When we narrow down the current COVID-19 economic situation, we’re all in the same boat. No matter who we are or what we do, getting back to doing business hinges on having customers. Whether we like it or not, there is no guarantee they will be there. Although it may be disconcerting, here is why:

• Some customers will decide they don’t need us. Their situation will have changed and they have moved on.

• Others will have found new solutions. Competition will be fierce with appealing options popping up everywhere.

• Core customers than we dare imagine will have simply disappeared, whether individuals or companies. For one reason or another, they aren’t around anymore.

• Many clients will be far less accepting and far more demanding than they were in the past. They have had time to rethink what’s important to them and have established new priorities.

• Others are so stressed and preoccupied with their situation, they’re unable to make decisions, let alone move forward. They cannot shake it off.

This may not be where we would like customers to be, but it’s where they are now. As frightening as it may appear, we cannot expect them to dust themselves off and pick up where they left off. Just saying these words sounds pessimistic. This isn’t the way we see ourselves. We’re optimists down to our DNA. We face danger squarely and we welcome challenges. To even suggest that a virus, of all things, could possibly disrupt our lives goes against the grain. It’s more than a mere slap in the face; it’s the ultimate humiliation.

So, what are we to do? How will we deal with the cards we’re left holding? Hope for the best? Keep our fingers crossed? Turn on the optimism and bring back a pop tune from the 1940s:

You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative 
Don’t mess with Mister In Between

That’s us — or is it? The words seem weak and out of place today. Here is the point: rather than trying to pick up where we left off or hoping for the best, we will be better served by recognizing that we have all been through a lot and a lot has changed.

Here is a checklist for reaffirming relationships with existing customers and building new ones with prospects. This is anything but easy. But it can happen.

1. Customers perceive us as being authentic. Citing Growth from Knowledge’s (GfK) Coronavirus Consumer Pulse findings, Marketing Insider’s Stacy Bereck says that “85 percent of U.S. consumers feel that the way brands behave during the COVID-19 crisis will affect their desire to do business with those companies in the future.”

2. We let them know we want to understand their situation. Call it empathy or whatever you like. Consumers want to feel they are doing business with those who are interested in them and not just making a sale.

3. We introduce ways for customers to stretch their money. It’s more important than ever. Here is how the Betty Crocker folks are responding to this obvious challenge. “Impossibly easy dinners for $2.50/serving. Dinner doesn’t have to be spendy to be delicious. These fuss-free recipes are big on flavor and easy on your wallet.” Right upfront they make it clear why their recipes are a good fit. They use the right keywords: easy, inexpensive, and delicious. A winning combination.

4. We help them avoid making purchasing mistakes. I can hear someone say, “That’s not a salesperson’s job. I’m there to make a sale.” That was then. Now, it’s the smart salesperson who takes time so customers can arrive at an informed buying decision who will get the business — and be remembered.

5. We focus on helping customers. Explore options with them. Not good, better, and best; not low, medium, and high prices, but options you and your customer develop together such as poor fit, good fit, and best fit. In other words, options that make sense to clients.

6. We try to pull customers rather than pushing them. This will take a lot more listening than talking, a great deal more patience than persuasion, and much more understanding than ever before.

7. We don’t think we can pick up where we left off. Let’s face it, there is not much worse than being unwillingly slowed down, sidelined, and told to stay home. We may be charged up and chomping at the bit to get going. Even so, it’s not like coming back from vacation. All of which is to say we need to give both ourselves and our customers time to adjust to a new and different situation.

8. And, finally, our customers will stay with us if we let them know we’re depending on them. Some will see this as a sign of weakness and take advantage of us. But if we believe in building relationships, it’s a chance worth taking.

In the past months, we have learned there is much that is out of our control. Even so, that’s not the last word. What we do next when it comes to our customers and prospects is up to us.      

John Graham of GrahamComm is a marketing and sales strategy consultant and business writer. He is the creator of “Magnet Marketing,” and publishes a free monthly eBulletin, called “No Nonsense Marketing & Sales Ideas.” Contact him at jgraham@grahamcomm.com, (617) 774-9759, or visit: johnrgraham.com.

