How to Market During a Recession

A depressed economy or personal business downturn requires that you relinquish any restrictions about your “ideal” or preferred customer.

This isn’t a time to be selective with your criteria; you may have to break some of your previous rules for those with whom you do business.

For instance, let’s say you normally only have Fortune500 companies as clients. You may want to consider taking on assignments from smaller firms as well since you need to adopt an appropriate game plan to ensure that you advance and conquer when things are tight.

What you did yesterday may have worked then but probably won’t be relevant today or tomorrow, so be willing to open up your client base to offset any pullback from your normal list.

If your typical customer profile has diminished or clients have cut back on their budgets, you will be forced to look to wherever a flow of business could occur.

When economic conditions change, all of your earlier considerations and actions need to change along with them.

Now is the time to be prepared to change past decisions in order to achieve your goal of advancing and conquering during the "corona economy".

Let’s say, for example, that you are an accounting firm that has traditionally only worked on major annual reports. Now you might want to consider doing smaller quarterly reports—without your normal annual agreement—in order to generate some much-needed revenue. Maybe you expand your client profile to include smaller companies as well.

This doesn’t mean you throw your standards out the window and work for anyone who calls you; you’re simply readjusting your acceptable criteria during this temporary lull in order to accommodate a wider range of prospects and projects.

So get real during economic contractions, and know that you will have to make adjustments in the way you think, the people with whom you’re willing to work, and how you conduct business.

Ask yourself why you don’t do business in a particular zip code area or with a certain sized client or group?

Start looking for new markets and clients, and spend your energy and resources to determine what you have to do to go get them.

Forget yesterday and keep all your attention on what you’re going to do to create a new tomorrow.

Reassessing your list of potential clients should be an operating basis at all times, but it’s even more critical now. You need clients, relationships, business flow, action, new relationships, and new business. You need to adjust for any loss in opportunities and revenue due to the constraints on the marketplace.

These new considerations—and your willingness to work with a broader range of people—may cause you to find yourself opening up to opportunities you’ve never imagined before, expanding your power base, and finding sales and clients that you might have missed, denied, or overlooked during better times.

How far should you take this? It’s up to you.

If, for example, you normally have a minimum project fee of $1,000, you might accept $500 assignments, but you probably would not take on $50 assignments. When you think about it, there are probably a lot of things you do for free everyday anyway.

While the initial presentation you make prior to earning someone’s business costs you money, it’s usually free to that person, and you may or may not get the business. I always remain open to creating new relationships in order to establish new contacts that may one day become regular clients.

So get real during economic contractions, and know that you will have to make adjustments in the way you think, the people with whom you’re willing to work, and how you conduct business!

If you want support, I'm going live Friday April 10th at 3pm to give you a detailed COVID-19 RESPONSE for your income and business. Join me HERE

—Grant