Article Contents
Backstory
Peter Lang is the CEO of Uhuru Network, a full-service digital marketing agency. Peter has experience in mergers and acquisitions, startup funding, and business strategy. He also has a knack for being able to look around corners and find ways to solve problems that seem impossible. And right now, COVID-19, to some of you, may feel impossible.
Peter is here today to share how digital health companies can leverage marketing and sales in uncertainty to continue to move forward.
Headwind vs. Tailwind
COVID-19 is putting digital health companies in two major buckets: either they are experiencing a headwind or they are experiencing a tailwind.
DEFINING HEADWIND
A headwind can be defined, in marketing and sales, as trying to avoid a crisis and continue to move your business forward. However, the crisis you’re trying to avoid is bending your sail, and you’re trying to keep it from breaking. Right now that sail is your business, and the crisis is COVID-19. Headwinds are difficult to sail through and can result in your sail breaking, leaving you unable to move forward. It’s important to have your team prepared and ready to sail through the headwind with your sail still intact.
DEFINING TAILWIND
A tailwind is the exact opposite of a headwind. In sailing and business, a tailwind creates momentum expediting your speed of growth. A tailwind is a good thing, but if you’re unprepared for a tailwind, your company might miss out on a great business growth opportunity. COVID-19 has created a tailwind for many companies. This tailwind is even expediting their business plans for quarter one of 2020 and pushing them to further growth in Q2. However, that rate of impact and rate of change is something that a lot of organizations are not prepared for.
Unpacking Uncertainty
THE DOMINO EFFECT
Organizations should be mindful that there is going to be a domino effect from COVID-19. Even if your customers aren’t being impacted right now, your customers’ customers may be which will have long-term implications for your business and the people you serve.
There are two sides to the current crisis. Some people look at this as a short term, sharp recession, or a blip, where you can bounce in and out of it quickly, and with that comes the belief that you should keep your foot on the gas and accelerate through this crisis, leveraging the environment that’s being created. That doesn’t take into account or display the health priority that exists in this crisis. There are other people who are on the other side of the crisis camp, who believe that this is a 2008 recession 2.0 and fear that it may tip us into a depression. This fear and anxiety are causing some organizations to respond to this type of turbulence.
To understand how you should respond, it is important to know what high impacted and low impacted businesses are facing.
HIGH IMPACT
Many organizations and industries have had high impact and fast change because of COVID-19. Whether this is because of regulations, restrictions, or mandates at a local level—they’ve been forced into this. Highly impacted businesses could be restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, and other businesses that, because of restrictions, have seen a significant impact on their operations. Other businesses that fall into this category can even be those whose customers are facing major challenges in this crisis.
You can decide to go into this short-term change and have a rapid agile response to reduce the impact by changing this headwind into a tailwind, using it as momentum to grow your business.
LOW IMPACT
It’s important to note that some businesses are impacted less critically, and this crisis has a low impact on their business. Whether this is because they are a less impacted industry or because their buyers aren’t impacted, they have a choice to make a fast change. While choosing to make rapid changes, whether it be in your marketing, positioning, value chain, or how you present value to the marketplace, it’s important to keep in mind the three C’s that exist. The three C’s are cash, consistency, and community—all of these are leveraging points that help improve your performance and help take you right into a tailwind.
THE IMPORTANCE OF DIGITAL MARKETING AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
The vast majority of people are at home. Clients, customers, and patients are not allowed or can’t go into facilities and some stores right now. Everyone is online, and the opportunity that has been presented for online marketing, digital marketing, digital technology, and online lead generation is massive. Online marketing, digital technology, and marketing, in general, has never been so important. The value your company brings can be easily assimilated by the mass population. That’s why it is important to know how to navigate and understand, not just the potential, but more so the impact your company will have if you adopt these tactics. Before you make any decisions for your organization, it is important to know what tier of response to turbulent times your company is in.
The 5 Tiers of Response to Turbulent Times
There are five tiers of response to turbulent times that organizations find themselves in. This can be for any type of turbulent time, not just the crisis and pandemic organizations face today.
TIER 1: STRENGTHENING AND GROWING
The strengthening and growing tier helps save jobs and position your company to leverage the potential opportunities for growth through this turbulence. If you have recently received venture capital, private equity support, or have strong financials, and your customer’s customer is not impacted, you are likely in tier one. You might even have the choice to be in tier-one, but instead, choose to be in tier two.
TIER 2: STRATEGIC REDUCTIONS
Many companies react to uncertain times by automatically placing themselves in tier two. Maybe your accountants are asking where you are and what type of reductions you can make to strengthen and fortify. That’s a perfectly acceptable place to be as long as you’re not doing it to sacrifice momentum and potential opportunities. Sometimes letting go of your tightly held strategic reductions can help move your organization forward. With so much attention being given to healthcare, medical, science, and technology, it is time to leverage your opportunity for growth. Deciding to take the tailwind of the current crisis and move into tier-one might give your business the momentum it needs to grow.
TIER 3: CRITICAL REDUCTION
The critical reduction is the tier you have likely heard the most about. To be in tier three, you must be doing anything necessary to lessen the overall business expenditures to make sure your organization can continue. This includes forgoing salaries, sabbaticals, and layoffs.
