Blaming the Economy

As a small business advisor and someone who gets a peek into many businesses in the state of Michigan, I hear all too often one of the top concerns of the business owner is low sales. The follow up remark is, “It's just this economy!” As a general rule, after ten minutes of questioning, I find that these small business owners have poor sales practices because they believe that the economy just won’t support their business anymore...or they never had good sales practices to begin with.

Take a look at your sales practices and answer the following questions:

• Is there any one person responsible for (spear-heading) sales?
• What are you doing to be in conversation with your competition?
• Are you taking advantage of every opportunity?

Acknowledging you have to spend more time on sales than you’d like is the first step. It’s not as fruitful per hour as it used to be so the tendency is to think you can’t get blood from a turnip and then resolve yourself to the lower sales. “That’s just the way it is,” you will say to yourself. Can you afford to wait a bad economy out longer than your competition? How much fat can you trim from your expenses to make this possible? My guess is you have trimmed as much as you can.

If you are committed to your business succeeding, you can develop a strategy that will sustain you through the low times (after all a 50 year low only comes once every 50 years).

Action steps:

Have someone (even if it is yourself) commit to the responsibility for sales.

• Develop a strategy for:
• Taking care of your current customers.
• Bringing on new customers (resolve yourself to the fact that it will take much more time and energy than it used to).
• A campaign for others being enlisted into your sales staff through customer referral programs, employee referral programs, and strategic partnerships.
• Continually examining what is working and what isn’t.
• Getting high level expert help in sales (an hour conversation with a sales professional could make all the difference).
• Change the way you run your everyday business.
• Set up clear practices for wearing your different hats at work and make sure you have sharp focus time for just sales.
• Even in a small family run business have rules for communicating (no shouting requests across the office, an email or a note so YOU can choose when to pay attention to something).
• Examine the roles you play and delegate as much as possible (or just quit practices that aren’t producing a return).

Know your competition personally.

• When your competition is ready to throw in the towel get them to introduce you to their customer base (buy this if you have to).
• Join whatever associations you need to find these people.
• Make strategic alliances with others in your business, or that are tangentially related. Often, clustering like businesses can lead to improved sales for all the businesses involved.

Figure out how you can use the economic situation to your advantage.

• Show your customers how your product will save them money.
• Differentiation in quality and service can make a huge difference. The key is not to offer an expensive product at a lower price, but to show the customer that paying more for your product is smarter than paying less for the competition.
• Stay upbeat. The more your customer thinks you are struggling, the less he will think of your ability to solve his problems. (Negativity is infectious - but so is enthusiasm!)

Most of these simple ideas are things you can do right now. Commit to improving performance by implementing lean business survival skills. Stay positive and don't let the bad economy get you down!¹

Miche Suboski

Pricing Yourself and Your Product