5 Things to finding business growth amongst crisis

2020 is already made its mark on businesses and individuals as the world faces one of its toughest challenges in recent times. Not a day passes without news of another industry with cutbacks, potential bailouts, and weak financials. We will hear of hundreds of businesses close, and thousands laid off. Put in simple terms; it will not be an easy year. But does the year necessitate the pessimistic mindset, doomsday strategies and cash hoarding?

It is essential to remind ourselves that many of the most influential companies were all founded during a time of great challenge. General Electric(1893), General Motors (1908), IBM (1911), Disney(1929), HP (1939), Hyatt (1957), FedEx (1971), and the list goes on. By starting their business during tough times, their core designed to understand the value they bring to their customer during the hardest of times. Tough circumstances forced these companies to think more in-depth on the customer need they meet, think laterally on their commercial model to spread the cost, and think out of the box when it came to motivating staff through purpose-driven culture.

In the past decade, barriers to entry have dramatically reduced, opening the door for disruptive businesses to; execute more effectively in meeting customer needs, to leverage technologies and ecosystems for grander scale and new value chains to reduce the cost of products to as little as zero. None of this happens by accident. Its new perspectives stress testing the incumbent status quo.

So in the face of lockdowns, restrictions and a slowing in the global economy, how can a business not just survive, but thrive? What strategies deployed, and what actions can make a material difference?

1/ Train Your Empathy Muscle

A trait that sets Disney, FedEx and Microsoft ahead of their competition traces back to the period in which they started the businesses. By starting during a challenging period, they had to work harder to understand customer's need before translating insights into products and services. What resulted is a more evident value proposition that customers would spend money on, even when times were tough. 

With growing concern on industry viability, levels of supplies in supermarkets, and stresses on household income, many people are scaling back on spending, thus making it 10x harder to convince a customer to buy your product or service. A fear present in both B2B and B2C buyers.

Many companies pay third party research firms, run focus groups, or hire consultants to attempt to understand the customer need, but all of these miss the point. But engaging customers out of context or through secondhand intel, a business loses the chance to learn from their customers. Nothing beats the value of first hand learning on your customers' pain points, goals, behaviours and limitations.

What Should You Be Doing?

Customer Centricity or Personas are a great framework to start with and give you structured ways to think about your customer and explicit assumptions to test. Many companies still think only about demographics, but the understanding now needs to expand to goals (social, emotional and functional), behaviour, pain points and constraints. 

Refer to Finding Product Market Fit, for a practical way to document and test your first customer persona.

2/ Deepen Relationships

One of the great things about working under a period of restriction is that almost everyone is in the same boat. And if you're anything like me, you'd jump at the chance to escape your forced job as a 'distance learning' teacher to have an adult conversation. 

In times of challenge, people tend to be more open with their thoughts, feelings and context because the normally 'posturing' is set aside as nobody expects to do business now. For individuals that have invested in building reliable professional and personal networks, this is a time to thrive as those relationships have deep reserves of trust that accelerate the depth of remote conversations. During prosperous times everyone thinks they are playing poker, gaming every human communication.

During tough times, people are more vulnerable and want a genuine human connection. If you have convinced people you aren't trying to 'sell' them, you can have some fantastic and in-depth dialogues, whether it's philosophical, inspiring or practical, now is the time to engage in real human to human conversation. You never know where it will lead, but there can be no downside to building stronger relationships in business.

What Should You Be Doing?

Whether you're working from home, or on restricted working arrangements, make the time to have regular, meaningful conversations. Under normal working conditions, this might have been your morning coffee or lunch break. My suggestion is set aside just an hour a day, at a time you are most reflective, then work to book catch-ups video calls. By doing one a day, the amount of effort is small, but the accumulation over a month will be massive. Please make sure you're up front on the intent of the call and go in not expecting anything, remember it's not a business development conversation. If possible, journal after each call to reflect on simple things, like;

1. What you learnt
2. What you're grateful for
3. One way you could give value to that person
4. When you should speak to them again.

If you're in B2B, I'd also encourage you to develop this rhythm with partners, as they too face the same challenges as you.

3/ Fill The Top of the Funnel

Let's face facts; it's hard to convince anyone sales will continue at previous rates under COVID-19. More than likely, leadership groups are already scaling back sales targets, re-evaluating marketing budgets, planning cutbacks, and potentially even hoarding cash. While many of these actions help 'survive' crisis, few will help a business come out strongly on the other side of the crisis. 

Just because the likelihood sales will close, doesn't mean there are nothing sales and business development team can be doing. Most businesses run at least a basic sales funnel or pipeline that stretches from lead generation, through qualification, proposal, contracting and closure. During restricted periods, active companies will focus on the activities that build the pipeline within evidence-based pipelines. This means working with prospects to build out opportunities, help develop customer needs understanding, and mapping those to potential solutions, and taking the time to align commercials for mutual benefit. During the prosperous period, we tend to rush things by convincing ourselves that everything is urgent. This results in sales processes being shortcut, opportunities weakly qualified, and commercial proposals tend to be a win/lose scenario.

Under COVID-19, you have the time to focus on doing 'Good Deals' with 'Ideal Customers', don't let fear lead business decisions. Now is the ideal time to do some reflecting on the business' priorities, which should be focusing on doing great deals with the best customers. Remember these deals are unlikely to close in the short-term, so take the time to dive deep and find more substantial win/win situations. 

