All businessmen and businesswomen recognize that when the economy is growing customers buy and businesses expand, creating new sales opportunities. However, sales opportunities exist in a declining market, too. When businesses and government agencies cut back they look for ways to save money.
As a small business, to succeed in a declining market you must be willing to make a few changes. The following are a few ideas you may want to consider.
Use your speed as a small business to respond to changing conditions and opportunities more quickly than your larger and slower competitors where decisions and execution take much longer in what I call leveraging your underdog strategy.
If you offer a product or service with high operating leverage (low variable costs) consider offer customers an all-you-can-eat plan so they can have one price and no consequences for using more of it.
If you don’t already offer volume discounts, considering allowing customers to buy in bulk. This saves them not only costs but the logistics to making multiple purchases.
Offer “buy three get one free” offers as an incentive to encourage customers to save by buying in higher volumes to get the discount.
During a declining market, companies and government agencies also cut costs by consolidating and outsourcing non-key functions.
Look for ways that any service offerings can be extended to a new customer base looking to outsource a function previously performed in-house.
Finally, make sure your own house is in order financially. Your goal should be to survive an economic downturn as a bad economy kills off poorly managed or over-extended businesses.
Are any of your competitors about to go under and release their customers into the market?
