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| This is a weekly column transcribed from my Radio Show. The "Top Story" is the major discussion each week in which I address in great depth and detail, aspects of selling that are pertinent to your job everyday. |
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| Handling Your Business During a Crisis |
All you need to do these days is pick up the newspaper and you know that many businesses have been hit with crisis proportion things. Airline, hospitality, hotels, stock market, you name it, there's a tendency to look at all this news and say it's time to run for the hills. In my opinion we and the market always over-react. The market over-reacts to good news and bad news. We as human beings over-react on the upside - we get euphoric; we go from happiness to euphoria. And on the downside we go from unhappiness to depression. The pendulum is swinging way to one side right now.
There is not only the situation we face today where an environmental factor, the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash of the plane in Pennsylvania, and the subsequent terrorist feeling that we're all being attacked by terrorists. That's an environmental crisis that hits businesses worldwide and nationwide and statewide and citywide. That's not the only thing that can happen. I've said it on the show before: you can lose a lot of business by offering bad service, and pretty soon your top five clients become your no-five clients. That's another way where crisis hits an individual business.
There are also those unfortunate things that happen. I've had a number of situations. It happened in '91; it happened in '98, where two of my best clients got acquired by other companies, and they had people they were using to do the types of things that I did. Without any fault of mine I was on the outside looking out. The first time, that client represented 60% of my revenue. In 1998 when it happened again, those clients represented about 40% of my revenue. There are lots of things that precipitate a crisis in your business. No matter what the crisis is, when business slows down, when sales revenue drops, when profits are leaving and expenses are not, you have a crisis in your business.
I'm going to talk about four things we absolutely cannot do, and we're going to talk about four things we absolutely must do when those types of things happen to us. The first thing we have to get involved with is on the don't side. If a crisis hits our business, the first don't is don't panic. Don't panic. The sky is not falling, folks. It's one of those things that happen, especially in light of the current environmental situation. If we start making drastic changes in our business, or if we hide under the desk, or if we start laying off people without forethought, or if we stop making calls on our customers, or if we decide we're going to reduce our warrantee or change our guarantees or reduce our premium service, or whatever it is, we're asking for bigger trouble.
It doesn't seem like it's easy now, but we all need to take a step back and look at what's happened in this particular situation or in any situation, and try to get some global perspective. Try to get some perspective from ten or twenty thousand feet up in the air. Take the long-term view. Take the big picture view. If you were an investor and you sold out all your stocks last week during one of the largest declines in eighty years in the marketplace, believe me - now I'm not a pundit, and don't take this as financial advice because it's not. I think a lot of those people who sold and created the new bottom that we saw last Friday are going to be very, very sorry. I think they absolutely sold the bottom, and those are the classic investors who sell at the bottom and get in at the top and never make any money. The first don't is don't panic.
The second don't is don't change what you're doing just for the sake of change. I'll use my own business as an example. I speak outside of Fairfield and outside of Iowa. I travel to my clients' sites. Sometimes I drive. If I'm going to Minneapolis or St. Louis or Chicago or Kansas City or Des Moines or Omaha, I drive to these places. I do business by how far I can get to by car. I'll tell you, folks, I was scheduled to be in Birmingham, Alabama early last week. I was scheduled to be in Nashville, Tennessee the week before. I was in Dallas last weekend. I'm going back to Dallas later in the month. I'm going to California in October. I'm going to Florida and Atlanta.
Those are not places I want to drive to. I'm not in the mood to drive a day-and-a-half to get where I'm going. That means that I have to get on planes. And there weren't many planes flying after the crisis, and a lot of my clients canceled meetings and a lot of future meetings are being postponed because so many people are afraid to fly or their spouses or children or organizations are afraid to let them fly. So you might say, "Well, Warren, are you going to change your business? Are you going to turn into a teleconferencing business?" I thought maybe I should only work on the radio and just try and syndicate my radio show. Maybe I should do telephone consulting. Maybe I shouldn't take on any client that I can't drive to.
So you can see that the panic mentality affected me just like it affected you. So the second don't is don't change just for the sake of change. Two of the meetings that got canceled have already been rescheduled. My phone is starting to ring. People are starting to come out of their fear, and they're starting to realize that the way to defeat what happened is to go on with our lives. Had I decided that I was never going to speak out of town again, and I was never going to fly on a plane again, I would have been changing just for the sake of change, running around like the proverbial chicken with my head cut off. And that's not something that we want to do. We don't want to change our business models just for the sake of change or because we think the sky is falling.
The third don't is don't be alone; don't be isolated. Both those are the third don't. Don't be alone; don't be isolated. During the stock market crash of 1987 there were a lot of stockbrokers that basically stopped going to work. Their customers would call them up and the secretary would say, "I'm sorry. Warren's not here." "Do you know when he's coming in?" "No, I don't." "Do you know where he is?" "No, I don't." You literally had stockbrokers hiding out in movie theaters and in their homes and apartments. There were stories of brokers hiding under their desks, so when other people walked by, they looked and saw an empty office. The broker was there. He just was afraid to be seen. The point I'm making is don't be alone; don't be isolated.
