One serious barrier to finishing the year strong is the incredible amount of misinformation in our current environment. Turn on the news on TV or check out the news stream on your phone. It is the same everywhere: you will see the news that everything is a disaster.
But switch the channel, or access a different news site, and you will see a feature that says things are coming back to the same point they were before the pandemic began.
This is quite literally true. I just read an article that claimed that Italy is in an economic recession. By the time I reached part 2 of the same article, it was making assertions that Italian consumers were back to the same level of buying as they were before the virus. This was in the same article! Which portion should I believe?
It makes one wonder how true any of this news is. You get this piece of information that says one thing, another piece of information that says something else. Then you are into the minutia of whether it is this or that and find yourself spending time trying to sort it out.
First thing you know, you are down a rabbit-hole of something that may very well lead you to a dead-end, and you have no idea in which direction to take your business.
Misinformation can be deadly. Throughout history, it has caused riots, revolutions, and financial disasters. It can even be more insidious on a normal, day-to-day level, though, because it can seem more harmless. Yet if you act on it, you may find yourself moving in completely the wrong direction.
But there is something you should know. From a business standpoint, different pieces of conflicting information, which might be otherwise very distracting, can actually be forgotten about.
The best possible way for your business to survive is to ignore all the misinformation and “do the usual.” All of the regular actions that your company has always engaged in, all of the routine patterns that made your business a success in the first place, will still work.
You will probably have to take them to a whole new level—and we will cover that in another blog post later this month—but nonetheless what worked before will still work now.
Your business must still operate on:
• Marketing, through which you show prospective customers how your product or service will benefit them and make their life better.
• Sales, in which you guide the prospect through the precise steps of your sales process to a win for them, and a win for your company.
• Customer service, which must be stellar in this time when many companies are excusing bad customer service due to pandemic regulations.
You are very likely not going to obtain valid information from the media, so do not worry about it. Just do the things you know will work. And they will.
