Business is slow? Are you confident? Doubting about everything?

When business is running smoothly, you are confident. All seems right, all seems to be fitting into place.

Missing confidence due to recession

However when it is difficult to generate leads and even more difficult to convert leads into sales, then you are no longer confident at all.
You start to worry and to question everything. You want to analyze and investigate in every part of your business and sales cycle.
The advertising, the marketing, the lead generation, the website, the sales people, the attitude of sales people, the motivation of sales people, the motivation of the sales team, your pricing, the competitiveness of your offering.
You seem to favor changing nearly everything, even things or procedures that have worked fine before, just in order to generate more leads and get more sales.
The slower your business the less confident you will become.

In times of recession (or even depression) it might just be the market is not ready. People and companies are interested but they miss the budget or they don’t dare to take the decision yet.
Deciding or imposing a decision is a risky act for employees.
Thus no sales.

The sellers’ alternatives:

There are two main alternatives for you as a seller:
- Keep the offering, things and methods like it was before as they have proven to work and are effective.
- Change the offering, things and methods as recession is also a trigger for change of your typical customers.

During a recession it is likely people will revisit their decisions and evaluate different alternatives. Thus keeping the same offerings and the same sales methods might not be adequate anymore.

The recovery will bring market changes

However once the recovery will start, business will return. The question is if your offerings and sales methods are still adapted to the possible changed requirements or demands of your typical customers. Or you might get customers from a different market segment as there has been a market shift.

If business picks up again, your doubts will slowly disappear. Still you should try to figure out if your market or market segment has changed as you need to know who you are selling to. Knwing if they need a different marketing approach or a different advertising.
Change of your market is rather certain as new offerings can obtain the required critical mass to become a valid solution and claim or even impose a place in your market.

In any case we all have to sit through the recession and wait for the time to change as a quick fix won’t be appropriate.

Are you starting to miss confidence? Or confident as ever?