Heads Up: Marketing and Sales teams are first on the chopping block

Don’t wait until you’ve been let go to make a plan for what’s next.

While the tech field overall is relatively safe, and might even grow during the pandemic... There is one segment of employees that is taking a hit. Marketing and sales teams are getting the ax.

It makes sense, this is a hard time for companies and they are looking at the market contraction and know that even with the best teams, they can’t meet their sales goals and they can’t afford to keep the teams going.

The question is not about how to keep your jobs- because you can’t control that. So ask yourself, what are you going to do next?

My suggestion is simple- look around you, at the small businesses in your area and start reaching out to them. Offer them a profit-sharing service (or charge a fee, whatever) where you help them go and grow online. They are struggling with inventory and rent, or with services that they don’t know how to translate to an online business and then scale- and the truth is that you are aces at that. So pitch in together because you both need each other.

There is so much that you know, that might even seem obvious in terms of opportunities online but someone who has spent their life running a family business has never thought about.

The experience that you have building brands & audiences, being creative, hustling, and making things happen needs to be applied on a different scale. Perhaps you can bring together local businesses that are complementary and get them online together in one portal for local people in your neighborhood. Make it easy for people to continue to support and sustain their local businesses- which many people would like to do. They would prefer to stay a patron of the businesses that are local and familiar, they are just not sure how.

Obviously, you can expand beyond your neighborhood but my point is this- there are a massive number of small businesses that must pivot to selling online to survive. You have the skills to help them do that, and in turn, this will provide an income for you when the larger companies are pulling back.

Become an expert on the way that Facebook and other large companies are assisting small businesses with grants and advertising discounts, contact the local small business associations in your city. Put together a suite of services that can be applied across a wide range of small to midsize businesses and then start reaching out.

While it’s already a cliche to say “We are all in this together.” I recommend that you dive in with everyone else, forget the tech world for a while, and apply your world-class skills to helping your friends and neighbors transition to the new normal.

This is your time and your opportunity, so run with it.