Some businesses will have no choice but to move forward with layoffs or furloughs, others may seek solutions to maintain staff, even if it means moving people to part-time or making salary cuts. If you are in this position, think about creatively redeploying your resources. Consider some of the following:
1. Invest in online marketing and remote sales
If you’ve traditionally relied on conferences, networking, cold calling, out-of-home advertising or other channels that are disappearing for the time being, it’s time to rethink your entire marketing and sales approach: from lead generation through customer acquisition. A few ideas:
- Bring your marketing and sales personnel together and ask them to brainstorm ideas to generate more projects. You may be surprised by the ideas from lower level employees who don’t normally have a seat at the table.
- Task field sales reps or marketing personnel with emailing personalized videos to customers and prospects.
- Ask sales reps to pick up the phone and simply ask, “How are you doing? How can we help?” People are craving human-to-human connections right now, and you can gain a lot of trust by leading with empathy.
- You’ve heard content is king. Use this opportunity and your experienced resources from marketing, sales or customer service to build out a library of information. Develop lists of frequently asked questions, customers’ key challenges, or prospects’ objections to your product or service. Turn the answers into videos or blog posts, and leverage the content for your website, email newsletters and social media channels.
- If you’ve traditionally spent money on tradeshows and have marketing dollars to spend, consider reallocating that spend to digital ads, which may be cheaper while some competitors are tightening their wallets.
2. Work on tabled projects
All businesses have projects that get pushed to the back burner. Oftentimes these projects are deprioritized due to a lack of extra resources. Some resorts, for example, are using the time they are closed to do deep cleans and maintenance projects that were put off. Other companies may use the time to beef up their prospect databases or digitize their assets to be more effective and efficient. Making headway on these tabled projects will put you in a better position for when business activity inevitably ramps up again.
3. Pivot to a new offering or vertical
If the livelihood of your business is threatened due to the nature of your product or service, sit down and take a serious look at the skillsets of your team or the business functions your company excels at. There may be an opportunity to repackage something you were doing for yourself, and sell it. Target it to industries that are more recession-proof, or may be looking to grow during this uncertain time. For example, a virtual reality rental company that lost all demand for its services overnight needed to make changes fast. Leaders brainstormed and researched anti-fragile businesses. Their team excelled at process design and automation. Within two weeks, they executed a full company pivot to start selling that consulting service to other companies who will need to scale in the near-term.
4. Focus on innovation
If your bottom line can stomach it – this can be the time to invest in innovation. Spanx founder Sara Blakely recently posted about Isaac Newton completing his early work in calculus, optic theory and gravity while being forced to stay home during the spread of the Great Plague of London in 1665.
Solicit ideas from your full team, invest in research and development and ask all levels of employees to evaluate and lead change with you. Continue to consider the challenges your customers are facing and how you are uniquely positioned to help them.
As author and motivational speaker Rachel Hollis said, “Bad news: a lot can change 30 days. Good news: a lot can change in 30 days.” While it’s anyone’s guess how long it takes to get through the COVID-19 impacts, business owners and executives have a unique opportunity to rise to the situation. Use this time to creatively adjust your business, along with the roles of your staff, in order to improve your business and that of your customers. Meeting this challenge head on and pivoting to meet the difficulties ahead will help set you up for success now and in the future.