7-Apr-09 12:00 PM CST

Lauron's Survival Tips for Building Business in Bad Times and in Good

Marketing is always a critical component of business success, but certainly when times are tight. If you aren't maintaining a smart, aggressive marketing effort, your business will always fall short of its potential, and that can become detrimental or even devastating in a stressful economic environment. Sometimes it takes a few buckets of sweat to kick us into the activities we should be doing all the time. View challenging times as an opportunity to clean up and perfect your marketing act. Eliminate the weak and the excess and then implement and hold firm to the principles, practices, and mindset that will help you weather the storm today and create growing and lasting success tomorrow.

Here are a few survival tips to help you protect and move business forward both in bad times and in good.

1. Think like a marketer so you'll act like a marketer. In my upcoming book, Think Like a Marketer: What It Really Takes to Stand Out from the Crowd, the Clutter, and the Competition (July, Career Press), I address head-on the mindset that makes your company a marketing machine. One component is simply realizing that everything in your business—every communication, exchange, interaction, piece of paper, sign, policy, everything—makes an impression that can help or hurt you. In both good and bad times, you should be capitalizing on the myriad marketing opportunities that are inherent in the normal operation of your business every day. Accept that everything is marketing. Everything that is you and that represents you works to make customers choose you (or not) and choose you again (or not).

Therefore, thinking like a marketer means constantly asking, "What is the marketing opportunity here?" If you're on the phone with a prospect, ask the question. If you're sending a fax, ask the question. If you're working up a price quotation, ask the question. Everything presents an opportunity to sell, cross-sell, up-sell, and re-sell. If you are not making every moment in your business a marketing moment, then you are leaving money on the table constantly. In troubled times these could be the rafts and rescue boats that could save you from the storm. Put everything you already have to work for you. Constantly ask, "What is the marketing opportunity here?" and then capitalize on it.

2. Get your entire company operating from a marketing mindset.First, get sales and marketing teams talking. These players need to be in constant communication and collaboration anyway, but more than ever when times are tough. Get your power brains in a room and devise an aggressive action plan that can generate sales and make a difference in your business right now. Get everyone involved, including customer service representatives. Rough seas call for all hands on deck. Every employee who closely interacts with customers needs to be active in keeping tight connections and fostering business along, but they'll need specific direction from you on how to do that effectively, so don't leave them hanging.

Next, pull in the rest of your troops. Every single person in your company plays a significant marketing role, no matter what they do. Everything they do every day—what they do and how they do it—determines whether or not prospects and customers will choose you, choose you again, or spread good news about you. Any single person may be the very reason a customer does business with your company—or not. Keep staff mindful of the impact they have on the overall marketing of your company. Help them understand how they can improve the customer's experience by what they do and how they do it. Get everyone asking the question, "How can we make a great impression here?" and "What is the marketing opportunity here?" Encourage more by acknowledging, rewarding, and celebrating all good deeds and successes large and small.

3. Get up close and personal with your customers. Now more than ever, you need to know what's on the minds of your customers. If business is tough for you, it's likely tough for them, too. Ask how they're doing and how you can work together to keep business flowing for both of you. Demonstrate a "we're all in this together" attitude. Say thank you. Indifference and neglect are always customer killers, but the tighter the margins, the less you afford to allow them in your business. Take the lead to keep relations tight and communications open. Plus, you want a heads-up if bad news is coming.

4. Pick up the phone. There's no time to wait for customers to come to you. The greater the need for business, the more direct and personal your approach must be. You don't have time to wait for marketing to build, you have to go straight to the source, so pick up the phone. Call customers. Call prospects. Hire a telemarketing firm if you need to (just be extra diligent to choose a good company). Be aggressive, direct, and personal.

5. Crank up the volume. Get out there relentlessly. This is no time to cut back on marketing. I understand you have to have the funds to make it happen, but you're only putting yourself in more danger by being silent. Tailor back expenditures that aren't producing, but keep the best ones active. Get your entire company out there. Network more. Make phone calls. Send more notes. Follow up on the contacts you made 6 months ago. Tell everyone you meet who you are and how you can help them. Ask one more question about what else they need and how you could serve them. Whatever has been productive for you in the past, double your efforts in half the time.

6. Stand out. Get bold and creative with how you reach your audience. I have seen a ton more signs about town lately, and that's terrific. Add signage to your door, curb, street corner, and inside walls. Get extreme with a killer promotion or offer that really gets attention (like the car companies who say we'll let you return your car if you lose your job). There's no room for playing around. Do something really big, bold, different, or unexpected to get noticed and get attention.

7. Expand your reach. If you aren't getting enough business from your traditional circle, expand your universe. Can you reach into a neighboring geographic area? Can you go to a different market segment that you haven't focused on before? Can you use a new tool like email and other online campaigns to reach more people faster? Go where impact and results are the warmest and the likeliest. Also look to other centers of influence who can help you. What organizations or other industry groups can help you find business or make referrals for you? Reach out to them.

8. Do what you've hesitated to do to get in front of customers. There's no room for subtlety in tight times. Maybe you've resisted some less-desirable marketing activities because they just weren't fun. Certainly, you must always uphold the highest standards of ethics, professionalism, and human courtesy, but when business is starving, you may have to take some less than desirable measures. Maybe it's time to hire high school students to put flyers on doorknobs. Maybe you need to draw extra attention to yourself at networking meetings by wearing a button or interesting hat as you pass out colorful notices about your business. Maybe you need to ask other businesses to carry your business card or walk the halls of a large office building and make cold calls to introduce yourself. I personally wouldn't enjoy those activities either, but if my business were starving, I'd do it. Rough times call us to step out from our normal routine. Remember, you don't get it if you don't ask. The greatest flaw of salespeople is that they don't ask for the order. Go where your customers are and ask, ask, ask. Who knows what great things might come of it.

9. Take ultimate care of customers. There's no room for sloppiness. Make sure customers feel extra pleased and extra appreciated by paying attention to every detail. Again, you must eliminate the possibility of indifference at all costs. People make decisions based on emotions and then justify them with fact. Make sure you're creating positive (not just average) emotions in every customer in every single step and transaction. Remember, all impressions either help you or hurt you so pay attention to everything.

10. Keep positive. If you dwell in the negative, you only get more negative. Companies have defied tales of woe because they didn't listen to them. Countless salespeople have made record sales in the "down seasons" because they didn't know they weren't supposed to sell that much at that time. Keep a positive attitude and just keep talking to customers and prospects, offering incentives, making great impressions, and taking advantage of every moment and tool in your business to ask, sell, cross-sell, and up-sell.

Whatever you do, you must keep stirring the pot to keep the momentum going. Don't back down or slack off when business picks up again. Whatever delivers results for you today can deliver results tomorrow—if you maintain your pace. The best defense in rough times is an ongoing, smart, and aggressive marketing strategy. You can learn more about how to keep marketing automatic in my new book, Think Like a Marketer, available right now for pre-order at Amazon.com.

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