Skip to main content

Don't Give Up During the Pandemic

Each day I talk to people who are small business owners, independent contractors and sales reps from a variety of industries. Nearly every single one of them has told me that the Coronavirus has impacted their enterprise to some degree, some worse than others.

Inevitably one of these people will say something like, "I don't know how much longer we can hang in there." They struggle hard to keep the proverbial doors open, regardless if they own a restaurant or if they are realtors. None has shut down yet, but it may be coming soon for some of them.

I try not to be the person to tell others what to do when it comes to how they make a living. In the past I've been asked to do some informal business consulting and have made a suggestion here or there, usually as part of an insurance deal. With the pandemic in our midst for the last few months, the threat of business closures is ramping up. Open Table, an online restaurant reservation service, estimates that as many as one in four restaurants could ultimately shut down due to Covid-19.

Not trying to sound like a cheerleader, my advice to all of these people is this:  Do your best to not give up. For those of us in sales, no matter the industry, we need to understand that our efforts can keep the doors open. 

I managed to study for and pass my securities exams just in time to get pummeled in the 2008 great recession. It was strange time with people calling me who were upset at their market losses, but the weird part was that they weren't my clients. "Who is your advisor and why aren't you calling them?" I'd ask. Because they were small fish in those advisors' eyes, they didn't get serviced properly.  I managed to steal those clients away, and worked them as free leads. 

It was a long process but I managed to use these "accidental clients" to keep my pipeline full with cases while my colleagues were floundering around, mostly complaining. One guy had made a living selling variable annuities, but his sales had dried up. "I don't know anything about other products," he lamented. 

We hear that chaos creates opportunity, and it can be true, but one needs to make some adjustments. My friend didn't want to make adjustments and he suffered. He could have easily contacted his current clients and made the case for life insurance, but he didn't.

 

Tweaking your strategy in times of crisis is one of the best ways to create opportunity. Just as restaurateurs are changing seating arrangements and pivoting to more delivery and take out, you can make some alterations to your business plan. These aren't major changes, but are keeping them afloat. 

Are you making the changes you need to survive? Talk to others in your industry to see what changes they making, and keep an eye on what works and what doesn't. In the meantime, stay well and don't give up.


Chris Castanes is a professional speaker who helps sales people succeed through workshops and humorous presentations. For booking information, click here. He's also the president of Surf Financial Brokers selling life and disability insurance in several states
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Telemarketer's Leads - A Dumb Story

For a brief few months I worked as a telemarketer for a small firm owned by a young married couple. The husband was a bit of a hot head and kind of a jerk on occasion, but his wife was nice and had to put up with the guy.  One of their clients was a mobile home company that wanted people to come to the lot and see how awesome their singlewides and doublewides were. As telemarketers we offered incentives like a cooler and camera (back when they weren’t part of your phone) and other assorted giveaways. We got a small commission if we could book the client. My coworkers and I would call from a list of leads that our employers had purchased from someone. These leads were supposedly “qualified” ahead of time, meaning that they had been vetted to meet the needs of the client, the mobile home company. Unfortunately, most of the leads were useless. The people we spoke to didn’t live in the right geographical areas or their incomes were too low.  “Why aren’t you guys closing anyone?” t...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Prevent (Or Lessen) Momentum Killers

Have you had a great sales run, with the wind at your back as you continue to sell and make money, only to have some event or holiday slow down your momentum? It's happened to all of us. I compare it to running at full speed down a field, and out of nowhere comes a patch of mud and tar, designed specifically to slow you down and make you work harder.  An example of this is the holiday season. For some industries, the end of the year is a great time to make those last minute sales and thin out inventories. But for others, it can be horrible. Let's face it, the holidays are about spending money on fun stuff, like electronics and clothes. No one is even thinking about buying insurance, unless they have to.  "I can't spend any money on life insurance because I have to buy Christmas gifts," is what I hear each year. (Nice priorities, by the way!) Having been through this for a few years I now plan ahead. Instead of beating my head against a wall trying to get people to...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Short Post On Social Media

Are you leveraging social media to help your business? Are you posting daily and creating content like the "experts" say to do? Most importantly, are you getting results? I've tried using most of the more popular platforms for my insurance business, as well as my writing and speaking business. To say the results are "mixed" would be generous. This may be because I really haven't invested much into advertising on these platforms.  The way I see it, when Facebook, for example, allows me to set up a free page for my business, that is like a "free trial" to see if I can get any interest in my product or service. After nearly 15 years of this trial period, I have garnered little to no business.  One can come up with two arguments here. The first is why would you throw money at advertising when you haven't seen any returns. The other side is that "you could have done better if you had quit being a tight ass penny pincher." Fair enough. But ...
Post a Comment
Read more