What to do when your customers cut their budgets and cancel deals to save money?
We are well in the middle of a cost cutting era at work and home.
Prices continue to rise and pressure on businesses who have been unable to pass on all their cost increases to customers increases.
Right now I know many companies with travel bans, cost cutting measures and money saving initiatives.
One of these is to cancel unnecessary spend on products and services
That is horrible news for service organisations and producers who are trying to maintain or grow sales of products, services and range.
It is easy to sell when money is abundant, but what can you do when times are tight?
How do some businesses remain profitable and growing even in times of hardship?
What can you learn?
Here are my thoughts;
– Challenge your customers hard to establish a need
During hard times the easy thing to do is decide what is not important to invest in now. Create an apathy to protect spend that can now be seen as optional.
Successful businesses selling to these customers invest more in creating a need for their solution. People will only buy what they need. Create evidence that supports how important your solution is or how much of a problem your customers face.
– Be really clear about your offering
A strong position in the market is essential. Be totally clear and absolutely obsessed with the niche that you serve. Anything that sounds vague can be dismissed as irrelevant.
Focus on the smallest customer group required to pay your bills and what issues they face. Your positioning is what means customers will buy from you rather than others.
– Gently walk your customer along a path to buying
Be prepared to push customers to make decisions. Delay is a great way to avoid spend. If you have created a need and you have owned the position of the solution then you need to be assertive about the sale. Have a clear process which means you aren’t aggressive, but have a number of small steps that gently guide the customer to a decision from lots of small options.
– Negotiate flexibly
Listen to customers and negotiate with respect. Don’t lose a sale because your terms are so aggressive and your style so focussed on results that you become hard to do business with.
Flexible isn’t soft – it means you have enough flexibility across terms that you can create a feeling of achievement that your customer can be proud of when they are desperate for savings.
After all – you have got them to buy something that they were trying not to spend money on – the least you can do is make it feel like a win.