There is ample evidence from past downturns that the company that maintains its marketing spend through the downturn exits the downturn in a far better position than its competition. Even in the worst of times, there is still business to be written, markets to be taken and customers to be won. And a downturn, when many of your competitors may well be going quiet, often represents an unprecedented opportunity to grab a much larger share of voice.

2. Recalibrate your strategy and recast your budget strategically as opposed to simply cutting x% across the board.

People often look for the one thing that companies should do in response to a downturn. I resist being so binary since a downturn represents doom to some but incredible opportunity to others. And even for those for whom it’s a challenge, an across-the-board response is rarely the right one.

At times like this, strategy becomes more valuable than ever. Know where you’re trying to go, the best way to get there, and how you’re going to know that you’ve arrived. Cut those marketing tactics that won’t help get you there and re-invest the money in the tactics that will.

3. Negotiate pricing.

All the vectors you use to communicate to your marketplace are feeling the pinch right now. There is no better time to play hardball on pricing, or to negotiate added extras that usually cost a lot more. Most media outlets will cut their line rates or give you valuable extras like a free newsletter distribution, web conference, white paper distribution or even additional insertions. Trade show organizers may agree to a bigger booth space for the same price or throw in sponsorship opportunities or show guide advertising that in better times might cost you thousands more. Even if your supplier must hold the line on fundamentals, see if you can’t snag some of the valuable extras.

4. If you have channel or other partners, consider pooling budgets and activities to make your dollars go further.

Can you share a trade show booth with partners? Can you initiate a co-op advertising program that sees you put up some of the cost while your channel partners put up the rest? Is the opposite available to you — are you a channel for an OEM with a co-op program?

5. Do not abandon measurement.

If marketing is seen as the easiest thing for companies to cut during a downturn, then measurement is seen as the easiest thing for marketers to cut. After all, it doesn’t really contribute anything, right? Wrong. Harken back to tip No. 2: If you’re not measuring, you have no idea where you are or what got you there, you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, and you simply can’t be strategic about your marketing spend. When times are good and there’s budget to spare, you might be able to afford to have some things work a little less effectively. When times are tough and every dollar must produce a result, you need to be measuring so you know which tactics are delivering and which ones aren’t.

6. Be transactional if there’s an immediate opportunity.

As I’ve already noted, a downturn means different things for different companies. If there is good business that can be immediately secured, be highly transactional in going after it. Alter all your messaging to “Buy now,” and focus on tactics, like advertising and direct marketing, that communicate transactional messaging best.

7. If there isn’t an immediate opportunity, go long.

It’s far more likely, however, that your customer’s buying cycle has stalled; it almost certainly has lengthened. So if your customers have hunkered down waiting for the storm to pass, there’s no point in blaring the hard sell at them or offering them discounts and other incentives to immediately do something they’re simply not going to. Does this mean you, too, should hunker down and draw the blinds until things blow over? No, it means your messaging should shift to support longer-term objectives such as awareness building, thought leadership and marketplace education. Tactics like media relations, content marketing, trade shows and white papers that establish your authority and expertise are a better use of your resources if this is your reality.

8. In all communications, employ story telling that emphasizes how your product or service saves money or drives additional immediate revenue for your customers. Speak to the pain they’re feeling in a recession.

Whatever the economic conditions, your marketing and communications messaging should be all about your customer, not you. You should always be speaking to the pain your customer feels and how your product or service solves that pain. In a recession, your customer’s pain is almost certainly all about revenue — making more of it or keeping more of it. Make sure you’re speaking to this.

9. Be overly attentive to your existing revenue base.

“Love the one you’re with,” says the old song, and that’s never more relevant than in a downturn, when new customers are hardest to acquire. Your current customers are keeping you in business and it’s almost always cheaper to maintain and build business with existing customers than to find new ones. Lavish your existing customers with attention, look for low-cost ways to improve the value you create for them, and communicate, communicate, communicate — let them know you love them.

10. Effective relationships never expire, so keep talking.

Keep talking to everyone in your value chain, including suppliers, service providers, channels, influencers and, of course, customers and prospects. Even if they can’t use your services or you theirs just now, keeping those lines of communication open and full of useful information will serve you very well when the economy recovers.

When considering any kind of partnering arrangement, be it for sales, marketing, distribution, R&D or any of the functional areas involved in bringing a product from concept to the end user, you as the leader of the organization must carefully consider your strategy. What is it you are trying to achieve? What unique value do you bring to the market?

