Selling in a Crisis

55Be Bold

During a crisis, there is a tendency to slow down. In business and your personal life, you hunker down, put on a helmet, jump in a foxhole, and try to wait it out.

Look around you. It's as if everything, along with the economy, is just creeping along. It is a far slower pace than in the boom that preceded this crisis. When people are afraid, they become more tentative to avoid making mistakes.

This is fantastic news for the individuals and businesses who can rise above fear and see opportunity where others cannot. Instead of slowing down, these rainmakers speed up.

Think about it like this. If you were driving a car on an interstate going 70 miles an hour, and there was another car going 68 miles an hour 5 miles ahead of you, how long would it take you to overtake and pass that car? I won't bore you with a high-school math problem. Suffice to say it would take hours upon hours of tedious driving to eventually catch up.

This is what business is like in a normal economy. It takes much more time, effort, money and tenacity to catch your competitors.

But if you were in the same car going 70 miles an hour, and 5 miles ahead of you there was a car parked on the side of the road, it would only take minutes to pass it.

This is the argument for accelerating during an economic downturn. Your competitors are creeping along in the slow lane. Some of them have pulled over to the side of the road and parked, hoping to ride out the crisis in safety.

Right now, speed is your greatest ...