Preparation Over Planning: Crisis Management

As a post-modern growth agency, we preach preparation over planning all the time, and it’s only become clearer that in times of crisis, brands who have invested in preparedness are better positioned to maintain and even grow… even during times like this!

No one has ever gone through what you are going through and there is no plan out there that will 100% ensure your survival, recovery or success. However, preparation improves your odds at success by improving your company’s capabilities and capacity to handle whatever the future may hold.

Here are a few things that we would recommend you spending time on right now that can improve your brand’s chances of success:

Create or Improve Your Customer Acquisition Process

What are you doing to introduce prospects to your brand, educate them on your products/services, entice them to qualify themselves and who is following up once they have indicated interest? Are you marching toward a path to understand your CAC (Customer-Acquisition Cost)? Your CAC is the quantified amount that it costs you to generate a new lead, opportunity or client. This is the holy grail of your business because if you now your margins and you know how much it costs to get a new customer, you can turn this on and off based upon your capacity.

To quantify your customer-acquisition cost, calculate the following:

• The advertising and marketing that customer was served (including the cost of photography, your landing pages, ad spend, etc.)
• The payroll hours it took you to close the deal (including your salesperson’s time chasing the lead and your marketing team’s advertising efforts)
• The cost of the tools you use to acquire the customer (your company’s “infrastructure” costs)

Once you have your official CAC, you will be much more prepared for times of revenue fluctuation.

Reduce Friction in Your Process

It is critical to remove potential road blocks in your customers’ experience. With so many people feeling overwhelmed, we often hear “This seems great but I just don’t have the time to focus on this.”

This screams “Too much friction for me to realize value“, or that you have done a bad job of educating your client on the experience they can expect.

From internal operations to external customer experience, your processes should be streamlined so that unnecessary steps and/or roadblocks are removed. One of the most important things you can do is to implement a CRM to track customer data and keep your organization informed of all customer movements, orders, opportunities, and marketing efforts.

KPI’s – Key Performance Indicators are what you report on.

These are critical to knowing what parts of your business are performing well, which are doing ok, and what needs improvement.

The first step is identifying the things that matter to your success, regardless if you can measure them now or not. Once you have identified the things that matter, this will give you the opportunity to drill down and see what activities and processes are contributing factors to your KPI.

Preparation is paramount in any successful business strategy. Whether you are struggling right now or not, think about ways that you can prepare for the next disaster. You’ll thank us later.