All this talk of recession is downright depressing if we let it be.  The natural tendency is to tighten the belt and batten the hatches.  Not all bad, but be careful not to make a bad situation worse.

I don’t know about your part of the country, but in ours, retailers are closing at breakneck pace.  Some are local but many are national.  One of the most recent is Circuit City.  This was especially disturbing to me because I had always felt that they had better customer service and more educated salespeople than some of their competitors.  So WHY did Circuit City fail?  Some attribute it to a cost cutting measure back in 2007.  At that time, Circuit City let a good percentage of their sales force go to cut costs.  In so doing, they not only diminished their own people assets but guess what happened?  Alot of them went to work for the competition, namely Best Buy.  Needless to say, cutting costs but cutting experienced salespeople was a very short sighted solution.

Bad times call for trained, experienced salespeople.  If you are looking for a way to survive and thrive in an economic downturn, your salespeople are probably the best place to invest.  Invest in training not only in advanced sales skills and customer service skills, but refreshers on the basics that they may have let slide in good times when orders were rolling in.  Once trained, make sure you compensate them well enough to keep them away from your competitors or you will have paid for the competition’s sales training!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.