Look at all aspects of your business, the full range of skills and functions required to make it fire on all cylinders. Break these into two categories: what you will keep in-house and what you will outsource or seek to execute with an outside partner.

When, and when not, to keep it in the family

What you keep in house is known as your core competencies. This group should be characterized by only those skills that are specific to your organization, add significant value to the customer, and differentiate you from your competitors. These are the ingredients of the secret sauce that define your unique value proposition.

What’s left are you non-core competencies. These are skills that may still be critical to getting a product to market and encouraging a customer to buy, but they are not significant differentiators. They may in fact be quite commoditized and standard for your industry. The question that must be applied here is if it is more cost-effective to find an outside partner who can do the job for you.

For example, if you are a software developer, does it make financial sense to have internal resources on the payroll focused on manufacturing and distribution of shrink-wrapped product? If you’re in the hardware business, should you be stamping sheet metal enclosures and fabricating optic cable when there are suppliers who specialize in these components?

Once you have taken a hard look at your business and separated your core from your non-core competencies, what then? How do you go about establishing a relationship of mutual benefit?

The building blocks for lucrative partnerships

You have to let go. Sometimes this can be difficult. Key individuals within the organization may feel quite possessive about a specific skillset or function. This is particularly common in high-tech companies with product R&D. But again, it comes back to having a clearly defined focus for your business and understanding what does not have to be kept in-house. If it doesn’t differentiate you, don’t waste internal resources on it. The right partner can bring your product to market faster and allow you to better leverage limited resources against your core competencies.

Partners can add value in multiple ways. For example a partner with an established presence in a market you wish to pursue can validate your offering as a reference customer.

What’s in it for them? It’s easy to look at a partnership arrangement purely from the perspective of “what’s in it for me?” But to build a truly beneficial relationship, consider “What’s in it for them?” What is going to make the arrangement work for the person on the other side of the table?

Once the deal is done, the real work begins. The partnership requires ongoing care and feeding. Too often, organizations will close a deal and move on to the next one without putting the resources in place to ensure value flows both ways as intended. This is crucial to preventing the arrangement from going south and driving your partner to a competitor. For example, it can take 12 to 18 months of dedicated effort to see returns from a distribution deal.

Trust is critical. There must be a relationship of trust that goes beyond the fine print of a contract and the threat of legal action if there is a breach. If you are in the midst of negotiating an agreement and there is a persistent and obsessive focus on the granular details of legal rights and obligations, this should be a red flag that this prospective partner may not be the best choice for you. Once the deal is struck, continue to act in a way that engenders trust and goes beyond the terms of a contract. For example, in distribution arrangements, companies will often damage the relationship by doing an end run around their distribution partner and selling directly to the end client.  If you plan to go direct under certain circumstances, outline them at the outset – setting the right expectations in any relationship reaps huge rewards.

Have a mechanism for discussion. Prevent the relationship from jumping the tracks by assigning an individual who owns the relationship and having your partner do the same. The idea is that these representatives of the two organizations have a personal, eyeball-to-eyeball dialogue and a clear communication channel to put issues on the table.

Outsourcing. Invariably, a partnership arrangement is a form of outsourcing. The time, effort and resources required to effectively manage the arrangement may, in some cases, be more costly and distracting to the organization than simply keeping the competency in house. This can often by the case in situations such as outsourcing complex R&D outside the company.

To conclude, handing off a non-core competency to a partner is not an abdication of responsibility but rather an opportunity to focus on your strengths. There must be trust and a commitment to feed and nurture the relationship to ensure it is profitable for both parties. Finally, for a partnership to be successful, there must individuals on both sides of the table dedicated to maintaining a regular and open dialogue.

Everyone buys for different reasons and with different priorities. When you made that purchase, who made the final decision? Was it you, or the person selling it? Was it the words they used that pushed you into committing to the buy, or did you take the step with certainty?

Well of course, if the purchase was a good one, it was you who made that decision. You were motivated by what you wanted to take away from doing business with that person. It wasn’t the mass of reasons for buying that may have been sprayed at you by the seller. How could they have known what truly motivated your decision? Maybe what you wanted to buy was peace of mind, or a product that delivered lots of action, or to save time and money; or maybe you were investing in something that would help make you money. Whatever the case, it was the result you wanted to take away, not the specific product or service in question.

Buying without remorse

And what about when it wasn’t such a good purchase? Have you ever experienced “Buyer’s Remorse?” Have you ever said, “I didn’t really want it but I was pressured into buying it.” How did you feel about doing business with that person the next time? If you’re like most of us, it wasn’t a good start to a long-term relationship. As a consumer, being pushed into the wrong buying decision may result in lost money or inconvenience. As a business, it can result in a poor, perhaps fatal, return on investment that means money wasted and productivity lost.

