Selling in a Crisis

50Be Proactive

In a crisis, savvy competitors will strike fast and aggressively with lower prices and offers of better quality and service. Retaining your customers and protecting your prices will be hand-to-hand, in-the-trenches combat.

Your customers have problems. The volatility is impacting their businesses and personal lives. When you anticipate the issues your customers are facing and proactively bring solutions to the table, it makes breaking up with you hard to do.

Rolling up your sleeves and getting in there with them to help solve those problems is challenging. However, the alternative is customers calling you to demand steep price reductions, cancel contracts, reduce services, or terminate the relationship.

Smart sales professionals are looking objectively at each of their customers, doing account retention analysis, and developing solutions designed to help those customers deal with the crisis and to ensure that they remain customers over the long term.

From delivering additional value-added services, extending payment terms, reducing costs, or lessening contractual obligations, these actions show your customers that you care and you are a valued partner.

The long-term financial impact of losing customers is very expensive. Winning your old customers back from competitors who picked your pocket during the downturn is time consuming, costly, and sometimes impossible once those new relationships are established.

This cycle will abate. We will climb out of this mess. ...