Many businesses are reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, and while some may return to business as usual once the crisis is over, others may need to alter the way they think and operate in order to survive. 

 Many global leaders think the pandemic will transform the world in significant ways, and companies with leaders who already have a transformation mindset will be better equipped to adapt and succeed at a high level.

 There are two types of companies who entered the crisis. The first type involves those who went through a level of transformation prior to the crisis and had the plans and structure in place to keep moving. For them, it will be a lot easier to see where the gaps exist and also where the opportunities are for growth. They will have better tools to react and analyze what happened and make decisions on what to change.

 The second type of businesses includes those who, before the pandemic, were contemplating changes that were necessary, but they did not follow through. Those companies will come out of this wounded and feeling the environment is more chaotic. Transformation management in this environment is vital. It’s about creating momentum to see results and growth, and the process must be geared at successfully moving hearts and minds toward the end that we seek.

 I suggest three phases — prepare, initiate, and implement — for managing transformation in these challenging times.

Prepare 

• Understand your soul as a company. Understanding an organization’s soul becomes important because it is the only true representation of the impact that the organization has on the world. Knowing the company’s true north puts it in a position to build a higher purpose into the transformation program, and ensures the transformation is rooted in the essence that will make the business successful going forward. It really comes down to answering one question: “When people think about our company, whether we are still in business or whether we are gone, what will we want them to say?” The answer to that legacy question should be a set of descriptors of your identity and capabilities.

• Conduct a post-crisis assessment. Businesses should take this opportunity to examine what they were dealing with before the crisis, how they handled the crisis, and to create plans for how to emerge stronger than before. This event gives leaders carte blanche, in many respects, to implement bigger plans and changes than before. At the end of this, there will be opportunity for those who seize it.

Initiate 

• Program the team structure. I organize a transformation team into these departments: program managers, the leaders of the workstreams, the team members for the workstreams, and administrative support. This team will be in charge of the implementation phase and be accountable to the company leadership team. Communication must constitute a key part of every transformation program and must be organized to reach various audiences at different stages of the program.

Implement 

• Manage results. The implement phase is the riskiest, because it includes the organization’s transition through the emotional cycle of change. Programs must deliver the intended results, and along the way failure will happen. Measuring short-term as well as long-term results allows the opportunity to deliver on a specific goal and to celebrate specific successes. However small they are, they add stamina and motivation to the effort.

• Manage people. A significant challenge that organizations often face when it comes to implementation is people’s resistance to change. Implementation is much about building people and building performance. It involves teaching, convincing, coaching, rewarding, sometimes disciplining, but always expressing to people that they are at the center of the organization’s destiny.

All companies that come through this pandemic have a huge opportunity to learn from what they have done and from what they have not done. For many, it will be a time for transformation.        

Edwin Bosso (www.myrtlegroup.com) is founder/CEO of Myrtle Consulting Group and author of “6,000 Dreams: The Leader’s Guide To A Successful Business Transformation Journey,” published by ForbesBooks.

As the nation’s economy continues to struggle because of the impact of COVID-19, small-business owners and their leadership skills are being put to the test.

 They face the task of adapting to the crisis and helping their employees adjust as well. But just what steps can business leaders take to keep employee morale high, make sure the business stays afloat, and manage their own concerns about the future?

One of the most important things is to be transparent with employees about where the business stands.

 Face the facts head-on and don’t try to sugarcoat it. Share with your team, in calm and rational terms, what impacts you expect the virus to have on your business and what the business is doing to try to mitigate those negative impacts.

 Here are other steps business leaders need to take as they manage their way through the crisis.

• Overcommunicate. With remote work, communicating is more important now than ever. In an office, much of the communication happens naturally as people drop by each other’s offices or pass in the hallway. With everyone spread out, communication can easily fall by the wayside, so it needs to be more intentional. It’s critical to use video communication like Zoom or Google Hangouts whenever possible to interact with employees. I make sure to send at least three companywide video messages per week. In times of great uncertainty, communicate more, not less. In the absence of information, people tell themselves stories, and I can promise you they are bad stories.