But what about when you experience a “Good Buy?” When you’re with a good salesperson or with someone who’s a great influencer, it all seems to go so well – they don’t seem to pressure you at all. It’s just a pleasant conversation that ends in a desire on your part to buy their offering, or to accept their ideas. Sometimes they even seem to accurately know what you need better than you do. Occasionally you’ll even end up buying something completely different from what you had intended, but you’re actually much happier with the result. Do you go back to that person the next time? Do you recommend them to other people? If they ask you for a reference, do you give it to them? Well of course you do.

If a seller is well prepared and professional, they might even be able to give you evidence that their offering can actually do what they claim it can. You can feel this “locking you in” to believing in, and championing, them long after you met or discussed it.

Why do we make selling so hard?

Well, it’s probably no surprise to you now, but when you are selling something – whether it’s goods or services, or maybe just an idea, the person on the other side of the table is no different from you when you are buying something. They have their own unique way of making buying decisions; they have their own list of what, in the longer term, they want to get out of the transaction; they don’t like being sprayed with annoying or irrelevant information; and most of all, they won’t come back if you tick them off.

So where’s the problem? If we’ve all experienced being the target of both good and bad selling, why do so many of us do it so badly ourselves? We do it over and over again … and we make it SO hard!

Why do we become different, and far less effective, than we normally are? Isn’t it much easier to turn someone into a Willing Buyer who tells you what they’d like to purchase? Then you can start discussing how they can complete that purchase and stop focusing on “Closing.”

Inevitably, we get nervous, we talk too much, and we force the prospect to go to the effort of selecting what they actually need from the mass of information that we’ve not been able to filter for them. And what’s the effect on you (especially when times are hard)? You end up stressed because you can’t measure how effective your “spraying and praying” will be or by the wasted time on lost causes that were never going to buy; then you make the oh-so-dangerous assumptions, guesses and self-delusion that can take hold when people are under pressure to close sales and create new prospects.

Wouldn’t it be just great to get rid of all that stuff and at the same time improve our use of time and our effectiveness? Maybe by an order of magnitude?

Take the pressure off

It all begins with taking the time to step back, take a deep breath and evaluate whether your communication with other people is truly Two Way, and then investing a small amount of time in making it so. In tough times, you need to give your business every chance you can. It’s no longer sufficient to simply go through the motions of “putting yourself in their shoes” to understand where they are coming from.

What truly motivates that person; how they filter any information they receive; what “model of the world” they use to make sense of what’s going on around them – these are all key things that can make your approach to “influencing people to buy” far more effective.

To make you even more productive, you can add an insight into how others observe your interaction and how other stakeholders are affected by the sale or the decision. This could include customers, colleagues, family members and competitors –  the list can be long or short, depending on the situation.

View the accompanying video for a simple yet extremely effective exercise for gaining this insight into the motivations, concerns and agendas of the individuals you are trying to influence or sell to. This exercise is a fundamental step in learning how to turn “Selling” into “Buying.”

This piece is the first in a series that will give you solid tools and insights that you can use every day to survive and thrive in today’s tough markets, and to become a far more effective and comfortable influencer, seller or business partner.

It takes a significant commitment of time and resources to provide adequate answers to these questions and determine if there is in fact an opportunity worthy of the pursuit. If your organization is challenged by lagging sales, consider first if you are in fact doing all you can to a maximize revenues from your existing customer base.

It is far easier to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. I have seen examples where having the sales team devote 25 per cent of their time upselling existing customers has boosted revenues by 30 to 40 per cent. Get to know your customers, understand what they need, and how they can derive more benefit from what you have to offer. Odds are, you have a product or service that could be of interest to an existing customer and they are not even aware of it.

If you do identify a new market opportunity to pursue, don’t lose sight of how important this established client base is to your business. Avoid the pitfall of devoting so much of your time and resources to developing a new market that you neglect your existing customers. Otherwise, you may be leaving money on the table, or even worse, giving customers reason to embrace overtures from your competitors. Customers always need to feel the love.

When looking at a new market

Address it as narrowly as possible. The more you understand your market, the better you can target your marketing. How to go about this depends on the scale of your business. Are you a local retailer looking to open a new location on the other side of town? Are you a growing software company with a solution that has an established track record in the banking industry that you believe can help manufacturers improve their supply chain logistics?

