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Can a Business Really Grow in Todays Economy?

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Published: 18Jul2009
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Almost any business can achieve astonishing growth, even in the midst of a severe economic downturn like the one we face today. I'd like to show you how.

It's vitally important to take careful stock of all the psychological and transactional changes going on in both the minds and lives of your marketplace and in the minds and lives of your competitors. Look at the attitude and actions of all your suppliers, vendors, and support services. You'll probably witness the following predictable reactions: your competitors are feeling battered. Their sales and marketing approaches are generating meager results. They don't have a tried and tested plan of action. Certainly they don't have a proactive strategy for capitalizing on all the things going awry. So, most typically, you'll see them pulling back and trying to cut costs to maintain a holding pattern. Or, they're redoubling the same ineffectual efforts that really didn't work during the good times, but got masked by the upward force of the growing economy.

What Do You Do Instead?

Set up an offense and a defense. Offensively, you look for gaps, weaknesses, and hidden opportunity in all this adversity. And believe me: it exists in droves.

Defensively, you stop doing anything that isn't working. Implement testing, monitoring, and measuring results so that you'll know immediately when something isn't working. That way you can stop wasting time and money on it right away. That saves capital by eliminating waste.

This will help you guard against loss, but you can do better than that. Your next step is to go beyond merely surviving and to begin to enact changes that will ensure that your business continues to evolve. So, begin to conservatively and safely test new approaches to replace the ones that weren't working and that you eliminated. In other words, you move from optimization to innovation.

Joint Ventures Make More Sense (And Dollars) Than Ever Before

What are some of those direct and impactful ways? Your first plan of action should be to structure joint ventures with groups who already have access, trust, and a credible relationship with the market segment you want to reach. This could mean going to non-competitive businesses actually selling to the same buyer you're going after. It could mean a company selling something totally unrelated but selling to the same buying influence. It could mean going to anyone selling any product or service that your target buyer typically purchases directly before, right after or at the same time they buy the product or service you sell.

Or, it could mean you find your market's local, regional, or national association; journal; or organization and start an endorsement deal in which they endorse, recommend, and tastefully promote your product/service directly to their members. All these deals should be done on a pure performance basis whenever possible—which is most of the time—so that you pay only the selling or endorsing source in direct proportion to the specific, actual sales that their involvement generates. You can also make similar arrangements with the sales force of any company selling directly to the same market you are targeting. The key to this strategy is that it moves your costs from fixed and speculative to variable, contingent and result-certain. But it gets even better. These steps only comprise Stage 1 of your "crisis growth" strategy. Your entire outlook and modified approach are based on gaining more direct, favorably predisposed, highly credible access to your market in unconventional (but highly ethical) ways—that your competitors would never think to pursue. It's all a part of the strategy of preeminence—make your product or service stand out head and shoulders above the rest.

Sales Are Still Happening, But You Don't Hear About That On The News

Keep in mind that, even in a grossly downturned market like the one we face today, all sales don't dry up. Sales certainly can drop 30, 40, or even 50%. But people and businesses are still purchasing things. All commerce hasn't come to a full and absolute standstill. This realization is crucial.

Think about it. If a market normally does, say, 10,000 transactional purchases a month, and now it has dropped to 5,000, that sounds bad. And it is—for everybody else! But if you figure out how to gain preemptive access to those 5,000 transactions that are still alive and well, and you make irresistibly attractive offers through trusted sources, those prospective buyers will be all the more committed to you because you've offered them the solutions they need in a trying time. When your competitors are too blinded by their own panic to reach out to the marketplace in a meaningful way, that's when you have the best opportunity to establish yourself as the most trusted, reliable source. Instead of losing out to your competition, your business can actually grow and thrive, while everyone else you compete against is bleeding red ink.

Don't buy into the mindset that recession equals disaster. Instead, sell...like never before!

Jay Abraham is the author of The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times, published in June by Vanguard Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group, $25.95, hardcover. For more information visit www.abraham.com/

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