• Project calm. When a leader is anxious and fearful, everyone will pick up on that and they, too, will become anxious and fearful. If your employees see that you are worried, they will begin to think it is all over. That doesn’t mean to fake it or to pretend the situation isn’t bad. We cannot control the situation we find ourselves in. But we can control how we react to the situation, and how we react will dictate our results.

• Consider introducing new products or services. Now is a good time to get innovative, so brainstorm with your team about alternative ways to bring in revenue if your usual sources have been disrupted. For example, some restaurants that were strictly sit-down establishments pivoted to offer takeout and delivery. My own company created new publishing and marketing products aimed at potential clients who may be more cost conscious during these tough economic times.

Finally, make sure you have a plan.

Hopefully, you already have a strategic plan for your business that you are executing week in and week out. As we continue to move along through this crisis, that plan will need to be adjusted as COVID-19 makes some pieces of your plan obsolete.

I suggest meeting weekly, if not more often, to keep updating the plan to reflect the new realities. Then communicate the plan and its latest adjustments to your team. 

When employees know the leaders have a plan, it creates calm and confidence.                       

Adam Witty, co-author with Rusty Shelton of “Authority Marketing: Your Blueprint to Build Thought Leadership That Grows Business, Attracts Opportunity, and Makes Competition Irrelevant,” is the CEO of Advantage/ForbesBooks (www.advantagefamily.com) which he started in 2005. The company helps busy professionals become the authority in their field through publishing and marketing. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is crippling and toppling many U.S. small businesses. Often called “the backbone of the economy,” small businesses that are managing to survive face an uncertain future.

 As states start to reopen, consumer spending is in steep decline while unemployment skyrockets and many people remain hesitant to venture out. Some entrepreneurs find their businesses in trouble because they had the wrong mindset toward customers all along. 

 Small-business owners everywhere are infected by pandemic thinking. But they were infected with this thinking before the pandemic. It’s only now the strategic weakness of short-term, fear-based, transactional thinking in all different kinds of businesses is becoming more obvious. Pandemic thinkers ask the wrong question, “What can you do for me today?” Rather than, “How can we work together to build a long-term mutually-profitable relationship?”

Business owners who built long-term relationships with customers and clients can weather this storm. Those who didn’t think this way before can adopt elements of this kind of thinking and they will start seeing the benefits almost right away.

 Here are three tips for small-business owners on how to develop long-term relationships that benefit both customers and businesses:

• When first meeting, look ahead at the relationship 10 years from now. The scale of a person’s thinking has a lot to do with whether they win the game. Look for all opportunities to be of service, even in some small way, to earn the right to call the person a client. Every deal doesn’t have to be a grand slam. Just get on base. Just get into the game. That way you can discover opportunities to be of greater service and have a client for life.

• Show you care. A lot of people don’t know how to show that they care. Ask yourself when is the last time you called to check on a former client to find out what’s happened in their life or business since the last time you did business together? What are their plans for the future? What can you take off their plate and help them with today even if what they need is just someone to help them think things through? Good relationships built over time are especially evident during the pandemic. Ironically, though, a pandemic is a perfect time to begin a marketing campaign like this and besides, you probably have a lot of free time on your hands anyway.

• Have a long-term business plan. A business being run without a 12-month, forward-looking budget is like a car being driven with a windshield covered in mud, and on an unfamiliar road with no particular place to go. A business that is being run without weekly cash-flow projections is like a person stumbling around in the dark in an unfamiliar house. To take an active, consistent interest in your clients and develop programs encouraging them to keep coming back, it helps to have a long-term written plan for your own business.

Businesses generate revenue by solving problems for their clients and customers. And right now there’s an abundance of problems, which is another way to say there’s an abundance of opportunities. Whether you already have or decide to begin developing great long-term relationships with clients, it’s an investment that will pay long-term dividends.                                  

RJon Robins is founder and CEO of “How To Manage A Small Law Firm” (www.howtomanageasmalllawfirm.com), which provides management services for the solo and small law firm market.