TIER 4: RESTRUCTURING THE VALUE CHAIN
You have seen a lot of companies do this, most recognizably, restaurants. Maybe your company has had to completely restructure the value you bring to the marketplace to accommodate the need you’re seeing. If this is the case for your organization, you’re in tier four.
TIER 5: GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
You do not want to fall into tier five. Tier five is in the case that you go out of business, and is the tier your organization should work hard to avoid.
How to Turn Uncertainty Into a Tailwind Step-by-Step
From all of the information you have gotten, you have decided to take this uncertainty and turn it into a tailwind. Great, but how do you make that happen practically? What steps do you need to take so your company can leverage this time of turbulence into growth for your business? Let’s walk through the practical steps you can take to turn this uncertainty into a tailwind.
STEP #1: CONTENT
When you have millions upon millions of people who are now social distancing at home, one of the critical ways for you to leverage technology and digital tools is to put messaging in front of people. Do you have something valuable for your target market or your ideal customer profile? Do you have regular blogs that are not just snippets of information, but are massively detailed around critical topics that your customer might find value in?
To know if the content you’re producing is relevant, you will need to have a strategic meeting. In this meeting, you can decide where you need to realign content and even the value you’re providing to the marketplace to make it relative to the situation you’re in. To put it bluntly, if you’re still running your content production plan from January or February, you’re probably not adapting to the situation.
STEP #2: ONLINE ADS
Online ads are crucial in this day and age. Because social media is going to have so much saturation, you need to make sure you’re investing in prioritization in your market. The only real way to do that is by building a LinkedIn network of potential leads you can regularly engage with, as Peter has, or you can get creative in the resources and thought leadership you produce. Content and ads are a great way to help your organization stay in tier-one.
STEP #3: WEBSITE
With such a highly competitive market, having a website that sells for you is priceless. Your website should be structured like your best salesperson, always able to answer the frequently asked questions that come up in any situation. You’ll always notice that the top 10% of the performers are usually the ones who can answer the most prospect questions, and a lot of that is on their website.
A big challenge many organizations are facing is outside sales teams. With the current turbulence, they can’t go outside. They can’t fly, they can’t do dinners or golf. They can’t even do their presentation on location. Maybe this means you can’t do the things that you’ve been doing to close deals. So, how do you go from an outside sales organization to an inside sales organization?
You have to understand that if you only have a small opportunity for your salespeople to communicate with a lead, that lead is going to do the rest of their discovery about your business on your website. So you must ask yourself, does my website stand on its own two feet? If your website requires a salesperson to partner with it to be effective or vice versa, you’re in a bad situation with the uncertainty you’re currently facing. So the changes you need to make are:
- A breakdown of what the most successful sales situation is and the frequently asked questions.
- Understanding how that applies to the user or the target going to the website and consuming it themselves.
STEP #4: CREATE VALUE FOR YOUR CUSTOMER
Creating value for your customers will create loyalty down the road and bring them back once they have money to spend. To do this effectively, you need to have a real grasp of lifetime and short-term value and be able to hold two distinct thoughts simultaneously. This would include both short and long-term thoughts. Thinking both short-term and long-term is leveraging the opportunity, if you can afford it, to give your customers upfront value that will result in long-term value for your customer and your company. This could look like free trials, extended trials, or even training. At the end of the day, there are things that you can add value to your customers beyond just your product or service.
However, there will be people who look at what you’re doing as taking advantage of this crisis for financial gain. If you’re truly adding value to the marketplace, you will be servicing a need. If that is the case, you have to get the value you offer to the market the best way you can.
Don’t forget that you’re marketing and selling to scared people. Don’t use scare tactics to sell. Be sensitive and transparent in your crisis communication. Communicate frequently, daily, if you have the resources. There should be a constant steady stream of good, relevant, helpful, and valuable information that will inform your customers about the value your relationship brings them. This way, they know they have a supportive, consistent partner.
STEP #5: CONSIDER HIRING AN AGENCY
If you don’t have what you need to address the market need, you need to go get it. Most organizations bring in that level of capability and knowledge through a hire. If you don’t have it as a prerequisite, you should go get someone with the knowledge to build it out for you. This could be VP of sales, chief revenue officer, or head of business development.
However, because of so much uncertainty, a lot of organizations are experiencing a hiring freeze. With so many people being displaced at this time, there is a large saturation of an available workforce, which brings into question your ability to vet all these incoming candidates. Now you need a strong ability to vet marketing and sales hires. They’ll be available, but at the end of the day, you can’t afford for them not to be effective. The cost of making the wrong hire or decision right now is extremely high and could be fatal for your business.
Even with the uncertainty of the timeline of this crisis, tailwinds will be given to those who aren’t afraid to move, who make decisions, and who take action. Consider what you have and what you do and don’t need, then be decisive in the actions you need to take. Work on getting these resources quickly. Don’t be afraid to lean on people who are either a few steps ahead of you or have successfully implemented this for others. Consider a digital marketing agency like Uhuru, who can take this uncertainty you’re facing and turn it into a tailwind for your business.
The foundation of your success is the combination of your desire and discipline. What are you doing to make your business successful in these uncertain times?
Favorite Book
Peter recommends On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis. This is an interesting book that takes the lessons of history and identifies the patterns. During the crisis we are currently in, this could be a good and useful book to read.
Want To Connect With Peter Lang? Find Him Here:
LinkedIn: Peter Lang
Website: www.uhurunetwork.com
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