Sometimes the best advice comes from other small business owners. Mark Hayward asked on Twitter,
“Small biz owners, are your numbers down? Ours seem to be off quite a bit from this time last year…How are you compensating?”
In the course of our conversation online, we came up with two suggestions:
1. Diversify – What else do you have to offer?
Mark owns a guest house on a tropical island and maintains a great online presence for it with a whole bunch of different social networks, etc. Mark has considered doing some consulting with other small businesses, to help them market using these same tools.
What skills do you have you could use to either expand your business, or possibly start a side business? Have you developed any tools, software or skills you can offer to other small business owners?
2. Refocus your time to do more outreach.
Mark said it this way, “ahh, next, step away from Twitter …and focus more on some travel sites. :)”
When you have less business to do, it can be either tempting to do relaxing or distracting activities, like Twitter, or it can feel odd, not knowing what to do.
Focus your time on reaching more people you can serve.
More ideas from other small biz owners:
Gabriel Pagan @gabopagan added several points:
- discipline and cost control without sacrificing quality and service (hard!)
- redoubling efforts to get new clients while doing as much to keep existing ones
- trying to get all employees with sense of ownership, we all in this together
packages and more advertising for increased sales
I say keep keeping on, improve things, come up with better packaging/presentation
Your ideas?
What would you do if sales were down? What real-world experience can you share?
Technorati Tags: small+business, recession, marketing, advertising, promotion, social+media, Alisa+treasurefield, Royce+Gomez, Garbiel+Pagan, Mark+Hayward
This article is part of the Small Biz 100, a series of 100 practical hands-on posts for small business people and solo entrepreneurs, whether in a small town, the big city, or in between. If you have questions you’d like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
Hola Becky,
Greetings from Lima/Peru. I am here for a week visiting family….. and working. I keep an office here :-)
I think that “Refocus your time to do more outreach” is excellent advice.
Although ideally, one should do more marketing when sales are UP (yes…up) so that there wont be any down periods. Many small biz owners only do marketing when things are no going to well, which adds to the challenge.
Muchos saludos desde Lima.
Marco
Thanks, Marco! You’ve made a great point.
I also got a tip from Steve Finikiotis, @finikiotis on Twitter:
“Boost sales? Tough times bring tough problems for clients. Get very clear about what they need help with & do that well.”
Great info Becky! As always you offer insights and needed information that is timed well.
Earn more by learning more. Your customers have a lot more to say about your business than you think. Make it easy for your them to communicate with you and they will. Solicit comments from your customers whenever you can in order to see your business from your customers point of view. The insight your receive from your customers will help you make better business decisions and grow your business faster.
As a small business owner, I’ll throw a few out.
– Cut costs. You’ve got to trim up expenses. This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people try to keep business as usual or try to save face in front of employees by keeping things as they are. Everyone knows the economy is down, it’s OK to cut/downgrade/change things to bring your costs in line with the changing climate.
– Champion your big customers. Most small businesses have a few clients that really “pay the bills.” Do everything you can to service and extend your work with them.
– Be an all-star with customer service. Like the above, retention of your current customers is key.
– Don’t cut marketing. There are ways to keep your marketing strong while still cutting costs. I’ll be releasing a document called “6 Ways to increase marketing at little or no cost” on our blog and via Twitter that will have several tips we’ve used successfully at my company.
Hope those help!
@JustinCowan
elementfusion.com
Lou and Justin, thank you for adding your advice to this. Excellent points! I really think our insights are worth more, because we’re speaking from our own experience as small business people.
Although at first counter intuitive, consider raising your prices when sales volume is low. Decreasing your prices, reduces your margin, and puts you in a downward spiral requiring ever more customers to break even. Increasing your prices increases your margin requiring fewer sales to break even. With fewer customers, you can focus on adding value to your serivce, or increasing the perceived value of your product through marketing, in order to justify the higher prices.
Derrick, my first reaction is, “don’t go TOO far!” There is a business in my region that has been hit with declining sales, and they have reacted by raising prices much too far. Obviously, this isn’t what you mean.
Perhaps the other part of this is to make sure that you raise prices as one part of an overall strategy to improve your customer service and rebuild your business.
Thanks for another thought-provoking contribution, Derrick.
The raising prices trick can work. I used to keep prices low on one of my CafePress shops because I figured I’d sell more if the prices were reasonable. Once I raised prices, sales increased AND I made more from each sell.
I’m not saying it works in every case, but it’s worth considering.
Eric, thanks for sharing your experience, also. It’s a good reminder not to sell on price.
Yes, it’s all about (perceived) value. The idea is to both raise your prices and increase the (perceived) value. Raising prices alone will turn customers away, especially those that were familiar with your previous prices. However there is something to be said for high prices with new customers, because baring all other evidence, people relate price to value. I think that is what Eric experienced.
When the real estate market started to decline in October 2005 I began to look at cutting redundant costs; websites and software offering the same services in different packages, for example.
Then, I eliminated employee support in favor of outsourcing through virtual assistants.
Now, I am increasing revenue sources through other skill sets.
In my “former life”, I was a therapist specializing in counseling Adult Children of Alcoholics and other family members impacted by alcoholism.
Being an active listener with intuitive insight enables me to coach and mentor real estate agents and other small business owners. The original focus was improving their social networking skills. Today, I find our focus is providing a safe environment for the self-employed to talk.
Terrific example, Kathy. Thanks for sharing it. Amazing resilience and determination!
For more ideas, contributor Zane Safrit has a follow up post, Sales are down. Now what?
Hi Becky, Good discussion with excellent comments. I was a sales manager for several years. When sales are down, there is a temptation to think the answer is to sell more, sell harder, or worse, reduce prices. The answer instead is to raise your value proposition. Give more value for what you offer.
Realize, that there is rarely a quick fix to slumping sales. But for the long-term I have found one of the best ways to turn sales around and avoid slumps, is to continously train your people.
Jay, I agree. The comments here are terrific! I particularly like your point to give more value for what you offer. Thanks!
Hi Becky – thank you for including my thoughts in your post! :)
We have had many calls from people looking for various discounts, so I am truly happy to see all of your smart readers above commenting that lowering prices/discounts isn’t necessarily the answer.
In the end we looked at the quality of our product and what we provide and have decided to stand firm.
Thanks for all of the great thoughts!