You can’t start every post without commenting on how business has changed over the past 8 weeks. This one is no different.
Business has changed over the past 8 weeks….
The most import thing to think about is how does it impact your customers and your profit.
If you look at the data things are bleak. Low consumer confidence, increasing unemployment and businesses are cost-cutting.
Where is the growth coming from?
To help solve that, I held a series of virtual brainstorming sessions with several top CMO’s. The aim was to understand the customer and commercial challenges in the post COVID world.
Below are the top six findings:
- New customer insights. It is time to revalidate your customer insights. How has the customer’s purchasing habits changed? Does your product and service still deliver their unmet needs or does it need to evolve
- Existing customers. Focus on retaining and growing your base.
- New business. It’s going to be hard to win new business unless you have aligned your offer with the new customer insights.
- Think increasing value instead of price drops. Before you think about dropping price think about how you can add value and where possible move to variable pricing.
- SME’s are under pressure. This appears to be the segment most people are nervous about. Keeping an eye on SME’s payment terms, flexibility and moving to variable pricing is going to be key.
- Digital delivery. Digital delivery for everything, online shopping, meetings, ways of working. Time to get serious.
Stay tuned for another post I’ll unpack each of these for you.