4 things we learned about doing business in COVID times
By Clement Soliva, Co-founder at Staizen
When the news of COVID-19 spread, people and organizations began to consider how it would affect their business continuity and employee well being.
Government authorities made sure that essential functions can operate and all of us are very grateful for those working hard to make our lives safer and major services up and running.
As a leader and co-founder of a young company, Staizen, it is also one of my roles to make sure that everyone is safe and that our business remains resilient for the future. It’s no surprise that one of the key areas impacted was our business development activities. While talks about business development appeared far from immediate concerns, it was at the same time essential to maintain a sustainable business.
It is time to reinvent the role of business development and focus on what we are expected to do — nurture the link between, people, companies, and organizations. I have included some learnings and reflections based on my personal experience from the last few weeks:
1. Be positive, but not ignorant
After all, we are people… I have been contacted by a lot of my suppliers who asked me for some news about my colleagues and my family. These initiatives had a very positive impact on me. It became clear that I must do the same with my network.
The goal is to take care of people. Be authentic and only contact those who belong to your active network. If you launch an impersonal emailing campaign you will not reach your goal and maybe receive the exact opposite effect and create distrust. Does Ikea really care about me when they ask “How are you doing during these difficult times? and by the way, we are open!”. The discussions we have with clients and suppliers are mostly informal. We do not have to emphasize the difficult situation we are living in by sharing alarming thoughts. We must be aware of difficulties and adopt a positive attitude to be ready to help if we can.
2. Stronger together
It is time to reach out to your networks to share best practices and ask for some support or advice. Keep communicating with your support networks and speak with other small businesses to share ideas, innovative practices, and business opportunities.
I am used to calling companies and organizations in my ecosystem on a regular basis. Thanks to a call to one of my competitors, we both have identified a business lead we would not have been able to answer alone. Your professional network is living under the same experience and circumstance as you are. You can build synergies and create opportunities with partners, suppliers, competitors, or any organization embedded in your ecosystem.
3. Keep current customers happy
Is there anything of value you can do for your clients now, without expecting anything in return? Do things that don’t scale. Help will go a long way and will be remembered long after this crisis subsides.
Below are some examples of what we have put in place during the last weeks:
- Continue to celebrate the happy events of life like births and weddings. Don’t forget to send a message or a tiny present to the people concerned.
- Offer free services when the service contract is suspended. The idea is not to provide the same service for free but to offer ways to explore other services within your portfolio to demonstrate your valuable skill set and give a concrete deliverable that is useful for your client. The goal is to maintain a long term partnership and show other valuable expertise that your team can deliver.
- Try to be flexible regarding your contracts’ engagements. If requested by your customer, try to find arrangements if you can, rather than adopting a defensive position. These are unique times for everyone.
4. Reflect, don’t reset — when Business Continuity Plans become the new norm.
All business development textbooks will explain that business developers need to have face-to-face meetings. By visiting a client, we learn more about his or her way of working, company culture, and so on. The lockdown has radically changed the game and remote meetings have become the new standard of our lifestyle. We do family drinks, friends games, and company meetings behind our screens.
Why is having a remote client meeting better? I have never felt closer to my clients than I do from conference calls done from home. The context of a crisis can, of course, be a good ice breaker. But after a couple of minutes, our true personality appears more easily at home.
We invite clients at home and they do the same. Backgrounds of our videos can show our kitchen, our bedroom and sometimes our family. We create an intimacy that is not possible to build at the client’s office. Apart from that, we also optimize transportation time and are more efficient, and less stressed. Entertainment time such as lunches and drinks will still be important for informal meetings, but video calls have been a new way of working for prospecting that will become the new norm in the future.
Everyone from the CEO to an intern has a special role to play in the business development of every company. Choose your way to interact with clients but KEEP GOING!
This article was originally published as a Linkedin Post by Clement Soliva, Co-founder at Staizen
