Our topic this month, for our newsletter and blogs, deals with answering this question: How do you finish a year strong, if that year never really started in the first place? Because of covid19, this year never had a chance to get off the ground.
Well, one way to not finish the year in a strong way is to do what many seem to be doing right now playing “the waiting game.”
When this pandemic hit, most of us thought the lockdown would be over within a month, two months at the outside. Here we are, though, 6 months later, and while things are (very slowly) opening back up, we still have a long way to go. And it is almost as if some of us are back there in March, simply waiting for “things to get better.”
Others of us have placed faith in the government, and our leaders, to bring us a solution and allow us to open back up. Our leadership seems to be more interested in bickering and finger-pointing at each other than actually helping us out of this mess, yet many of us are still looking to them, waiting for them to take truly effective action.
It is time to stop waiting for “things to change” or for someone else to change this condition for us. Your customers and prospects are probably waiting, too—but as long as you are playing the waiting game, there is no one to provide your customers and prospects with guidance and help.
What can you do?
You should look at it this way: the pandemic and the lockdown are not things you can control. Kind of like the weather, you have to take what comes. You should therefore look to what you can control.
As we talked about in the first blog for this month, there are three major courses of action and activity that you certainly can control:
• Marketing, through which you must demonstrate that your company is stably there to assist your prospects and customers to achieve their goals and dreams.
Your written materials not only provide believable printed “evidence” for your buyers (people tend to put more faith in written materials than verbal messages) but also act as a stable guide to salespeople in bringing their prospects and customers through the sales process.
• Sales, through which you actively bring your prospects and customers to achieve their goals and dreams, or at least a portion of them.
You must have a reliable sales process, and all your salespeople should have a thorough understanding of it so that skillful and beneficial selling, with the proper amount of care and attention, actually takes place.
• Customer Service which, as we discussed last month, must be stellar—especially while so many companies are reducing service and blaming the pandemic.
In the end, it is a spectacular service that will keep your customers returning to purchase more of the same, or new products or services.
How do you beat the waiting game?
Instead of putting your attention on waiting for the pandemic to finally be solved so that your business can finally return to normal, get into action on marketing, sales, and customer service.
