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How to market your business during a recession

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Does your business rely on the success of other people’s businesses?

If so, it can be stressful when their business starts to take a nose dive.

A dip in sales for long enough generally leads to trimming the fat…And only keeping what’s essential to drive their business forward.

I had a chat the other day with a friend that has a startup.  She said one of her leads’ sales are down 30%.

They’re right in the middle of a sales cycle with this prospect and it has her worried now they won’t buy because their business is down.

So I asked her, have you changed the way you message and position your service?

Rather than positioning her service as a way to exponentially increase sales, I told her she needs to shift it to reflect their current business environment.

Here’s what I told her to say in her next email and sales conversation:

“When sales slow, it’s critical to identify what’s working and what isn’t working immediately in your product assortment so you can present the right product at the right time to consumers.

And if you’re relying on manual spreadsheets and overwhelming dashboards to find your product winners, it can be like finding a needle in a haystack. You don’t have time for that in this business environment.

Our software helps you uncover and identify your business driving products faster, sooner so you can get your sales back on track.”

Her response:

“Why don’t I think to say it simply like that?”

 

When’s the last time you updated your brand messaging?

Now look at your messaging in your marketing and sales collateral.

Does your message reflect the current business environment your customers are in? Does it talk about the problems, pains, and worries they’re dealing with?

If not, update it ASAP.

Here’s how to update your messaging with a breakdown of the example above:

1. Start with the big problem they’re dealing with today

If you want to get your customer’s attention, talk about the problems they have. If you stop talking about their problems, they’ll ignore you.

Our brains are hardwired to be on the lookout for the things that could harm us. It’s science! So open with a problem.

Here’s the problem opener from the example above:

“When sales slow, it’s critical to identify what’s working and what isn’t working immediately in your product assortment…”

2. Highlight the pain it causes

We only act on the problems we have when the pain it causes becomes too big to ignore. If you don’t get your customers to feel and recognize the pain they’re dealing with, they won’t act.

Amplifying their pain helps overcome status quo bias: the bias to do nothing. We want to shift our customer’s line of thinking away from, “The problem I’m dealing with isn’t that bad…” to, “I can’t ignore this anymore.”

You do that by amplifying the pain. Here’s how I did it above:

“And if you’re relying on manual spreadsheets and overwhelming dashboards to find your product winners, it can be like finding a needle in a haystack. You don’t have time for that in this business environment.”

In this example, I’m using a specific pain they can visualize and I know they are dealing with. We have to get our customers to visualize and recall the pain.

3. position your product as the solution to that problem and pain

Now they recognize the problem and feel the pain it causes, we can position our products and services as the solution.

Here’s how I did that:

“Our software helps you uncover and identify your business driving products faster, sooner…”

4. Paint a picture of what a successful ending looks like

And now that we’ve positioned our product as the solution, let’s get them to visualize what life looks like after working with us.

Here’s how:

“…so you can get your sales back on track.”

Simple, clear, and easy.

It doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Conclusion

If you haven’t updated the way you talk about your business based on what’s happening in your customers’ lives, it’s time to work on it.

When you create a relevant message to use in all your sales and marketing efforts and you nail it, you’ll get more responses, more calls back, and more yeses, even in tough economic times (yeses is the plural of yes…right? 🤷‍♂️😆).

Here’s to relevant messaging and more sales (even during uncertain times).

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