By Steve Laborda
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January 24, 2020
In the last months, many articles talking about the possible recession to come in 2020 and some others saying that the slow-down is not coming. Here you can read some online articles related to the possibility of a recession either strong or mild from Bloomberg , Forbes , and UStoday . Anyway, is your company ready if it would be coming? I have seen this happening so many times, companies are starting to cut costs and jobs in anticipation of the hard time ahead, hoping to get them to overcome the crisis. I have been wondering is this really the right solution or more a drop of water on a hot stone? From my experience, cutting costs and jobs are actually only actions on a very short term to prepare for the slowdown, and these actions might give some relief to your bottom line for a few months or quarters. And then? I have seen that too many times after the recession when the economy picks up again, it does take so much time to get the sales activities as well as the customer excellence projects at full speed. That once the economy picks up again, as a company you are not capable of capturing all the value, profitability and growth that you could be getting. What is your approach when your company is getting under pressure due to the recession? So if you do not cut costs or jobs, what is the alternative to bring your company through a slow down? What if you would be building on sustainable value capture instead of destroying value with cost-cutting initiatives? The benefits of focusing on a value approach with your customer base would: make your business sustainable Strong and less incline to economical cycles Impact positively the customer experience Of course, this is not happening overnight and should not be taken just before the wave is going to hit. So a clear plan and preparation are required to build the capabilities of your organization. Here the quote that I like very much to explain the importance of preparation: The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression John Preston Does your sales organization have the right mindset, skills, and competences to capture effectively and quickly value at the customer-end to ensure the company stays profitable independently of the economic situation? Are you satisfied with the performance of your sales teams when considering the value selling capabilities? If yes, you can stop to read here. If not, I encourage you to continue reading! What if, your sales teams would always look at not only creating value for the customers but also automatically consider to capture as much as a possible value for your company? I have been working many years in the sales and marketing arena in B2B industries to know that it requires a lot of effort and time to invest in people to develop their skills in value selling. The good thing about it: is that if you do it properly it delivers the right profitability. Most of the time, it is more than developing the skills of a group of sales reps. It is actually to get the right mindset and attitude for this new way of working and interacting with customers that do matter most. Indeed, you need to shift your farmers to hunters and from talker to listener. Obviously, easier said than done, but not impossible. As always, from a change/engagement perspective, I would focus first on the early adopters and big mass of the team to get them moving towards the new way of working. But please do not forget the so-called "back sheeps" because as you may know the bad news spread much faster than the good news, almost like forest fires. This means that even you might have a lot of success with the early adopters including some of the more undecided ones, if suddenly some failures show up, then those will lead to the undecided ones to move towards resistance. By the way, it is normal to have failures in a change process and even it is recommended. So, do not forget to talk about the learnings from the failures. To get these teams moving you need to build their understanding and confidence to make your change a success. How do you do that? To get their understanding, you need to focus on communication but not only. You need to make sure that they get the information, but also that they understand it. This can only be made sure if the communication is in both ways and in such a way that they understand What Is In For Them. To get your teams having enough confidence, you need to give them the right skills and at the same time, let them feel that failure is ok or even wished to happen. If you feel that this resonates a lot with the challenges that you have in your organization, and you are not sure how to take this further, l et´s get in touch and find out together on how we can get you ready !