How can businesses continue to survive and thrive during difficult times? Whether it is the global COVID-19 pandemic or any other economic crisis, businesses will come at a crossroads where they will either feel helpless and frozen in fear or they will remain strong and persevere past those obstacles.
As unrelenting as they may be, challenges encourage us to learn from mistakes, develop our character, gain new insights, rework our plans, and come out stronger as a result.
Ashley Kretzschmar is a veteran of sales and marketing in the pharmaceutical industry based in Aledo, Texas, who regularly donates her time and resources to support charities and improve the lives of others. With her 14 years of experience in the sales and marketing industry, Kretzschmar shares her key advice on how businesses can continue to thrive and overcome obstacles during tough economic periods.
In the middle of a tough time, it is really easy to start focusing on the negative and letting our imagination get ahead of the reality of the situation. However, most of the things we worry about never actually happen. So rather than expending valuable time and energy stressing over “what ifs”, Ashley Kretzschmar advises businesses to maintain a positive mindset and power through these challenging times.
Along with avoiding those negative “what-ifs”, it’s important to avoid that “deer in the headlights” reaction where we become frozen by fear and unable to move forward. In order to maintain positive momentum and avoid being paralyzed by a crisis, it’s important that businesses engage in a critical analysis of their situation.
By engaging in this analysis and encouraging team discussions, businesses should be able to determine solutions that will support their continued development and allow them to bypass further challenges. However, ideas are only as powerful as the action associated with them. If businesses don’t leap into action, things will always get worse and they will get worse quickly. Thus, the single most important thing to do is to take action, says Ashley Kretzschmar.
Just as you’re continuing to take action to support the business itself, it’s important to maintain excellent customer service to support clientele. You need to remember that your business is nothing without your clients, so you should be considering your clients’ needs as much as you’re considering those of the business itself.
In whatever way you’re communicating with a client, ensure you’re engaging them in a thoughtful manner, listening to them and focusing on their interests and concerns — your business challenges set aside for that moment. By strengthening and cementing these relationships with existing clients, they’ll remain loyal to your business through both good and challenging times.
Tough times are crossroads for a business, and they provide an opportunity to make hard decisions about what is working and what is not. This is the perfect time to stop and really reflect on your business and make the changes that deep down you know you need to make, says Ashley Kretzschmar.
Many businesses fall apart because they aren’t willing to try something new, but would rather keep doing the same thing they’ve always been doing. But in order to evolve with the world and the challenges that it brings, it’s important to step outside that comfort zone and try new and innovative ideas.
Take time to reflect on the situation, with the following questions: What would you do differently next time? What were the clues that you should have picked up on? What are you going to do to make absolutely certain that this never happens again?
There will always be more obstacles along our path, so it’s crucial that businesses to take time to engage in fruitful discussions about how they handled this situation and how they can prepare themselves for the future, in the event that they are faced with another similar challenge, says Ashley Kretzschmar.
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