start believing it and it will make you feel a victim. The credit crunch is the ultimate excuse for poor performing businesses everywhere – don’t let yours become a victim of this awful mind-set.
2. Look past the credit crunch. If you let your head drop, you’ll spend a lot of time looking at the ground and looking at your feet. Keep looking ahead and keep the vision for your business in the forefront of your mind and in the forefront of your employees’ minds. Don’t get side tracked from where you are taking your business. Continue to set huge goals for your business and continue to drive everything towards them.
3. Understand the benefits that your product or service brings to people in a credit crunch. Your prospects’ current priorities are probably saving money, getting more business in, and saving time. How can your product or service help them do that. Adjust your marketing messages, benefits statements, elevator pitches and USP’s to capitalise on the current business environment your prospects are likely to be experiencing.
4. Once you’ve done what is described in 3 above, reaffirm your total belief in your product or service. Believe that your product or service brings huge benefits to your clients in a credit crunch. They would be foolish not to buy from you. If you don’t believe this, who will?
5. When telephoning your prospects, or emailing them, sending them a prospecting letter, or any other communication method, join in with your prospects’ conversations. Try to imagine and predict the types of conversations that your prospects will be having in today’s business environment. Your communication with your prospects needs to add to that conversation so they immediately identify with what you are communicating and the product or service benefits that you are promoting.
6. Always remember that if you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. You CAN thrive in the current climate. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. Don’t listen to negative people. Let them own their own failures. You are in business to win and retain clients – nothing else! It’s time to get focused and to get close to clients – really understand them – really look after them.
7. Take a really close look at your competitive advantages. Why do your clients come to you instead of going to your competitors? Has your competitive position become better or worse over recent months. Invest in technologies or whatever else you need to really capitalise on your prospects current pressure points.
8. Really focus on the talent in the business. Teams thrive when challenged so keep them updated with what’s happening in the business and the results that are being achieved. Get them to recession-proof their jobs by developing their talents and out-performing the competition. Celebrate success very loudly and openly and more than you usually would. Learn from failure more than usual; failure is the biggest learning opportunity that you and your people will experience. Learn from those failures and share the learnings.
9. Take a really close look at costs. For instance, are your sales people going out on really good sales visits where they stand a really good chance of closing some business? Sales people driving around to poor appointments is huge wasted cost. Look at all of your costs at this level of detail.
10. Enter business awards. Sound a bit off the wall but winning business awards drives great PR; usually free! Go after them – someone’s got to win!
11. Go to more networking events. There are loads of them these days – BNI, BRE, Camber of Commerce, Business Link, etc, etc. Go to as many as you can manage. Get yourself known more and get yourself seen more.