That’s clients’ natural habit, to cut marketing budgets first. It could be a winning or losing strategy; we’ll see in time. The storm will eventually calm down, and there will be an economic recovery, but no one knows exactly when it will happen.
What is your survival strategy? What do you offer the clients in the face of recession? What could make you an essential part of their business in times when even tech companies are cutting thousands of jobs?
I have been perfectly safe with my clients over the last ten years, despite all the past crises and pandemics. Why? Cause I sell growth. It sounds counterintuitive, but only for a moment.
The only way to weather the storm is to focus on business growth. Not just for you, but for your clients.
For any client, you will be indispensable if you help them get through the crisis with minimal losses, in the same boat as you.
To do this, you need to be able to find the needle in the haystack. You need to find the very limitation that is preventing them from growing. And your marketing expertise will help you a lot.
Sometimes the bottleneck is in marketing; you see it and can quickly solve it. Other times, the problem is in product, segmentation, somewhere in the sales funnel, or somewhere else. In this case, you can clearly see why marketing isn't working the way it should.
So you can show the client the main limitation and help them overcome it. Your framework would be as follows: you focus on the limitation, overcome it, find a new one, and so on.
This way, you overcome the crisis together with your client. To succeed in a time of challenges, not just survive, focus on business growth.