Edgewalker's Journal: The Post-Recession Relaunch
posted October 20, 2009 - 6:06pm
Eighteen months ago, you knew all about your business. You knew your customer, you knew your market, you knew your competition. You knew what people expected from you and what they were willing to pay for it. You knew what you had to offer and why it
mattered. You knew how to sell it.
The world has changed profoundly since then.
Half your competition may have disappeared. They may linger on in Google search results, but try to visit the website or once you get there, to use the web form to contact their sales department. Half the time, you’re visiting a haunted house.
Your network of partners, resellers and referrers has almost certainly contracted and re-formed. Some have gone belly up, some have shrunk, some are barely recognizable, they’ve changed so much.
Where’s the money now? If buying your product or service requires financing, the ground has surely shifted as banks withhold loans from small and medium-small businesses. As revenue expectations dwindle, the return on investing in your product or service is bound to look different than it did two years ago—smaller and slower and far less certain.
This impacts the sales cycle. So do the cutbacks in your sales staff. And the ever-longer time it takes your customers to get paid by theirs. What to do about your customers-in-name, who continue to use your services but never pay their bills?
Here’s the key question as you think about your post-recession business: Who is your customer? How has his situation changed in the last two years? What can you offer him that he needs now? How can you incite his desire and win his trust?
To find out, talk to him. Talk to lots of hims and hers who were or might have been your customers in posher times. Their priorities have shifted just as yours have. To accommodate your business to their altered needs, start by asking lots of questions and listening hard to the answers. In the places where you find painful changes, you’ll find the need you can answer creatively and thus grow.
Given the real estate market, maybe your customers are looking at spending the next ten years in a house they would have flipped by now. That makes them prospects for a remodel they wouldn’t have considered two years ago. Maybe the case for a fuel-efficient furnace has legs with winter coming on.
Maybe they lost their savings, so will be working longer than they planned. Maybe the startup didn’t sell and won’t die. Maybe the product’s ready now but the marketing department is all gone. Maybe an investment in teleconferencing can slice travel costs and make it possible to do business with a leaner staff.
Maybe the half price pitcher of mojitos at happy hour will increase the dinner trade.
You get the idea. Find the altered circumstance and speak to it.
Speak loud. Speak smart. Speak in every channel and every venue you can find. At the same time, of course, you’ll be readjusting your own supply chain, trimming your overhead, recalibrating your image and your expectations, putting a post-recession polish on your value proposition.
The companies that rethink and relaunch now will flourish. Look for the rest in the dinosaur museum.
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