Is there a silver lining to this recession?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Sep 19, 2011 @ 10:02 AM
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, a lot has changed from one year ago, as far as inside sales is concerned. I no longer have to spend a lot of time helping great inside reps who took my inside sales training classes to find new jobs… they’re all working. We now have more open inside sales jobs here than we have people to fill them (note to good inside reps in other localities who can’t find work: change to high tech if you’re not already doing so, and consider relocating to the SF Bay Area).
Recessions occur on a periodic basis (this was the third since I started my company), and since they predictably will occur, I encourage reps to practice good financial discipline to be prepared for the next one. Savings accounts never go out of fashion. But amid all the tough lessons that we re-learned over the past several years, something positive has emerged: customer service and support has never been better, and customers have never been treated better.
In the past three weeks, I’ve had to return faulty merchandise I ordered over the internet to four different companies. In each case, they sent me new, non-defective products within 48 hours, and emailed a postage-free return label for the return. Three of those companies followed up with me by email on a daily basis, including routing information. Net additional cost to me was zero, as they each paid for all shipping charges. That type of thing simply didn’t happen to me last year, which leads me to believe that in these tough economic times, keeping customers happy/retaining customers has taken on an increased level of importance.
I’m a “glass half-full” type of guy. In tough times, I do all the marketing stuff I don’t have time for when I’m wall-to-wall with training classes, catch up with folks with whom I haven’t spoken in a while, and find new ways to be creative (that white paper I wrote on Getting Hired for Your Ultimate Inside Sales Job was one result).
Lots of talented people were, and still continue to be, adversely affected by tough economic times. But if companies from whom we buy products are treating their customers better than they ever have in our lifetimes, it benefits all of us. And that’s a silver lining that I hope won’t go away when the economy fully recovers and people start forgetting about how tough times really were.