Take advantage of slow times to make your business stronger for the future.

As tracked by The National Federation of Independent Businesses, 25% of small business owners are citing poor sales as their #1 concern.

This is the highest this figure has been in 22 years. These concerns are not being fueled by fear, but by actual results.

However, small businesses are perhaps the best positioned to be able to take advantage of the slower times in business life-cycles to develop and implement a strategy to grow business and eliminate slow periods in the future.

NEBS Business products sponsored an entire small business webinar on the subject of how to utilize economic downturns to prepare your business for the growth ahead.

"Every business has its up and downs. Slower periods are a good time to get busy with internal projects to improve performance," says Wes Carrington of NEBS Canada Business Products, presenter of the Turning Slow Into Grow webinar.

"Instead of enduring peaks and valleys in your sales cycle," Carrington continues, "why not take advantage of this time to develop a strategy to level out your business? A good example is one of our HVAC customers that was far too busy to handle all of the furnace cleanings in the fall, so they developed a strategy to offer a free air conditioning inspection when their customers had their furnaces cleaned in the spring. Not only did this even out their business, but it is actually easier to clean a furnace in the spring than it is after it has sat all summer."

This is also an excellent time to establish or reestablish your brand, do you have a logo that is recognized around town? If not, now is the time to get one!

Take the case of a landscaper from Calgary during the last oil boom in the 1980’s. Branding was not an important issue with this small company, they didn’t even have a sign on their truck. When asked, the owner responded "I don’t have time, besides, I don’t need one, I have more business than I can handle"

Then boom turned to bust. Suddenly, this landscaper was desperate for business, but no one knew him and no one knew how to get in touch with him, they didn’t recognize his business or anything he had done. Hindsight is always 20/20!

Slow business presents the perfect opportunity to prospect for new business and revitalize your existing base by developing an ongoing marketing plan.

A well thought out plan will help you through the slower times and gear up for busier days ahead.

Prospecting is hard work, but new customers are worth it.

In order to convert a prospect into a new customer, you need to satisfy all or most of the common human needs: Certainty, variety, significance, love and/or connection, growth (everything is either growing or dying) and contribution.

On average, it takes eight contacts with a prospect to turn them into a customer.

Many small businesses don’t have time to think about what the customer should take away during a single contact point, let alone how to coordinate all eight of them to maximize their impact.

In order to develop a marketing plan, you need to know your own unique selling proposition

• What’s the one thing that makes your business unique and distinct?
• Why should people buy from you and not from your competitors?
• Do you promise great value, benefits or service?

Every small business needs to make their business special in the eyes of their customers or prospects.

A good piece of advice is to take advantage of your current customers, get to know them, keep them coming to your business.

Perhaps surveying your customers to find out their lifestyle, their demographics and why they purchase from you will help you to model a marketing campaign targeting prospect with similar characteristics.

In order for marketing materials, or any marketing campaign, to be successful it requires the right offer, a call to action (creating a sense of urgency is helpful as well), the right audience and the right timing.

Another very important thing to keep in mind when you are determining how many pieces to send out is how many responses you can handle. If you can handle 20 additional jobs in a roofing season, there is no sense sending out 25,000 postcards. It is important to follow up with each lead you get, so be certain you can handle your anticipated prospects.

Every marketing method has it’s own typical response rates, and you can use this to judge the anticipated response. Postcards, for instance, can range anywhere from .5% for a bulk mail campaign to near 10% for a fully variable personalized piece, but these are simply guidelines.

Any combination of direct marketing vehicles such as postcards, invoice stuffers and doorknob hangers and business cards can be an effective way of producing results.

These initiatives are sometimes difficult to focus on during busier times, when a small business is concentrating on fulfilling customer demand.

Slower times, either during economic downturns or during off-peak times of the year, present the perfect opportunity to create and implement strategies that can be rolled out now in order to increase awareness of your products, or in time to attract interest to your business when the timing is right.

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