Biggest is seldom best. Expanding companies often think they should go after the largest market. But it is often the smaller niche market that can provide higher margins and greater profitability. A large share of a small market is often more desirable than a small share of a large market where there may already be well-established incumbents. If you control the market, you will see a greater return on the investment. Competitors will be at a disadvantage and will find it difficult to undercut you.

Get to know your customers. It’s one thing to identify an untapped market opportunity, but quite another to understand how you should address it. Talk to prospective customers, ask them what pain points they are trying to address for which there isn’t an adequate solution, then tailor your offering to fulfill these needs. Don’t even bother proceeding with new product or service development until you have obtained this intelligence from the field. Customers should first be consulted at the earliest stages of product/service development, rather than asked to critique something that is about to roll out.

Where do I find new markets?

A new market can be one based on geography, industry or price point. The type of business you operate and the nature of the new market will dictate how you should go about defining and capturing it:

By sector/industry. This generally involves targeting an existing product or service at a new industry or sector. It may involve customization by tweaking functionality and features, simply retooling your promotional literature to highlight the product/service’s relevance to this new market (case studies with established customers in this market are great marketing tools in this regard), or some combination of both.

By geography. In this circumstance, you may be targeting the same customer profile, but in a different part of town, country or continent. Geography obviously means different things to different kinds of businesses. For a retailer, it could mean the other side of town, or a neighbouring community. For a high tech firm, it can mean another continent. Whatever the individual circumstance, the same rules apply – you must identify and qualify the market opportunity and in the case of international expansion, the culture of your target market.

If you are an export-oriented business, the further away the new market is from your home base, the greater the likelihood that you will have to establish a satellite sales office. When operating in other countries, there are obvious differences in culture, customs and language that necessitate an on-the-ground presence.

By price point. This involves tweaking your product or service to provide customers with different price options, such as the deluxe version with all the bells and whistles and the most scalability, versus the stripped down, more economical version appropriate to a smaller customer with basic needs and fewer staff. In a challenging economy, being able to provide customers with that economy version can make a significant difference to the bottom line.

Find out more about how this exercise is the first step in Turning Selling Into Buying.

Your business

You need to be very focused on your target market and very clear about what you bring to the table for them – why they need to meet with you, and what they miss if they don’t.

• What are the core competencies of your business?
• What is your target market?
• What is the profile of your ideal client or customer?
• What are the primary challenges you address or solutions you provide for your target market?

Your strategy

You need a mix of passive “marketing” activities and active prospecting activities. The marketing activities should augment the prospecting activities … not the other way around. Once you’ve developed your strategy, make a firm commitment to not only implement it, but also to stick to it. It will be the backbone of your business.

• What is your strategy for reaching your target market?
• How many avenues for “getting your message out” have you identified?
• Have you considered costs and time while exploring the options?

New clients

Remember, people “buy” for their own reasons, not necessarily yours. Don’t create roadblocks that will prevent them from buying.

• If your product or service requires a large commitment of time, money or involvement from potential customers, is there a way for a prospect to “ease into” becoming a client?
• Can you provide a short-term study or a pilot program, for instance, for a smaller financial or time commitment?

Existing clients

Keeping existing customers and growing your business with them is as important, if not more so, than finding new customers. Be aware, your best customers are at the top of your competitors’ prospect lists. Don’t take them for granted.

• What will you offer existing clients to add value to the relationship?
• What are your plans for leveraging the relationship to find new opportunities?

Support mechanisms

What new processes, resources, or infrastructure will be required to support your business development efforts?

• Will you need to establish new systems or bolster existing systems to support your marketing, prospecting, or product delivery processes?
• Are there new technologies that will allow you to maintain more immediate contact with your customers and keep them better informed?
• Will you need new hardware or software to support your efforts?

While you may not have the answers to all of the above questions, they can serve as a starting point for designing your action plan. It’s never too early to start building your future. Begin to plan for and put systems into place now. (Learn more about how you can find Rich Rewards in a Poor Economy)

Are you still a leader?

Which brings us to the importance of leadership. True leaders have vision, belief in a cause, and the wherewithal to overcome indecision and commit to a course of action. A true leader is driven by something bigger than personal ambition – a corporate cause and the value their organization brings to the market. Personal ambition may motivate an individual, but it won’t motivate others to follow.

Leadership is about taking a position to further the cause, knowing that it will draw criticism. It’s about ducking the bullets and firing back. It’s about conviction and keeping the vision in focus. It’s about making tough decisions and following a direction.