My Rotary group had a golf outing the Friday after the crisis. They asked me as one of the members of the board who doesn't golf, so I didn't have any strong desire to be out there on the golf course, "What would you do?" I said, "We should hold this golf tournament. We can pass the bucket and raise money to pay the American Red Cross. We can take all the greens fees and we can donate those to the American Red Cross, to the families of the victims, the firefighters' families, the policemen's families." It was great for everybody to be there, to get together, to talk to people they trusted, to share our experiences and talk about our fears. We had fellowship and that's what we needed during that time. And that's what we all need now. So don't be alone; don't be isolated; don't glue your eye to the TV or the website. Get out there and do what you usually do, which is get connected with other people.
And finally, the fourth don't is don't be reactive. Don't be reactive. One of the clients I work with is in the media, and they have noticed that their phones have stopped ringing. Nobody is calling them to spend money on advertising. I said, "If you're reactive, and just wait for the phone to ring, you're going to be in big, big trouble." That's why the fourth don't is don't be reactive. Don't be one of those people - you've heard the story before. There are people who make things happen; there are people who let things happen; and there are people who say, "What the heck happened?" If you're going to be one of those reactive people, and you're just going to wait for things to turn around, you might find that your business cannot recover from a shock like this. The point I'm making is don't be reactive.
OK, those are the four don'ts. Now that I've got you thoroughly depressed, don't panic, don't change for the sake of change, don't be isolated or alone, and don't be reactive. Don't, don't, don't, don't. Well, there is a bright side. There are four things that we can all do that can help us climb out of this hole that we've dug for ourselves - well, we haven't dug it. It's been dug for us. These are four things that can help us get back on track, back on the beam, back on the horse, all those types of things, all those metaphors and analogies. Here come the dos.
The first do is do be proactive. If nobody is calling, making outbound calls because they are shell-shocked by what happened, our job is to get on the phone and make calls. I've said this on the show before, and I'll say it again. Take your clients and divide them into three categories. The top 10% in terms of revenue or loyalty or however you rank them are your A accounts. The next 20% are your B accounts. The next 70% are your C accounts. What I would suggest is that you spend 70% of your time contacting your A and B accounts. Call them up. Talk to them. Ask them how they're feeling. Make sure you know and they know that you care about their business. You're looking to call them up just to reconnect with them. You don't even have to ask for any business. Just reconnect with your customers. If the conditions are right and the topic moves on to business, by all means, talk about current opportunities, future opportunities. Seek out referral business, all the things I've talked about before on this show. The main idea, the main concept is be proactive.
The second do is focus on your strengths. Focus like a laser beam. Focus like a heat-cutting laser beam that can cut through metal. Go with your strengths. Figure out what got you where you are today. Don't start going off on esoteric tangents thinking you should get into a new business line or start some new product or service. Go with what got you there. It's called "go with the horse that brung ya." You figure out, "What am I strong in? Is it warrantees? Is it guarantees? Is it customer service? Is it the way I approach my clients? Is it information based? Is it technology based?" Are you a price leader? It's something I don't promote on this show, but if that's your strength that's what you go with. This is not the time to be diversifying into unrelated areas of business. It's time to get back to core competencies. What are you really good at? That's what we ought to be doing. The second do is do focus on your strengths like a laser beam.
The third do is called do be persistent. Do be persistent. Now is the time when so many companies and so many salespeople and so many sales organizations are going to think that it's time to be on the sidelines. Our job is to make those calls to those people who have said no in the past. Call those people who have said, "No, I'm all set with so-and-so. No, I don't need any right now. No, I'm really busy. No, I'm not interested. No, I don't really need that technology. No, I'm in a meeting. No, I'm on vacation. No, I'm just getting back from vacation." Now is the time to contact all those people who are good prospects for your products and services, the ones who have said no before.
I've said it on this show before: the best accounts we are ever going to open are the ones where we had four and five and six and up to seven different obstacles, delays, resistances, objections. Now is the time to out-persistent your competitors, to out-hustle your competitors, to make those calls. The fifth call on the same company, or a new call on a new company. The persistent and consistent prospecting efforts, the outreach, the customer contact, the client contact, the prospect contact that we all need to be doing now. That's what I'm getting at. That's what I mean when I say be persistent. Do those things over and over again, and go back and do the same things you've done with the people you've done it with before. Come at them a new way. Give them a new idea. Give them a new offer. Now is the time to go build market share at the expense of our competitors who are just sitting around not doing anything.
Finally, the fourth do is do take action. Take action. I've talked about this probably - if I've been doing this show eighteen months, four shows a month, you run the math. That's a lot of shows, right? Four weeks in a month. It's a lot of shows, folks. Take my word for it. Seventy-two shows. If I've said it once, I've said it thirty times. The thing that separates those who succeed from those who partially succeed are those people who take action. I've said this over the last couple of days. I said it in Dallas. I said it in La Crosse yesterday. I spoke to a high school group today right here in town, and I said it to them.
There is a secret to being successful in life. There is a secret to being successful in sales. I've never really termed it as a secret, but I really want to tell you, it is so special. It isn't a secret; it shouldn't be a secret, but I get your attention by saying it's the secret to being successful. It is no secret. I'm going to tell you what it is right now. Those people who are the most successful are those people who have the shortest time elapse between the time they hear a new idea and the time they take action on it. Those people who are the most successful are the ones who have the shortest amount of time that elapses between the time they hear a good idea and the time they act on it. The fourth do, folks, is do take action.
If you find yourself in a crisis, if we find ourselves in a crisis in business, in sales, in commerce, I think very strongly the four don'ts and the four do's are one of the keys to unlock the door to get us back on track.
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– Warren
Wechsler |
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