7 Strategies for Finding Opportunities during Social Distancing
With an obstacle as large as a pandemic that brings with it tremendous health and financial challenges, we have a couple options. We can get caught up in the panic and hysteria, or we can be responsible while looking for potential opportunities. Those opportunities may be in spending more time with family, providing community support, learning new methods for expanding your business through virtual meetings, etc. The most important thing is our mindset and the questions we are asking.
I want to be careful here not to sound insensitive. I am not talking about the opportunity to hoard toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and face masks to sell for large profits and exploit people’s fear. I am talking about coming from a place of compassion and creativity. I am talking about looking for ways to add value to our clients, prospects, communities, and families.
Our questions formulate our thoughts by triggering our brain to search for answers. Simply ask yourself, “what is the opportunity here?”, and your brain has to shift gears from fear and anxiety to problem solving and creativity. In asking myself this question I quickly thought of 7 ideas to increase sales and grow my business while forging stronger relationships with clients, prospects, and employees.
1.) Work ON your business instead of IN your business.
For many salespeople, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, small business owners we get so wrapped up in the day to do of running our business, working IN our business that we rarely designate time to plan and strategize on our longer term plans. If you are limited in your ability to meet with clients, if deals are put on hold, if you save time traveling or commuting right now – it presents an excellent opportunity to set aside an hour or two per day to step back and look at where your business is right now, where you would like it to be, and create a clear path forward to communicate to everyone around you. Clarity, alone, will increase productivity.
If you are looking for a guided reference on developing this level of clarity in your business, Hal Elrod and I developed a workbook designed to help you with this task which you can find on Amazon if you are interested, but please read the rest of this article first! It’s a 120 page workbook to guide you through the process.
The Miracle Morning for Salespeople: Companion Guide
2,) Reconnect with current and past clients.
As salespeople and business owners, we tend to focus most of our energy on finding new clients. It makes sense. In most businesses, as in many areas, if you are not growing you are dying. Many people miss opportunities with current and past clients though when they are so focused on finding new clients. We miss the opportunity to deepen relationships to create repeat business. We miss referral opportunities. And we miss opportunities to fulfill more of our clients needs with other products and services we may offer. You can start by reaching out and just asking people how they are handling the current situation, how is it impacting them, and if there is anything that you can do to help?
3.) Forge stronger relationships with employees.
Please do not mistake my language for sounding cold, but your human capital is one of your greatest investments. Whether we call them human capital, employees, or team members, we must keep in mind that they are all people, and they are all experiencing this current crisis in their own ways with their own attitudes, fears, energy, and emotion.
This provides a tremendous opportunity for us to strengthen our bonds with our employees by showing them that we care about them and their families. Depending on the extent of this health crisis and any financial fallout people are going to be concerned about their health, safety, job security, and financial standing in the coming weeks and months.
The sooner we address these concerns the better. What can we do to help alleviate these fears? Communicating you plans for keeping them safe through deep cleaning of all workspaces, moving to work-from-home where applicable, ensuring them they will have a paycheck. Many will be dealing with children at home with school cancelled and require child care that they either do not have or cannot afford. All of these things will keep people more productive during a crisis. When people are preoccupied with their basic necessity needs it is hard to add much value anywhere else. Let’s work to alleviate those concerns where possible.
4.) Trim the fat in your budget and reallocate funds.
In my line of work, coaching and training salespeople and entrepreneurs, we spend a lot of time finding answers for how to grow their businesses or increase sales. Sometimes this involves testing new methods of advertising, marketing, and lead generation. On occasion these plans are strategically determined, but in most cases, when left to their own devices, I find people looking for the next shiny object. It only costs $X a month. If it even generates one more sale it will be worth it.
The main issue here is that many salespeople, entrepreneurs, and small business owners do not do a great job keeping track of these expenses and they add up over time. There could be several reasons for this. We don’t have time. We aren’t naturally good at it. It’s easier to focus on earning more than saving more. All of these may be true, but if we let them get out of control we can quickly spend a bunch of our profit margins.
When the economy is booming these expenses may seem trivial, but when we need to get lean, it starts with trimming fat.
What could you cut from your budget today without impacting your business negatively?