Can’t decide which strategy would be the most effective, bring the fastest results, or generate the biggest return? Stop thinking about it. Continuing to “think about it” is like allowing a prospect to “think about it” when making a buying decision. Both lead to the same place – NOWHERE.

Not making a decision … is a decision: a decision to do NOTHING.

Are you afraid of making the wrong decision and perhaps making things worse? It would be wonderful if every decision you make was the “right” decision. But, many “right” decisions aren’t reached until a few “wrong” decisions are first tested. Every “wrong” decision inevitably reveals a lesson which, if applied, makes the next decision a potentially better one.

Regardless of how many lessons you learn before you “get it right,” by making a decision to do SOMETHING, you start the process of moving forward and making progress. So, stop THINKING, make a decision, and start ACTING.

While your competitors are sitting in their offices, worrying about the state of the economy and losing market share, demonstrate your leadership and set a sound foundation for the future by continuing to be out in the marketplace with new strategies to make contacts, develop new relationships and close sales.

Too often when times are good and new business is relatively easy to find, business owners and managers slip their grip on the reins. Less effort is expended on keeping the sales team lean, hungry and focused on prospecting and qualifying new business. The organization is already at a disadvantage before a market downturn rears it’s head, since it lacks the ingrained habits and behaviours its sales team needs to quickly adjust when closing sales becomes more difficult. This leaves management distracted by internal operations and scrambling to put the organization back on course when the economy sours, leaving more nimble competitors unchallenged in the marketplace.

So what should your business be doing now that it should have been doing all along to ensure your sales people are effective revenue generators and not just order takers waiting for the phone to ring? Consider the following points:

Always be qualifying

In a tight market overcrowded with aggressive competitors, the more effort you put into qualifying the prospect, the more you will differentiate yourself and the more quickly you can develop and close the opportunity. If the prospect measures up to your qualifying criteria, you can move forward, if not, you can move on to another opportunity.

What information should you uncover? Concentrate first on the quality of the fit between what you have to offer and the prospect’s problem, challenge, or goal. If the correlation is low, or you know that another company competing for the business can provide a better fit, it’s likely time to look for another opportunity.

When you adopt an “Always be Qualifying” strategy, poor quality prospects will be eliminated early and you’ll find yourself presenting to high quality prospects with whom you will almost always be closing.

Read more about closing versus qualifying.

And the answer is …

A text book strategy to obtain more information in order to understand a prospect’s true intentions and needs is to answer a question with a question. But apply this principle judiciously, otherwise, you may be perceived as manipulative or deflecting a question because you haven’t done your homework and can’t answer.

There are situations where it is OK to directly answer the prospect’s question. The rule is: answer the question when it can’t hurt you or it can help you.

It’s OK to tell a prospect what you do or how you can help from a conceptual or big picture standpoint. That can’t hurt you. What you should avoid is providing detailed explanations for specific solutions to problems that have yet to be fully defined. That will hurt you. There will be plenty of time for specifics and details if the opportunity progresses far enough along for a formal presentation or proposal.

Read more about giving the right answers.

Is your message relevant and believable?

You won’t capture a prospect’s attention with features and functions, regardless of how “Revolutionary,” “Tested,” or “Enhanced” they may be, unless, first and foremost, your product or service addresses a specific problem, concern, or challenge the prospect is grappling with. Discretionary spending for enhanced features is dead.

Your message must focus on those problems, concerns, and challenges. If you’re a telecommunications provider, rather than tout “widest coverage,” ask a problem-focused question. For instance, “Are some of your loved ones outside your calling area?” Rather than promote “lightening fast Internet connections,” ask; “Does it take longer to download your e-mail than it does to read it?”

To make the features and functions believable, tell the prospect HOW you deliver what those features and functions promise. Do you provide the widest cell phone coverage because you have more cell towers than any other company? Do you guarantee the fastest deliveries because any shipment with a destination over 250 kilometres away is shipped by air and delivered the next day? Is your software never obsolete because you provide free lifetime updates? If so, make those facts part of your message.

Read more about how to be relevant and believable.

Attitude Drives Results

Successful sales people have a diligent work ethic that is undaunted by the prevailing market conditions or the news of the day, no matter how bleak or depressing it may be. They remain consistent in their business development activities –  prospecting for new opportunities by networking, obtaining referrals, and doing something relatively unheard of today – making cold calls. That’s right – cold calls via telephone and in person.

Don’t adjust to existing market conditions by changing proactive business development behaviour. Instead, change focus and redirect your efforts to different opportunities. Bottom line, there’s still business out there and somebody’s going to get it. Why shouldn’t it be you?

Read more about having the right attitude.