Joe DiDonato | Chief of Staff | BCI Corporation
Disaster or opportunity? That’s a question that we all have to face over the next several months. Some will choose the disaster route and constrict their spending until the crisis passes. Others will choose the other path of opportunity. It’s to that second path that I wanted us to look at together.
Let’s say that we use this as an opportunity to take more market share, whether that be a competitor from the group that’s constricting their spending or just some revenue streams that we’ve never thought of before. The point of this article is to give you a starting place to come up with your own unique strategy.
Here are 10 ideas to start the list and get your creative juices flowing:
Add new products – This is a particularly difficult approach when monies are tight but adding new products – especially ones that are timely – can provide you with additional revenue streams. Another new product strategy might be a product that opens access to a new market. Many times, government and non-profit organizations are harder to sell to, but this might be the time to shift your focus there, as they too grapple for solutions. Bundling of products to create a new offering is also a good product strategy – if the customer sees the resultant bundle as a bargain.
Launch new services – New services are not always “top of mind” for product companies, but this is where a lot of revenues lie unclaimed. For a product company, think about what your “whole product solution” could be if you added training and consulting revenues. If you’re a service company, think about what new services might lead you to other divisions within a company, or to a new vertical market, or even to a whole new market.
Go after new market segments – One of the traditional transitions is to expand your market to new types of market segments. For instance, if you’re a retailer faced with store closures, you can probably buoy your decline with an online website. If you are primarily a commercial seller, then maybe the consumer side might be an opportunity. Analyze the “new normal” during a recession, and that will help you decide on new directions that keep you in your area of expertise and adds an easily accessible adjacent market segment.
Go after new vertical markets – As mentioned above, new markets can help to offset lagging sales in your current markets. But it goes beyond just looking at the government and nonprofit space. What I’m advocating is that you consider completely new vertical market segments like healthcare, manufacturing, insurance – whatever makes sense with your product and service set. A good way to find which ones to focus on is to look at the current markets you’ve only dabbled in lightly and analyze what kind of sales and marketing campaign it would take to increase your presence there. Not all companies and vertical markets suffer the same fate during a recession.
Go after new territories/countries – This is an obvious choice for many companies that have been regionally or nationally focused. A recession is a good time to tap into new adjacent markets. It’s akin to how a franchise expansion plan works. Setting up 20 stores across the nation doesn’t produce the same market impact as focusing on one part of one state. But once your reputation is established, it’s easier to move adjacently. The same is true for many other services and product companies.
Target a competitor’s clients – This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, once you’ve isolated your win-loss accounts or simply scanned your competitor’s website for the companies that they point to as clients. You’ll need to figure out what your unique value proposition is going to be to win their clients over, and then you will need to do a targeted sales and marketing campaign.
Find a way to double your close rates – This can be a great source of additional revenue. One way is to train your people to overcome objections, which I discuss later. But there are other ways. We have a lot of statistics that say your rate of closing an inquiry plummets after 5 minutes pass. How can you speed that response time up? Perhaps you need to train your team on closing techniques. Perhaps you need to train them on the negotiation tactics that they’ll encounter. If you have assessment tools, this is how to find the root cause of your closure rates not being higher. And just because they may match an industry benchmark – don’t accept that as the ceiling!
Strengthen a partnership – or team up with a new partner – Probably the best way to gain access to a new account is from a trusted advisor who recommends you and your company. When you have a partner to work with, that is a “leverage multiplier” when it comes to introductions. “Hey – have you thought of working with ABC Company? They are doing some amazing things with some of our other clients.” Can you imagine a better introduction?
Provide the team with strategies to overcome the top 3 objections they encounter – This is a personal pet peeve for me. We know statistically that if you can teach your sales team to overcome your top 3 objections, it will have an enormous impact on your sales and pipeline. That impact can be as high as 50% on sales and 150% on pipeline deals. Reach out to your sellers and ask them what their top objections are that they face on a recurring basis. Then get a contest going for the best answers to those objections, codify it, teach it, and test your sellers’ ability to do it on a constant basis, when put on a spot.
Increase the frequency of Marketing communications – This is the easiest way to stay in your customer’s mind. You just need to do it, over and over again. The number of times you have to ‘touch’ a client has gone from 3 to 6 to 12 to 24. The more we’re inundated with social media content, face disruptions at work, or deal with other competing priorities, the more you need to be in constant contact with your customers. Press releases, mailing services, personal emails, telephone calls, etc. all count as a needed touchpoint. If you’re Marketing team is overwhelmed, do it yourself.
These are the conversations that we’re having with our clients right now. Let’s share the brainpower and help all of us minimize the slide during this period of crisis. Hope this helped you, and I hope you and your team will add 10 more ways! Thanks for the read, and let me know your thoughts at jdidonato@bcicorp.com.
