Right now, the economy is being upended and many of you are worried the COVID-19 pandemic will destroy your business. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have faced this in business.
NOTE: Before I go on, I’ve done a free webcast on “How To Avoid Losing Clients And Still Market Your MSP During The COVID-19 Crisis.” You can watch and get the templates and slides at: www.TechnologyMarketingToolkit.com/prosper
From 2008 to around 2012 we lost roughly 30% of our client base due to the recession. They just closed their doors or had credit cards declining. Despite that, I still grew those years in both top- and bottom-line revenue, so you CAN actually thrive in the face of a difficult economy. Here are my recommendations…
First, double your efforts in coming up with new and valuable services to sell to existing clients.
If you can bump your average client spend by just 10%, that’s a MORE profitable piece of business than going out and getting a 10% increase in new clients for three reasons. First, you won’t have the marketing costs associated with new-client acquisition, which means more profit for that sale. Second, selling more services to existing clients tightens the bonds you have with them, makes them more loyal, happy and likely to refer. Third, if you can implement a process for selling more to existing clients (not just a one-off campaign), you can continue that on forever, thereby allowing you to spend more to GET a customer in the first place because you know that each one you get will spend more with you.
Second, DON’T stop marketing and sales efforts.
Almost every other competitor is going to do the exact opposite, tightening the screws, spending less on lead generation and client outreach. How THAT makes any sense is beyond me.
If the marketing wasn’t producing, you have no business spending any money on it in the first place, good economy or not. And if it IS producing and you restrict it during a time when you arguably need it the most, you’re dumber than a box of rocks.
I would also suggest you don’t let yourself blame a bad economy for poor sales. It’s an excuse. You can’t do anything about it anyway, so using it as a crutch for slow and stagnant sales doesn’t help.
One client of mine used the last recession here in the U.S. to approach bigger companies and convince them to outsource their lower-level IT projects and management to them as a means of cutting costs—and secured thousands of dollars in new business they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
The market will do what the market will do—YOUR results are largely based on what YOU are thinking and doing. My team and I are reacting quickly to this situation and providing resources to our clients. Take advantage of the FREE ones here: https://technologymarketingtoolkit.com/videoblog and www.TechnologyMarketingToolkit.com/prosper.