One of the sales stages most business shortcut is needs understanding and qualification. Sales teams hate these stages as the activities imposed on them appear to be 'compliance' driven when they actually should be a means to do better deals. During this period work with your sales teams to review sales process and activities to ensure everyone contributes to the purpose, value and ownership of each event, that way you can take the time to gain broader buy-in from stakeholders and find universal buy-in. 

What Should You Be Doing?

From the learnings in Point 1, leverage deeper understandings of customer need as a fantastic marketing opportunity. While people have more time to research and educate themselves, marketing teams should focus on education lead campaigns. If you're in the business of providing technology for building digital banks, think of the top 25 questions or challenges past customers have had building their digital bank and turn them into 'How' guides. Remember you aren't trying to sell, you're building credibility and authority.

With time on your side, make an effort to test activities for effectiveness, and refine processes to be more efficient, effective, and measurable. Don't be afraid to have exploratory discussions with leads without expectation of finding qualified opportunity, lead with curiosity and don't be shy to ask new questions. The goal here is to learn and refine your sales effectiveness.

While revenue is an inferior metric in the current environment, focus on weighted pipeline. Weighted Sales Pipeline recognizes not every opportunity results in a sale. Instead, it is a more comprehensive sales forecasting tool that assigns a value to each prospect based on where it is in the sales funnel. The measure helps to refine sales activities that positively influence the confidence of any opportunity. 

By focusing on growing weighted pipeline, you are ensuring your effects are contributing to the growth of the future business. When the current conservativeness lifts, you'll have customers with well thought out strategies and solutions they'll be keen to accelerate to rebuild business confidence.

4/ Be A Positive Contributor

COVID-19 has hit everyone, and I mean everyone. Few industries, businesses or individuals have escaped it's rath. It's a time that demands respect and a united, compassionate front. It's not a time to be caught off guard, or subject of public criticism. 

Leaders across the globe have made cutbacks, including executive salaries, bonuses, and expenses. Airlines have grounded entire fleets. Celebrities keep announcing significant cash contributions. While some of these may be for different motives, they all help the current situation.

Unless the virus has directly affected you, it's easy to distance yourself from the reality of the situation. This time is about uniting as a species to fight off one of the greatest threats we will see in our lifetime. Now is not the time to be seen in a negative light. It's time to find what resources you can to support those in your community, country or supply chain. Businesses will need relief, families will need support, and the burden of that needs to be shared.

Do your part

What Should You Be Doing?

Immediately seek to understand the impact of the virus on your employees, suppliers, customers and partners to provide relief where you can. Those whom you help will likely never forget the gesture, plus it is the right thing to do. Profiteering, in a period of struggle probably be all over social media within hours, cause damage you'll never recover from.

Nobody wants to strike off revenue, lay off staff, implement cutbacks, but it could be the very thing that ensures your customers stay afloat. During tough times, we have the chance to unite as a community; we are all in this fight against the virus together. It's time we act like it.

Ask yourself, how can you as an individual help? And what can your organization do to help?

5/ Give Stuff Away For Free

Is his best-selling book, Jab Jab Jab Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk outlines a straightforward message; give, give, give, and then ask. In a world where information is in abundance. The challenge is that most people are just trying to answer simple questions to decide their buying journey. It could be building self-awareness, searching for alternatives, understanding details of implementation, or quantifying a business case. In every case, it requires resources and information.

Far too many businesses fail to see the value in giving away value during essential steps in the buyer's decision-making process. The realities are if you can become the source of knowledge for a potential buyer, the likelihood of them buying from you goes up exponentially.

When building Moven, we created a small tool that evaluates an individual's financial personality, which had a significant impact on the type of feedback they respond to best. The quiz initially helped us analyze aggregated transaction data, but we soon found it was an excellent tool for a person to understand more about their relationship with money, and hence we released it as a free tool for non-customers to use. It was a big breakthrough as it meant more customers came to us with an informed perspective on their relationship with money, which lead to a more effective product.

What Should You Be Doing?

Think about the steps your customer goes through to purchase your product or service. Go right back to the initial self-awareness that they have a problem they need to be solved. Then offer a preview or slice of your offering to help them in the process; this gives the buyer a sample of the value you offer. Like how an ice-cream store will let you try various favours, or online services have trial periods. 

Document three parts of your product or service, that if sampled would demonstrate the value, then package it and give it away from free. Usually, I'd suggest having many ideas, as it gives you the mindset of testing response rates to various options.

This simple strategy helps to give your customer tangible value before they commit to spending with you. During the period of restrictions, B2B businesses might be investing in Proofs-of-concept, prototypes or even risk sharing. While in B2C markets, trials periods, samples or educational tools.

Conclusion

COVID-19 is not going to be easy. But we have a choice, we can approach it with a mindset of scarcity and fear, or we can approach it with a mindset of abundance and growth. The mindset you choose will shape how you see the world in the coming months and could be the difference between 'surviving' and 'thriving'. 

Take the time to focus on quality, not quantity. Find measurable value gains, and aim to fill the top of your sales funnel. If you get this right, and your competition misses the chance, you'll likely accelerate out of the crisis and have built a solid, sustainable foundation that ready for any downturn in the market.

Would love your feedback... is there something I got wrong? Or something I missed? let me know in the comments below