On March 18th, during the beginning of this covid-19 crisis, when news first struck that Malaysia was going into the Movement Control Order lockdown. My phone started ringing with notifications, and it was flooded with emails and messages from clients canceling hundreds of thousands worth of contracts!
I was devastated, demotivated, and depressed.
But I decided I would not stay that way.
I regathered myself by March 23rd and brought the team together, making the decision that I would continue paying all my employees, with no retrenchments, no pay cut, and no unpaid leaves! Committing to a strategy to achieve this goal.
I’m proud to say that we managed to pull through as a team and achieve this, generating RM200k in revenue without meeting a person face to face, even though it was tough and we struggled hard at times.
I would like to share with you what we did so that you can get through these challenging times too:
1. Talk To A Lot of Prospects & Customers
We constantly had our beat on the pulse, keeping in touch with the marketplace to figure out who’s buying and who’s not.
My sales team called thousands of people on a weekly basis, we learned so much from listening to the customers and being able to identify what their pain points were.
2. Keep Innovating
From the market feedback, we kept innovating and creating new solutions to serve the market and solve their critical business problems until they started buying on March 30th! And we’ve been closing sales every single day, until today!
Every day, we changed our strategy, our system, and constantly innovated.
We also changed our scripts to convince our customers to buy our products and services, and it worked!
Don’t get stuck in your old ways, find what works and keep innovating and keep reinventing in whatever that you need to do until you succeed!
3. Constant Communication
At our peak, we had 4 meetings a day to keep everyone in check.
We had 8.30 am meetings, where we set the goal for the day and see what happens.
Then at 12 o’clock, we log in again, to get market feedback. So we can change accordingly where necessary.
And after lunch, we log in again and set the direction for the afternoon session and evening.
From 6.00 pm to 7.00 pm, we log in again to align to the market’s feedback and what were the challenges faced by the team. And at night, we worked again.
The next day we repeat the whole process again, so there has been a long repeated process of reinventing our business model.
And that’s how we generated our revenue. We had to work really, really hard in order for us to survive.
It’s all about constant alignment and communication to ensure that the team and the leaders are all on the same page and aligned with the market’s needs.
4. Keep Fighting
We kept persevering even when we felt like giving up!
My team worked day and night.
Myself, I worked during the weekends and even public holidays.
Everybody was putting in their 100% into ensuring that we get results. Because we don’t have a choice.
And because we worked long hours, we got more time to accomplish more things compared to people who worked only during normal working hours.
Even though we worked from home, we worked very productively.
Constant communication found out was the best way for us to survive.
And because of that, we have sales, we have cash, and we have income.
No cash flow issues, all employees fully paid on time, no unpaid leave, no salary cut, and no retrenchments!
5. Go Digital
We shifted our business entirely onto digital to reach the people we needed to.
We were an enterprise corporate selling at aB2B level and we actually switched to B2C for a while.
We put massive marketing campaigns on Facebook, and we launched apps.
We targeted people by doing look-alikes to ensure that we actually generated leads.
In 2 months, we generated over 2,000 leads that my sales team eventually followed up with and closed sales.
And because we’ve got tons of leads, it actually generates back our B2B sales but using a B2C channel. That is something that most enterprise sales companies or enterprise companies don’t do.
They only do B2B, which is cold calling, email marketing, and AdWords. But we actually went and used a B2C strategy for our B2B business!
And so far, it has worked for us, so I hope that it can work for you as well, in changing your channel to going digital.
6. Strong Mindset
The foundations of what kept us going is mental strength, persistence, perseverance, and a never give up attitude!
It was extremely tough, everybody was working tremendously hard, and we were even fighting amongst each other amidst the pressure and stress.
But at the end of it all, what happened? We got the results, which actually give us hope and therefore the belief that we can survive and succeed in this crisis.
My dear friends and dear Sales Ninjas, that’s how we survived and managed to sell in this crisis.
I hope these lessons can provide you with unique insights and inspiration, that if we can do it as an SME, you can do it as well!
