What to do when sales are down?
Sometimes the best advice comes from other small business owners.
Mark Hayward asked on Twitter,
“Small biz owners, are your numbers down? Ours seem to be off quite a bit from this time last year…How are you compensating?”
In the course of our conversation online, we came up with two suggestions:
1. Diversify – What else do you have to offer?
Mark owns a guest house on a tropical island and maintains a great online presence for it with a whole bunch of different social networks, etc. Mark has considered doing some consulting with other small businesses, to help them market using these same tools.
What skills do you have you could use to either expand your business, or possibly start a side business? Have you developed any tools, software or skills you can offer to other small business owners?
2. Refocus your time to do more outreach.
Mark said it this way, “ahh, next, step away from Twitter …and focus more on some travel sites. :)”
When you have less business to do, it can be either tempting to do relaxing or distracting activities, like Twitter, or it can feel odd, not knowing what to do.
Focus your time on reaching more people you can serve.
More ideas from other small biz owners:
Gabriel Pagan @gabopagan added several points:
discipline and cost control without sacrificing quality and service (hard!)
redoubling efforts to get new clients while doing as much to keep existing ones
trying to get all employees with sense of ownership, we all in this together
Royce Gomez @rghorses also provided a good idea:
packages and more advertising for increased sales
Alisa Treasurefield @treasurefield said to persevere:
I say keep keeping on, improve things, come up with better packaging/presentation
Your ideas?
What would you do if sales were down? What real-world experience can you share?
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This blog was written by BECKY MCCRAY and originally appeared on SmallBizSurvival.com