With the world economies displaying dynamic conditions most of the time, what can entrepreneurs selling products and services do to ensure they not only stay afloat but also thrive during these rough weather phases. Being one for over 20 years, I’ve come to understand, no matter what the situation is we need to settle bills, pay salaries and manage to take some home too. Here are 3 quick tips about how you can make your business recession proof. These tips have helped us get through 2 recessions and a couple of slowdowns in our business.
Introduce low priced products and services – This encourages a steady trickle of orders, as there is lower resistance to buy when the price is less. This will help keep the cash flow alive, will help you get new clients who are happy to try your work by buying a small product or service. Your sales funnel will continue to get new additions more easily. So you have more number of relationships to nurture in your business.
Up sell to existing clients – Happy clients don’t need to be convinced about how good you are. Simple questions can help you up sell to them and increase your order value by as much as 25%. This requires no extra marketing cost, just some common sense. Eg., if they order a festive gift with you, ask them if they would like it gift wrapped for a nominal price. (Remember McDonalds? When you order for a burger, they’ll ask if you’d like to add fries or coke to the order – so you end up picking one. That is a smart upsell!)
Re-position from features to benefits – No matter how bad the slowdown, people are still looking for ways to solve their problems. A simple tip would be to showcase your product / service on social media or through any other format of marketing – highlighting the benefits of using the product instead of being feature focused. How would this look like? Eg., if you are selling a computer by highlighting its features – you would mention its technical specifications like 8GB RAM, Intel Core 15 processor and so on. Whereas when you sell through benefits you would mention how the system would benefit the user – so you would say how the computer can let you access multiple programs at one time, without hanging up, or how you can download your favourite music and store all your digital books on the high capacity disk – see the shift?
None of these tips require any further investment or big change and that is what I love about them. I would highly encourage you to implement them too. Try it and let us know how much it has helped you and feel free to share more innovative ideas that you may have come up with along the way.
Leena Munot
Co-Founder
The Giving Tree
